After a successful and stimulating Basics of Screenwriting course this fall, I’m energized to teach again during the winter and spring terms in the Midlands Technical College continuing ed program. The Fiction Writing course returns first, and then immediately after, we go back into scriptwriting mode.
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 […]
A posting on the New Yorker site regarding the Twelve Tribes, a religious sect (or cult) that follows around particular musical acts, proselytizing and recruiting in the parking lot, features a quote from me regarding an encounter I had almost 25 years ago with one of its members outside a Grateful Dead concert in Landover, MD. (A […]
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 […]
The news dropped today that my long-in-gestation literary novel MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, now out on submission, has made it through the initial reading at Pat Conroy’s new fiction imprint Story River Press, though not selected for the first round of releases coming in 2014. When is a rejection not a rejection? When you’ve made the […]
It’s getting into that holiday-week feeling vibe, and with the end of month number two of the composition of DIXIANA upon us, time for an update regarding what we may also think of as Novel 2013. Click through to find out more about what this project’s all about, my approach to the writing, and my ambitions for […]
UPDATE: I downgraded and toned down what had been a bit of a bitter rant toward the end. Eh. Blowing off steam. It’s all good, just a sensitive writer responding to the stresses of the path. Revised post follows. — A while back I made a commitment to keep readers informed about career events, both […]
The gratifying journey of Fellow Traveler continues this morning with another positive review, this one from jambands.com, courtesy journalist Brian Robbins. Here’s an excerpt: Some books are murder mysteries; Fellow Traveler is a life mystery. Newly-divorced-and-somewhat-adrift Ashton Tobias “Z” Zemp is trying to make some sense of the life (and recent death) of his best friend – and […]
Now in the midst of Writing Retreat 2013 Redux, thanks to my benefactor we again find the Southern novelist secluded, sequestered, and in the midst of writing his most ambitious piece yet, DIXIANA. Here’s a report from the secure, undisclosed location designated as Hilltop North.
Pleased today to announce that I’ll be returning to teaching his September in the MTC Continuing Ed program, this time with two classes.
