It’s time once again to tally up the books I read over the last year and see which ones held up. As usual, I only include books I read for the first time in 2015, but they can have been published anytime. Oddly, it seems I read fewer books in 2015 than in most recent years, by almost double digits, probably because I moved away from NYC and lost all that subway reading time. Oh well, so it goes. Here’s my top 10. Enjoy!
Read more"No Harvest" Appears in Red Fez #84
My poem "No Harvest" now appears in Issue 84 of Red Fez, a madhouse of a publication that has accepted a great deal of my work over the years and I am always grateful to have another piece in the fold. More of my older poems accepted by Red Fez can be read HERE. In other writing news, I have taken a step away from a lot of social media outlets to focus on the latest mystery novel (as I said in a previous post) and it's going a little slower than I hoped, but I'm getting closer to the end. Details on that will follow, as well as on a few other poetry and fiction publications I have in the works with presses and magazines in 2016. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
NaNoWriMo…or Something Like That
So it’s National Novel Writing Month, and I’m sort of participating. I’m working on my fifth novel and getting about a thousand words a day (average) down, which doesn’t feel like a lot per day but it’s adding up. The “sort of” qualifier comes into play in that this isn’t really anything new for me. NaNoWriMo is every month when you’re working on novels around the year, plus short stories, poems, freelance, and run a lit magazine. So as much as I love everyone (well, writers at least) getting excited about a novel writing month, it’s really just another month for many of us.
But like I said, production levels have been steady. I’m maybe 25K words from the end of this novel so I should be able to finish come December. I’m excited for this one’s potential, and had a revelatory moment while sitting in a mechanic’s lounge waiting on my car about how to better wrap up the ending with more of a surprise connection to how the crime driving the plot started out. Perhaps not thrilling to any reader of this blog, but thrilling to me as I scrambled to jot down all the new details and connections on the back of 23 of the mechanic’s business cards with his dying Bic pen, hoping to get it all down before I forgot anything. So it goes.
By the way, the novel is a mystery based on a real series of disappearances that took place in Vermont in 1945. The working title is The Girl in the Mountain, and I’m really excited about it. More details coming soon.
Top 6 Scariest Old Time Radio Shows
I’m a big old time radio nerd, and my favorite tales are the creepy chillers and spook stories about ghosts, killers, and weird supernatural happenings that they’d play late at night as you sat by the radio in your stuffed chair with the lights turned low and the wind rattling the windows. Here are my six favorite shows for sending a chill up your spine, perfect for getting in the Halloween mood!
Read moreRanked: Every Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Album
From so-so to legendary, because there are no “bad” Tom Petty albums!!
My number #2 band always fluctuates between The Replacements, Tom Waits, and Ryan Adams, but my overall #1 ever since I was a little kid has always been and will always be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. TP has a knack for crafting that 3 minute rock song that is both radio friendly (well, back when radio mattered) and also tells a story. That’s what I love about the band the most: their storytelling, little fictions that speak to realities. With guitars. Really loud guitars. Sometimes soft ones, too. All good stuff. Enough chit-chat. Here’s my ranking, from passable to great.
Read moreThree New Poems in Change Seven Magazine
The new issue of Change Seven Magazine is now out, and it includes three of my poems. "The Good Fresh Kind" is a look back at a lazy day on the job as a lawn-care laborer back in college before the full hammer of adulthood struck. "Death Row Escape" is a poem about how obsession and lust is a prison, and is a poem I held out of my collection Berlin to work on it some more, and I really like this final version. "It's Only Temporary" is a New York City poem, a love poem, a lonely poem, and still takes me back to that strange feeling you get in NYC of being so constantly surrounded by people yet feeling a million miles away from everyone. A deep thank you to the editors at Change Seven for including my work with so many other fine writers, including Emily Strauss, William Doreski, Seth Jani, Ilana Masad, and many others.
What Lies In Wait - Just $10 Through Halloween!
It's that time of year where the leaves turn, the air gets cooler, and the ghost stories come out to play. If you're into that kind of thing, stories about a tentacled beast who dwells beneath the surface of a picturesque lake, of a house full of the ghosts of everyone who ever lived within its walls, of an abandoned car on a lonely country road with bloody handprints on the windows, of a motel in the Texas desert whose temporary residents are hunted by an ancient evil, of ... well, you get the idea: monsters, ghosts, and the end of the world. I've got you covered with What Lies In Wait! From now until Halloween, it's just $10 for print or $1 for the Kindle version. I hope you enjoy!
My Top 3: John Steinbeck Books
I’ve long been a huge fan of John Steinbeck’s writing and his humanist, critical examinations of not just the American experience, but of what it is to be human, to struggle against greed and oppression, and most of all, with our own demons. The fact that Of Mice and Men doesn’t even make the top three here should say something, as that’s the book I read in my early teens that made me want to be a writer. It was the first book that hit me right in the gut and said—This is what you are supposed to be doing! The following three books helped shape my worldview in such a way that I’d say his ideals and passions are more important to who I am as a person than any other artist.
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