Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers

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Toddlers - and drunks - bang around hitting walls, tables, chairs, the floor, and other people, trying to find their legs. Writing fiction is a similar process. Sometimes it might take a while before the story gets some balance and moves forward. Sometimes the story takes off as if motor-driven, then crashes into something not foreseen or expected. Learning to be a writer is all about finding your legs, and doing your best to convince onlookers that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going.
In Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, acclaimed Southern story writer and novelist George Singleton serves up everything you ever need to know to become a real writer (meaning one who actually writes), in bite-sized aphorisms. It’s Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil meets Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. It’s cough syrup that tastes like chocolate cake. In other words, don’t expect to get better unless you get a good dose of it, maybe two.

Accompanied by more than fifty original full-color illustrations by novelist Daniel Wallace, these laugh-out-loud funny, candid, and surprisingly useful lessons will help you find your own writerly balance so you can continue to move forward.

"The Madcap side of sobering up"

NEWSWEEK

"A very wacky novel about one drunk's efforts to go straight"
---Newsweek



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Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he’s ruined his reputation as one of the South’s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might’ve led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his sane and practical potter wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it’s time to return to the mig welder. Yes, it’s time to prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angels—welded completely out of hex nuts—for the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, their arms voluntarily fused so they can’t drink, show up in order to help Harp out in a variety of ways? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into desolate Ember Glow? Is it true that there’s no free will?

The Half Mammals of Dixie

“Singleton’s South doesn’t look like anybody else’s.”
—The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

This second collection of short stories by a bright star in Southern fiction showcases a town so tiny it missed the map, the gleefully off-the-wall Southerners who refuse to be pigeonholed, and a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston. As the author says of his characters,
"They're regular people just trying to get by."


Among them: a boy whose reputation is ruined when he appears in a head-lice documentary; a lovelorn father who woos his third-grader's teacher with creative show-and-tells; and a former pharmaceuticals salesman who waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint on next the "primitive" canvases he sells for big bucks to an art dealer.

Novel

“Singleton may have invented a new genre. Call it The Hoot.”
—Kirkus Reviews


In his first novel, entitled Novel, George Singleton, master of the comic short story, introduces us to a down-on-his-luck young man named Novel who lives in the colorful town of Gruel, South Carolina. With adopted Irish siblings named James and Joyce, Novel is a professional snake handler who stumbles across strange doings while he manages a motel and resides in one of its rooms writing his autobiography. As he struggles to recount his life story, he uncovers—and finds himself starring in—a decades-old town secret that can blow him and his fellow citizens sky-high.

Irreverent and funny as only George Singleton can be, full of Southern mischief and wit, Novel is a laugh-out-loud fictional whirlwind of drinking, cheap motel-living, art-forgery- committing, pool-playing redneck charm.

Drowning in Gruel

"[The] unchallenged king
of the comic Southern short story."
---The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

George Singleton follows the lives and schemes of the citizens of fictitious Gruel, South Carolina, in search of glory, seclusion, money, revenge, and a meaningful existence. In these nineteen tales, young Gruelites learn lessons when confronted with neighbors who might not be as blind as they appear, dermatologists intent on eradicating birthmarks, and fathers prone to driving on half-inflated tires in order to flirt with cashiers. Meanwhile, the town's older citizens try to make sense out of dogs that heal wounds, lawn-mowing dead men, wives who don't appreciate gas masks for Valentine's Day, and children who mix their mother's ashes with housepaint. Hilarious and tragic, George Singleton's unforgettable characters try to overcome their limitations as best they can.

Why Dogs Chase Cars

"This is not your mother's Southern fiction."
---Candler Hunt,
Ollsons Books and Records, Washington D.C.

As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, all Mendal Dawes wants is "out." It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. He buries stuff in the backyard--fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (Bird on a Wire, Bird on a Perch, Fly toward Heaven, First Baptist Church), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts." He makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and take terrible unpaid jobs helping out at nursing homes and tutoring little Shirley Ebo in reading. This funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human book is about how the only son of a weirdo learns what a wizard his father really was--after it's too late. On the way to witnessing that understanding, we get to watch this duo's precarious relationship in a place with "a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry." To be consistently funny is a great gift, but to be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift.

These People Are Us

"Funny and funky, trendy and counter-friendly, wild and accurate." ---Fred Chappell

Once you start reading George Singleton's first book of stories, a strange thing happens: You discover that the characters sound like people you know--people who are trying hard to make sense of modern absurdities.
With a style all his own, Singleton fashions a world that wins our hearts but teases our senses: how to find a black-market sonogram so your pregnant wife won't find out

you accidentally taped over the original; how to help your father and everyone else in town fake being hit by a tornado to get emergency government funds; and why not to look for your next wife at your local recycling center
Step into Singleton's world and you'll see why he is earning a reputation as one of the funniest, wisest, and most surprising Southern writers of his generation--and why he was named one of the "new writers you need to know" by Book Magazine.