A quick tour of my long and winding road
Parents
My mother and father were married during World War 2. My father was killed, not long after this picture was taken. My mother was pregnant with me.
I learned more than I realized about the basics of this art and trade from being around two great writers, Nelson Algren and Kurt Vonnegut, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
The school was everything it has become celebrated for, but I was too young and insecure for it. The paradox of my life got to me: I was pounding the keys for hours a day, isolated, lonely, unworldly. I need more life, a lot of it, before I would feel comfortable settling into this career.
I left Iowa for New York, where I got work in the early cinema verite documentary film scene, as a production assistant, then a sound recordist, then an editor.
Later, I made an abrupt career change and worked for 5 years as a musician, in rock bands in the Cambridge-Boston area. The most prominent of those was John Lincoln Wright and the Sour Mash Boys, a popular bar band in Harvard Square, Kenmore Square, and a string of clubs from New York to Canada. We played occasional stadium and concert gigs, the biggest a sellout in Boston Garden, where we opened for The J. Geils Band.
When I married Carol, life as a musician was impossible–I would be rolling in from a gig at 3 or 4; she would be leaving for a ballet class at 7. In the band years I had supplimented my income as a freelance journalist and multimedia scriptwriter. Now I hung up my fiddle and begin to freelance seriously.
For a few years, we lived in New York, so Carol could get more work as a modern dancer. Then we moved to Los Angeles, where I learned the screenwriting trade at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, home of future gurus Syd Field and Robert McKee. I learned, hustled, pitched, took meetings, made some option money, but ultimately chose to go back east and write fiction.
My first novel, Stark Raving Elvis, began life as a screenplay, written while I was at Sherwood Oaks, and finished after some drastic critique from a friend, screenwriter Len Shrader.
We have two children, Olivia and Colette, both in their 20's now. In 1989, moved to North Carolina, and we've lived here, in my childhood home for 20 years.
During that time I taught Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, and published my second novel, I Killed Hemingway and a memoir, I Elvis, Confessions of a Counterfeit King (see right sidebar).
After 12 years of teaching fiction writing, I realized that, with my freelance skills and the rise of digital media, I could run my own teaching and coaching practise, at my own computer...and that (in addition to some serious blogging) is pretty much what I do.
Am I glad it worked out this way? You better believe it. I love working one-on-one with my clients--even if we've never met. (And it works: I've had clients in such far-flung locations as Alaska, Qatar, and the Phillipines). Has working online made me a better writer and teacher? Yes and yes, absolutely. And this, I can pass along to you.
If you'd like to explore the details of working with me, please check out my FAQ page, where I get down to specifics. You can also visit Write a Better Novel, where I post about fiction writing issues three or four times a week, friend me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter.