Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies, is a story collection by Bobby Horecka. Originally written as a final thesis project for the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Houston-Victoria (2018), it was signed by Madville Publishing in early 2019 after Kim Davis, director of the Texas-based literary nonprofit, discovered one of the manuscript stories ("Lubbock 1974") published in the literary journal Amarillo Bay put out by the University of South Carolina (2018). Based loosely on the author's own childhood, that story would not only become the opening chapter to Horecka's first work of fiction, which made its publishing debut in March 2020 at the AWP Conference in San Antonio, but it was also picked up as one of the stories in another collection Madville published at that same time entitled Runaway: An Anthology (eds. Smith, Gills & Zacharias, 2020). The following year, Horecka's Long Gone & Lost was named a finalist for the 2021 Sergio Troncoso Best First Book of Fiction Award given by the Texas Institute of Letters. Pick up a copy of Long Gone & Lost or Runaway today at all major online book retailers, or visit https://madvillepublishing.com/.

Serve managing editor of five South Texas newspapers, including the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald, The Shiner Gazette, Yoakum Herald-Times, The Moulton Eagle, and Luling Newsboy & Signal.

Serve managing editor of five South Texas newspapers, including the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald, The Shiner Gazette, Yoakum Herald-Times, The Moulton Eagle, and Luling Newsboy & Signal.

Serve managing editor of five South Texas newspapers, including the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald, The Shiner Gazette, Yoakum Herald-Times, The Moulton Eagle, and Luling Newsboy & Signal.

Serve managing editor of five South Texas newspapers, including the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald, The Shiner Gazette, Yoakum Herald-Times, The Moulton Eagle, and Luling Newsboy & Signal.

Serve managing editor of five South Texas newspapers, including the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald, The Shiner Gazette, Yoakum Herald-Times, The Moulton Eagle, and Luling Newsboy & Signal.

Before I covered the real back roads of Texas for newspapers, my first taste of the printed word came via the pages of books I helped write, a flavor I never shook. I pitched in on several faculty members' projects as an undergraduate. More than a dozen became scholarly books or articles. Just two ever credited me for my labors: Scott Slovic's Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers (Prentice Hall, 1993) and Allan & Nancy Feyl Chavkin's Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (Mississippi University Press, 1994).When I got the chance to try my hand at something of my own in 2008 as author, photo contributor and editor of a book we called The Winds of Change, I dove at it. The work, a locally-published, 100-page pictorial history, commemorated a Texas institution's landmark 75th anniversary.Despite filling newspapers, magazines and websites with stories, my next book would be another 10 years in the making, utltimately written as part of my MFA in creative writing program at UHV. I called it Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies. Not only did its mauscript serve as my MFA thesis but it also became the title of my first published work of fiction (Madville, 2020), which was later picked a finalist for the 2021 Sergio Troncoso Best First Book of Fiction Award given by the Texas Institute of Letters. Visit https://OutlawAuthorz.com for more.