It’s May, and as often happens when I prepare one of my first blog posts in May, I have Julie Andrews and Vanessa Redgrave dancing and singing in my head. You know, the number from Camelot. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there as they say. I’m just glad it’s May and I can have a greater expectation of reasonable weather patterns.
None of which has anything to do with this week’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Tom Doyle, unless of course you want to make a stretch and conflate seasonal rebirth with tomorrow’s release of American Craftsmen, Tom’s first novel. Sure, that will work.
I have to tell you up front that I’m especially happy to see Tom’s novel coming out because I had the privilege to publish his first collection a couple years ago. And I had no choice. I had to publish him. I’d attended a reading he’d done at Capclave (a D.C. area convention that I heartily endorse) and the sheer intensity of his reading demanded that I do all within my meager powers to get his stories out into the world in a book. Tom packs more raw stuff into a short story than any other author I know, and I’m eager to see what he does with the greater elbow room a novel affords.
What more can I tell you about him? He’s won the WSFA Small Press Award, as well as the Writers of the Future Award. He can tell you anything you want to know about premillennialist apocalyptic fiction. And as you’ll garner from his remarks below, he’s been a lawyer. Best of all, I get to call him my friend.
