Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, August 25, 2017, 11:23 a.m.

This week has been a strange one. I think I may have been zapped by the eclipse.

My new novel – and first sequel – is out. I have a book signing in Spartanburg on September 2 at Hub City Bookshop (3 p.m.). The week has been spent the way all weeks are when a new book is out. It’s sporadic, and slow, and unfulfilling. Writing a novel is exciting. Selling it is burdensome.

Everything is slow, most notably money. To paraphrase the late Henny Youngman, buy my novel. Please!

My glands are swollen. Earlier this week, it was on my left side. Now it’s the right. I didn’t feel badly until last night. I’m better this morning. Tonight I’ll be writing about the annual high school football rivalry between Clinton and Laurens. This game is nothing special elsewhere. Locally, it’s roughly as important as the aforementioned eclipse. What separates Clinton-Laurens from the eclipse is that Clinton-Laurens happens every year. The grass needs cutting. Bills need paying. I’m on autopilot. I like it better when I have something to do with the steering of my life.

Last night Cleveland pummeled the Red Sox unmercifully, but the Yankees lost in Detroit, so the AL East lead is still 4-1/2 games as Boston heads home to meet the Orioles at Fenway Park. I’ll be at K.C. Hanna Stadium. That’s where the Laurens Raiders play the Clinton Red Devils. I was once a Red Devil, a mere 42 years ago.

The NASCAR circuit, my home for 20 years, is idle this week. Without racing to watch, I hope NASCAR fans will have time to read, preferably my two novels on the sport, Lightning in a Bottle, which was published this spring, and Life Gets Complicated, which was published this week.

Life Gets Complicated could easily be the title of this week, but the novel is far more interesting. Obviously.

I’ve been writing an original short story about Barrie Jarman, the hero of the two racing novels, for a collection of short stories that will be offered for free in the fall.

Then there’s the next novel, which has been as slow as Lightning in a Bottle and Life Gets Complicated were fast. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell won’t get italics until it is finished and published. It’s about to get a new ending. Things changed. The real world changed. My fiction changed with the election of Donald J. Trump. It changed so much that I wrote two sports novels while pondering the ramifications.

This is a time of many thoughts, few of them coherent. I’m trying to find an ending to a novel that makes sense in the context of current events. I’ve got to get it done. A cover is being designed. An excerpt is soon to be published in the same collection noted above.

At the moment, I’m incapable of writing anything more interesting than this. I’m biding my time by spinning my wheels. An old song comes to mind:

Gimme a beer or two and I’ll be fine / At least it worked every other time / I’m a rodeo-deo-deo cowboy / Bordering on the insane.

Hah. I haven’t had a beer in months. I can’t remember the last one. Soon there will be parking lots outside of football stadiums before and after games that I am not covering. The life of a writer is solitary. He’s got to get out, though, so that he can find fuel for his writing to burn.

 

If you’d like me to mail you a signed copy of Life Gets Complicated, or any of my other novels, you can find my address and instructions at montedutton.com. (montedutton.com/blog/merchandise)

I’ve written seven novels and a collection of short stories. I’ve also written a number of books about sports, mostly about NASCAR. You can find most of them here.

The Kindle versions of my books, where available, can be found above. Links below are to print editions.

Lightning in a Bottle is the story of Barrie Jarman, the hope of stock car racing’s future. Barrie, a 18-year-old from Spartanburg, South Carolina, is both typical of his generation and a throwback to the sport’s glory days.

Life Gets Complicated follows Barrie Jarman as he moves up to FASCAR’s premier series. He and Angela Hughston face discrimination for their interracial love affair, and Barrie has to surmount unexpected obstacles that test his resolve.

Cowboys Come Home is a modern western. Two World War II heroes come home from the Pacific to Texas.

I’ve written a crime novel about the corrosive effects of patronage and the rise and fall of a powerful politician and his dysfunctional family, Forgive Us Our Trespasses.

I’ve written about what happens to a football coach when he loses everything, Crazy of Natural Causes. It’s a fable of life’s absurdity.

I’ve written a tale of the Sixties in the South, centered on school integration and a high school football team, The Intangibles.

I’ve written a rollicking yarn about the feds trying to track down and manipulate a national hero who just happens to be a pot-smoking songwriter, The Audacity of Dope.

I’ve written a collection of 11 short stories, all derived from songs I wrote, Longer Songs.

Signed copies of Lightning in a Bottle are on sale at Emma Jane’s (see ad above). Signed copies of all my fiction are also on sale at L&L Office Supply in uptown Clinton, South Carolina.

Follow me on Twitter @montedutton, @hmdutton (about writing), and/or @wastedpilgrim (more opinionated and irreverent). I’m on Facebook (Monte.Dutton), Instagram (TUG50), and Google-Plus (MonteDuttonWriter).