- Oct 11, 2022
It's been a slow year for news on the site, but I'm still out here and still working. I recently completed a collection of short stories focusing on workers at a Wisconsin packing plant, and that collection, Lost Time Incidents, was several years in the making. While I look for markets for Lost Time Incidents and my two novels, I'm also working on the next couple of writing projects. Thanks for staying tuned, my faithful reader -- there may be some actual news soon!
An old short story of mine, "Security," has reached the quarterfinalist level in ScreenCraft's Cinematic Short Story Competition. I had a little success with this contest last year with my stories "Bell" and "Real-Life Experiences," so I decided to give it another try. The contest is designed to find prose stories with cinematic adaptation potential. "Security," originally published in Barrelhouse and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is the story of an anxious security guard who's well aware that if this were a spy movie, he'd be an expendable character who has five seconds of screen time before being killed by the super-agent.
My novel A Travelogue for the Wasteland was a finalist for the University of New Orleans' 2021 Publishing Lab Prize. Although it didn't ultimately win the prize, it did make it to the final round, and that is encouraging.