Help Plot My 2015 Reading Tour

Would you like to hear me read Long Black Curl to you this summer? Maybe ask me some questions in person? If so, here’s what you need to do.  Go to your local bookstore, ask if they’d be interested, and if they are, send me the contact info, including the name of the person in charge of author events. Don’t … Read More

A Giveaway in honor of National Bubba Day!

The “Bubba” is a creature of the American South, often misunderstood by those not from the region. I’ve known a half-dozen people whose preferred name was “Bubba,” and it’s been used as a term of endearment for older brothers since time immemorial. It’s fitting, then, that there’s a National Bubba Day to commemorate this. The classic Bubba is best embodied … Read More

Interview: Vanessa Horrocks, writer/director of Her Tragedy

I met Vanessa Magowan Horrocks at TeslaCon three years ago, at a seminar she gave on homegrown filmmaking. She was sharp, dedicated and had a clear artistic vision, and listening to her describe the travails of independent film production, I also realized she was funny and entertaining. So when I heard she was financing a new feature film through IndieGoGo, … Read More

The best* Christmas Eve gift

*Sarcasm. Once about ten or twelve years ago, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I went through a process that will be instantly familiar to every struggling writer: I sent a query letter to a publisher, and they responded with a request to read the first three chapters of my manuscript. This happened fairly often, so I did not … Read More

Genre respect and the NYT

It’s an ongoing issue that genre fiction–mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror–is somehow less important than so-called “literary” fiction. That involves forgetting that in many cases the disposable genre fiction of yesterday (Jules Verne, HG Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, Louis L’Amour, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler) has become the acknowledged classics of today. [frame align=”left”] [/frame]Still, it’s … Read More