Quick news break: Tonight I’m pleased to announce a change in representation—no, not with a new agent, but rather the same Michelle L. Johnson who has shepherded DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW thus far on its path to eventual publication. Michelle’s just moved under a new shingle, Inklings Literary, which is where she’ll now be repping […]
As work progresses in 2013, every month or so I’ll post an update. — DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW (novel) After a fast and somewhat mysterious rejection from Simon & Schuster, the MS is currently at Penguin Group, where the longer it stays the better: these things take time. I persuaded an agent, Michelle L. Johnson, who persuaded […]
LOOPER A Sony/TriStar Pictures Release Dir-scr: Rian Johnson Throughout the history of storytelling, writers and other artists have toyed with a Big Impossible Idea: that of attaining the power imbued through an ability to move outside the parameters of the flow of time. It’s irresistible for one reason alone—the individual who has the ability to […]
UPDATE: After viewing all 13 episodes, the Netflix Original series House of Cards builds to a thrilling conclusion in which all of Rep. Underwood’s machinations, some of which have turned deadly, demonstrate both how far he will go to achieve his ravenous ambition, and how far that naked, amoral hunger will take him. Only an […]
As a fan of master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, I’m naturally eager to see the new documentary Room 237 currently making the rounds on the festival circuit, and thus not readily available for review. Instead, I thought I’d look at some of the doc’s source material, and what I found was a troubling, fascinating document that in its […]
Seen at the time as a return to form for Woody Allen—never mind that prior to this movie he’d gotten wonderful reviews and Academy Award nominations for Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo (two of his best, incidentally)—Hannah and Her Sisters garnered as much commercial and Oscar acclaim as his prior, late 70s […]
So you’ve completed and revised a manuscript that’s a thriller, that’s a character study, that’s suspenseful and literary and exciting . . . an easy sell, right? Right. What if it’s set in a milieu that could be seen as distasteful or icky, however . . . like the brutal blood-sport of dogfighting?
Backstory: A number of years ago I began a YA I called VISUAL PURPLE, in which an emotionally disturbed young woman, Courtleigh, 25, pretends for a variety of reasons to be 15 again—she interacts with actual teenagers, has a love affair, and through her actions engenders tragedy, violence, and her own downfall. During a few […]
Readers of my Saturday Evening Post short story finalist ‘Trailer Trash‘ (a version of which also currently appears in Petigru Review, the journal of the SC Writer’s Workshop) have not only told me what a vivid picture I paint of my young protagonist’s ordeal in extreme housecleaning, but also in my scene-setting during the story’s […]
As I suspect many authors also experience, since my career’s started gaining some traction I get asked more often by aspiring writers for advice—to read pages, usually, or simply to give them some sort of insight or ‘secret’ to getting published. I can’t do that, though, mainly because there isn’t one surefire route to publication, only a […]
