Checking In

Apologies for letting this blog run stagnant for a while. There are a couple of pieces I've posted below that are a little more recent and have made their rounds with the publishers... suffice it to say that I feel comfortable consigning them here for now.

I'm just finishing up my first semester in the MFA program here at the University of Colorado. The friends I've made have been great, and though there are aspects of the program that have not exactly lived up to my expectations so far, there are at least some writers whom I've been able to connect with and whose work I respect. Most of the stuff I've been working on is longer, and is still making its rounds publication-wise, so I have little to share here other than news.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, the novel I've been working on, sort of went stale during revision and just as I was on the brink of putting it away I've begun working with it in a way that is once-again exciting for me. That's probably what I'll be working on this winter break. I'm finding out that sometimes not-giving-a-shit gives you a degree of critical distance necessary to take risks you otherwise wouldn't. I originally wanted to have it done by...well, now... but clearly that's not going to happen. My revisions so far have been changing the text quite a bit without really bringing it any closer to completion, so now I'm hoping to finish it sometime this summer.

Lately my work has been exploring mostly The Terrible (i.e. terror) and The Fantastic (i.e. fantasy), and it's about time. Much of it has been terrible for a while, but in a different way. Rainer Maria Rilke said: "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear." That's something I'm trying to keep in mind these days.

Here's a link to my latest publication at Ghost Ocean Magazine (which was actually some time ago). Beautiful site. My story is in issue 1.

I will try to keep posting news and works of fiction here. I'm finding it tough to balance it all right now, but that is not an excuse. Just a plea for patience! Thanks to those of you who still check in from time to time.