Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 11:50 a.m.

My greatest flaw is absentmindedness. Fortunately, I am also meticulous. How do these competing atributes exist in the same body?

This has thus far been a frantic week, and there’s no good reason for it. It’s “the summertime when the weather is hot, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.”

Thanks, Mungo Jerry.

It just seems like a drag race, but a dragster takes only a few seconds.

Oh, I’ve written a feature. I’ve described a couple board and council meetings. I’ve taken faulty notes of a candidate forum and written a faulty story about it. Every time I’ve gotten up in the morning, I’ve raced to edit releases and look up information, and when I returned home, I’ve cranked out new stuff that has insidiously arrived in my in-box. I’ve edited obits and compiled lists of arrests. I’ve spent an absurd amount of time dickering with photos I’ve taken, which is one area where the meticulousness kicks in.

I haven’t had the time to give my work the once-over it requires. I’ve succumbed to half-overs. (Is that a word? Why, of course not.) I’ve gone to bed after 1 and awakened before 7. This morning I awakened at 8, and my laptop screamed to life with emails listing mistakes I had made.

I have a stress-inducing habit of both making absentminded mistakes and feeling badly about them. Damn it. I’m a professional writer.

Lest I get the notion that my slow descent into senility has begun, I have enough memory to recognize that I have been this way all my life. In high school, I realized it was entirely possible that my life would end by walking in front of a city bus while reading a book.

I can be as dull as a butter knife and as sharp as a stiletto. Fortunately, when on assignment, I am usually rapier-like instead of lackluster.

There are, unfortunately, exceptions.

For much of my career, there was such a thing as an editor. I’ve been an editor. I used to face fierce deadlines at night. In the brave new world of the Internet, it can be argued that there are no deadlines, or that everything is on deadline, and editors are preciously few. It shows. I’m not the only writer whose mind outraces his or her fingers. Quite often I am accused of a typo in a message full of typos.

The job is to get it right, whether in a blog, a report, a column, a book, a tweet or a Facebook post.

As Chief Watie said in The Outlaw Josey Wales, “We thought about it a long time. ‘Endeavor to persevere.’ And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.”

As soldiers from both sides were alleged to have said during the Civil War, “We’ll fight them, sir, till hell freezes over, and then, sir, we will fight them on the ice.”

This week my mind has been slippery.

 

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Another way I cobble out a living is with my books, a wide variety of which is available for sale here.

 

My eighth novel is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.