On boots and bars and motorbikes...

Had a great time visiting with the folks today and, tomorrow, it my bride's. O, Tannenbaum time. Ho-ho-here comes the Claus, man. Tis' the season and whatnot. Gotta love it!  That spirit was plenty alive a couple weeks back, too, when one of my Chambers of Commrce hosted an event dubbed the Hallettsville Wine Walk, where our local museum invited me and a few other writers to join them for a booksigning event that went well into the evening. Had a great time visiting with fellow authors from the town we all call home, and it inspired more that a few moments creative these last few days. Look forward to more opportunities like those in the coming year. Here are a few pictures from the event, all forwarded along to me last week.  Thanks so much to the folks at the Lavaca Historical Museum, as well as to Doug Kubicek and his bride for keeping me entertained with great conversation throughout the evening. I know I enjoyed it plenty.  ...

I just got word from my publisher that my 2020 story collection,  Long Gone & Lost: Tru e   Fictions and Other Lies , was just added today as a new selection now available on the iBooks app. Do check it out when you have the chance:  ‎Long Gone & Lost on Apple Books Recently picked as a Finalist for the 2021 Sergio Troncoso Best First Book of Fiction Award presented by the Texas Institute of Letters, Long Gone & Lost touches on several stories/events from my own life, often blurring that oft fine line that can sometimes exist between fact and fiction. Most of the stories it contains were written in 2017/2018 as part of my thesis/final writing project to complete the requirements of my MFA creative writing program at the University of Houston-Victoria, in Victoria, Texas.  Copies of the originally submitted book manuscript, which includes three more stories in the manuscript version than we used in the final published version of the book, are on file as pa...

Some monsters will keep you up nights. But in the heart of Texas, our monsters are all too often, all too real... That's how Madville's editorial director Kimberly Davis teased the stories that have become my book, after picking a picture for the cover that you'd swear slipped right out of an old family album someplace, based on little more than a few words I lumped together in an attempt to express a coherent thought. Believe me, "attempt" was just about all I managed in some of those earlier drafts.  Still, the Davis officially added Long Gong & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies to its 2019-2020 Catalog, a week before the start of the annual AWP Conference in Portland, Ore., and mere days after they officially signed yours truly as one of their newest authors.  In case that title is seeming awfully familiar, it is the same basic manuscript I submitted for my final thesis project in the University of Houston-Victoria's MFA creative wr...

I spent 25 years writing for the cheap sheets. Then, after a while away, I shot for the impossible from the cheap seats. I returned to writing. I decided one day I'd call it Author-ized in ’18… Why? Because it sounded good and slogany, and that’s exactly what I needed right then as I built pages like this one. God knows how many pages built on social media platforms before I finally settled on a few that I liked. As 2018 draws to a close, I thought I might do well by revisiting some of where all this has been in just these few short months. Of course, like most things you'll ever read by my hand, you're about to get some back story. You can take that to the bank. Besides, that MFA program I was in, you see, required me to write an entire book. If I didn't pad the backgrounds, how the hell else would I have pulled off something like that? No, really, I didn't intentionally pad a damn thing. Not saying it ain't there, just that I didn't intend for i...

Holing up  for the holidays?  Can't say I blame you. Just way too much in states of transition right now, especially since it seems to be taking the slow walk  around the world right now. Too many people I know who spent the season alone. Several for the first time. In their present situation, anyway We've lost too many this year...  I know its coming.             I can feel it.             Prickles on                 golden hairs                      long lost ghosts of my phantasmal              fortune.  Time to                     fortify, fluidly.                                           ...

Jamey Johnson: High Cost of Living From YouTube

Ever had one of them days where everything goes from roses and sunshine to something much more akin to the southernmost drafts of northbound horse? I never was all that great at geography, but something about all this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve always been a lot better at getting a story told, I always thought. And the editors over at The Ocotillo Review and Kallisto Gaia Press seemed to think so, too, because they recently notified me that they planned to publish my fourth story from my Long Gone & Lost collection, which I’ll be turning in for my MFA here in the very near future. I’m fairly certain that the two fellows from my story would know all about those ill tasting after effects I mentioned, however. They may be all fiction themselves, but they were indeed inspired by real life events in a real life newsrooms. Dave Kindred wrote about a few folks just like these two who, mere days after everybody was riding a high that only those who win six Pulitzers wil...

Oldies but goodies: Got notified today that two previously published  Bobby Horecka stories will be running again, this time in the May /June 2019 Down in the Dirt literary magazine  Mr. Man Candy | The Legend of Chunk Two of our reader favorites, both on this blog and https://OutlawAuthorz.com   are now part of Down in the Dirt literary magazine!

What happens when a medically discharged combat veteran, an oddball albino and a runaway toddler all cross paths one day? Toss in a big pile of pups and you'd have the start of a character list to Lubbock 1974 , one of the newest and darkest stories from my Long Gone & Lost collection, and it went live on the East Coast today at Amarillo Bay, the University of South Carolina's online literary magazine. The story offers an unsettling glimpse at a day in the life of a bunch of misfits tossed together by chance in the Texas Panhandle during the early 1970s. I tried writing something like this almost thirty years ago now, when I first went off to the university in San Marcos. Called it the Red Rubber Ball, a truly awful piece college freshman-year poetry that I'm fairly certain the fates destroyed for me finally, in a late night house fire during the mid-1990s. Few are left who ever even saw those particular words. But the story it told is where started when I wrote th...

Although I knew it would be coming soon, I can't tell you how big a kick it was finding this in my Inbox when I got back to my house yesterday. September was a rough month for me. For several reasons. Not least of which was losing Gramma and a new job within the exact same week. So, this was welcome news indeed, something I kinda needed after some true head-spinners these last few weeks...  This interview was actually put together months ago (back when my website launched in January 2018, to be precise). I figured it was lost months ago already. Until I got word from them last month, which was good because I just didn't have it in me for another Try, Try Again moment. Not then. Not with everything else. But I'll be damned if another job didn't walk up out of nowhere, one I started the exact same day this published. And other than a bit sunburnt, I can't complain in the least. It was even kinda fun. So, here's hoping for some hellova lot better weeks in st...

A forthcoming Q&A with the Writer's League of Texas and my story "Lubbock 1974," in the October issue of the University of South Carolina's Amarillo Bay, a literary magazine, the second one published from book Long Gone & Lost: True fictions and other lies... Which is now due in 21 days, to finish out my MFA by year's end. And believe me, I'm going to try and get the whole thing published right alongside HAP.HAZ.ARD the poetry collection I've been steady building as wrestle my way through stories.  Plan to get back to the novels I started a year or so back, now. and hopefully, I'll have to fits around my full time job. Thankfully, the electrical classes are behind me because I found out yesterday that one of the big classes I've taught since I started is canceled this semester due to a lack of enrollment. Apparently, student numbers are some of the worst ever at Victoria College this semester. For a dude who gets paid by the number ...

Quite a day on the writing front! Today I got word that a new poem would be publishing soon in Typishly, an online literary publication. I'll add more about this when things are a bit more confirmed and definite. I also saw that a Q&A guest blog I did a few months back for this fellow from Australia I met in a writers groups online ran today. It's admittedly long-winded, but most definitely not anthing I expected. Thanks for the opportunity, Clancy!

Somewhere between teaching summer school college classes, working on book edits, wrapping up my electrical classes and otherwise riding life bareback, trying hard to hang on, I almost forgot about it.  You might recall, perhaps, me mentioning a few weeks back that three publications had chosen to publish things I wrote- -Bluestem (from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill.), with my story "Mr. Man Candy" (which I'll be publishing here soon, in its entirety with audio); the new Havik anthology Rise (from Las Positas College in Livermore, Calif.) ran my poems "Hap. Haz.Ard" and "Hipster Jesus," the latter even claiming a surprise second place win in the school's poetry contest along with a $75 cash prize (but that's another story for another day). And finally, there was Alchemy from Portland (Ore.) Community College, which published two more of my poems, "My Little Girl," shown above, and "Why You (dis)sin?...

I found this proof cover of the 2018 Havik anthology about midday Saturday, May 19, at roughly the same time the faculty and staff were hosting a party for the new book at Las Positas College in California. I rather hoped I would've seen more photos from the event, but from the looks of it they came right down to the wire of getting this thing put together. I've attached another picture at the foot of this post that goes over the general basics of the publication this year. If my imaginings are anywhere close, this must be one hefty volume. A total of 122 contributors from six continents. I'm rather amazed my piddling contributions got anyplace near it. At least that's what I thought, anyhow. In fact, I wrote the whole thing, tongue in cheek, more as a spoof of a poem rather than an actual submission. Of course, I banged this one out on one of those days I got like 14 rejections in one day. I wrote this snarky as hell, and submitted it thinking it could...