SIGNED! and Future Projects

What a week—first the book release of FT, and then the momentous news that I’ve been signed by the enthusiastic Michelle Johnson of the Corvisiero Literary Agency, who says that DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW is suspenseful, accomplished, and eminently sellable. Well now! No more encouraging words have been said to this writer, one who’s worked up through the ranks to this new level of achievement. Best of luck to Michelle in placing this material with the right editing and publication team. In going through this manuscript over the weekend, I’m allowing myself to agree with her enthusiasm—I do think this is a strong piece that, if handled correctly, could really connect with a wide readership. Sounds like a query letter!

2012 has turned out to be such a banner year, but with so much more to come: At this notable occasion of the publication of Fellow Traveler and my signing with Ms. Johnson, here is an overview of my unpublished and active longform fiction projects, some of which may also one day come to publication alongside King’s Highway and Fellow Traveler:

DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW (Literary/Suspense, 85,000 words)—under representation

Bereaved mother Randi Margrave tries to leave her troubled past behind with a move to the bucolic Carolina countryside, but when she discovers she’s moved in next door to the Macons, a family of backwoods dogfighters, she finds she’ll risk everything she has left to save the tortured Dogs of Parsons Hollow.

MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS (Literary/Upmarket, 160,000 words)—polished and ready

Devin Rucker, tortured, irascible end-stage alcoholic, is forced to confront his past: a harridan of a mother, a dysfunctional, nettlesome, domestically-abused sister, and worst of all, gut-wrenching memories of a betrayal by the best friend who tried to steal Devin’s girl Libby, now long dead — a narcissistic, foppish cocksman of a best friend who, unbeknownst to anyone else in the story, also happens to be a cheerfully oblivious serial rapist and murderer. The operatic emotion and family drama of Conroy meets the bitter Gen-X nihilism and black humor of Bret Easton Ellis—Prince of Tides meets American Psycho.

KUNK (Mainstream, ~85,000 words)—polished and ready

My movie memoir: an 80s coming-of-age story told through the eyes of a middle-aged, downsized journalist reflecting on the romantic travails of his creative youth as a budding filmmaker in a southern city a long way from Hollywood. Under the influence of his scriptwriting colleague, the streetwise, late-blooming college student Levon Kunkle, the nameless narrator finds love, loss, and the lesson that our mentors and heroes oftentimes have feet of clay—in Kunk’s case, ruinously so.

LET THE GLORY PASS AWAY (Mainstream, ~85,000 words)—1st draft complete, under revision

Cort Beauchamp, a middle-aged, blocked writer with issues of his own, is charged with persuading a reclusive, damaged rock star, Duncan Devereaux—’We sound like a French lawyer’s shingle, Cort notes waggishly—to accept a monument from their shared hometown. When the death of his mentor, the community’s arts maven, also forces the writer to become an inadvertent spokesman in the war over arts funding, he finds his formerly staid and dissatisfying life turned upside down, in ways exciting and otherwise. A comedy-drama about creativity, finding true love, and healing from the tragedies that follow us, this is designed as a ‘literary Woody Allen movie,’ with a number of characters and threads who in their way each highlight aspects not only of the creative renaissance underway in their small southern city, but also the human condition. Like the real place, this fictional Columbia, SC, a hundred-fifty years since being one of the only American cities to have been destroyed as an act of war, one in vindictive redemption for what had been an entire nation’s sins, is still searching for its identity.

MIRIAM MULLINS (YA, ~35,000 words) — halfway through first draft of this presumed 60-70,000 word YA.

Courtleigh Hoogstradt, an emotionally stunted, mousy 25 year-old reeling from the death of the infirm mother for whom she’s cared for ten years, reinvents herself as ‘Miriam Mullins,’ 15, a ‘teenager’ set on reliving the boyfriends and fun of the past she’d missed. When her no-good, absent drunk of a father shows up to collect what he hopes is her mother’s death-insurance money, though, Courtleigh takes out her revenge on him in a way that means she might have to stay Miriam Mullins forever.

WANDO (Crime, ? length)—prep and research (to be written summer 2013)

In 1990 Tillman Falls private investigator and aspiring mystery writer Jasper Glasscock agrees to ghost-write the autobiography of Edgewater County serial killer Coy Wando, a charismatic psychopath whose horrendous account of his crimes to Jasper nearly costs the gentle southern man his own sanity. Is Coy Wando, who soon faces execution for the brutal torture and murder of three Tillman Falls girls, including homecoming queen Honey Watson, telling the ‘final and true account’ of all his crimes, or merely burnishing the execrable, murderous legend?

DIXIANA (Literary, ? length)—~80,000 words so far of prep, research, prewriting (to be written 2014)

Prodigal son and recent divorcee Roy Earl Pettus, key minor character in MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, returns to Tillman Falls, SC, to inherit his grandfather’s honky-tonk The Dixiana; when he decides to not only re-imagine the tavern as a ‘third wave coffee shop’ but also paint over the iconic Confederate Flag mural on the side of the building, he provokes a firestorm of controversy that ultimately turns deadly. Amidst a contentious town election, a murder that eerily mimics those of the long-dead Coy Wando, and terrorist fears over the Sugeree River Nuclear Station where hardcore environmental protesters have set up camp to stop the building of a new reactor, Roy Earl struggles through a divorce, a wrongheaded love affair, and the dawning realization that he might not be able to be the change he wishes to see there in Edgewater County. A seriocomic Southern small town epic, this is my principal longtime project that brings together many characters and threads from all my other work (Jasper Glasscock, the narrator of Kunk, the ghost of Coy Wando hanging over the proceedings, Roy Earl and Creedence Rucker from MANSION, a major new character in Button Sykes, a millennial Phish ‘phan’ trapped in her awful southern hometown, Burnham Sykes, Rabbit Pettus, Garen Oakley from DOGS, etc) and represents what will be the last of the Edgewater County stories. If LTGPA is my Woody Allen movie, this is my Altman.

In a future post, I will describe the short stories I have ready, as well as a couple of sequenced collections consisting of both published and unpublished pieces. For now, I’m off to complete a last polish on DOGS.