Clinton, S.C., July 10, 2022,10:28 a.m.

First of all, the highlight of the week was peaches.

Like all self-respecting South Carolinians, I love peaches and know that my home state produces more peaches than the so-called Peach State, Georgia.

Even though modern times have made produce available year around, it generally isn’t produce worth having. The supermarkets sell fruits and vegetables bred to be durable, not tasty. Peaches and tomatoes aren’t worth eating unless they’re local and in season. This is the time of year a lover of fruits makes the transition from apples and oranges to peaches and watermelons. I had such a hankering for peaches that I bought a bag at a supermarket. I ate them but wanted better, and so I was happy to be headed to the bank early last week when I spied a fellow in the parking lot of a convenience store with bags and baskets of fresh peaches from down the road in Johnston. When I was a kid, my dad sold fertilizer to peach farmers from that area, a little southwest of here, and along I-85 – every staff meteorologist on TV calls it “the I-85 Corridor,” as if a 4-lane highway has something to do with where rain, snow, sleet, lightning, thunder and hail are conjured up – around Spartanburg and Gaffney to the north and northeast.

Anyway, I know Johnston peaches to be good peaches, so I bought a bag of big, beautiful ones for $8, and it was just right because I was able to consume a couple a day without them getting all mushy. The last two were the best because they were tasty and soft.

For a modest living, I write about sports. Here in Laurens County (LaurensCountySports.com) and at Furman University (FurmanATT.com), it is calm. Next month the storm of football gears up, but I’ve been writing and reading fiction, which together are my greatest loves.

I wrote a short story titled “The Graduate Transfer” and decided to turn it into a novel. This week I added two chapters, leading to a total of four and about 10,000 words. I also have a completed novel, The Latter Years, that is about baseball. I’ve barely even tried to get it published, but I’m trying to find the time.

Recently I’ve read a novel about the American Revolution and its aftermath, a non-fiction book about a would-be minor-league baseball team, and another historical novel about the beginning of World War II.

Currently I’m reading a novel with which I’m familiar. I wrote it. It’s been out since 2018 and is titled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I’m almost as curious about it as I would be if I hadn’t written it.

When I am in the process of writing – not just novels or books but columns and game stories – I really think it’s good. People don’t write shit on purpose, but I’m sort of manic-depressive about what I write. I love it while I’m writing. I hate it the first time I read it. Then, down the road, I think I have a more balanced view.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell isn’t a horror novel. It’s scary to read now, though. When I started reading it, I wasn’t sure whether it was my best or my biggest mess. That novel was almost finished when Donald Trump was elected president. As a result, I rewrote the latter half. The president in my novel plays a bit role. It’s not a political novel. It’s a tale with a huge cast of characters caught up in a vast web of intrigue.

So far, so good. I found a few typos scattered around about 2/3rds of the way through it but nothing major. It gets a bit contrived, but I think it stands up pretty well in the context of what has happened in the country since it was written.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has few examples of anyone – from writers to athletes to politicians to businessmen, and from rural Virginia to Santa Catalina Island off the coast of southern California – who obeys the law.

I’m also reading it as a means of understanding why not that many others do, and I think I’ve made some headway.

I grew up in an age of flawed heroes. In other words, anti-heroes and likable rogues. My fiction consists of me creating characters with lives more exciting, successful, and dysfunctional than mine and inhabiting them with what I would do in their shoes.

The movies and literature that inhabited by youth were energized by Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Clint Eastwood, playing characters who never let the rules get in their way. The music came from like-minded spirits such as Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, James McMurtry, Gram Parsons, Iris Dement, Jimmy Buffett, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark. The books I loved were written by John Steinbeck, Pat Conroy, Kurt Vonnegut, Larry McMurtry, and Elmore Leonard.

Note the McMurtrys, father and son.

Irreverence and satire have gone out of style.

I don’t think I can change the way I write, but it could be that the great flaw, when I write about generations younger than mine, even as I avidly observe them, is that I insert the roots of my raising, which may no longer be particularly relevant, into their lives.

The Latter Days – along with the auto-racing novels Lightning in a Bottle and Life Gets Complicated – may be my best solution. Those novels are written from the viewpoint of an aging veteran of one sort or another, describing protagonists who are younger.