Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, December 9, 2017, 9:20 a.m. It’s been a week of boring days and exciting nights. I’ve spent most of my waking time proofing an audio version of my year-old novel, Cowboys Come Home, and there hasn’t been much sleeping time because my mind has been occupied with the financial difficulties that …
Tag: fiction
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 …
Playing Music Through the Years
It all started with a book, my last non-fiction to date. As I traveled around the country, writing about NASCAR, I started doing interviews with favorite musicians on the side. Robert Earl Keen in Newberry, S.C.; Tom Russell in Berkeley, Calif.; Pat Green in New Braunfels, Texas; James McMurtry, and Slaid Cleaves in Austin, Texas; …
This Too Will Pass … Or It Won’t
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, October 26, 2017, 11:03 a.m. It was 100 degrees in Los Angeles for the first game of the World Series. The president is Donald Trump. A hurricane hit Ireland. Puerto Rico is still an American wasteland a month after Maria. I thought, oddly, about an old pop song. Take a letter, …
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 …
The Car Won’t Start
Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 11:22 a.m. “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” – Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), Blazing Saddles. Today my mind is more of an intravenous placebo drip, and any cascading rivulets are probably a result of coffee and …
Torn between Tales
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, September 8, 2017, 12:03 p.m. I’ve shaved nearly 10,000 words out of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which has become an on-again, off-again, long-term project. At the beginning of the year, I mostly set it aside to write two related auto-racing novels, Lightning in a Bottle and Life Gets Complicated, a sequel. …
It Is What It Is at the End of the Weekend
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, September 3, 2017, 3:34 p.m. I’ve drawn no conclusions from the past few days. They’ve been good experiences, I guess. Character building. Not altogether good. Not altogether bad. Clouds with silver linings still glistening. Greer clobbered Clinton, 41-0, in the local home opener. Chapman clobbered Laurens, 61-24, on its home field. …
Apparently the Eclipse Zapped Me
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, August 25, 2017, 11:23 a.m. This week has been a strange one. I think I may have been zapped by the eclipse. My new novel – and first sequel – is out. I have a book signing in Spartanburg on September 2 at Hub City Bookshop (3 p.m.). The week has …
‘Life Gets Complicated’ for Fictional Stock Car Ace Barrie Jarman
Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, August 23, 2017, 8:53 p.m. The Clinton Chronicle was kind enough to run this today: Just five months after the release of Lightning in a Bottle, Barrie Jarman is back in a sequel. Life Gets Complicated takes Barrie into the top level of FASCAR. Monte Dutton’s seventh novel is the first …
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Nightrider's Lament 