In hindsight, losing my satellite TV reception wasn't such a bad thing. A storm hit last Thursday night, and while the damage wasn't severe, it did rip apart a cedar tree in the backyard. I'm not sure whether the tree will survive or not. She might just need to be taken out of her misery. …
Tag: NASCAR
Back to the Bunkhouse
This morning I've been reacquainting myself with a manuscript. I lost a race with Cowboys Come Home. I wanted to finish its first draft before my fourth novel, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, was published. It was released in Kindle edition on March 29. I was still a couple or three chapters shy. Then came the …
The Crazy World Is Just Getting Older
It's a lovely Saturday morning, not that I have so much as cracked a door to sniff the chill wind. My confidence relies on the sunlight flickering through the blinds behind me. The outside world flickers, also, affected by the various blinds of the programming I happen to be using. I read Sarah Palin's Facebook …
Too Much Information About the Way the Morning Went
I just read the county arrest report on my iPhone. Police charged a man named Roydrecilous Irby with "giving false information to law enforcement." I wonder if it was his name. The bad weather has "about played out," as is often said around here. It's slick, but it'll be wet by tomorrow. I had to …
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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 …
A Different Kind of Racing Book
Motorsports and American Culture: From Demolition Derbies to NASCAR, Edited Mark D. Howell and John D. Miller (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield) I’d never heard of this book until a copy of it was given me by my friend John Edwin Mason, who, in addition to teaching African history and the history of photography at …
Various Absurdities of the Televised Sporting Life
Between episodes of an irreverent short story, I’ve decided today to write about sports in this space, rationalizing it on the basis that what will be written forthwith is fictitious and exaggerated. ORCHESTRAL INTRO “Live from Grand Canyon Arena in Teaneck, New Jersey, it’s the finals of the Rust Belt Conference Men’s Basketball Tournament, matching …
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Still Chipping Away
No, I’m still not through with the first draft of Forgive Us Our Trespasses. This morning I completed the forty-fourth chapter. It’s getting there. Two or three chapters more, and a postscript. I would write “you can’t force these things,” but maybe you can. I can’t. As I bring this crime story to a close, …
Peeking Outside
Man, oh, man. My life has changed. For twenty years, I flew about fifty thousand miles in each, writing about stock car races all over the country. On Friday, I will walk onto a plane for the first time since November 2012. I used to write columns. Now I write blogs. I used to write …
What’s in It for Me?
On my other blog, at montedutton.com, I struck a chord this week.I think it was a G, but it might have been an E-minor.Two weeks ago, I wrote a NASCAR blog about Dale Earnhardt Jr. About eight hundred people read it. On Sunday, I wrote a blog about the incident in upstate New York involving …
Nightrider's Lament 