To promote the pre-sales of my upcoming collection Romance for Delinquents, everyone who pre-orders the book will get a copy of one of my teenage love letters (92-98). These were pulled at random and only the name of my past love affairs were removed. If you want to spy into my teenage love life this is your last chance. You can pre-order my collection here.

“Father Christmas” by The Kinks. Santa gets mugged.

My all-time favorite Christmas movie: Gremlins. Watch it, and feel the joy.

Since it’s the season I’m going to post a Christmas favorite each week until Santa comes. This week my all time favorite Christmas album: Bad Religion’s Christmas Songs. You can listen to the whole album here.

I wanted to take the time to thank all my fellow authors and friends who wrote blurbs for my upcoming book Romance for Delinquents. They took the time to read my book in less than a month and offer their support, and I’m humbled by their kind words. I wish there was more that I could do to thank them, but I hope listing their names and linking to their work will pay them back in some small way. Buy their books, and support small press lit!

Rob Roberge                     Joseph Bates        Chris Holbrook

Amber Sparks                    Silas House

Ian Stansel                           Tim Horvath

Diana Wagman                   John Minichillo

Marie Manilla                      Alex Kundera

Charles Dodd White          Joey Goebel

November is my favorite month. A chill falls down around us, the colors of the world change, and a wonderful silence that goes unnoticed but calms the nerves of summer settles in. This November has been one of the best months in my life.

First, and in a way that seems improbable to me, I was blessed to find an incredibly supportive agent who took a chance on me when she had no reason to. If you’ve been following my blog then you know the whole process started in May.

This May I gave an alumni reading from my chapbook Bad Kids from Good Schools at Spalding University. After my reading Erin Keane, a poet friend who taught one of the stories I read at The Kentucky Governors’ School, suggested that I send off my chapbook to agents to see if they would be interested in shopping it around as an outline for a Y.A. novel. I’d never considered writing a Y.A. novel since my work is edgy, but thought it was worth a shot.

A few months later I sent out a query to 14 agents I found through Publisher Weekly’s New Agent Alert. One of them, Roz Foster, loved the stories, but said she couldn’t sell anything as a partial. That was August 23rd. Since I also had a book scout interested in the work, and given that publishing slows during the holidays, I set out to finish the novel by November 1st. For 73 days (forgive me if my math is off. It was a blur.) I wrote six drafts of the novel which became The Dream Academy. I sent it to Roz on November 4th (almost made the deadline), and by the next week I had an agent; one I clicked with and who really dug my work. This was an amazing pay-off since the months I spent buried in writing were done with no promise of anything working out. I only had to bleed all I could onto the page and hope for the best. The best came.

As I write this the book is being shopped. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I already feel incredibly fortunate.

Other than finishing The Dream Academy and getting a great agent, this month I was blessed with the support of so many fellow authors who blurbed my story collection Romance for Delinquents. I asked them for blurbs during the busiest month for academics, a month with Thanksgiving, and had less than four weeks for them to send blurbs for the book if they could and wanted to. They came through for me more than I could’ve ever expected, and I am humbled by their kindness and support. I’m going to post a thank you to all of them soon.

To help spur pre-sales for my collection I also started my love letter promotion which you can read more about on my blog. An old flame sent in a picture from our days of stolen beach love affairs, and was excited about it. That was nice to see since the promotion is meant to be at best a sweet snapshot of young love.

Lastly, one of my cnf tweets was chosen by Creative Non-fiction for inclusion in their November newsletter, and is under consideration for publication in the journal itself. How lucky can one guy be?

Christmas is three weeks away as I write this. I’m hopeful that The Dream Academy will find a home, and eager to get back to reading after the semester ends. I have book reviews to finish, and a new novel to start writing in January. The world is calm and quiet. At this moment anything is possible, but if nothing comes of the new novel it’s enough to know that I have the love and support of people who cared when they didn’t have to. That more than anyone can ask for.

Thanks to Creative Non-fiction for including my work in their November newsletter.

I got this photo tonight from one of my early 90s vacation flames! She digs my love letter give away. If you pre-order Romance for Delinquents you’ll get a copy of one of my old love letters (name removed). Maybe even one of hers.

That’s me. I’m 13 or 14, and on vacation at Myrtle Beach. In this picture I have my arm around a girl whose name I can’t remember, but who I’m sure at the time I was madly in love with. What teenage boy wouldn’t be?

My romantic life was entirely made up of vacation-length love affairs during most of my teen years. I’d go to the beach and fall desperately for  a girl my age from another state who was as eager to turn her vacation into a love song as I was.

But after five short days of puppy love make out session we were stolen away from one another and taken back to our real lives. There was no internet back then so the only way we had to keep our profound desire for one another alive was through mixtapes and hand-written letters. For months after my vacations I wrote pages swearing my devotion to my newest soul mate, and walked to the mailbox each day anxiously waiting for her reply.

It was good practice for a writer, putting my innermost thoughts down on paper for a stranger who might not care and enduring the all that time with no words or answers. More than that, it allowed me to save a part of myself that would’ve been erased by time otherwise.

I don’t have the letters I sent out. They might be long since thrown away by this point, or like mine, buried in a shoebox in a basement. But I do have all the ones I received. Hundreds of them from girls who lived in different states, girls I loved with the pure blind want of youth who I’d never see again. There’s something incredibly powerful about young naive love that makes a teenage heart feel as if the world will break if one more day passes without hearing from the person you want most in the world; a person who is already more sense memory and idea than breathing and true. That’s what I want to share with you.

In the spirit of romance, of dumb devotion, of trying to figure out the world and place yourself in it in a way that matters, a copy of one of the love letters I received from my vacation love affairs will be sent to anyone who pre-orders my new collection Romance for Delinquenst from Foxhead Books. You can order it HERE.

This is a way to not only share my creative life with you, but also part of my teenage romantic past. It’s also a fun way to see how the two texts work together to form a conversation. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t like going through another person’s backpages to see what secrets or gems are lurking there.

This is my shoebox of burning love. If you pre-order Romance for Delinquents you will get a copy of one of these letters chosen at random. I’m not going to edit them in any way, other than removing the name, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the letter you get is embarrassing or funny. Those are always the best.

I hope this is will be fun for you all, that you enjoy my new collection, and dig the chance to spy into my teenage love stories.