James D. McCallister

author of the Edgewater County series

New DIXIANA Draft Completed!

Here at the end of 2014, there’s no greater news I could announce than to make this post trumpeting the completion of the third draft of my three-novel saga entitled DIXIANA, about which I’ve blogged in an extensive and ongoing fashion. Twenty months into a two-year timeframe to completion, with the current version I feel as though I’ve already […]

SO MANY ROADS: Grateful Dead Academic Symposium Schedule Now Set

Somebody pinch me. This may not constitute new news to regular readers of this blog, but today I’m beyond honored and energized to report that I’ve received notification of the scheduling of my appearance promoting and discussing Fellow Traveler at the upcoming Grateful Dead academic conference called So Many Roads: The World in the Grateful Dead! As […]

Down to DOWN IN DIXIANA

It’s been some time now since I posted about my ongoing, two-year process of crafting a novel called DIXIANA, but that doesn’t mean the work has stalled. In fact, I haven’t posted because I’ve continued to plow through the revision of this life’s-work-grade project at a very satisfying pace. DIXIANA lives . . . but […]

MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS: A Reader’s Report

For those of you just catching up to this manuscript and its path to publication, over the last year my literary novel MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS has been making its way through the process of acceptance at Story River Books, the new fiction imprint now operating under the auspices of the University of South Carolina Press. […]

MTC Fall Writing Classes Return

This stuffy summer finds me not only blazing through the third revision of the DIXIANA saga (1608 pages and counting) but continuing to wait for news on any number of promising submissions, the most prominent of which is my literary drama MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS currently residing on desks and hard drives at Pat Conroy’s Story River […]

FELLOW TRAVELER News Roundup

Now wrapping up a ten-day break from the editing phase of my three-novel series DIXIANA (the process of which I’ll detail in a forthcoming post), here we have two newsworthy tidbits of note coming in an otherwise sequestered time of authorial diligence and quiet endeavor: Tidbit 1: I’m thrilled to announce that an abstract I submitted to the So Many […]

STATE OF THE PROJECTS Spring 2014

Here’s an updated rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts. — MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS—As we know from this wonderful news back in July, 2013, MoHG, as my original literary epic is known ’round these parts, is under consideration for publication from Story River Books as part of the second slate of titles from this exciting new fiction imprint at the […]

DIXIANA . . . Done!

But you know how that goes. In the writing game, it’s premature to call anything ‘done’ until the final product is published. In this case, by completion we mean that I’ve managed to get all scenes written for what I think of as the ‘second draft,’ but that in reality represents the first comprehensively detailed and finished version […]

DIXIANA Update!

Writing update: I’ve been mum about this work lately, but progress on my epic literary novel DIXIANA goes quietly and diligently onward. Since the first draft back in August, what was already a formidable text has now grown to the Wolfeian length of 315,000 words, with still quite a few small chapters, scenes, and moments […]

Spring MTC Classes: Signups are Open!

After a successful and stimulating Basics of Screenwriting course this fall, I’m energized to teach again during the winter and spring terms in the Midlands Technical College continuing ed program. The Fiction Writing course returns first, and then immediately after, we go back into scriptwriting mode.