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: novels
The Resistance of the Just Soul
Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, January 15, 2018, 12:15 p.m. Fritz Kolbe is just a man. He has no yearning to kill and never does so in Andreas Kollender’s The Honest Spy, expertly translated into English by Steve Anderson. Perhaps because the novel begins in South Africa, where he is assigned a diplomatic post by the …
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 …
Dreeeeeam, Dream, Dream, Dreeeam …
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 …
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; …
The Glory of the Past and the Unremitting Legacy
Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, November 4, 2017, 2:38 p.m. Since noon, I’ve been keeping tabs on Auburn-Texas A&M, Kansas State-Texas Tech, Syracuse-Florida State, Western Kentucky-Vanderbilt, Florida-Missouri, Massachusetts-Mississippi State, and several others that don’t occur to me now. That’s just on television. Via Twitter, I’ve been keeping tabs on Presbyterian-Monmouth, Chattanooga-Wofford, and Western Carolina-The Citadel. The …
Continue reading The Glory of the Past and the Unremitting Legacy
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 …
Nightrider's Lament 