• Slworking edit by Eric Schmuttenmaer, on Flickr

My Love-Hate Relationship with Final Revisions

[Er, so, I just unearthed this in my drafts folder. Apparently I scheduled it to publish on December 15, but it never actually...published. This happens in Wordpress sometimes, but not consistently, which is one of the reasons I'm clearing out my drafts folder. In any case, I present to you a time capsule from two months ago.] Polish read number seven. Y'all, the ghost story is almost ready to rock and roll. It's only just occurred to me that I don't put polish reads on my to do list, and they take up huge, massive amounts of time. Just ridiculous

February 24th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |

Origin Stories: The Ghost in the Penthouse

I began writing the book that would eventually become The Ghost in the Penthouse in August of 2001. It was my second time in Manhattan, and I was spending the entire semester there, attending Eugene Lang College, which is part of the New School. My experience at Lang was remarkable in that it was the first time I'd ever heard someone who wasn't blood-related to me say nice things about my fiction. (Jaime Manrique will hold a special place in my heart for the rest of my life for saying, somewhat offhandedly, in the middle of a workshop, "She's the first one

December 19th, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , |

The Ghost in the Penthouse: Excerpt

THE DREAM Sometimes Hiram dreams of his ghosts. In these dreams they are not yet ghosts, they are merely people, the people they were in life, in his memories. An old man, the kind of man who considers himself master of his domain, who always stands tall and straight, and insists boys, even young boys, do the same. The kind of man who, when squeezing his grandson’s shoulder in greeting, will squeeze just a little too hard. Hiram never cries out—he knows better than that—but he does bite down on his tongue and edge away ever so slowly from that

December 3rd, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , |