The Eleanor Sketches
A couple years back I began work on novel no. 4, about a girl named Eleanor. I wrote what I considered a pretty great prologue, an interesting final chapter, and then derailed the whole process by botching chapters 1-3. So I dumped the book idea, and began exploring the characters and possible story arcs in a series of sketches that I published on DS. I eventually caught myself writing more and more of them, and soon it made sense to give them a home of their own. So I did, and about a week later decided to stop writing the sketches, and get back to writing the novel I'd been practicing for. So I did, and eight chapters later I sort of stalled. That's where I'm at currently. But hey, the sketches are still pretty good reads, I think.

Manual
An anthology of work by a whole bunch of the best writers I know. And I'm in it! One of the happiest moments in my small writing career.

Nightblindness
Definitely the best attempt at a novel yet, though that might not be saying a whole hell of a lot. This one was good enough to land me an agent, but not good enough to forestall the closing of the literary agency that signed me, which means I didn't have an agent for very long. It's got some holes; I wasn't able to admit that for a long time, but four years gives you a decent amount of perspective. I still think it contains pieces of my better work, though as a whole it's unsatisfying, and you don't have to take my word for it -- there are readers I trust very much who will confirm. All the same, it's the perfect book for making you feel better about your own life: the protagonist, over the course of the novel, contributes to the burning at the stake of a beloved local councilman, which eventually leads to the councilman's suicide; he also is (unwillingly, natch) involved in the rape and murder of a coed, and goes on the run, ending up back in his hometown, where everybody still hates him for what he did to that councilman fellow, and where his father is banging strange women in his parents' bed while his mother sleeps on the couch and miscarries a child, and where his former girlfriend is laid up in a hospital bed with HIV, and... well, there's more, but I've made my point. Definitely makes you want to read an excerpt, huh?

Close Program
The first major disappointment of my writing career, if you can call it that (a career, not a disappointment -- it's definitely a disappointment ... this book, not my career). This was a collection of my short fiction, most of which probably should never have been printed anywhere. So it's a good thing this never was. The publisher -- Pixel Press Publishers, now defunct, I hear -- slapped together the most amateur excuse for an electronic book ever (a PDF file full of blank pages, inconsistent spacing, misspellings of titles that weren't misspelled in the manuscript, et cetera), and so I yanked the plug on a print version, which wasn't going to happen anyway, since they'd decided they wanted a massive amount of pre-orders to justify a printed version of the digital mess they'd already created. I laugh about it now. Bitterly, though.

Sleeps the Stars
I got cracking on my second book almost immediately after I finished the first, basing it on what was at the time one of my better short stories ("The End of It All," published once upon a time in The Paumanok Review), and tackled another subject I knew nothing about: the '60s. The story plays out in a series of flashbacks told by a suicidal geriatric, though all of his backflashing really doesn't do much to illuminate his reasons for offing himself. Which he does, in probably the lamest (and most painful) way ever. Read an excerpt »

Breathe
The embarrassing first novel. I started writing this one in 1998, when I was nineteen, though for some reason I could swear I started earlier than that. But I've always made a habit of marking my cover pages with the date I began draft one, and this one's definitely marked '98. Anyway, they say to write what you know, but I wrote what I wanted instead, which, like any pre-twentysomething (and sometimes pre-thirtysomething) writer could tell you is fame and notoriety and lots of money. So this book's all about a kid who doesn't get rejected nearly enough, and signs an unlikely book deal in a series of chapters that display a hilarious lack of understanding about the way a book actually goes from creation to publication. Read an excerpt »