[Much of what is below was originally posted on September 6, 2023, but kind of a lot has happened since then! So, here’s the year-end edition.]

I did a lot of writing in 2023.

In January, I signed up for an online class on writing grit lit led by writer Sheldon Lee Compton. Three of us worked with Sheldon for a couple of weeks (maybe more). In the process, we wrote four pieces of what turned out to be flash fiction, each with a different focus; on one, for example, we were to create the piece (narrative, character, etc.) using mostly dialogue.

I titled my dialogue piece “Abyssinian Night.” Mystery Tribune picked it up for its online daily fiction archive back in April or May, I think. You can read it here if you’re interested. The story had at least one reader! My X (not ex-) writer-friend Casey Stegman wrote this and linked the story: “Another story this year that I enjoyed the hell out of is this one from @DrMacOde (published by the always amazing @MysteryTribune).” Remember Casey’s name!

One of our other assignments for that workshop was particularly focused on setting. I wrote a piece I titled “Holy City Buskers,” which was accepted for online publication by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. The story went live there in early December. You can read it here if you’re interested.

I wrote two other pieces from Sheldon’s grit lit workshop – “Bell-Eye” and “Penny and the Beast.” I submitted both a couple of times to no success before deciding not to send them out anymore. Instead, I’ll keep them for myself and make them available here when this site is revised (hopefully in the first part of 2024).

In late August, I completed what I think was my first more-or-less traditional short story since the publication of A Twilight Reel. For the longest time it went untitled, and I referred to it as “Something Unspeakable,” a working title taken from what was – again for the longest time – its opening phrase: “Something unspeakable now lives in our woods. . . .” Eventually, as the character and voice of the story developed, I adopted the title “Payne Mountain,” for the place where the majority of the story is set, a mountain above Runion named after the family living there as the story begins. With help from writing friends Tonja Matney Reynolds, Pat Hudson, and Chris McGinley, I refined the voice and finally finished the story, now out on submission at a handful of places. Here’s the first paragraph as a bit of a teaser:

That evening, half a century ago now, just after supper when we had moved out to the veranda to worship the last light, something unspeakable asserted an ear-shattering claim on our fifty acres of forested mountainside. What we heard began as a forlorn howl, such as some creature might make if it returned to its den to find the place and its little ones destroyed, a howl that escalated into a scream of rage. Its echoes spread invisible fire through the woods and sent us scrambling for our front door, imaginations terrorized.

from “Payne Mountain” by Michael Amos Cody

I spent the last quarter of 2022 and most of 2023 in the “querying” stage. (For those who don’t know, “querying” is the hopeful, humbling, humiliating, hopeful again act of writing to literary agents and publishers/editors to ask if they are interested in representing/publishing my work. The vast majority of these queries either go unanswered or answered briefly with a note that might be summarized in four words: “not-interested-good-luck.” But that’s the way it is for 99.9% of us who engage in this writing business. (For an example of this process, you might want to check out the September 5 episode of Writer’s Bone podcast with National Book Award winner Tess Gunty.)

I completed the first draft of this new novel, Streets of Nashville, late in the summer of 2022, aided by a week-long residency in Laurel Cabin at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains. In the excitement of new creation, I prematurely submitted the novel to a few agents and publishers who (rightly?) rejected it. Since then, through the semesters of Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and on into the summer, I revised the novel a dozen times, guided by helpful comments from a few friends, particularly my colleague Michael Briggs.

Here are the two main paragraphs of the query letter:

It’s 1989, and Nashville feels like a city on the knife edge of uncertainty. Violent crime escalates, even on hallowed Music Row. The city’s streets fill with strangers. Its music industry faces the death of traditional practices as the digital age looms. The anxiety of change cracks the façades of “Music City, U.S.A.” and “Athens of the South,” revealing an unacknowledged darkness.

In the early hours of Easter Sunday morning, gunfire echoes along 17th Avenue South when four people are shot. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he has had with his songs—witnesses the shooting, but the masked gunman spares him. But why? While Nashville Metro PD’s investigation progresses, the killer develops an obsession with Ezra—calling him, following him, haunting his dreams, but not eliminating him. Ezra tries to carry on with his songwriting, maintain his day job cleaning pools, and assist in the investigation as he can. When the seemingly methodical mind behind the Easter killings begins to unravel, the violence—including the threat to Ezra—escalates in Nashville and moves toward a final confrontation in an isolated farmhouse near Ezra’s hometown of Runion, in the North Carolina mountains.

Major Update: Here’s a surprising saga of success rising out of failure. As mentioned above, in the excited flush of new creation, I submitted what amounted to a first or second draft of Streets of Nashville to a few agents and publishers. One of the latter was Madville Publishing.

  • Original Madville submission was sent in the second or third week in September 2022.
  • After it was sent, I continued to learn more about my story and continued revising. Sometime in November or December, I received important feedback from my colleague Michael Briggs regarding one of most important and difficult relationships in the novel. I began to revise accordingly over the winter holidays.
  • On January 23, 2023, I received two things from Madville: 1) a pass on the novel, but which time my response was “of course and rightly so” and 2) some useful comments from Madville’s fiction reviewer.
  • I accepted the rejection and continued forward with revisions that were making the novel better and better (in my opinion, at least)
  • In May, I submitted the novel to a publisher I had really high hopes for and strong interest in, but even as I submitted the MS, I knew it was much longer than the publisher was interested in; still, the publisher remained interested in reviewing my work, so while I waited, I started an intensive mid-summer revision to reduce the word count from 106,000 (I think the original Madville submission was 92-96K words) to somewhere in the mid- to upper-80K range.
  • I think some miscommunication occurred between this desired publisher and me. When I wrote to say I was working on reducing the word count, the publisher—who still hadn’t rejected the novel—thought I was going to send the revision when completed. At the same time, I thought I was in the still-waiting-to-learn-if-you’re-interested stage. By the time this miscommunication got sorted and I sent the shortened manuscript in late September 2023, the publisher wasn’t going to be able to get to it until January, so I settled in to wait.
  • On October 12, my wife and I were taking part—as crawling audience members—in a Johnson City poetry pub crawl. On the walk between our second and third stop, I received an email from Madville (now some nine months after the rejection of Streets of Nashville). The initial email said that some old queries were being gone through, and mine looked interesting. Had they ever requested the manuscript? It just so happened that the acquisitions reader was looking for reading material. Before I could reply, I received an email apologizing for the confusion after the realization that they had, in fact, already seen and passed on my novel.
  • I went ahead and responded with this: “Yes, your reader responded to my first draft, which I submitted way before it was ready. The novel has gone through many revisions—guided by your reader’s comments and those of other beta readers—since September ’22, which I think is when I originally submitted it.” Only that and nothing more.
  • Here’s the next email I received a couple of minutes later: “My reader says he’d read it again if you want to send it.”
  • Reader, I resubmitted the manuscript the following morning, October 13, 2023.
  • On Friday evening, November 3, I was playing the season finale gig at the Barnett Patio. At some point, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at it and saw that I’d received an email from Madville. Figuring it was a closer-but-still-no-cigar note, I put the phone back in my pocket and played for my people. As soon as the gig ended, I had to hop in the car and drive two hours south to Union, South Carolina, to participate next morning in the Upcountry Literary Festival held at USC Union. I’d forgotten about the Madville email until I was in the drive-thru line at a McDonald’s just south of Hendersonville, NC. I placed my order as I rolled forward, I opened the email and read it carefully a few times. By the time I reached the pick-up window, I knew Streets of Nashville had found a home.

I have signed the contract. The completed manuscript is due to Madville by July 1, 2024, and Streets will hit the streets in early 2025.

During the year as I was revising Streets of Nashville, I spent significant time drafting a new novel with the working title Avalon Moon. This first draft currently stands at roughly 77,000 words (271 pages in typescript), and I think that I’m 5,000 words or thereabouts from typing THE END (which I actually never do). Back in the spring of 2023, I submitted the first fifty pages to a competition called the Claymore Award, which is associated with Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. In July, I learned that Avalon Moon had been selected as a Finalist for the Claymore in the category of Southern Gothic (it’s actually more Appalachian Gothic). While my submission wasn’t the ultimate winner in that category, I consider its achievement of Finalist status to be affirmation of the novel’s potential

I started the ball rolling with an Asheville company called The Talking Book to record an audiobook of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook. Time and quiet recording space have been hard to come by, but I hope I’ll be able to do some—if not all—of the recording by the end of January 2024.

Another new thing I’ve done here at the very end of the year is write a couple of short stories specifically for proposed anthologies. The first—completed and submitted by the end of October—was for possible inclusion in the Bouchercon 2024 anthology. The second—completed and submitted by the end of December—was for possible inclusion in an anthology based on the lyrics of Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen. I really enjoyed writing these stories and have fingers and toes crossed for the success of each and both!