The first novel — and the choice not to publish it.

Beginnings

I wrote my first novel, What Day Is This?, just over fifty years ago, just after I turned twenty. My teacher wanted me to publish it on the first draft. She could have gotten it done. She’d been a professional writer and had the connections. I could have had money and a published novel before entering my Junior year of college. It might have made some small splash on the national scene, but it would really have made me a figure in Alabama.

I knew what the media were doing already to young writers. If my book hit, I’d have been a “voice for my generation,” which appealed to me, but I knew that I wasn’t ready for that and the slime pit of media that could have followed. I also knew that the book wasn’t ready for publication, either. So I never published it, though I rewrote it three or four times without being able to create the resonance I knew it lacked. Now I’m glad I never got money when I was young because I would have given a lot of it to political candidates who would have disappointed me badly.

Small published things — chapbooks and e-books.

Published works

The only things I’ve published to this point have been small chap-book type things — Targets (~1987), The Deep Lake (2005) — and some e-books, including The Scrivener (2016) and Flight of the Venus Satellite (2020).

Four novels in motion.

Novels in progress

What Day Is This?

The Cafe of Mirrors

The Dog That Fed Us

The Empty Book

Four screenplays.

Screenplays

Ambies

Good Old Fashioned Flying Saucer Movie

Scorpion Wars

The Ruined Heart

What drives all of it.

The through-line

The work has always lived under the influence of writers who took the strange and the political seriously without losing the music of a sentence — Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Tom Robbins. The novels and screenplays here all sit somewhere in that line of fire.