Austin-shot 'The Son' ready to premiere on AMC

Philipp Meyer was getting drunk on author and folklorist J. Frank Dobie's front porch when he decided to adapt his epic Texas novel The Son for the screen.

"Let's just do it ourselves," he recalls thinking, with the "ourselves" including his compadres Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman from the University of Texas' Michener Center for Writers. "The worst that can happen is we fail."

Read the rest at the Austin Chronicle.

Joe Lansdale = modern-day Mark Twain

I interviewed Joe Lansdale for Kirkus Reviews about his great new novel. Here's how it starts:

Even if the prolific Joe Lansdale created an imaginary twin (don’t put it past him), the two combined probably wouldn’t have enough fingers and toes to count all of his published novels. So when he says Paradise Sky was the most fun one to write, take heed.

A fictionalized story of the real-life Nat Love, the picaresque tale follows its African-American protagonist on a jaunt through post-Civil War adventures that lead him into careers as a marksman nicknamed Deadwood Dick, a Buffalo soldier and a marshal, all the while being tailed by a racist miscreant bent on killing Love for a mostly imagined slight.

Lansdale had read the real Nat Love’s autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" by Himself and saw an avenue to tell a tale often overlooked—African-American contributions to the Old West mythos. He’d pitched it as a novel as far back as the late ‘70s, but agents and editors then saw no audience for a story with black heroes.

Read the rest here.

Texas as seen through recent fiction

I regularly interview Texas authors for the San Antonio Express-News. Tomorrow they'll run my interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, a Corpus Christi native who sets his debut novel Remember Me Like this there. Here's how my piece begins:

Bret Anthony Johnston's fiction shapes Corpus Christi into a literary character, but he has a confession: He hates the beach. The sand itches; the salt water clings.

“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.

The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.

“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.

Read the rest here.

I also recently interviewed Jim Sanderson, whose two new books are set in West and East Texas. Here's a taste:

East Texas and West Texas might as well be on separate planets, but Jim Sanderson straddles the divide and puts both under the microscope in his two recent books of fiction.

The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection “Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college instructor for seven years before that.

Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”

“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even changes a little.

Read the rest here.

'Thieves' tells fictional truths about a writer's life

This piece ran in today's San Antonio Express-News. It's behind a paywall, so here it is in its entirety (along with a photo I took of David):

By Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

January 12, 2014
SAN ANTONIO — A sign by David Marion Wilkinson's writing desk reads “Joy.” It was his guiding principle as he attempted to write the ultimate comic novel, but life and the book took a different turn.

The result is “Where the Mountains are Thieves,” a solid novel that is equal parts funny and tragic, but 100 percent honest about human failings and what it means to be a writer today.


“I came to this place where writing a comic novel wasn't possible,” said Wilkinson, who is best known for writing historical novels of the West.

“Thieves” follows Jesse Reverchon, a middle-aged author fresh from rehab and an affair who moves with his wife and young son Travis to Alpine to patch their lives together. Reverchon coaches his son's baseball team and tries to buckle down and get his writing career back on track. Along the way, the reader is warned of an accident lurking in the pages ahead that will rock Jesse's world.

Jesse says, “I came to understand that most novelists are strictly observers. At first I struggled with it, agonized over it. And then, about the time Travis was born, I accepted it.”

But in heartwarming and funny moments, Little League baseball proves Jesse's salvation. Á la “The Bad News Bears,” he tries to whip a ragtag group of misfits into a team.

“It's his catalyst to getting connected,” Wilkinson said. “His only success is impacting the lives of fatherless boys, but what he comes realize is they are saving his life.”

Wilkinson's latest novel is itself a lesson in the vagaries of the publishing industry and the human heart.

Like his main character, Wilkinson had moved his family to Alpine (he has two sons and, unlike his character, no history of drug or alcohol abuse) to make a new life in the Big Bend region. He became writer-in-residence at Sul Ross State University, built a house overlooking Cathedral Peak, and befriended the sometimes-eccentric residents of the beautiful but isolated place. But his real-life marriage was falling apart.


Courtesy

David Marion Wilkin-son's new novel, “Where the Mountains Are Thieves,” follows a middle-aged author who moves with his wife and young son to rebuild their lives.

“You could sit there and watch the sun go down with a sense of peace and a feeling that everything's OK, but then you look around and see it's not,” he said.

Careerwise, it actually started in 2001. After three years of work, Wilkinson's last novel, “Oblivion's Altar,” was hot off the presses and receiving positive reviews when the events of 9/11 changed everything. The nation was in turmoil, and no one was reading fiction. Wilkinson turned instead to nonfiction with “One Ranger,” a biography co-written with famed Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson.

Suddenly nonfiction agents were hitting him up with work-for-hire projects, and he realized they saw writers as interchangeable widgets. Like his character Jesse, Wilkinson was desperate to prove he still had fiction-writing chops.

Nearly broke and recently divorced, he found himself back working oil fields as he had in his youth. He didn't write for two years. When the words came, “Where the Mountains are Thieves” became a different, better, more honest book.

“There's a little anger in the book, along with frustration, sorrow, regret,” he admitted.

It's the writer's story of when art meets commerce. Wilkinson cites Herman Melville, who stopped writing and became a customs inspector. Only after his death did perhaps his best novel, “Billy Budd,” see publication.

These days, Wilkinson is not sure about his next novel. His writing career has taken another turn. He's been working as a writer on a History Channel miniseries about the Texas Rangers, and another in development about women spies during the Civil War.

“It changes every day,” he said of writing for television. “I'm good at that from what I've been through.”


Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer. Reach him at therealjoeo@gmail.com.

'Evacuation Plan' in Award-Winning Books Week

The folks over at Storyfinds.com are highlighting the new e-edition of my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan today on their site as part of their Award-Winning Books Week. The novel won the North Texas Book Award and garnered some good attention. (Look on the right of this page for more info!)

They've got an excerpt of the book here. Check it out and spread the word.

Sublett reinvents the novel with 'Grave Digger'

Jesse Sublett knows noir. He’s a student at the feet of Chandler and Hammett (he named his own son Dashiel) and penned three respected mysteries about an Austin, Texas, based musician/private dick named Martin Fender. He’s also a heck of a musician who led the seminal Austin punk/garage/new wave band the Skunks. What happens if those two parts of his persona crash together in a post-apocalyptic world with elements of dystopian sci-fi, poetry and outsider art? Grave Digger Blues is born, my friends. It’s not so much a book as an experience, particularly if you spring for the iPad version with all the bells and whistles.


 
Last year I wrote in the San Antonio Express-News about Sublett’s efforts to do something similar with the re-release of the Martin Fender novels. But here he’s taken it a large step further.

You’ll be thrown into the world of the Blues Cat, an a down-and-out jazz musician, and Hank Zzybnx, a private detective haunted by Marilyn Monroe’s ghost. It’s a wild ride into despair with bouts of frivolity. All along the way the Blues Cat keeps the beat pounding and Jesse Sublett keeps pulling the strings somewhere behind the curtain. Hop on this train. You’ll like where it takes you.

'Evacuation Plan' is now an e-book!

First off, I'll be signing my novel-in stories Evacuation Plan during the Texas Book Festival from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday and noon to 2 p.m. Sunday outside the Texas Capitol. Stop by and say "Howdy."

Just as important, Evacuation Plan lives a new life as an e-book is all of the various formats. Thanks to Sisterhood Publications for adding me to their stable of fine writers. You can look in the column on the right for more info on this award-winning tome. The new cover includes a photo I took a million years ago. 


Want to read it for free? Here's how:

Sisterhood Publications is so excited to announce our newest release, the award-winning EVACUATION PLAN: A NOVEL FROM THE HOSPICE by Joe M. O'Connell.

We want YOU to help us spread the word, so we are making it worth your while. There's a free copy of the book, a free DVD where Joe talks about the book and a $25 gift certificate to Amazon to the first person who spreads the word in ten different places on the Web.

Rules:

1. You cannot write "Buy Joe's Book 10 Times on your FB profile.
2. You cannot write "Buy Joe's Book 10 Times on your friends profiles. If you write it on your profile on Facebook, that counts for one time.
3. You must take a screen shot of your comment. For information on how to take a screen shot please visit https://www.facebook.com/SisterhoodPublications for exact details.
4. Once you have visited 10 different Internet locations and posted about Joe's book, please send your screen shots, your name, snail mail address to draneydesign@gmail.com.
5. Example of what to post. "Make sure you check out Joe O'Connell's new book, EVACUATION PLAN. I'm in a contest to win a copy plus a $25 gift certificate" or something like that.
6. Examples of places where you can post: FB (once). Twitter (Once), Tumblr (1), Reddit (1), Google + (1), Pinterest (1), Your website (1), Your Blog (1), etc. See? Not so hard, kind of fun, and you can win a book, a CD and a $25 giftcard to buy MORE books. So let's play.

Louise Shelby: a fighter to the end

One day while I was working in the tutoring lab at Austin Community College a woman wearing a patch over one eye turned to me and said, "You're Joe, aren't you?"

Her name was Louise Shelby and I didn't remember her, but she remembered me as if we were still at Bryker Woods Elementary in Austin, Texas. My sister recalls Louise as a pretty little girl with translucent skin. Louise was an innocent who one day discovered something odd hanging out of her nose. It was a flap of skin that didn't belong. It didn't hurt, but it concerned her family who immediately took her to the first of many doctors. Louise had something growing in her face. It was a massive and quite malignant tumor.

I didn't immediately remember Louise from Bryker Woods. She was a year younger than me and she had vanished from our school. Her life was a series of treatments for a cancer she had little chance of surviving. Doctors had to remove her eye. They just as quickly removed her youth. Many of us are stuck, frozen in a moment of tragedy or brilliance. It might be the glory days of high school or the partying times in college. Perhaps it's that first love that still stings with desire. For Louise it was innocent childhood days at Bryker Woods when she could still see through both eyes clearly.

Like me, the adult Louise was a writer. She set out to tell the improbable story of her survival in a book called Child of Glass. She joined a tight group of Austin writers who helped her along her journey. She had found her purpose. She had improbably survived both of her parents and many of the doctors and nurses who treated her.

Then the beast that had been crouching in wait pounced on the adult Louise. Cancer. Again. More chemotherapy. More struggle. More survival. Louise wrote, she drew, she fought.

Two years ago I sent out a note on Facebook that I would be selling my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan at a Texas Book Festival booth. Louise wrote that she would love to read it, but she was broke. I told her to come and I'd give it to her as a gift. When she arrived it was clear that the chemo had taken its toll. Her speech was slurred and the weariness was pulling her down. But she was alive and Louise knew how to fight. She put her book out on Kindle, and I recently tried to help her connect with a publisher who would put out a print edition.

She lost the battle this past week.

My book Evacuation Plan is about hospice, but I don't claim to know much about death. Louise knows. She fought it off for years. She never stopped being that little innocent at Bryker Woods. She made art, laughed in the face of the beast of cancer and lived as long as she could manage. In her last days traveling to Houston to see doctors, she marveled at the beauty of Texas wildflowers. She never stopped seeing the beauty in life, and that's a big lesson for us all.

Please do me a big favor and read her story as she wrote it. You can find it here. The best tribute to Louise would be for her book to be on the Amazon bestseller list.

You can also read Louise's blog here.

Jim Sanderson evokes 3 San Antonios in new novel

I talked with Jim Sanderson about his new novel Dolph's Team for today's San Antonio Express-News. I had previously reviewed Sanderson's story collection Faded Love in the Austin American-Statesman.

Tobe Hooper plays himself in new novel featuring a swarm of zombies in Austin

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Tobe Hooper has a new novel out called Midnight Movie starring a guy named Tobe Hooper and a bunch of zombies swarming the South by Southwest Film Festival. An Austin Chronicle film writer helps our host battle the baddies.

Read my Austin American-Statesman review here.

Book review: 'Nights of the Red Moon'

My review of Milton Burton's latest mystery novel Nights of the Red Moon was in Sunday's Austin American-Statesman.

Review of Carolyn Osborn's 'Uncertain Ground'

My review of Carolyn Osborn's novel appeared in Sunday's Austin American-Statesman.

Book-signing hell: Nobody's there

Parnell Hall is a mystery writer, and he has a tough lesson to offer on becoming an author. Welcome to book-signing hell. (A tip of the hat to author Karen Harrington.)

Carolyn Osborn's novel harks to Galveston in 1950s

Carolyn Osborn of Austin is clearly one of the finest short story writers to ever come out of Texas (though she was born in Tennessee!). Now her first novel Uncertain Ground is out. It tells the story of a young woman coming into her own in 1950s Galveston. Here's my talk with her about it in today's San Antonio Express-News.

On getting stuck in writing fiction

Writer Suzy Spencer asked me to guest on her blog this week talking about getting stuck while working on a longer piece of fiction. This is a very appropriate discussion give my novella-in-a-semester graduate students at St. Edward's University officially began writing their books this week (I'm writing alongside them!). They'll log 4,000 words a week toward completing a 40,000-word draft in 10 weeks. The race is on!

Writing a novella in a semester

I'm teaching a graduate class at St. Edward's University this semester where we will write a 40,000-word novella in one semester--10 weeks to be precise. I say we because I am joining in. It seemed unfair to ask them to write like this while I stood on the sidelines. My experience is that you learn to write a novel by writing a novel. We're also reading five novellas as models.

Last night the author Jeff Abbott spoke to the class about his writing process, which is in many ways like what my students and I will be doing. The notion is to create a basic plan--structure, the main set pieces, some good character exploration--and then write without revision. This is exactly the opposite of the usual writing workshops I teach which are heavy on critique and require revision. That's why workshops are better attuned to short stories. For longer works, the march is the thing. Once the draft is done, revision can and must commence.

Why this post? What I'm already noticing is shadow writers who are going to follow us along outside of the classroom. Go for it! If you want to be one of our shadow students, see the syllabus and check back here. The main thing is to do the work.

For our second meeting last night, along with hearing words of wisdom from Abbott, students created a vision board--photos and text made into a collage to be looked at as the writing process continues. Sounds goofy, but it's a great way to daydream about your story as you look for those set pieces (the big moments of explosion in the story). They also did some deep character work on the the main three characters in their work--protagonist, antagonist and a third character who is perhaps a love interest.

For next week, they must write a 4- to 8-page synopsis of the novella in first person. They also must pitch their stories to the class. If this sounds like screenwriting, it is indeed very influenced by that form. The notion is if we can get a good foundation, we'll have the freedom to continue forward and write. At the end of that discussion, we will begin to write.

If you want to follow along with us, check back here for our progress reports.

Support your local author

Kind words from Todd Glasscock's blog about my novel EVACUATION PLAN...

Dan Chaon digs deep into the notion of identity

Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply is an amazing novel by an American writer at the top of his game. Dan speak at the Texas Book Festival this coming weekend (I'll be under the tents signing my book some on both Saturday and Sunday). I talked to him about it all for a San Antonio Express-News article that ran today.

Here's how it starts:

Imagine this: You change your name, dye your hair, buy a new wardrobe and move to a new city, leaving everything you've ever known behind. Would you cease to be you?

That's the central question of identity lurking behind National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon's beautifully written, thoughtful novel "Await Your Reply," and it's a question that hits very close to home for the author.

Read the rest here.

Why I like the Kindle after all

I sat across from a woman at Mighty Fine–a burger place in Austin, Texas–today who had a burger in one hand and a Kindle in the other. By the end of the meal she’d already purchased my book EVACUATION PLAN and had it next up in her Kindle queue. I think I like this technology thingy!

Creating characters from real life

So here's what happened this weekend. They took me hostage and drove me at high speed across Lake Lewisville. One was a retired pilot who spoke through a voice box, another was an older b.s artist with a weave and a ready smile, and the third was a wannabe movie starlet in a bikini. I've clearly got three new characters for my next novel.