Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, December 9, 2017, 9:20 a.m.

It’s been a week of boring days and exciting nights. I’ve spent most of my waking time proofing an audio version of my year-old novel, Cowboys Come Home, and there hasn’t been much sleeping time because my mind has been occupied with the financial difficulties that always seem to mark the holidays. I’ve tossed and tumbled and had what sleep there was marred by vivid dreams. In contented times, I don’t dream at all.

Vivid though they may be, I don’t remember the dreams for long. Last night one was about playing golf and repeatedly screwing up this 3-wood – back when I played the game futilely, that fairway wood was my best club, meaning that it was most peope’s worst – on a long, narrow hole that was uphill and bordered on both sides by thick woods. A lot of the shots were good, but the imaginary hole – surely it was the thirteenth — required perfection, and perfection I could not muster.

The other involved hanging out in the Texas Motor Speedway infield with the great singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen Jr. Even though it was in the infield of a NASCAR track, racing didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. I once interviewed Keen for a book, True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed, and he played a prerace concert at that speedway, during which I had a picture taken with my old friend David Poole, now deceased, with Keen performing in the background.

We had all sorts of interesting conversations, Keen and I, and then I wondered over to a stage, thinking his show must have started, but when I got there, and after listening to several songs, I realized the guy on the stage wasn’t he.

One of the first songs I learned to play on guitar was Keen’s “Corpus Christi Bay,” but when I awakened, the words to another song, Steve Earles’ “Tom Ames’ Prayer,” were running through my mind.

And you know I ain’t never prayed before / But it always seemed to me / If prayin’ is the same as beggin’ Lord / I don’t take no charity

I won’t want charity, either. Buying my books is, at least, a respectable form because you’ll get something out of them.

Now I’ve got to get back to that audio book. Four chapters to go. An audio book is boring if you’re the author and it lasts nine hours and 23 seconds. This week I hoped to finish my next and eighth novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which won’t get its italics until it’s available for purchase, but those audio chapters arrived from my narrator, and the novel shifted to the back burner one more time.

Next I’m going to fix breakfast, try to finish proofing that audio book, watch some football, and go buy a Powerball ticket, because it seems right now that the odds of winning that are about the same as one of my novels making it big.

Writing is what I do, and it’s all I can do well at this stage of life, even though reading, and NASCAR, and everything else, have gone out of style.