What do you think of literary magazines? I set up a database to track literary journals, both online or print-only. By now it’s got over 350 entries. I find maybe 5 – 10% are really intriguing in some way. I’ll offer a handful of my favorites here and hope that…
Just for luck, I submitted the first 50 pages of my book for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. They asked for a 300-word synopsis as well as the excerpt. Now how am I supposed to write a synopsis of 100,000 words of joyful psychosis? When I consider all my…
Writing is hard. Publishing is very hard. —Courtney Malm For a couple of weeks I basked in the glory of those wonderful words at the end of my typescript: THE and END. I felt like I’d just enjoyed the world’s most monstrous haircut. (That’s not exactly the crude metaphor I…
I was writing a novel set in Jerusalem when the poisons of the world outran me. I had no way of anticipating the massacre and kidnappings of October 7 2023, or Israel’s devastation of Gaza in revenge. Overnight, my novel became radioactive. Even before October 7, it was questionable to…
Everything Is Good, my current novel-in-progress, was germinated about fifteen years ago, when I started contemplating what I called “God’s sense of humor.” To be clear, I don’t pretend to know what makes the Lord laugh (or even what “God” might mean in our world and time). I just wanted…