shaping up

So here at Mason, May 21 is Graduation Day. This year that's also Judgment Day. I don't remember Judgment Day from last year, was there a lot of traffic?

I've known it for a while, but I'll be debuting Death Wishing at the Fall for the Book festival in September, somewhat ahead of the official release date of October 11.

Then at the end of October, I've been invited to the Louisiana Book Festival, to be held in Baton Rouge.






November 9 will be the City Lights reading.


I've got about four and a half toes in the door of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival for 2012. The Louisiana love comes courtesy of my friend and mentor, Darrell Bourque, who is just concluding his tenure as the Louisiana Poet Laureate. It also comes from Dorothy Allison, who blurbed the book and has been supporting my fiction for a while. They love her down in LA. I"m super excited about doing festivals, and the people who run them are so damn sweet.


So those are massive gigs, right?

Well alrighty. Galleys ahoy

Looks like the publisher approves the revisions, has completed the line edit, and is rushing the copy off to the galley printers by the weekend. I get passed by this go-round because we're a tad behind schedule, but that's fine with me. There'll still be time to work with the galleys.

Actually, they really liked the revisions, to the point of using four exclamation points to say so, and this makes me very happy.

Keep an eye out for Donna D. Vittucci's cameo appearance as a very friendly French Quarter waitress.

Death Wishing listed on Amazon.

So my friend's mom asked her to check out Amazon to see if my book was listed yet, and it was so she posted it to Facebook. Which is how I found out.

Yes, that is THE Dorothy Allison blurbing me.

I'm buzzy and my ears are hot.

The cover art is awesome, check out the wee little rats in the background.

Kathe Koja and Lia Matera

I miss Kathe Koja, the horror writer. She used to write gruesome, sexual, psychological dark fantasy novels with artists as main characters, and the books were all pretty much the same, but each sort of lurched the argument—whatever it was—forward in giant, sloppy, steps. I think of her as splatterpunk’s Flannery O’Connor, in that she seemed to be writing the same problem over and over again. I guess that’s why she had to stop. Now she writes for the “Young Adult” market and her website doesn’t even name check those lost novels, The Cipher, Bad Brains, Skin (I think the critical favorite?), and Strange Angels (when she overstayed her welcome.) A collection of short horror, Extremities and an erotic novel Kink (unreadable) capped off the 90s and her work for an adult readership.

Lia Matera is one of them there lady-lawyer-writers. What I specifically miss are her Laura Di Palma mysteries, which were super-short and power packed. And they somehow managed to make an iffy cousin-love situation kinda hot.