Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, March 1, 2017, 10:45 a.m. Sometimes a football team knows full well the importance of a game, and it knows it had better play well, and all the players tell themselves they’d better be ready and … sometimes themselves just don’t buy it. The fans simplify. They talk among themselves, and …
Tag: short story
Writing the Ages I’ve Been
Not too long ago, I stumbled across a quotation: The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the ages you have been. – Madeleine L’Engle. All I know about Ms. L’Engle besides that sentence is that she was an American novelist who was born in 1918 and died in 2007. That’s …
The Winter Solstice of Our Content
I raced right through Winter Solstice, a compilation of short stories by Kindle Press authors. Part of the reason I raced through was that two of the stories, “Strange Bedfellows” and “Chance Chills,” are mine. I’m lying. They were the first two I read. When an author reads stories he wrote, and he hasn’t …
Moving Right Along
Local sports are dying down, or at least the willingness of others to hire me to write about them, for now. The football teams have entered and exited the playoffs. Rain has returned to the Desert Southeast, and smoke from the mountains is at last on the wane. All I know to do is keep …
A Cry for Help, or, at Least, Reading
I’m just about to dive into the 21st chapter of my next – and sixth – novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which is a few paragraphs shy of 50,000 words in its first draft. Italics will be added when it’s published. But first! A warm-up. La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-lah! Get the old digits cranking like pistons! My urgency …
Spinning Supplemental Yarns
It’s not just another Thursday. I’ve been writing for most of two days. Come to think of it, I’ve been writing all week. I’ve been writing all month. I’ve been writing my whole life. If I didn’t love writing, I’d be tired of it by now. On Monday and Tuesday, I wrote about sports. Two …
Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open
My social calendar stays relatively free. Mostly, I get invited to events because people want me to write about them, or it, or them and it, whether they are ballgames, media conferences, or something else. I don’t think people trust me. They think I might write about them. Which is true. Not by name, though. …
Crazy Little Thing Called Writing
So much to do. So little time. It wasn't too long ago that writers got to spend their time writing. They didn't have to tweet and post and pretend it was writing, too. A book is an art. A blog is a craft. A tweet is a trick. It's not that I don't enjoy social …
News-Free Love
I haven't written enough short stories recently. This one could wind up as the beginning of a novel. Fortunately, by nature, Jordie Smithson was annoyingly early. He always allowed for disaster. A traffic jam on the way to the airport, for instance. On this Monday, the traffic jam was on the way to the office. …
Questions, Anyone?
A while back, I asked for questions from readers. It took quite some time, but I finally assembled enough of them to compile this blog. Question: Is Forgive Us Our Trespasses based on something in your life? Answer: Of my four novels to date, this is probably the least based on my own experience, though that's a …
Nightrider's Lament 