Few activities give me more pleasure than helping bring someone into the publishing business, and the story of Mike Mavilia is no exception. Mike is a Bowdoin College graduate, but more importantly a smart, literate young man with discerning thoughts and opinions about writing and publishing and, perhaps most importantly, a keen attention to detail. With a background like that, how could I not want to get him involved in Fictional Café? He took to it like a duck to water and has brought a great many improvements to this, our not-for-profit, totally for-pleasure, arts site. Mike began working at FC with Jason and me about a year ago, and has taken the reins with such gusto that I decided he needed to be acknowledged to our member audience and everyone else who reads and views…

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One of my all-time favorite books has recently come up in an unexpected way. The don’t-call-it-nonfiction travelogue Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck, has always hit me squarely on my adventurer’s funny bone. For those unfamiliar with the book, a late in life Steinbeck decided to travel across the country with his dog Charley in a highly modified camper truck (affectionately named Rocinante) in an effort to place his finger back on the pulse of a nation he so masterfully depicted in such works as The Grapes of Wrath. His journey was captured within the pages of Travels with Charley, and all the colorful people and scenery make for a cross-country story that one might think Kerouac would have seen if he’d not been on so much *ahem* coffee. My time in Maine taught me…

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It’s been a busy month here at the Fictional Café. In case you were on vacation, out at the beach or having a barbecue, here’s a recap. We started our second serial podcast in August. (You can find our first here). Every Saturday morning, we invite you to wake up with Jack – our resident novelist and founding father of the Fictional Café – to hear the next chapter of Nate Flowers and company in our podcast of Madrone. August also marked the second time we published a serial story. We thought Adam Gottfried’s supernatural, Gothic thriller was too good to merely excerpt for the Café. So we chose to post it in three installments, which you can read here. One more shout out before we get to the batting order for September. Last month,…

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An experimental new anthology — Baby Shoes — was recently released on Amazon in print and ebook formats. It’s a collection of 100 flash fiction short stories by 100 different authors, including Fictional Café’s own Jeb Brack, Jason Brick, Jenny Cokeley, E. A. Roper, Adam Gottfried and Jack Rochester. The Baby Shoes anthology was experimental in two ways. First, it’s a flash fiction anthology. Because flash fiction is so short, a reasonably sized book requires a lot of writers. That splits the royalties into such small pieces it’s not feasible for traditional publishers. An independent project could afford to give out a larger piece of the pie, making sure authors got a little bit more for their work. Second, the publication costs were entirely crowdfunded via Kickstarter. It’s not the first — nor will it be…

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I’m going to let you in on a poorly-kept secret… …I’m a bit of an asshole. I’m insensitive, demanding, revel in crass humor and generally am told that folks put up with me primarily because I’m their asshole and they get to point my assholility at their enemies when they feel the need. But that’s not all of it. I’m sympathetic…not in the “I feel your pain and give a damn” meaning, but in the “If I were in a book, readers would care what happened to me” meaning. My book series, The Farkas Foxtrots features a pair of loser assholes. These are not good people, or smart people. They’re not pretty, or nice. They do things like steal drugs, lie to women and frame a total stranger for bank robbery. They’re stupid with a capital C….

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