As I suspect many authors also experience, since my career’s started gaining some traction I get asked more often by aspiring writers for advice—to read pages, usually, or simply to give them some sort of insight or ‘secret’ to getting published. I can’t do that, though, mainly because there isn’t one surefire route to publication, only a […]
I came across this blog post yesterday, and felt compelled to propagate these very useful writing concepts from the lauded German author W. G. ‘Max’ Sebald, a likely Nobel winner had he lived to receive the honor. Credit to poster Richard Skinner (and, of course, David Lambert & Robert McGill, who took Sebald’s workshop and […]
Backstory: I completed the first draft of last summer’s new novel, LET THE GLORY PASS AWAY, on August 21, 2012, after which it lay resting and untouched for nearly five months. With the turning of the calendar’s page and the dawning of a new year (and with 20 pages of notes and ideas at hand), […]
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 […]
Here’s a holiday ‘gift’ for my readers: this short story was conceived on Christmas Day a few years ago, composed, revised, and circulated to no acceptances. Revised this year (among many other stories), it is presented here in the spirit of the season. The voice, style, and content are meant to evoke the late Southern […]
At 12:19pm on 12/19/2012, I find that I’ve finished Novel #2 for 2012, a/k/a MIRIAM MULLINS, a long in the works YA about emotionally stunted, 25 year-old Courtleigh, who tries to relive her teen years by pretending to be fifteen again, but with heartbreaking and tragic consequences. Here is the breakdown of what I’ve accomplished […]
My third completed, but first published, novel King’s Highway began its life as literal backstory for a character who has yet to make his debut in my fiction, though in 2013 ‘Jasper Glasscock’ will finally come into his own in both WANDO, in which he is the protagonist, and again in 2014 when I am scheduled to […]
A most memorable time of my life, the spring of 1987—successful and productive thus far in my chosen course of study, Media Arts, I found myself taking the third scriptwriting class in that track, a special section wherein students were expected in the course of the fourteen week semester to write a feature-length script. We’d […]
Edgewater County, SC… where is it? Only in the mind. It’s my fictional go-to locale for more or less all of my published output, alongside a slightly fictionalized Columbia, SC, which is perfectly recognizable but for the sort of minor changes that authors like me make to their hometowns: venerable Southeastern University for the equally […]
Now that DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW has gone out into the big-six world of publishing (in the form of pitches to specific editors), I thought it might be useful to discuss the inspirations and intentions behind this piece. While a long way from publication, here’s some backstory and character sketches to whet the appetite of […]
