Sometimes I Write About What I'm Writing

Things I'm working on:

Novel - THE BOX (172 pages in)    

Difficult to describe but I tossed a lot of stuff in here, mostly about ex-wives and ex-lovers and ex-lives. Was once titled FOUR STUDIES OF LOVE.

Novel - THE OMEGA PROJECT: A BISHOP FORD NOVEL (40 pages in)

This is the first mystery novel in a planned series featuring my journalist-turned-detective Bishop Ford.  Each title will do that thing that mystery/thriller series do with similar titles all set like this...The FILL IN THE BLANK Project: A Bishop Ford Novel. This first one is about a serial killer who thinks she's a werewolf.

Novel - GREEN FATHER (47 pages in)

I like folk horror. I've written several short stories in this genre but never a book. This one sees David Eversole move back to his hometown in Eastern Kentucky from the central part of the state when his grandmother dies. He finds she had been part of a cult based deep in the hills of Caldwell, Kentucky.

Prose Poetry Collection - I MISS THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA (14 pages in)

A collection of prose poems, which will be my fourth collection of poetry once finished. If I finish this one finished this year, it will be the second completed in that time. Alien Buddha Press released my third, Shark Life, earlier this year.

I've been fairly prolific, relatively speaking, since my first book, The Same Terrible Storm, came out in 2012. By about this time next year I'll have had fifteen books published since Storm appeared. But the above breakdown of my current projects should explain why. 

I've never been able to sit down and start a book and write only on that manuscript until the thing is done. I've just not been able to take that road. I will say, though, that having three novels going at the same time is pretty new. Usually I've worked on a novel, a story collection, and a poetry collection simultaneously. But it's all for the same reason: I get bored and burned out writing on the same story for too long without having another to jump to when that happens. Somewhere inside I'm missing that mechanism.

Fin

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Bits #118

I have a novel coming out from Cowboy Jamboree Press soon. I'll post more about that as it goes along. Folks say it's a good one. I wrote it fast - like really fast - so it kind of blurred by me. I know it came easiest of my books, even the shorter flash fiction and prose poetry collections. But I'll be talking more about it over the next several weeks.

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Had a strange week at work. I'm the sports director at a media company and just took the job about a month ago. That was during our district and regional high school basketball tournaments and it went by like a flash; our engagement numbers, money made from our social media, all that went through the roof. And I stayed busy. Now it's baseball season and things have slowed down. I can't adjust to being in the office with not as much to do. But I guess as problems go, that's a good one to have.

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My stress levels have improved as my faith in God has grown stronger. Two or three events in my life in which it's undeniable that God came to me with help over the past two years has boosted my faith to new levels. It's a lot to explain, and I have testified to this a lot lately, but it's maybe enough to say that I now, for the first time in my life, truly have 100 percent faith that as long as I live my life as a Christian to the best of my abilities every day whatever happens - good, bad, or otherwise - is part of the path I'm supposed to be on according to God's plan for me. I don't dread things anymore. I don't start to break down every time it seems like my life is unraveling. It's strange but beautiful, and a complete 180 from how I lived the first 50 years of my life. If only I could have had the courage and conviction to come to this sooner in life. Ahh, but that, too, is how this is supposed to work for me. Like I said, no worries, no stress. I wish this for everybody.

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I've been making a massive attempt to read the books I own. I own a lot of them. All of us writers do. I buy books like some people buy loaves of bread and so I've accumulated so many I'm beginning to think I won't get the chance to read them. Which is alright and everything, but I'd really like to, right? I wouldn't have bought them otherwise. So instead of doing what I planned, which was my year of reading only Big Books (think Vollmann), I'm instead starting to read as many of my shorter books in order to take as big of a chunk out as I can over the rest of the year. Wish me luck, because it's hard to stay away from those big max-style novels; they're from another planet. One that tickles a part of my reading brain like nothing else. But to get very many in, I'll have to devote an entire year (maybe two) only to those books. I'm a horribly slow reader, no matter what techniques I use. I can't scan as in speed-reading. I want to read all the story, not just the high points or whatever people do when they speed through like that. 

Today I Did Nothing

I have a hard time when things are slow, work-wise. I get antsy. I roam around the room. I smoke way way too much. 

It's never with my writing my books; I do fine there. I've been blessed by God to have never suffered from writer's block. Okay, okay...don't get mad at me for saying that. It's just true.

Some days are slow. Maybe a paragraph. But I never go a day without writing, even if it's only one terrible paragraph I know I'll be deleting tomorrow, or ever later in the day.

It's the work I do for a living. Unlike most authors I know, I don't teach. I taught for four years at a community college back in the mid-2000s, but that was 090, 100, and 101 classes, with some GED and Literacy classes thrown in to fill out the day. 

It wasn't mind-numbing like people say, not for me, anyways; probably because I strayed off the curriculum, would take a day I intended to be about the actual use for the semi-colon and instead talk about Stephen King's daily writing habits. I did that. I did.

Later - from about 2019 to 2023 - I taught online in a Master's of Fine Arts degree program. It was COVID time and those jobs were easier to land. 

But the remote work was never a living. It was extra money and generally took up more of my time than I had anticipated. 

Point is, I'm working now as the sports director of a media tv and broadcast company. Sports are big here in Kentucky, and so during basketball season and football season there's plenty to do. But baseball, softball, volleyball, and other "off-season" seasons can become a dry time for coverage.

And here I sit trying to think of feature stories to keep content flowing. Some recent segments have been about a statistics keeper, a score keeper, who has been doing this for one school for 47 years. Another was about a young man who is the tenth ranked archer in the state but has never been bow hunting, an odd sort of detail for someone that good with a bow and arrow. The one I'm trying to nail down now is a feature on a sort of "small town, big pride" kind of thing. Think the movie Hoosiers and you'll get the idea.

It's all slow. I've drank five cups of coffee (it's 1:02 p.m. here at the job). I've smoked six or seven cigarettes since getting to work. I've left my desk more than a dozen times and walked outside and stared at the sky, felt some cool breezes, and returned to my desk. I've talked five or so times with my reporter, trying to job loose some ideas. 

It's slow, and I'm not used to that. Most of my life I've made a living as a news reporter, and news is rarely very slow. There are dry periods, but nothing lasting as long as an entire high school baseball season.

It's how I ended up here, writing at Bent Country this afternoon. And so now it's time to get back to pacing the floor and smoking and drinking coffee.

My injured heart hates me. 

The 1985 Chicago Bears

Here I am watching the Bears / Packers wild card game thinking, "Why can't we get a good quarterback?" That's foolish of me to think; Caleb Williams is as good a quarterback as we'll likely see for another fifty years. 

(Now we're down two scores, which means, well...we're screwed already, several minutes before halftime, even.)

I've been a fan since 1985 - the Super Bowl Shuffle Bears with Walter Payton, Mike Singletary, Ditka at coach, Fridge Perry with the goal line TD, all those guys. It was the last time we won a Super Bowl. I was nine-years-old. I got a Payton football kids uniform from the Sears catalogue for Christmas that year, complete with helmet and pads.

(Green Bay Peckers just scored another touchdown, by the way).

Really trying to keep going with this blogpost, but I'm feeling pretty down with a full six minutes left before halftime. And don't tell me Williams is the comeback kid; if you're good in a playoff game that means you know enough to pile up points before the half. If you're constantly having to come back only to win by only a few points. It's too stressful for a newly old man.

I'm out. I'll see ya'll again soon. My apologies.

Exciting Publication Announcement

I've written here several updates on upcoming books I'm working on or may soon have published, but following up on one from a month or so ago, I have some new news.

A new short story collection of mine called Fallujah Boy was slated for publication with Cowboy Jamboree Press in May, but after talking with Adam Van Winkle, CJ's ultra-talented top dawg, yesterday and today, that has now changed in a wonderful flip.

Shortly after I submitted Fallujah Boy, I then sent Adam a manuscript of a novel I had just finished called The Old Invisible, which I've talked about here before at various stages. I wanted to know what he thought, and asked only one thing: is it any good?

The book came quick, which is unusual for me, and I felt unsure in some ways; I genuinely needed Adam's eyes on it to give me the insight he's so often provided time and again over the past decade.

I was ecstatic yesterday when he emailed saying the novel was great, even saying then and there he'd like to publish it. 

So we chatted a bit about this and decided on a different publishing schedule that includes both the novel and the collection. Instead of releasing the collection in May, Adam is going to publish the The Old Invisible in May. The collection, Fallujah Boy, will then be released sometime in 2027.

Let me tell you, my relationship with Adam and Cowboy Jamboree Press began in 2016 with the publication of my second novel, Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic, and things have only improved since. I know folks may get tired of me touting Adam and his press, but, honestly, I've not done so nearly as much as both deserve.

Just know this: if you have the good fortune of landing a book with Adam at CJ then you have a guy in your corner with a towel on his shoulder, a bottle of water in hand, and more than willing to step in the ring in your place at the drop of a dime.

Autumn Years: A Prose Poem

Fifty in April and haven't taken great care of myself over the past three decades. This quickly adds up to losing a step, wrinkles crawling their way across my face, skin hanging from my neck, pictures from last year are time capsules opened 20 years later just today.

A Complete Unknown and Highway 61 Revisited and others

Tried to keep it up with this novel-in-progress...Can't manage it. I like writing novels and all but I miss writing my lyrical, purple prose, prose poetry. I found out I'm happiest writing when I'm hunkering down and writing at a sentence level. It feels like I'm better at that. Either way, the happy outweighs whatever else I might be able to do with a novel. I've written five of them now and that's five more than I thought I'd write. I do kind of dislike that I've written 90 pages on this last one, but, who knows, there may be sections I can revisit and pull from for other work?

Just watched A Complete Unknown and thinking now I should actually listen to some of Dylan's songs - at least Highway 61 Revisited. The final scene in the biopic might have been conjecture, creative license, and it might have been overdoing it some, but I liked it. Maybe it happened; I can't know, I'm pretty sure. TC is becoming one of my favorite actors, especially since he knighted (The King reference) Joaquin Phoenix as the Strange GOAT. Or something like that - strange or crazy. I think strange. For the record, he said Denzel was the GOAT GOAT. I'd mostly agree, except Denzel has kind of a John Wayne acting method going...no matter what movie he's in he's sort of just playing himself.

Ordered a bunch of books with my bunch of Amazon gift cards. It's that time of year. On that note, they're all hard copies. I've spent the last three years buying only Kindle, and it's been nice with the instant gratification and all that, but I miss holding a new book in my hands. So there you go. Important updates all around.

Alright, let's go write something and then read something and then go to bed.