Writing update: I’ve been mum about this work lately, but progress on my epic literary novel DIXIANA goes quietly and diligently onward. Since the first draft back in August, what was already a formidable text has now grown to the Wolfeian length of 315,000 words, with still quite a few small chapters, scenes, and moments […]
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.
An ocean of consciousness, but individuated nodes comprising our minds and bodies. We’re bobbing on the surface, mostly, or at times plunging to the depths, if we’ve taken up meditation, let’s say. But it’s difficult. We need solitude. Quiet. And time, in order to find ourselves. All good reasons to take a sailing trip around […]
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 […]
So as part of my research for DIXIANA, a novel that’s steeped in both a literal and allegorical history of American ‘hillbilly’ music, I wanted to know about the time as a nine year-old that I attended the Grand Ole Opry. We’d gone to Nashville to have Thanksgiving with the Texas branch of the family, […]
Here’s a rundown on my various unpublished manuscripts. — DIXIANA—From May 1 to August 21, ‘Novel 2013’ consumed my life, mind, and soul; since then, I’ve kinda-sorta been in creative recovery, and for good reason: with this sprawling first draft now ‘in the can,’ as they say in the moviemaking world, DIXIANA represents the culmination […]
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 […]
Seven hundred pages; one-hundred eighty six thousand words. DIXIANA rolls on. As we enter the last week of the third month of writing this massive Southern literary novel (and with my personal deadline looming in another month’s time), over the last few days I’ve suffered something of a crisis of confidence. Not so much over […]
