Kindle

In a few weeks, I plan to offer my first novel, RESURRECTING VIRGIL, available also via Amazon.com, or Backwaters Press, on Kindle. RV is about a shy young man who lands a job at a funeral home. Because Virgil is so shy and inept, he keeps making mistakes. He is in love with a woman who is in love with one of Virgil's colleagues, Speed, a nefarious sort who has a business after hours of his own, selling bodies, which Virgil eventually discovers. The novel draws heavily upon Frazier's The Golden Bough, cryonics, body stealing, the Genome Diversity Project, and is heavy on the satire of funeral homes. It is essentially a dark comedy, set in the south, with a surprisingly gentle protagonist, Virgil, who does not know he is an enlightened feminist. My second novel, LUCKY JOYCE, an academic satire, unpublished, is still waiting to be discovered.

Arsonist's Guide, Contd.

So, I'd say it is not the agents' fault despite my catchy title, a play on you know what, as the huge conglomerations that insist on treating literature as though it is a product, a commodity to be bought and traded as unto cattle...Last week I received a nibble from an agent and sent the stuff off. She had been interested before the query but after reading five chapters said that the events were predictable, and allowed that I could send in a rewrite...so I started rewriting the beginning--rechecking her website for what she deemed saleable. Well...come to find out her bookshelf is not what she has been selling but what she has been reading. She has only sold two things over seven years ago and one was a child's book. Doesn't Bookshelf imply what has been sold? Hmmmm....I checked with Predators and Editors who has nothing on her but has received many questions. I have pushed my HOW TO OUTWIT YOUR COLLEGE PROFESSOR on an another agent to read. I am going to hit agents who handle midlist, and then university presses, and then independent presses--independent presses who have kept their integrity and vision, now that I think about it--for LUCKY JOYCE. I have read lately that publishers are backed up two years...LSU Press has been taking novel submissions for a few years now. The imprint is Yellow Shoes. Donald Maas has a helpful workbook: HOW TO WRITE THE BREAKOUT NOVEL...

An Arsonist's Guide to Literary Agents' Houses

Black Wednesday, December 3, 2008, entered my consciousness a few days after a colleague suggested I hold off contacting agents as HER agent had given her the iffy news about her novel which had been accepted by a Really Good Press: publishers being "dramatically" downsized, "several major publishers" (Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, Random House dissolving Doubleday) editors, assistants, etc. laid off. What's a southern writer (by that I mean only born in the south--notice I didn't capitalize) do? Faulkner, not being from the correct side of the Mason Dixon Line, if you recall, had that heyday of publishing, seven years, and then after that, as he drifted into alcoholism, his novels falling into obscurity, became out-of-print, until one Malcolm Cowley rescued them with the Portable Faulkner and he arose...But the odds are stacked because of other things: One, my novel is literary: LUCKY JOYCE is a take-off on Kingsley Amis' LUCKY JIM as I probably needless to say, say to most people who happened on this blog, and HORRORS!--an academic novel--THE KISS OF DEATH; Two, at present, better writers from the south than I have not received the attention they deserve: see Paul Tillinghast's article in Salon...even though E.G. once told me it doesn't matter what you write about as long as it's good writing. He started getting published (big time, translations, movies, Oprah--my teacher at UofL) in an age decades ago before all the hedge fund people Took Over and the little bookstores were wiped out and presses began to be run like corporations. My goal on this site, one of them, is to have pieces of my novel, --short pieces--to try out on any readers of this blog I may get. Another is to ask for your opinions about various subjects. It won't all be about publishing. It won't be all whining. Also if you spot any new agents on the horizon--midlisters--please let me know. What does anyone think of university presses? They are still alive, but my experience is that they are just as hard to get accepted by as huge presses, because they only publish one or two novels a year. And may I get a vote? Who would hate reading an academic novel. In LUCKY JOYCE there is sex and funny stuff in additon to dark stuff.