"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, Thursday, April 13, 2017, 9:27 a.m. Lightning in a Bottle struck me. It’s my new novel. I’ve written six. Right now I’m making up mind whether to start working on seven or eight, both of which are in progress. I guess the winner gets to be seven. I’m not stuck because of …
Continue reading The Thunder Rolls, but Will the Lightning Strike?
Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, April 1, 2017, 4:14 p.m. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Both long dead. Both masters of a genre. They wrote about crime fiction about hard-boiled detectives. Both are known more for the movies made from their novels than the novels themselves. I wanted to read Chandler and Hammett. I had for …
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, March 20, 2017, 10:56 a.m. Jesse Few lives in the suspended adolescence of the power life. Suddenly, all of his indiscretions come back to haunt him at once. So goes the irreverent narrative of Lying for a Living, Steve McCondichie’s debut novel. I traffic in such irreverence myself. Its smirk …
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, February 9, 2017, 11:24 a.m. All that I found questionable about Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep was how much it rains in Los Angeles. It was published in 1939. Perhaps it’s climate change. For a long time, I’ve wanted to read the masters of crime and mystery, principally Chandler and Dashiell …
Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, January 24, 2017, 11:45 a.m. When I started reading Jada Ryker’s Take the Body and Run, I thought it was a mess. I couldn’t keep up with all the characters. This was also the way I felt when I started reading Doctor Zhivago several decades ago. I stuck with Boris Pasternak’s …
The matter of whether Michael Carlson's The Age of Daredevils is fiction or non is unimportant. The tale of the men and women who tumbled fatefully over the Horseshoe Falls of Niagara and through the raging rapids thereabout is true. Carlson's knowledge is imposing and his research painstaking. The fiction in it is the thoughts …
I’m just about to dive into the 21st chapter of my next – and sixth – novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which is a few paragraphs shy of 50,000 words in its first draft. Italics will be added when it’s published. But first! A warm-up. La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-lah! Get the old digits cranking like pistons! My urgency …
I guess I found some identity in Roan Poulter's Motorcycle Chronicles that meshed with my own. On several levels. There are three of them, all about the troubled, but evolving relationship between bohemian literary figure Anne Carter and the son, Jordan, she left behind. Anne is an influence but not a character, in the final …
On with the show, this is it! That Oscar-winning rabbit concluded his intro with that tune, and, as of 12:01 a.m. today (Wednesday, August 17), my fifth novel, Cowboys Come Home, is up for nomination in Amazon's KindleScout program. Two previous novels -- KindleScout is fiction only -- have been published in the program, which …
Continue reading Little Help? Got a Manuscript Loose Out There
First of all, the title is perfect. Wild Whistling Blackbirds. The title of my upcoming western, Cowboys Came Home, came quickly, but, usually, a title doesn't come to me until I'm well into the first draft. Here, it's as if author Allen Kent came up with this splendid title, rooted in poetry, and built the …
Nightrider's Lament 