Category: Fiction
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Rejection Letters
This is one of the most painful aspects of a writer’s life. If you can work through this one, you’ve crossed a great desert of pain. And, with enough visceral fortitude, you’ll cross it, again, and again, and again. . . When it comes to rejection letters, I always think about one of my favorite…
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About Literary Agents
Dear TWB Reader, This is the second of a series on fiction writing, specifically, what you do after you’ve finished your manuscript (in this case, a novel). Many ask me about literary agents, what they do, do they make you rich overnight, etc. Here, I share some of my own experiences with literary agents. I’ll call my…
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Friends Don’t Let Friends Write Shit
Dear TWB Reader, I posted this five months ago, when I finished a fiction manuscript. The next step was to send it to people so they could run it through their bullshit-meters, asking the fundamental question: does it work? In the next few days, I’ll share some updates with you. The thing is, this book…
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 4
I forgot to mention, the 1967 Mustang plays a big role in this novel. It’s practically another character. It’s the summer of 1978, a few months after Tony cut his wrist. The whole family knows about it, but, unlike other families who try to avoid such difficulties and pretend nothing’s wrong, the women of the…
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 3
In this part of the novel, you get a real taste of what some of us call “internalized racism.” This is when a non-white person starts to believe, on a subconscious level, what the racist world says of him: in young, sixteen-year-old’s Tony case, he’s seen as a mongrel, the mix of a white man…