...you are in a maze
of twisty passages...

Donavan Hall is a writer. He's written several novels. Also, he publishes an excellent magazine called The Angler that is released three times a year and is sent directly to your snail mail box.

donavan's brain #1: The first installment of Donavan's Brain is ready for your reading enjoyment. I've been told by readers that keeping up with all the different things I writing is almost a full time job. Thus I've taken this narcissistic activity to a new level and am publishing a newsletter about what I'm doing. Well, some of the things I'm doing at any rate. If you want email alerts about when the next newsletter is ready, you can subscribe to the mailing list.

posted Sunday, July 6th, 2008 by donavan

a text adventure

...a new kind of narrator is born: no longer a man who describes things he sees, but at the same time a man who invents the things around him and who sees the things he invents.

---Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Realism to Reality" in For a New Novel

You are sitting at your computer. "What's this labyrinth above?" you ask yourself. "Am I suppose to click it?" You are about to click, but you are afraid that you'll get lost. Who or what is Donavan Hall anyway? Sounds like the name of a college dormatory. If he's a who, then is he real or a character invented by a novelist also named Donavan Hall? You'll worry about that later.

Of course, you've heard of Donavan Hall before. He's that guy that writes about craft beer. "Didn't he used to have a blog?" you ask. Someone told you that he is now writing novels (or novellas or novellettes or something like that). You also heard that he publishes a magazine, what was it called? You are about to give up and do another Google search, when you decide to...

1. click on the image of the labyrinth,
2. read a story in the angler, or
3. hoist a few pints in the beer hall, or
4. listen to radio beer hall, or
5. consult the long island beer guide, or
6. look inside donavan's brain, or
7. just keep reading, thereby delaying the inevitable.

Dear Reader,

The long promised, much delayed first print issue of The Angler is almost ready and I'll be mailing it out to subscribers in August. I've not been very successful in getting people to subscribe to this magazine, so instead of waiting for subscribers to contact me, I'm contacting them. So far, I've written to a number of my writing colleagues and people who have submitted stories to the online version of The Angler. This last week I wrote to one of my writing buddies who lives out in LA and asked him for his snail mail address. In his reply he commented that my web site was a bit complex and he was never certain where I was posting my new writing. That's when I decided to resurrect my newsletter, Donavan's Brain.

I created a "mailing list" with Google Groups thinking that people who wanted to subscribe to the print edition of The Angler would just sign up for that. Well, in six months only my wife and my friend Rich have signed up for that mailing list, so I thought it was time to retool that list. The idea behind the Brain is to send out a weekly update of everything that I've written and posted.

Now that The Angler is getting close to being completed, I've had a little action on the web site version. I've accepted three new stories. The first is by Rosanne Griffeth, a writer living on the edge of the Smokey Mountains. Her story is called "A Prayer to the Gods of the Fishing Dogs." The second is a story set in a bar. It's by Charles D. Phillips and is called "Dead Men Can't Give Orders."

On The Beer Hall mainly I've been posting about the progress of The Beer Hall Guide to Long Island. I've added several new articles to the guide, including information about the newly opened Croxley Ales in Farmingdale. In addition to revising and improving the content of the guide, I've been working on the guide's index (no small task). Soon, I'll give a copy to Denise for proofreading and then we'll take it to the printer after the corrections have been entered. The goal is to have the first printing done before the end of the month.

Radio Beer Hall broadcast it's 116th episode at the end of June. In that one I talked about rising beer prices, the cause of sulfurous off-flavors in beer, and about the breweries I visited on my trip to Washington.

In the last week I've revived my activity on Zoetrope, a community of writers who share and review each other's works-in-progress. My plan is to start submitting short stories to various online magazines. If you are a writer and don't know about Zoetrope, I'd encourage you to check it out. The writers there are in general quite good.

My own Long Island writer's group, Linotypo, has launched a new project. As a group we are creating a series of related novels which we will publish periodically, starting in 2009 probably. The idea is that each writer writes a short novel using characters and other elements created by the group. We will be attempting to introduce story arcs that span multiple novels and allow each writer to be creative with the development of the part of the arc that's in their novel. I'll be writing the first chapter of my contribution to this group project as soon as I finish The Beer Hall Guide to Long Island.

This year's novel-in-progress is based on the trip I took out to California with my friend Patrick. The novel is called Wasted. I'm also working on a short film, a version of the material in the novel, called The West End of Never. When the short film is done, I'll post it to YouTube and launch a related hypertextual installation on my web site with photos from the trip together with a selection of "readings" from the novel. All this has to be finished before November.

I have two novels which I'm in the process of submitting to publishers: Goodbye Green Day and Lost in the Ruins. Another novel, The Italians, will join that number. During our week in the Poconos I penciled in the corrections of The Italians. All I need to do now is enter them into the electronic file and print out a fresh copy.

Cheers,
Donavan Hall
Long Island, July 2008