"Why do they [write] for their money? Why do they [work] for short pay? They ain't getting nowhere and they're losing their share. They must have gone crazy back there." — Michael Burton (paraphrased)
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, April 6, 2018, 10:45 a.m. This week has seemed slow. Most seem fast. Yet my life has been full of activity. First the audio version of my stock racing novel, Lightning in a Bottle, was released. The audio version is fantastic, thanks to the diligent work of narrator Jay Harper. He …
Continue reading The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Imagination
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, April 1, 2018, 12:24 p.m. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will make some readers angry. What doesn’t? This novel is either my best or my best mess. I did my best. I put lots of effort into it. No one is objective about oneself. The readers decide for themselves, and their verdict …
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, March 8, 2018, 9:03 a.m. Imagine Professor Indiana Jones, only damaged by the trauma of the Great War. Imagine the alternative "Indy," deeply neurotic and wearing a half-mask to hide the part of his face disfigured fighting the Germans, for whom he understandably bears a grudge. He moves to Cairo, purchases …
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, January 28, 2018, 4:49 p.m. I read Preacher Man, by Clint Morey, of my own free will. I found it on Amazon. It was a quick read. The sample seemed promising. It's preposterous. That I actually completed a novel I found this insipid is astonishing. It is an inspirational story. It …
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, January 15, 2018, 12:15 p.m. Fritz Kolbe is just a man. He has no yearning to kill and never does so in Andreas Kollender’s The Honest Spy, expertly translated into English by Steve Anderson. Perhaps because the novel begins in South Africa, where he is assigned a diplomatic post by the …
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, December 24, 2017, 11:17 a.m. I’ve never been anywhere near the same distant universe as J.P. Dooley’s Getting High: The Jaymo Chronicles I, and I haven’t really read another novel like it. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Maybe, though it wasn’t a novel. I’ve written about the dangerous release …
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, November 27, 2017, 6:32 p.m. Raymond Chandler was an extraordinary novelist and screenwriter. I can only imagine how great a sports columnist he would have been. This man could turn a phrase. They cascade through his prose like waterfalls. “… she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look …
Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, August 1, 2017, 12:36 p.m. Hey, there. Hi, there. Ho, there. I wrote a western last fall. It’s not just any western. It’s a modern western, set at the end of World War II, when a couple Marines return home to Texas, looking for peace, love, and understanding even though they’d …
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, July 6, 2017, 11:15 a.m. It is no discredit to The Last Paradise that it took me too long to read it. It was circumstance. I’ve been buried in my own writing, and there’s no end in sight. I’ve gotten myself overloaded with writing, and my reading has suffered, which is …
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, May 12, 2017, 9:43 a.m. Many readers – okay, at least one – have comfortable refuges and guilty pleasures. Read something heavy – a bulky bio, a literary classic, an historical tome – and then scurry back to relaxing, reliable delight. It might be a comedy – a Carl Hiaasen or …
Nightrider's Lament 