So you’ve completed and revised a manuscript that’s a thriller, that’s a character study, that’s suspenseful and literary and exciting . . . an easy sell, right? Right. What if it’s set in a milieu that could be seen as distasteful or icky, however . . . like the brutal blood-sport of dogfighting?
Backstory: A number of years ago I began a YA I called VISUAL PURPLE, in which an emotionally disturbed young woman, Courtleigh, 25, pretends for a variety of reasons to be 15 again—she interacts with actual teenagers, has a love affair, and through her actions engenders tragedy, violence, and her own downfall. During a few […]
Michelle L Johnson is a woman of many talents, and here we see her fine efforts to put on this auction in support of the ailing SC Writer’s Workshop, the details of which may be read in this prior post. A terrific effort, and for such a good cause. It’s a bad time for the […]
Here’s the grim news: this the bad economy has hit the venerable SC Writer’s Workshop annual conference in the pocketbook, and in a serious way. This is one of the most well-run and -respected writer’s conferences in the country, and while they will be sure to figure out a way to soldier on with the […]
Out of my many unpublished pieces, ‘Patterns of Recognition’ (not to be confused with William Gibson’s very fine novel Pattern Recognition) is one of my personal favorites, but along the way acquired a few rejections. Very happy this morning, however, to report that it’s been accepted by online journal Fiction365, which publishes a short story […]
It’s not every day a writer gets an invite like this one: — In its nearly three centuries of existence, The Saturday Evening Post has published short fiction by a who’s who of American authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dorothy Parker; William Faulkner; Agatha Christie; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ray Bradbury; Louis L’Amour; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; Ann […]
With a number of awards and advancement opportunities coming my way, 2012 landed for this humble independent writer as a creative and professional benchmark: As a now-agented author with a new small press novel in print and another extremely commercial MS resting on publisher’s row hard drives, the possibility is strong that I’ll soon land a […]
After nearly a decade of writing, learning, writing some more, trying and failing and finally failing better — i. e., getting published in my modest but gratifying ways — in 2009 I came up with the idea of leading others on the path of the kind of discipline and thinking I’d cultivated in order to get […]
The next career benchmark, a manuscript request from one of the major publishing houses for DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, has now occurred! Let’s hope the reader on the other end is as moved by the story as others have been. For those following my career, DOGS was designed and written to make a connection in a much […]
Good news today—I’ve submitted to appear at the 2013 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association meeting. This conference has hosted the Grateful Dead Caucus for the last 16 years, and my last trip, in 2007, eventually resulted in the writing and publication of this article. I’d previously attended in 2004 as a presenter, and an essay I […]
