For those of you just catching up to this manuscript and its path to publication, over the last year my literary novel MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS has been making its way through the process of acceptance at Story River Books, the new fiction imprint now operating under the auspices of the University of South Carolina Press. […]
This stuffy summer finds me not only blazing through the third revision of the DIXIANA saga (1608 pages and counting) but continuing to wait for news on any number of promising submissions, the most prominent of which is my literary drama MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS currently residing on desks and hard drives at Pat Conroy’s Story River […]
Now wrapping up a ten-day break from the editing phase of my three-novel series DIXIANA (the process of which I’ll detail in a forthcoming post), here we have two newsworthy tidbits of note coming in an otherwise sequestered time of authorial diligence and quiet endeavor: Tidbit 1: I’m thrilled to announce that an abstract I submitted to the So Many […]
Here’s one of my favorite unpublished stories, one that’s not only garnered numerous rejections, but zero awards. Who cares? At ECC, we’re able to publish ourselves. Enjoy. Note: This short story also inspired a full-length feature screenplay, the first I’d written in many years. I’m proud of that piece, too, which has also gone nowhere. At […]
Here’s an updated rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts.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 […]
Better late than never, and in acknowledgement of the new Phish album due next month, here’s a never-posted review of last year’s epic Halloween concert. — For the second time in four years, Phish, Vermont’s perpetually popular group of prog rock virtuosi, returned to Atlantic City for their typically-legendary Halloween run. Anticipation, through the roof; […]
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 […]
From its initial silvery, widescreen, black & white frames, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska unfolds at an unhurried pace, much like the shuffling steps of its principal character, the taciturn, boozy, elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern, in a career-best performance). When we first meet him, Woody trudges along a freeway ramp up and out of Billings MT, but it’s […]
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,’ […]
