I’ve held this blog back a couple of days while I first informed people who needed to know.

Laurens County Sports is no more. Furman All the Time! is no more. I pulled the plugs two days ago. I’d been thinking about it for a solid month. There are two principal reasons: (1.) the two full-blown websites are never going to make enough to earn a living, and (2.) I’m putting more emphasis on other writing.

I don’t intend to give up writing sports. I’m just not going to work seven days and nights a week, often until the wee hours, to maintain two comprehensive websites properly.

Henceforth – this may be the first time I’ve ever written this word – my sportswriting will take place at wellpilgrim.wordpress.com, a site I’ve maintained for a decade and used little for the past couple years until two days ago, when I started posting sports stories on it.

I won’t be keeping up with everything in Laurens County and Furman. No more weekly sports schedules, daily collections of notes, photo galleries, etc. I’m going to go out and write about what interests me, and most of what interests me is sports in the county and at Furman. I’m still going to go out and take photos and write about sports. I will regularly post photos on Instagram, and link stories on Facebook and Twitter.

I will likely change the heading on “Well, Pilgrim …” to another name. I haven’t thought of a new name yet. I’m open to suggestions.

Sportswriting is a crucial part of my life, and it provides me with insights that are useful in my fiction. My author’s website, https://montedutton.net/, offers links where you can buy my current novels, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and The Latter Days, as well as most of the other books I’ve written over the years. The site also includes blogs that are mostly about topics other than sports.

Money is short, and I’ve been maintaining the two defunct websites all by myself, and life is too short and I don’t want to make it shorter.

I appreciate all the support, and hope you will regularly frequent the sites linked above. The expenses of running Laurens County Sports and Furman ATT are too much. To borrow from what politicians often say, the situation is not sustainable. I didn’t decide to take action until this week, so I still have much to consider. I expect I’ll be out at high school and college football, basketball and baseball games as much as ever. From time to time, I’ll write features about other sports teams and games.

My intention is to write less but write it better.