Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, May 2, 2020, 11:28 a.m. The times demand resourcefulness. Me? I invented a cocktail. I’m not a big drinker these days, but occasionally it helps me sleep soundly and without dreams. Occasionally I put some bourbon in a mug of coffee, but the weather is getting warmer, and the java and …
Tag: alcohol
Getting High on Jaymo and J.P.
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 …
Turning Phrases with a Deft Touch
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 …
Two Trains after the Last Football Game
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, November 20, 2017, 12:45 p.m. On Saturday night, something occurred that I had never seen before in my hometown. Maybe it’s because I’m not often out driving on Saturday nights. I had been at Presbyterian College all day. I brought a pot of chili to the tailgate party before PC ended …
Another Weekend that Was
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, September 17, 2017, 10:55 a.m. Every weekend has its ups and downs. This one isn’t over. NASCAR begins its playoffs today. Formula One’s Singapore Night Race was on when I got up this morning. The National “Buh-buh-buh-BUH!” Football League is on all day and night. The Red Sox are in St. …
Among What Is Small by Comparison
Somehow I spent most of two days working on a stock car racing story. Oh, I cut the grass the first day. Yesterday I shipped off some copies of my new racing novel, Life Gets Complicated. I wrote a regular column for a website. Okay, two stock car racing stories. And two stock car …
Daddy Downhill
I haven't had time to write short stories recently. With a seventh novel on the way to publication, and an eighth in an ongoing state of repair, I've been excising episodes from the latter manuscript. It's hard to remove items that are amusing but unnecessary. It occurred to me that I could turn them into short …
From Books to Movies, without a Hitch
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 …
Mystery When It Was Cool
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 …
You Can Hear the Music Burning Down Copperhead Road
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, January 30, 2017, 6:59 p.m. It was about ten years ago, at Robert’s Western World in Nashville, where I was working on a chapter of a book called True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed, and the subject of the chapter was Jesse Lee Jones, who owned Robert’s. I was sitting …
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Nightrider's Lament 