Only Eleven Days In

It's only eleven days into the new year, and I had a flash piece picked up for publication. Thanks, Word Riot, and a special thanks to editor, Kevin O'Cuinn, for his helpful edits. The piece is titled "The Difficulty of Endings", and Jackie Corley tells me that it will be in their February 15th issue.

Other things are going well. The new short story I'm working on is really going well. I'm slightly over 2000 words in (taking a break to get the new semester started), and I'm thinking about it quite a bit. I'd call it a surreal story, and I think that aspect of it is slowing me down.

I'm about half way through The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and I think it's just excellent. I can see why, though, in our PC world, such a book wouldn't be very popular. There's some racism in it (even from the main character), but I get the sense that James Farrell was a true realist, not out to create people as they should be, but as he knew them to be.

Still co-editing On the Clock, a collection of post-industrial fiction, for Bottom Dog Press. The process is going slowly, but I'm reading about 10 stories a week.

Two short film scripts that I finished, Sleeping Deeply and Distance, are in pre-production. I think Michael Randolph might even be close to doing some casting calls for SD. Jim Gleason and I plan to shoot Distance this spring. I'm going to take a stab at playing the lead role. I plan to watch some old William Shatner footage...get my technique down.