By MONTE DUTTON

One of my favorite jokes to tell on myself is: Some of the time I’m a writer, but most of the time I’m just a typist.

Right now, most of the time I’m a writer. Let me explain.

The late Laurens County Sports and Furman All the Time were comprehensive websites. I started out with two employees, then changed to part-time writers: two, then three, then two, then one, until Mitchell Mercer graduated from Presbyterian College. All that remained was I.

I was working seven days a week trying to keep up with rewriting news releases and combining them into notebooks, putting together combined sports schedules, going to one game, writing about it and going through the photos, then putting together stories about games I wasn’t at.

Let’s just say that I know Mannix is on at 2 a.m. on MeTV.

Most of the time, I was just a typist. And not a well-paid one.

I spent most of April thinking about what I was going to do.

I started writing: an average of about a story a day here – I’ve had wellpilgrim.wordpress.com for about 10 years – and interspersing ads in the stories to a few who had paid for ads through June. I also went back to work on a fiction project, The Graduate Transfer, that I started on shortly after I finished The Latter Days. The former is about football, and, yes, the latter is about baseball.

My life is manageable. I proceeded to make plans for a future of writing quality stories here about Furman University, Laurens County’s high schools, Presbyterian College, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

In May, someone sent me an email expressing the view that he wanted to hire me. This put a stop to the plans as we dillied and dallied for two weeks and I mainly waited. Then I got an email to the effect that he had changed his mind.

I had told this potential employer that he had to decide whether the job I could do was worth the money over doing it any which way but loose. I reckon he decided I wasn’t worth it.

That’s what I’m putting in front of you. Do you like my coverage, as demonstrated mainly by recent stories about Clinton winning the baseball championship — and Laurens getting in range – enough to make a donation to keep it going? Am I providing you with a perspective you aren’t getting anywhere else?

Tell you what? If you send me a $10 donation, I’ll put your name (or whatever you deem appropriate) on standing display on the site. I don’t want to be changing the list every day – so make a donation by June 30 – and I’ll run the list of patrons (assuming there is one) on the page from now until year’s end.

I am going back to some reliable past advertisers and asking them to renew ads in a different form. It’s doubtful that wellpilgrim.wordpress.com (a.k.a, Blue, Green, Purple & Red) will reach the former circulation, but early results are that baseball-game stories about two excellent teams hang in there pretty well. Placement within each story makes the ads impossible to miss, and the rates are lower.

Send your $10 to: Monte Dutton, DHK Sports, P.O. Box 768, Clinton, S.C.  29325.

Or, you can help indirectly by purchasing a copy of my rags-to-riches baseball novel, which costs no more than a slaw-dog plate at Whiteford’s after you add a drink and pay the sales tax. Plus, you can read it on your phone for next to nothing.