Dave K.'s Blog

The lovely and talented Abby Higgs tagged me in this blog tour thing, so I'm answering questions about my writing process and stuff.

1.)  What Am I Working On?
I'll assume that this question disqualifies the freelance hack work I do for extra cash every so often.

Now that MY NAME IS HATE is done, I'm working on a sci-fi noir project, a mash-up of Dracula and Reefer Madness, and a steampunky thing about a sasquatch who witnesses a murder. I also write lots of goofy poems and freewrite when I...

Okay so since there are people on this planet who live outside of Baltimore for some reason, I've made it easier to buy MY NAME IS HATE via Paypal. Honestly, I should have done this way sooner.
MY NAME IS HATE is $9, shipping included, and it is a bleak, steampunk/Western flash novella about a pregnant woman searching for her runaway husband and being followed by a mysterious, violent black dog.
You can read Lavinia Ludlow's review of MY NAME IS HATE

Speaking of, I've been working on a book release party for MY NAME IS HATE, which is challenging for someone who entertains as little as I do, and also trying to branch out to reading series in other cities. No wonder event coordinating is its own job. This shit is hard.

So I read Brian Moore's Catholics not too long ago and really enjoyed it. It's a short novel about a very old Irish monastery that refuses to adopt an imaginary Catholicism's new, more...

Good lord, another month has passed? Really? I've got to get back on a schedule for this thing.

Anyway, MY NAME IS HATE is here! There's a huge box of them sitting on my dining room table right now, and they look great. I'm really happy with how the design turned out, and I think the content has officially stepped up my writing game. Writing it tore big emotional chunks out of me, but I think the results are worth it, and hopefully any reviews I get will agree.

One goal I have for this book is...

Whoa it's been a long time since I wrote here.

The western is done and laid out as well as it can be for now. I'll be emailing the printer shortly to let them know that it's that time again. I'm working on a couple of other projects as well, and I made a short little e-chapbook of poems that I'll post on this site later on.

I've been reading a bit as well: finally finished The Wind-Up Girl, and read Gabe Durham's Fun Camp after that. I also read Chelsea Hodson's chapbook, Space Camp, because I...

How did I lose track of this thing for two months? Jesus.

Well, I do have some things to report. I am finished with the layout for MY NAME IS HATE, aka the sad bleak Western I wrote this year, and the cover is just about done. It'll be sent off to the printer soon enough, and then I will begin the strange and arduous process of selling it to people. I feel like I should have some kind of online store or an Etsy or something, but at this point I feel like I'd sell just as many books with the in...

I keep meaning to talk about John Dermot Woods' Activities here, and I keep forgetting because I am the worst.

It's also hard for me to really review comics because I don't have much experience creating them, and the fact that I can't draw means I can't really say much about the visuals. I pretty much just enjoy comics on a superficial level unless the writing is really good.

Lucky for me, John's comics all benefit from solid writing and concepts that don't feel like random indie comic wackines...

I finally got into Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, which I've had lying around for a while, and there's something very quaint about it. Lorrie probably won't like that, but there's no other word for someone in 2013 reading about what are essentially bored 1990s suburban adults whinging about their aging parents and career problems and affairs. All the women have difficult mothers, all the men are bumbling sitcom dads, and a not-insignificant amount of characters have jobs where they travel a...

I'm still here.

Haven't been writing as much as I'd like, due to some motivation issues and trouble keeping up at work. I've been reading about executive function disorder and dyspraxia, and the symptoms for both sound eerily similar to problems I've had over the course of my life.

Haven't done much reading lately either, which is bad because I have books to review, but again, motivation. I think more writers go through periods like this than most of us are comfortable admitting, despite the ge...