Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, March 24, 2018, 4:46 p.m. Surprise, surprise. I awakened this morning to discover that a close friend’s edit of my next novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, had arrived via email. Last night I arrived home from a free-lance assignment to discover that my stock car racing novel, Lightning in a Bottle, …
Tag: drugs
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 …
No Master Plan
Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 9:45 a.m. The process of writing what will be my eighth novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, has been unique, not because I’ve tried some original new method, or suddenly awakened with some master plan that had earlier eluded me. It wasn’t a master plan. It was a rapidly …
Different Except for the Same
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, July 28, 2017, 11:01 a.m. As I have recently realized, my novels have some recurring incidences, and several incidents. Over the course of writing six novels and dozens of short stories, my protagonists have characteristics I applied to more than one. I didn’t really realize the extent until I started hyping …
Even the Best-Laid Lies …
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 …
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 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 …
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. …
Relating in Reverse
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 …
Nightrider's Lament 