Poet, Writer, Editor, Bookshop Reviewer
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!
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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!
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.
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 MoreFrom 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.
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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.
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!
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.
Read MoreMy poem "Slaves of Some Strange God" now appears in Yellow Chair Review #4 alongside some excellent work by the likes of Alan Britt, Lisa M. Cole, Howie Good, Cathy Porter, Randi Ward, and many others. My thanks goes to Sarah Frances Moran and the staff over at Yellow Chair Review for accepting this poem, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Thanks for reading!
Call "Long Road to Luckenbach" flash fiction, call it a short short, but whatever it is, it's now live over at Drunk Monkeys, and I'm really excited to be there. The story, inspired by hearing Waylon Jennings' song on a jukebox, is a quick and (hopefully) amusing tale about how quickly plans can go awry when they're made over shots of whiskey in Texas dive bars. The story has a little truthful backstory to it, but I'll let the reader decide what really happened and what's fiction. The names, however, have been changed to protect the guilty! I hope you enjoy.
Any bookworm or literary type who likes an adult beverage every now and then and sometimes becomes annoyed with having to deal with other humans (or “time wasters”) when you’d rather be reading or writing will be absolutely delighted by Black Books—that is, if you haven’t yet discovered the show’s brilliance, and I hope you have. Irish comic Dylan Moran stars as Bernard Black with Bill Bailey as Manny and Tamsin Greig as Fran in this quirky British comedy about a bookshop and its morose, frustrated owner who wants nothing more than for customers (and staff) to leave him alone so he may drink wine and read books. It’s filmed with a live audience, as are many of Graham Linehan’s comedies (he also wrote Father Ted and The IT Crowd) but you get used to the laughter amongst all the sight gags, the pratfall humor, and literary quips. It’s one of my favorite comedies of all times, and these, at the moment, are my favorite three episodes.
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Hobo Camp Review released its 23rd issue this summer with the theme of Highway Life, and David and I (your humble editors) are looking for new unpublished poetry, fiction, reviews, columns, travelogues, photographs, and art for two upcoming issues:
Autumn #24: No theme, but of course we like anything fall or Halloween related during that time of year, because we hobos are really just big kids. Due out in late September.
Winter #25: We aim to release a "western" themed issue in January. Whether you have something about outlaws and mountaineers, a travel piece about the southwest, a desert poem or a California story, something modern or something rustic and dusty, whatever you think might fall into "western," we'd love to take a look.
Submission guidelines for available at the site, and we appreciate you reviewing those before submitting. Thanks!
Every other year or so I sit down and re-watch the bizarre television phenomena that was Twin Peaks, and it always revives my appreciation for David Lynch’s strange genius. It was as eerie and captivating as The X-Files and True Detective (eh, season one maybe) and for a season or so it had the intense following of Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, and despite some amusing 80s-styled haircuts and clothing, the show holds up. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, with a bevy of other writers to help—including Emmy nominee Harley Peyton, Saturn nominee Robert Engels, Barry Pullman, Tricia Brock, and others—the show became known for its blend of murder mystery tropes, soap opera camp, and spectacularly eerie dream sequences that included a dwarf talking backwards, flashing lights, a giant, white horses, and hip jazz numbers.
Most of all, Twin Peaks was (and remains) a storytelling playland where writers can discover all manner of tips and tricks for their own use. Here are some things that I found helpful with my own writing, and maybe they’ll help you too. Yes, many of these pertain to mystery, crime, noir, and horror stories, but you never know when you might be able to add elements of those genres into your own stories.
Read MoreWhile visiting home recently, it hit me how much more I enjoy the writing process when the family dog is lying at my feet. My pal Rocky, our yellow lab, has become my writing sidekick when I’m visiting upstate NY, and there are definite pros and cons to his watchful eye…I also used to live with cats too (eh, not as big a fan) and I found many similar pros and cons. Let me know if I missed any!
Pro: They’re always there to listen when you need to ramble about a passage or character, and I do sometimes ramble on about places in a story where I’m stuck when no one else is around. It helps clear out the head and get things straight with a willing (if captive) audience.
Con: They always think your idea is a great idea, so the feedback quality isn’t exactly “professional grade.” But hey, we all need cheerleaders, even those happily watching us write ourselves into infinite corners.
Read MoreI was a big time cereal eater in my day, and I still enjoy popping open a box of Trix or Cap’n Crunch every now and then to recapture that feeling of Saturday morning cartoons and multiple bowls of sugar-saturated cereal before anyone else was up. The 80s, in my opinion, was the champion decade for kid’s cereals, and here my favorites from my childhood. Feel free to mail me a box and I’ll love you forever.
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To celebrate Independence Day, I'm giving away FREE digital copies of a special edition of What Lies In Wait from now to the end of the day on July 5. The ebook is available as a PDF, EPUB, or MOBI file, and to get one all you need to do is email me at jhdwriting@hotmail.com, leave a comment below, or message me on Facebook and I will reach out with the free file. It contains 114 pages of fiction, including the first three stories that appear in the full version of What Lies In Wait:
"Game of Life": A young woman decided to spend a summer in a remote fire tower, reveling in her isolation and determined to prove she can overcome such a challenge. But when her radio stops working and the weekly supply drops stop appearing at the foot of the mountain, she worries that something is wrong. When she convinces herself to walk back into town, she finds barren streets, abandoned homes, and a fate worse than total isolation.
"Hell or High Water": Deep in the woods of Maine, a lumberjack receives word that his family is dead, all but his young son. While catching a ride home from an outback pilot, the lumberjack wakes from a crash landing to discover he is trapped in the remote wilderness. What's worse, something out in the darkness is following him, and it's hungry.
"Bannerman Sanatorium for Children": A violent pandemic is sweeping the region, and one mother fights to reach the remote sanatorium where her deaf-mute child receives special care. But when she arrives, she finds the pandemic has not spared the sanatorium's staff and patients, and she is torn between staying in the eerie, perhaps haunted facility to help or escape into the woods with a band of survivors.
The full version of the book is available at Amazon.com, and don't forget to look the book up on Goodreads. Your reviews and ratings help a lot! Thanks very much for your support!
While I actually have a little more childhood nostalgia for my original Nintendo system, the Sega Genesis system I eventually received one Christmas is tied to a lot of fond memories I have of being an early teen, especially memories involving my dad. He got one too so we could play together when my sister and I would go visit him in the summers, and we had a blast. When visiting him recently, we found that old Sega in storage and I played the devil out of it. Here are the three games that—even after all these years—are still an amazing way to kill a rainy afternoon.
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The right honorable David S. Atkinson has written a wonderful review of my new short story collection What Lies In Wait, now posted over at Buffalo Almanack, and I'm very happy that David reviewed the book because I really feel like he gets what I was going for in the collection. In his own words:
"The stories in this collection demonstrate Duncan’s wandering spirit in the impressive variety of ways that he explores the meaning behind his title. ... Considering the title on its own, someone unfamiliar with Duncan might expect this to be a collection of horror stories. Yet Duncan’s work resists genre, as his words pass through the conventions of apocalypse, noir, whimsy, zombie alternate history, and the uncanny. What Lies In Wait shows that though Duncan can maintain a focus, he doesn’t stay in one place for very long."
What Lies In Wait does cover a wide variety of styles and genres, but I'm glad he saw the thread that runs through the book, the idea that none of us knows what might be waiting for us right around the corner of this human experience; maybe something good, maybe something evil and hungry, or maybe its the discovery of our truest selves. One thing is for certain: once we cross that line and make that discovery, there's no going back.
Read the full review right here!
Copies are available online at Amazon.com.
Bogie. The Hump. Mr. Sam Spade himself. He’s been one of my favorite film stars ever since my dad started letting me watch some of Bogart's black-and-white classics when I’d visit him over the summer in middle school. I was always drawn to his casual bravado and endless confidence, and he mastered and trademarked the archetype of the law-bending detective with a shady past but a heart of gold. Far too many of his amazing roles will not make this list, but here are the ones that mean the most to me.
Read MoreDuring my time as a Writer’s Digest book editor, I had the pleasure of shepherding a tall stack of books into the world, and each taught me valuable lessons about writing (it’s hard not to pick up some cues when you’re neck deep in writing advice night and day), and some were a lot of fun to edit, too. The following books were especially enjoyable, written by talented, fun, whip-smart people who really cared about helping other writers write better (and sometimes just to write). All these books are definitely worth picking up, and that’s coming from a guy who doesn’t even work there anymore, so you know it’s not some PR smoke and mirrors act. Enjoy!
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