The Second Cortez Celebrates Its Fourth Birthday
Today marks the fourth birthday of my second novel, The Second Cortez, a finalist in the 2018 Red City Review Book Awards for General Fiction. As I sit here sipping my coffee this Saturday morning, I contemplate the novel’s themes, its characters and pivotal scenes,...
Austin Institution Hosts Water Lessons’ First Book Signing
On Sunday, November 16, Water Lessons traversed another milestone: its first book signing. And it occurred at one of my favorite locales in Austin: BookPeople, designated Bookstore of the Year by Publishers Weekly in 2005. Yes, BookPeople, that magnificent three-story...
Water Lessons Published, Premieres At Texas Book Festival
On Saturday, October 25 and Sunday, October 26, the recently-published Water Lessons debuted at the Texas Book Festival, held annually in late October on the capitol grounds in Austin. Despite the myriad of books sold or displayed at the event, I ended up a few copies...
Two Lessons From My Afternoon With Walker Percy
As a boy of eleven, when I asked Bunt, the perennially charming wife of Walker Percy, if I could meet the great writer, little did I know I would soon feel such inspiration, and years later, such admiration for the man’s character. Percy taught me two lessons...
Boston Strong, and Massachusetts Remarkable
If Boston is anything to a writer, it is a city worth commemorating. As a native New Orleanian, born and bred, I can tell you that the popular motto “Boston Strong” seen and heard in the wake of the horrific 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was apt. Like New Orleans after...
The Nautical Background of Water Lessons
New Orleans remains both a poor city and a major port. Boston continues to undergo rapid gentrification and has lost most of its identity as a port. Today Boston and New Orleans may seem like vastly different cities indeed, but for many generations this was not so....
Why Most Writers Return To Writers’ Conferences
Many accomplished authors go their entire lives without attending a writers’ conference, either as a speaker, teacher, or workshop participant. No Tin House, no Iowa, no Bread Loaf, no Sewanee. Many writers actually attend several writers’ conferences, year after...
Why Debut Novels Are Unique
It is true that for most novelists, their first novel is not their greatest. You can probably say this about Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, Hemingway, and scores of other greats. James Joyce and Walker Percy might be exceptions. But it is...
Finding Your Maxwell Perkins, Somewhere Out There
Whether a fiction writer elects to publish in a traditional or indie form, that writer should ideally search first for a skilled independent editor to ready the manuscript for submission. If that writer chooses the legacy route and must inevitably go under the knife...
No Writer Is An Island: Why A Writer Needs A Writers’ Group
Truly one of the shrewdest decisions an author can make is to participate avidly in a writers’ group or club. A writer is like the man in John Donne’s poem: “No man is an island/Entire of itself,/Every man is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main.” Almost...