At the Pen Festival 2010

At the Pen Festival 2010
© PEN American Center/Susan Horgan. All rights reserved. Please contact media@pen.org for usage and rights.

May 25, 2009

Glad That You're Back

Q: Glad That You're back! Where were you? How has your career been going since you last blogged?

A: I'm back, I guess, because I never left. I just took a little break. I am not a true blogger, you know? There are all of these fancy things that blogs can do that mine can't and never will because I am not interested in wasting time learning how to do them. I am a writer, not a blogger. So I write, and if I have enough time and energy left over I write on the blog.

Lots of good things have been happening since last I blogged. At the very top of the list is my old friends at Akashic, who are currently editing my new novel JESUS BOY, which is due out some time in early 2010.

I am pumped! And I think the readers have waited long enough to meet the horny born again teen piano prodigy Elwyn and his much older cougar lover Sister Morrisohn, both of whom have lived in my head since . . . since I was a horny born again teen piano prodigy myself.

JESUS BOY is one of those weird books--I began writing it when I was Elwyn's age, 16, and I completed it when I was Sister Morrisohn's age, 42.

Enough about that.

I attended the Algonquin Pitch Writing Workshop in New York in March. Thanks to my wife and the bad economy, I was able to stay in a swanky Manhattan hotel across the street from the U.N. dirt cheap.

I got to meet Charles Salzberg (Swann's Last Song) and had my very positive tete a tetes with editors Sandy Harding, Zach Wagman, and Tom Colgan (Tom Clancy's editor). I am hoping one of these top editors, each of whom liked my pitch enough to request a read of the novel, will make an offer I can't refuse.

The novel is called The Virgin of Biscayne Boulevard. Wish me luck (or as Elwyn might say, Pray for me).

So I took a class at the MDC/St. Thomas University's Earth Ethics Institute this past semester. For the final assignment in that class, I wrote the short story, which became the novella, which became the full blown novel, EVERY BOY SHOULD HAVE A MAN, which is about a world where man is a house pet and the real masters of the earth are the Oafs, or Giants (as in David and Goliath Jack and the Beanstalk giants). But really, the book is about the environment. More on this later.

I have a story, THREE KISSES, coming out in a new erotic anthology edited by Robert Fleming. More on this later.

And I keep re-configuring my collection of psychopath short stories and changing its title--these days I am having a hard time finding titles for my books. Writing is easy. Titling is hard.

At any rate, I'm back!

Thanks,

Preston

1 comment:

Geoffrey Philp said...

Happy to see you back & with all these great projects.

All the best!