Welcome to the dmac blog.

Greetings! You’ve stumbled upon (or were directed to check out) the wordpress blog of James D. McCallister a/k/a dmac! Thanks for your interest in what I hope will be an ongoing experiment — a chronicle of my writing life, as well as a place for reviews of interesting films, books, or music, plus social commentary and the occasional piece of short fiction. Your own additions in the form of remarks and criticisms are encouraged.

The first question readers may have: “why Edgewater County Confidential?” An answer: My fiction, both published and unpublished, often takes place in my mythical South Carolina county, one home to a variety of eccentric characters as any fictional, rural Southern county ought to be — “my apocryphal county” as Faulkner would often refer to his own Yoknapatawpha County.  My published novel King’s Highway, while set primarily in late 1970s Myrtle Beach, features a protagonist whose nascent political dynasty of a family hails from Tillman Falls, the Edgewater County seat. My unpublished novels FELLOW TRAVELER, MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, and DOGS OF PARSON’S HOLLOW all feature Tillman Falls and Edgewater County as their primary if not sole settings, and one of my two prizewinning short stories, “Howdy from Upstairs”, is likely set in or near the area though this isn’t made explicitly clear by any actual text. A new novel, one that’s been in the thinking, planning, and creating stages for years now, has been traditionally referred to as TILLMAN FALLS, though of late my thinking has evolved into calling this piece simply EDGEWATER. This manuscript has always been imagined as a mature work encompassing many themes and characters from the other novels (as well as a variety of short stories and other, unfinished or proposed novel-length narratives), so it makes sense to entitle the work thusly.

As for the other element of the blog title, it’s a nod to my stint as a sardonic alt-weekly columnist in the Columbia Citypaper, my byline published under the clever heading “Five Points Confidential,” only a couple of which are still knocking around in cyberspace. I have to say, having been a regular newspaper columnist was kind of a cool, left-field dream coming true, one that I miss and to which I may return at some point.

Having said that, let us note that this blog may function at times like FPC once did, with opinion pieces, agitprop, and the like. But for now, I’ll leave you with a piece of work that was my first published piece of fiction.