Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.
Late last month I finally finished the project I began in November as my National Novel Writing Month project. It’s a literary novel I’ve called Sycamore Souls. The first draft came in at a little over 93,000 words and, while it is a pretty rough draft, overall I’m pretty proud of it. Sycamore Souls is…
It had been more than 10 years since I last attended the annual Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. conference. The main reason was cost and return on investment. I’ve always been poor, and when I did attend OWFI in the past I seldom felt like I learned enough to justify the expense. So, I had no…
Tomorrow morning I’ll join many of my colleagues in voting yes to walk off my job as a teacher on April 2nd. It’s a vote that comes with a lot of anger, a lot of concern for my students, and a lot of fear for my own future. Today our district superintendent laid out what…
I haven’t blogged just to blog in quite a while. So, as I’m sort of between projects and figuring out what to do with myself at the start of summer, I thought I’d do an update on my life. Because both you readers care, right? School’s Out for summer. It was an interesting year. Not…
State Question 779 was not a good bill. It put the burden of the legislature’s job of funding teacher salaries onto the shoulders of everyone in Oklahoma, hurting the poor the most. And so it failed. One can hope people voted it down because it was a regressive tax and not because they feel like…
A friend and colleague recently showed me this article in last Sunday’s Oklahoman newspaper. The article quotes an educator with some pretty derogatory and fallacious things to say about teachers with emergency and alternative certification. For instance: “Emergency certified personnel may have had zero experience with children, may have achieved a 1.0 grade-point average or…
Here’s a PDF of the first two chapters of my new young adult horror novel Love Curse, coming June 7 from MoonHowler Press. It’s available for pre-order from Amazon (link in the PDF). Love Curse MHP 1-2 From the back cover … Keith’s mother is dead, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopped trying to help…