"Remember that time we almost lost to Hugheyville?" "Yeah," Dan Dimmelmeier replied. "Us playing against a school so small that they barely had enough boys in the student body to field a team." "Went into the seventh inning trailing by a run," his best friend, Brandin Porcher, recalled. "Then we tied it on a single …
Tag: weed
What a Tangled Web I’ve Weaved
I'm sort of a mass of contradictions this morning. I want to get myself in the mood to work on fiction, but, so far, this has been one of those mornings in which I can't come up with a topic, and so I bide some time by reading my timeline, and checking the weather, and …
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 …
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 …
My Fiction and Welcome to It
Let’s see. What’s the most boring, clichéd way I can begin a blog? Oh, I got it. Good news and bad news. First, the bad. Sales of Crazy of Natural Causes have been sagging recently. Rather than ranging from 15,000 to 50,000 in the ever-changing rankings, the range has shifted to 50,000 to 200,000 over …
An Open and Shut Case
As husbands went, Layla could have done worse than Preston Cranstern. The sex was good. He was, by most accounts, competent at his job. He had some annoying facets to his personality. For instance, Preston had an absurd habit of insisting he was right when he obviously wasn't. Once he had asked her to proofread …
Nothing Left to Lose
On Saturday morning, I was riding around and around my front yard on a mower, listening to Charlie Robison’s “Desperate Times.” That’s where this dark tale started. Joe Scharmann had applied for dozens of jobs. Three had deigned to invite him for interviews. Those whose job it was to conduct the interviews knew better than …
Ruination
Sipping a cup of coffee, Haney McGee thought about Ebby Newlin, the old man who didn’t drive a car, worked his whole life at a gas station without ever running one, and looked out for the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Haney had been in Denver, trying like hell to keep …
You Just Can’t Beat Originality
I’m learning slowly in spite of myself. I made some mistakes and wasted some money while trying to sell my second novel, The Intangibles. I learned that book reviews you pay for don’t do much good because most of the people who write them don’t read the book and go through the motions. The reviews …
The Smart Kid
This is sort of a “Man Bites Dog” story, or, perhaps, “Girl Bites God.” Macy McMahon awakened before the alarm went off, as per the usual. She turned it off, got up, rubbed her eyes, gathered her wits, and strode down the hall, where she knocked on the door and yelled, “Rise and shine!” …
Nightrider's Lament 