Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, March 22, 2018, 11:30 a.m. Science fiction is hardly my field of expertise. I just happened to dream up this scenario overnight and felt compelled to write it all down in the form of a short story. Dagwood Brandt made a fine living preaching against preaching. The executive director of AFG …
Tag: politics
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 …
At the Risk of Being Taken the Wrong Way …
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, January 5, 2018, 8:49 a.m. At some point, this feeding frenzy has to run its course. As with all feeding frenzies, some good has been achieved. Tides of frenzy sweep along with them some rampaging tyranny. To this very day, I am kind to women who wait on me at restaurants …
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, …
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 …
A Long Trip Down a Rocky Road
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, September 14, 2017, 1:32 p.m. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell* is going to be my most carefully composed, diligently examined, and thoroughly questioned novel to date. At the moment, I’m taking a break from the long slog of rewriting and reconsidering what will be my eighth novel. Twice I interrupted the process …
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. …
Cowboys Cheap as French Fries
Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, August 1, 2017, 12:36 p.m. Hey, there. Hi, there. Ho, there. I wrote a western last fall. It’s not just any western. It’s a modern western, set at the end of World War II, when a couple Marines return home to Texas, looking for peace, love, and understanding even though they’d …
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 …
The Writing Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today
Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, June 24, 2017, 1:39 p.m. This has been a troubling week. It’s better than, oh, a disastrous week. It’s had its good points. My latest novel, Lightning in a Bottle, is getting rave reviews and middling sales. So far, 10 readers have reviewed it on Amazon, and it’s gotten nine “five …
Nightrider's Lament 