This is the first announcement and the GRAND RE-OPENING of the new ART-ESCAPE website. Thanks to the team at Info Serve Media for their design and hard work. The art galleries will be updated frequently and periodically this section will feature news and announcements about my art and writing, shows, speaking engagements, book signings, etc. Enjoy, and check out my guestbook feature, sign it and leave your comments or send me an email with any questions about books, writing, speaking or art.
The hottest month of the summer, August! My 2006 novel, The Honey Bee Girl is getting great reviews. My next book signing will be sometime in September at the Santa Fe Public Library, Santa Fe, Texas. This is the town where the book is set in 1973-74. I look forward to meeting the townspeople that have lived there back when I did, remembering how things were in the small town, when it still was a SMALL town.
This summer I visited the states of Montana, (Where my unpublished novel, Montana Mist, is set) Wyoming, and Idaho. The National Museum of Wildlife Art was fantastic in Jackson, Wyoming. It was awesome to see the beautiful mountains and waterfalls, geysers and hot springs, buffalo and elk of Yellowstone.
Before we returned to teach school we took another trip down to South Padre Island, Port Isabel, Texas. It was interesting and we encountered a wild Javelina hog close up!
This summer was filled with writing and critique groups, playing a lot of soccer, and not as much ART as I usually do in those off weeks. I have written a few more new short stories and published a couple and submitted a couple more.
I didn’t get to get into the painting studio this summer and I regret that. I guess too much traveling and too much soccer. I’m back at school teaching art and I am looking forward to an interesting year at my new high school. I am sure I will get inspired too many times to count by the creations and ideas of my students and fellow teachers.
The update on my latest novel, {tentatively titled, CHICKEN NIGHT}, is that I only lack a few chapters left to finish and I regret that I haven’t worked on it often enough. It is over 70,000 words right now. It is one of the funniest things I have ever written and is sort of in the style of Raising Arizona and Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, except that it is a Mystery Novel, my first.
I had an hour long radio interview in July on Artist First satellite radio. If you missed it and want to listen go to the Archives at www.ArtistFirst.com and click on my name.
My latest published short story is available in the e-zine: Ten Thousand Monkeys.com called “The Bill Cherokee Wampus Troupe in Carnival Square.”
A story of a future earth without any wild animals and the only living animals are found in rare collections of traveling carnivals. Not really a sci-fi story, more of the Spectacular fiction genre. My newest short story written, Calypso’s Island, is a story of an amnesiac man marooned on an uninhabited island confronted by a huge jaguar-tiger cat. I hope to find a home for it soon. |
