High Stakes for Me at the Millbrook Literary Festival

1553112_710153725693215_7318415197670883238_oIf you hap­pen to be in Mill­brook, NY this com­ing Sat­ur­day, June 21, drop into the library at 11:15 a.m. and you can hear me read from my new nov­el, One Hun­dred Miles from Man­hat­tan.

This year marks the 6th annu­al Mill­brook Lit­er­ary Fes­ti­val, and I’m being fea­tured in an “Author Spot­light” dur­ing the day-long event.

My prac­tice read­ing and book sign­ing at Mer­ritt Book­store in Mill­brook last month was a suc­cess, and if you care to see it, the video is below. I was intro­duced by friend and fel­low author Dave King.

 

Since last mon­th’s read­ing, I’ve con­tin­ued to rehearse, pol­ish­ing my deliv­ery and the voic­es of the var­i­ous char­ac­ters. The sec­tion I read is only about 2,000 words (or 15 min­utes) long, but con­tained in it are 9 char­ac­ters, and I’m try­ing to make each of them dis­tinct.

The pres­sure is on for me because the nov­el is about a fic­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty very much like Mill­brook (Welling­ton, NY), and this is my home­town.

I spent my sum­mers here as a boy, grad­u­at­ed from high school here, was a news­pa­per reporter here after col­lege, and set­tled down here again about 8 years ago. I’m a fix­ture at the din­er, the post office, the library, and the Chi­nese restau­rant. Every day I bump into some­one with whom I went to high school.

DSCN5778The point is, I’m going to have to show my face around the vil­lage after this, so it had bet­ter be good.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

Comments (2)