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LOST HIGHWAY? GET A MAP, BOOMER

September 19, 2023 by

The Lost Highway by Hank Williams is every road ever traveled. Some longer, some shorter, but it’s the same road. You can say you’re not lost. Go ahead. But we’re all old enough to know better.

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BLUE SKIES IN THE BOOK REVIEW MIRROR

August 31, 2023 by

Blue Skies came to me via Twitter. T.C. Boyle mentioned a new novel and he delivered. What he delivered felt a little too close to home for me, which kept me reading. How close?

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KEEP GRINDING, WRITERS

August 14, 2023 by

“Keep grinding’ is the message all writers tell themselves, but not out loud. Instead, what they say is their word count for the day. Maybe it’s a thousand, maybe more. The message they send is keep grinding.

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ESSENTIAL READING TO IGNORE . . . AT YOUR OWN RISK

January 18, 2020 by

One blogger’s essential reading is another’s fire-starter; that’s just how it is. Except the book in Ken Kesey’s hand won’t start any fires today, not the way it started fires in his younger days.

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WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT JAY GATSBY?

August 28, 2019 by

The Great Gatsby patrols the modern world with Jay Gatsby walking point. (Just finished Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald came in at the end. He and Papa were buddies in Paris before Zelda slipped a gear. In 2011 Paula McLaine wrote a novel called The Paris Wife about the same time. Read both books for […]

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WRITING THE BOOK I WAS DESTINED TO WRITE

January 24, 2019 by

    An English major joke goes like this: I like to write poetry, but I suck at writing poetry. So I wrote a short story that was worse than my poem. To fix the problem I wrote a novel and it’s the worst yet, and this explains the deluge of bad writing.

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Life Long Learners Get Life Lesson Whether They Learn Or Not

July 25, 2018 by

Life Lessons start early for writers, then they spend years figuring it out enough to make a joke, a poem, a short story, novella, novel. Maybe more, like a groundbreaking memoir. If it’s worth learning, it’s worth writing about to drill it in. Like most children of my generation, baby boomers, I had it made […]

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STORY ARC, LIFE ARC. SAME THING?

February 13, 2017 by

      You can hold a story in your hand, but it’s better on the page.   It’s funny how a picture explains everything if you let it. A life arc begins and ends, birth and death and all the stuff in between. But unless you commit to the thousand words a picture might […]

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SEC FOOTBALL AND LANDFALL

August 31, 2015 by

SEC Football Is Ingrained In The Soul Of The  South, As Demonstrated At Powell’s Landfall Book Launch. Remember the last literary reading you attended? An author sat beside a stack of books, read a few pages, took questions, then signed copies. It’s the way it’s supposed to be, nice and traditional. The audience knows what […]

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