But they exhibited a lot of charisma and potential. People would have recognized it at the time. Historical fiction, particularly when a writer takes great liberties, can be a gold mine for the imagination. Gray was born in Jonesboro, Ark. I found myself putting in color and details that the editors would take out. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. I was living in an environment where writing was a prized endeavor. Just keep writing, day after day.
His young-adult novel King Biscuit was released in by Tempest Books. Gray also teaches as a full-time online English faculty member for South University, where he is one of the founding editors of the student literary journal Asynchronous and sponsor of an online readings series featuring fiction and poetry.
While it is possible that the demand for celebrity gossip represents voyeuristic impulses or simple escapism we cannot overlook that celebrities also embody the great lie which American society maintains itself on—that anyone can make it to the top, to become rich. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Not Famous Anymore Nov 21, Available for download now.
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Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. In your work, he certainly does.

He makes an appearance in several of your works. What is it about the music idol that fascinates you? Jonesboro, Arkansas, where I was born, is not far from Memphis. My mom took me to Graceland when I was around twelve or thirteen, I think. She had a friend who lived near Graceland who had had met Elvis various times.
If you found a star under the bottle cap to your RC Cola you got a second one free. Elvis was revered around there and pretty quickly I picked up on the fact that he was perhaps the coolest person that ever lived. Men liked him and women fell for him. I also liked his voice.
I still do even though my music passion has always been the Rolling Stones. It was the first rock album I ever bought. It was as if Elvis was in the air — in everything — in those days.
The characters take shape in your mind and they itch to move in certain directions … Michael: Not Famous Anymore — reviewed by Anthony Squiers. I can visualize and hear Grace Slick right this moment in my head. He began fictionalizing an account of Earhart on that island when, in his research, he discovered she had moved to Chicago in to Hyde Park to finish high school. He cares about people and doing the right thing. She was a magnificent and very independent cat. Do you teach to support your creative writing habit?
In Well Deserved , there is interesting interplay between the law and the outlaw. Are you an outlaw at heart or the sheriff with compassion? And with Raul, too, Art comes across as a bit fatherly, although those two have war in common — Art was in Korea and Raul was in Vietnam.
Along with Elvis, music is another scene and mood setter in this novel. How much did the music of the day create the day? That is, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Elvis, Hendrix, talk to us about how music influenced that entire time period the 60s. Do you write to music? I saw him play in a small theater in Santa Barbara, California. They listen to the Stones, Beatles — the Jefferson Airplane. I can visualize and hear Grace Slick right this moment in my head.
That was the soundtrack of those days. That was the music I grew up with and still listen to. If someone made a movie out of Well Deserved it would have a great soundtrack. You choose to move from one narrator to another in this novel, rather than the more conventional one. What kind of challenges did that present … or eliminate? Initially I probably wondered whether I could make it work, but it was easier than I expected. I would go over the last chapter while assessing what I wanted to accomplish in the next chapter and it sailed along very well. The key to constructing a following chapter was to make sure that while the point of view in the following chapter was from a different character than in the previous chapter, they remained compatible in terms of accuracy.
The difference, of course, would be in how each character viewed events, but the events had to be fundamentally accurate in both versions. One character may perceive how fast a car was going, for example, differently than the character in the previous chapter.

I hope that makes sense. The challenge became fun. Multiple points of view can open up a novel quite nicely.
Well Deserved (Sol Books Prose) [Michael Loyd Gray] on donnsboatshop.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The folks of Argus, from the small-time dealer to. His novel The Canary was released in August by Harmony Books. Currently, Michael . Well Deserved (Sol Books Prose Series) Nov 20, by Michael.
Because Well Deserved is about four people who discover their paths are intertwined and that a shared event will affect their futures, it helps to use multiple narrators to reveal more about each person than we would get from filtering the story through just one point of view. All four characters get their time on stage to reveal who they are. The story needed to offer the inner feelings and fears and desires of each character.
Along with being a writer, you have been or are a journalist, a professor. How has this influenced your creative writing? Do you teach to support your creative writing habit? Or do you teach because that is another love in its own right? What does teaching teach you? Almost all writers can tell a novel about the process of getting a novel published. Or has it been a matter of pounding pavement and getting yourself discovered? I love to tell people that my overnight success is going on twenty years now. I credit Stu Dybek and John Smolens with helping me a little to discover what I could create through fiction.
And Daniel Curley at the University of Illinois was the first real writer to take me seriously and read my stuff and tell me I could do it — that I was good enough to do it. Stu Dybek and Dan Curley, too. The publication of Well Deserved gave me a little boost and King Biscuit will come out in An agent in New York is currently reading samples of several of the unpublished novels. But the person I really must credit is novelist Monique Raphel High, who has become a dear friend.