Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, March 7, 2017, 10:45 a.m. I haven’t really had much to do. Local sports, or at least my market value for writing about it, has subsided for a while. Bills are outstanding at both ends, which means I am both owed and owing a decent amount. I go to the mailbox …
Category: Writing
I Don’t Know Why, but I Know When
Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, March 1, 2017, 10:45 a.m. Sometimes a football team knows full well the importance of a game, and it knows it had better play well, and all the players tell themselves they’d better be ready and … sometimes themselves just don’t buy it. The fans simplify. They talk among themselves, and …
Horror and Relief
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, February 23, 2017, 1:18 p.m. I have tried to find a market for my fiction. I don’t have lots of money to pay for the search. Five novels now. Six and seven in progress. Nothing makes me happier than the completion of a chapter, well, except, maybe, getting the whole yarn …
Spanning My Literary Globe
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, January 23, 2017, 9:35 a.m. I had another brainstorm overnight. I’m working on two literary projects. One I’ve been working on for several months. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is up to about 80,000 words in first draft. Two weeks ago, another sleepless night led me to a second project, tentatively …
Comedy Remains Elusive
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, January 5, 2017, 9:32 a.m. Try as I might, I don’t seem to be able to write a comedy. Oh, a couple of years ago, I took a stab at it. My third novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, was funny at times. It was a fable of life’s absurdity, but I …
The Lines Are Open
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, December 29, 2016, 12:02 p.m. I got nothing. This sentiment is all too familiar, as what few veteran readers there are of this space realize. It’s entirely possible that a few veteran readers have fallen by the wayside because of this troubling pattern of wandering blogs. As I have heard is …
The Way I Write the Things I Write
I have demonstrated my allegiance to fiction. At present, I am about seventy-five percent done with what will become my sixth novel. Three – Crazy of Natural Causes (2015), Forgive Us Our Trespasses (2016), and Cowboys Come Home (2016) -- have been published in the past two years. It appears likely that Don’t Ask, …
Writing the Ages I’ve Been
Not too long ago, I stumbled across a quotation: The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the ages you have been. – Madeleine L’Engle. All I know about Ms. L’Engle besides that sentence is that she was an American novelist who was born in 1918 and died in 2007. That’s …
Read My Books, Save Your Money, and Hope for the Best
Army beat Navy. Anything's possible. Sure, Donald Trump was there, and he shared the TV booth for a while, saying his usual nothings to Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson. I'm trying my best to respect the office in spite of the man who will soon occupy it. I still have friends who think it's …
Continue reading Read My Books, Save Your Money, and Hope for the Best
One Big Hullabaloo
In the 1960s and ‘70s, pop-music shows became popular on network TV. It was common for me to come home from a high school football game and, unable to sleep after either good or bad performances (mostly the latter), watch In Concert and The Midnight Special. In the ‘60s, a couple were on network TV. …
