Website for novelist and short story writer Colleen Curran

If you’re in Richmond on Thursday, April 30, I’ll be participating in The Writing Show. You should come on by.

This week’s topic is Building A Writing Career: Literary Magazines, MFA Programs, Writers Conferences, Contests and the Necessary Art of Rejection.

I’ll be sharing the panel with the lovely and talented Thom Didato, editor of www.failbetter.com and Mary Flinn, editor of Blackbird. Both are fantastic online publications and Blackbird was kind enough to publish my short story, “The Boss’s Boyfriend,” a few years ago.

Should be an interesting discussion. I’m looking forward to what everybody has to say.  A lot of changes are going on in the industry and I’m curious to see what the editors have to say about it. 

For instance, I’m starting to wonder more and more, why don’t authors just publish immediately to the Internet?  Will the Kindle change publishing?  Will people post their manuscripts directly to their websites and have people download them for a small fee?  Or like what Stephen King’s doing with the Internet and self-publishing?  Who knows….all I know for sure is that changes are coming fast and furious.  

I work at daily newspaper for my day job.  It’s the biggest newspaper in the state.  And we’re seeing massive changes on a daily basis with users going to the Internet.  A year ago, we thought print wouldn’t go away.  Now, elimination appears imminent.  

Book publishing is much slower and probably won’t see the changes as soon as we are…but I can’t help but think the waves of change we’re experiencing at the newspaper will come to book publishing eventually.

The sights, the sounds.

Welcome to my new DIY website.

I’ve been wanting to update my site for a long time and finally…here we go.

On the new site, you’ll find:

• Short stories.  Did you know I write short stories too?  Now you do!  Check out “Fine Young Woman”, a short short originally published in Meridian, below. Or click on the short story category for more published stories.

• Online-only exclusive material, like the “Whores on the Hill” short story (plus original cover art) that sparked the novel. Read it below…..

• News, updates, maybe even some audio and video if I get really fancy.