It was Sign-Up Day at Meriweather High School, and the armored trucks were lined up outside. Everyone was excited. Everyone would change. The ballplayers would get stronger and run faster. The board scores would improve. The future would be better in every way. The cheerleaders would get cheerier. The teachers would get teachier. Some called …
Tag: writing
Grab a Novel, Don’t Cost Nothing
It's not raining now. Well, maybe a mist. It's been raining. Last night it was heavy when I was driving home from Spartanburg. It's going to rain some more. A lot more. On The Weather Channel, it looks like a wall of fire is coming through South Carolina on Saturday. Any old rain is light …
Download and Let the Good Times Roll
This isn't the first time I've tried to let you know you can read my new novel, Crazy of Natural Causes, without owning a Kindle. Before Crazy was selected as a KindleScout winner, I wasn't knowledgeable, either. All three of my novels, and several of my non-fiction books, are available in a Kindle version, …
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 …
Brontes We Can Understand
What Amy Wolf has achieved, in her novel The Misses Bronte's Establishment, is to make, in the guise of fiction, a distinguished family of writers human. What the Brontes meant to me, before I read Amy's work, was Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights). They were remnants of an education grown ancient. I try …
Not Just Another Baseball Novel, and Not Just Another Sports Writer
I've read Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, about a ragtag baseball team during wartime. I've read fiction about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I've read novels with a supernatural element. What I haven't read is a novel like Matt Caldwell's The Lost Tribe, which combines the themes above with a few more subplots thrown …
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The Inside Dope from Halford
This is kind of a writing exercise. I decided I'd exercise my dialogue muscles by writing a short story that tells the entire story in the form of conversation. In this case, most of it's on the air. "It's Springfield Dynamos baseball, live on Oldies Ninety-Seven from Auckland Mosaics Ballpark in Halford. I'm Lamar Bridgman, and …
In Order to Write … One Must Read
It's hard to read the work of another writer without comparing it to one's own. Being in Amazon's KindleScout program has had the somewhat unexpected consequence of being joined, mainly via Facebook, with other writers whose novels have been published in the program. One effect has been pride. We help one another. We read one …
The Possibilities Are Endless
Olivia Vetrano's Neverland is about an intelligent young girl who, wracked by the scars of tragedy, retreats into an irresistible world of both fantasy and self-destruction. It is a world Hayley inexplicably finds comfortable, and neither a devoted boyfriend nor a best friend who knows her all too well seems to be capable of …
At Least See if It’s too Hot for You to Handle
Why should you read my novel, Crazy of Natural Causes? Maybe you follow me. Maybe you’ve read one or both of my other novels, The Audacity of Dope (2011) and The Intangibles (2013). Maybe you’ve read my non-fiction books. Maybe you’ve read my newspaper columns, blogs and stories over the past 35 years. Maybe you …
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Nightrider's Lament 