I love writing fiction. At the end of a good chapter, I feel warm in the knowledge that I have done my best. The best of days is when I spend most of it writing and playing my guitar. This morning I finished the editing process of the next novel, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. I'm …
Category: Writing
Finding My Audacity
Nowadays I write novels in order to make a living, or, at least, that's the direction I'm headed. Free-lance sportswriting provides some regular income. Royalties come in bits, snatches, and clumps. They're slow when I need them and flood in when the crises are past. I'm making progress. When I got my first novel, The …
Another Glamorous Day of Editing Awaits
I'm editing. Applying the lessons of my current novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, I'm taking my time more with the next one, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. It's a balance. In order to eliminate mistakes, I take my time. In order to get it out as soon as possible, I hurry. This time I'm stressing the …
Audacity for a New Year
This morning I awakened the usual way, which is to say I put on some coffee, washed down the daily medication, and retired to another sector of the manse for normal relief of bodily functions. Then I returned to the kitchen, stirred Sweet 'n' Low into the coffee -- which, I might add, was recently …
Go West, Old Man
A Swedish movie with subtitles was on a few minutes ago. I didn't watch it, but it was on. I was going through emails and getting rid of spam on my website. All I know about the movie was that it had something to do with love, probably the forbidden variety, and, when the closing …
I’ve a Rambling Mind
The NFL has a commercial in which a couple of Arizona Cardinals male fans take part of the picket fence around one of them's home to the game so they can hoist up one of those "D-Fence" signs. The wife calls them at the game to complain. The home is in a neighborhood unlike any …
Language Is a Funny Game
Political correctness. It's nothing new. It's why you walk into a convenience store and ask the lady at the register where the restrooms are. Restrooms, huh? It's why a prison is part of the Department of Corrections. Not prisons. Corrections. The War Between the States was politically correct. Not the war. It was awful. The …
The Golden Time
I'm holed up again, writing. The weekend was exciting -- a memorable high school game, Bristol night race, up late both nights writing about them, and then restless afterward -- but I'm back in the routine of work on a short story, write a blog, pay some bills ... ... And, on selected days, I …
A Book to Bed and a Book to Rise
With about thirty minutes to spare before the Tampa Bay-Boston baseball game commenced, and an hour ahead of my weekly radio appearance on South Carolina SportsTalk, I put a fourth novel to bed. It's an appropriate term: "to bed." It's not like I buried it, but it's a little like sending a kid off …
Bouncing Like a Rubber Ball
For as long as I can remember, I've been manic-depressive about my writing. It's not clinically manic-depressive. It's predictable and controllable. It's just that, while I'm writing, I generally think it's really good, and, then, the next time I read it, I consider it unsalvageable, and, on third read, I feel I have some balance. …
Nightrider's Lament 