Feeding the Habit

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook chances are you have already heard the news, but I'm going to share it again nonetheless.

Yesterday, I signed a contract with TAG Publishing (the link takes you to a list of Tag's titles currently available on Amazon) for The Feedstore Chronicles. 

The Feedstore Chronicles started as a series of posts here on this blog back in the spring of 2007. In many ways they were what made this blog as until I began posting them I had few readers and even fewer who commentators. Some of you longtime readers may recall the tales about my days as an impressionable teenage boy working for what I still believe to be the worlds most morally bankrupt boss at a Texas feedstore.

For the sake of protecting the not-so-innocent I changed my boss's name to Earl in those days and I told tales about dead parakeets, sack room sex, bulldog masturbation, love both found and lost, arrests, ostrich boots, dead bodies, and fist fights.

Well for the full length book all those things and more are included, but my boss's name has been changed to Doyle and while everything is based on the truth characters and events certain things have been manipulated to better fit the arc of the story. Call it the writers prerogative.

I began fleshing out the stories and turning them into a cohesive story rather than a collection of anecdotes in 2009. It was in October of that year that The Feedstore Chronicles found its first success.

It was then that Blog Star/former super agent now turned writer and tech man extraordinaire, Nathan Bransford hosted a Stupendously Awesome First Paragraph contest which drew over 2600 entries. When the smoke cleared I was shocked and damn proud to discover my opening for The Feedstore Chronicles had won.

The opener has been tweaked a might since then, but here is the current first paragraph ...

Most coming-of-age stories are fraught with symbolism, hidden metaphors, and a heaping mound of other literary devices. Not mine. you see, I came of age while working at a dusty Texas feedstore.  A place where To Kill A Mockingbird involved a twelve-year-old and a BB gun. Of Mice and Men was a problem easily solved with rat poison. And David Copperfield nothing more than a dude that made shit disappear. 

  So nearly two decades beyond my working there and better than four years after the first blog post, my experiences working at the feedstore will be published sooner rather than later. Work is already underway on the cover and a few changes as requested by the acquiring editor. I will keep y'all updated along the way and thanks to all of you, my friends for, the continued faith I would get here as well the camaraderie to keep me writing even when most of the world kept saying no.