Over the last few days, I’ve felt a little nervous. Sometimes I get this way, when I have this lingering feeling that something is about to happen, something is about to break free. This nervousness certainly manifests itself in several ways, for me: irritability, shortness, lack of concentration, and feelings of ambivalence. (And that’s even when I think the “big break” is going to be something positive…) <img class="size-full wp-image lazyload" id="i-1406" alt="Image" src=

Marni Mann’s Books Now in Young Adult Editions Fellow Florida writer, friend, and all-around great gal, Marni Mann made a big splash with her two novels about addiction: Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales and Scars from a Memoir. Marni’s publisher has now released Young Adult versions of the novels which retain the gritty reality of the books while downplaying some of the more “adult” situations the main character, Nicole, finds herself in. The link above will take you to Marni’s webs

Good fiction transports us into other worlds. Sometimes, this takes the form of the sweeping Civil War epic or the Deep Space Trilogy–big, complex novels filled with a large cast of main characters and more extras than could be supplied by a Hollywood casting company. While Clifford Garstang’s new book, What the Zhang Boys Know, is less assuming in scope, it nevertheless settles us into an unknown world both captivating and complex in its own way. <img class="size-full wp-ima

If you already follow Jen Luitwieler’s blog, you may have noticed I was tagged in a recent post to provide details of my current works in progress. (If you don’t follow Jen’s blog, you probably should.) The challenge Jen issued, then, is to answer the following ten questions about a work in progress. My challenge was to pick which work in progress to discuss. They are all in various stages. Here was the list of projects I could choose from: A literary fiction novel. A literar

Background and White Noise I heard something this morning I hadn’t heard in two weeks. Traffic. Our apartment faces a street that isn’t super busy, except a few times a day. At some point this morning, when I was laying awake for the tenth or eleventh time, I heard a trash truck or UPS truck drive by, followed by a motorcycle and several cars. Traffic. The Brush Creek Ranch didn’t have much of that. Even though there were some trucks and 4-wheel drive sports vehicles that wen

<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-903" class="size-full wp-image-903 lazyload" title="ph30" src="https://ericswyatt.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/ph30.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="187" /> A photo taken from the Brush Creek Foundation website. Tuesday morning (very, very early, as Cami will tell you) I will head off to the Brush Creek Ranch, near Saratoga, Wyoming (via Denver and Laramie). I’ll be one of seven or eight other artists (two writers, two musicians, and fo

The week started well. My story, Most Dead Birds Are Never Found, was featured in Eunoia Review. (A link to the story, along with several others, is below.) The publication of that story marks a sort of milestone. Most Dead Birds… is an excerpt of my novel-in-progress, tentatively titled, I Should Love You Less. Other than my wife, my Queens University classmates and advisors, and a few other special readers, this is the first public appearance of any part of the book. Sharin

So, let me dig into today’s thoughts on writing. I’ve been working on a novel for a while now. That’s pretty typical. Most writers (there ARE exceptions) don’t sit down and spit out a novel in some long mental purging that is well-plotted and coherent in one pass. I’m not putting any time line on this writing, except that one of the goals I hope to have accomplished by the end of my MFA (January, 2012) is to have this book finished and polished and ready to be read by agents

I just returned from the May Residency week at Queens University of Charlotte. We had another amazing week of reading, writing, laughing, learning, and enjoying the mental stimulation provided by 100 or so writers all in one place, talking about their craft, encouraging each other, and pushing each other on to bigger and better writing. The week is too short, and too long. It flies by quickly, and it is packed with all sorts of wisdom from established writers (Fred Leebron, N

News has come in today that author J.D. Salinger–famous for both his trademark character of Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye and for his aversion to fame and celebrity–has passed away in his New Hampshire home at the age of 91. Some will find this hard to believe, but even though I’m a very active reader–and have been since childhood–I hadn’t read Catcher until this Fall, as I was preparing for my first MFA residency. I was stunned by the book, in ways both positive