When my novel Believers sold earlier in the year, the publication date was either going to be fall 2014 or spring 2015.
Well, there’s been a decision, and it’s… spring 2015.
Yes, the extra waiting will be hard (to quote my son: “Hasn’t your book come out yet?”). On the other hand, there will be more time to generate prepublication interest among booksellers, reviewers, etc.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, I know. A couple quick things…
My story “Job History” is in the latest issue of The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.
Here’s what the cool cover looks like:
Other contributors include Rick Moody, Stephen Dixon, Steve Almond, Chad Simpson, Len Kuntz, and many others.
You can buy the issue here.
Lastly, I’m currently working with my editor on the final edits for my novel BELIEVERS. So far so good. Hoping to have everything wrapped up in the next couple weeks. I’ve also started another novel, so I’m looking forward to getting back to that.
“I wish I could say to you that it all works out organically as planned, but they never do, these books. Writers constantly—you know this—fly by the seat of their pants, and you just go along. You’re open to the mystery. You’re open to the possibilities.”
Great interview with Colum McCann over at the Rumpus. Can’t wait to read his new novel, TransAtlantic.
From Joan Didion:
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.
Over at the Quivering Pen, Shawn Vestal, author of the newly released collection Godforsaken Idaho, had some things to say about parenting and writing that really hit home.
Here’s a taste:
“I needed to be drawn out of myself and into the world, to be forced to consider my own existence in the context of someone who would look to me as an example, to be forced to confront, more gravely and less glibly, the parts of myself that might fall short of that standard, and all of this made me a more reflective, contemplative human being, and therefore a more reflective, contemplative writer.”
You can read the entire essay (well worth your time) here.
