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 …
Tag: Riley Mansfield
Christmas with All My Imaginary Friends
This Christmas I'm thankful for my characters. Not the characters, mind you. As a lad, Christmas was full of "characters": the uncle who always showed up sloshed on Christmas morning and stayed all day long, and my father, who would drink with anybody but him, fleeing to parts unknown; the Christmas Eve parties with the …
A Weird, Wonderful Tale of the Road
It's no surprise I enjoyed Joe Clifford Fausts's joy ride of a novel, Drawing Down the Moon. Dating back to a dive into the Beat Generation about a decade ago, I've grown fond of "road novels." My first, The Audacity of Dope (2011), was about a songwriter leading bad guys (and girls) on a merry …
Go West, Old Man
A Swedish movie with subtitles was on a few minutes ago. I didn't watch it, but it was on. I was going through emails and getting rid of spam on my website. All I know about the movie was that it had something to do with love, probably the forbidden variety, and, when the closing …
Isn’t Fun the Greatest Thing You Can Have?
My greatest ally is my guitar. Or, my guitars. I keep one leaning against the couch to my left while I type away here. I just got finished playing a few songs to get me ready to write this blog. I played a couple of mine, "Stuck in a Rut" and "Uh, Huh." Then I …
‘Nasty Habits,’ a Song
I love to write songs. You can find rough versions of them on my YouTube channel (oddly enough, called "Monte Dutton"), mostly videos from back when I was occasionally playing little gigs at places near NASCAR tracks. This one, "Nasty Habits," is the first one I've written in about six months. I love writing songs, …
A Book to Bed and a Book to Rise
With about thirty minutes to spare before the Tampa Bay-Boston baseball game commenced, and an hour ahead of my weekly radio appearance on South Carolina SportsTalk, I put a fourth novel to bed. It's an appropriate term: "to bed." It's not like I buried it, but it's a little like sending a kid off …
The Bright Lights Burn
SEVEN YEARS IF IT’S A DAY The walk down to the mailbox wasn’t far, but it was hilly. The right knee, operated on so long ago, was wearing out again, and there wasn’t a damn thing Riley Mansfield could do about it. He now understood what was meant by the term “trick knee.” One morning, …
Completely Unawares
This is the seventh and final episode of a short story about Riley Mansfield, the hero of my first novel, The Audacity of Dope. This story is set in the present, nearly seven years after the events of the novel. The first six parts were, in order, “Seven Years If It’s a Day,” “Like Old …
A False Sense of Security
This is the sixth episode of this short story about the character, Riley Mansfield, I created for my first novel, The Audacity of Dope. The first five, in order, were "Seven Years If It's a Day," "Like Old Times," "High in La-La Land," "Far, Far Away," and "Melissa, Under Water." Riley Mansfield had no sixth …
Nightrider's Lament 