I love to write songs. You can find rough versions of them on my YouTube channel (oddly enough, called "Monte Dutton"), mostly videos from back when I was occasionally playing little gigs at places near NASCAR tracks. This one, "Nasty Habits," is the first one I've written in about six months. I love writing songs, …
Tag: Crazy of Natural Causes
The Future Is Harsh and Scary, but the Kids Give Us Hope
For the first half of Jake Lingwall's action-packed, young-adult novel, Kari Tahe spends a considerable amount of her waking hours in virtual simulation, testing her drones in a wide range of combat scenarios. This is the future, when the lines between games and reality are blurred. As the story advances -- forgive the vulgarity to …
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Download and Let the Good Times Roll
This isn't the first time I've tried to let you know you can read my new novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, without owning a Kindle. Before Crazy was selected as a KindleScout winner, I wasn't knowledgeable, either. All three of my novels, and several of my non-fiction books, are available in a Kindle version, …
My Fiction and Welcome to It
Let’s see. What’s the most boring, clichéd way I can begin a blog? Oh, I got it. Good news and bad news. First, the bad. Sales of Crazy of Natural Causes have been sagging recently. Rather than ranging from 15,000 to 50,000 in the ever-changing rankings, the range has shifted to 50,000 to 200,000 over …
So You Like ‘Real’ Books, Huh?
My novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, has been out for almost six weeks now. It's gotten a good response. The sales have been decent, particularly since it remains available as a Kindle ebook only. It only costs $3.49. You can download free apps that allow you to read it on a wide variety of …
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 …
Not Just Another Baseball Novel, and Not Just Another Sports Writer
I've read Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, about a ragtag baseball team during wartime. I've read fiction about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I've read novels with a supernatural element. What I haven't read is a novel like Matt Caldwell's The Lost Tribe, which combines the themes above with a few more subplots thrown …
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At Least See if It’s too Hot for You to Handle
Why should you read my novel, Crazy of Natural Causes? Maybe you follow me. Maybe you’ve read one or both of my other novels, The Audacity of Dope (2011) and The Intangibles (2013). Maybe you’ve read my non-fiction books. Maybe you’ve read my newspaper columns, blogs and stories over the past 35 years. Maybe you …
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I Didn’t Know Where I Was Going, but I’m Glad I Went
I'm envious. Writers are an envious tribe. I try not to succumb to envy, because my style is what has developed and evolved throughout my life. I bear the scars and achievements of my existence to this point. In a song, Guy Clark once quoted the rodeo cowboy Larry Mahan thusly: “Mistakes are only horses …
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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 …
Nightrider's Lament 