Arriving this week at the conclusion of what we’ll remember as the Composition Period that began on May 1, 2013, the fifth and most complete draft of the entire DIXIANA story will soon rest comfortably fresh from its detailed line-edit. DIXIANA… it’s more than fiction, it’s a state of mind, one in which I’ve been immersed […]
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 […]
Here’s an updated rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts.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 […]
Yes, We Have No Nirvanas I grew up wanting to be a writer. An only child who spent lonely afternoons and summers at the home of grandparents who lived in a neighborhood without kids, books and reading were (insert drumroll) my constant companions. Yawn. How many times have we heard those very words out of […]
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 […]
This list is bound to grow, and may in fact be incomplete already, but these are many of the songs that influenced and inspired the writing of DIXIANA. Like most of my fiction, songs are key: the narrative of the DIXIANA saga is on one level meant to mirror and echo the history of ‘hillbilly music,’ […]
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 […]
Ah, the holiday season…! It’s that time when, for a month or so, this author’s other role as a small business owner begins to take precedence over the writing career. I’m sure most working writers will find it easy to sympathize with the necessity of keeping food on the table, roof over head, et cetera—these […]
So as part of my research for DIXIANA, a novel that’s steeped in both a literal and allegorical history of American ‘hillbilly’ music, I wanted to know about the time as a nine year-old that I attended the Grand Ole Opry. We’d gone to Nashville to have Thanksgiving with the Texas branch of the family, […]
DIXIANA . . . a novel of Edgewater County, of word counts and pages, scenes and characters, voices and plotlines. Since May 1, when I began writing the first draft, this enormous piece of fiction has been the top project for me, the exclusive project, in fact. And coming up on the second full week of […]
