To sleep or not to sleep, that is the thoughtful question.

I shared this picture from the Facebook page of a friend to my Facebook page. Other friends clicked the heck out of the "like" button, which I assume indicates that they, as do I, have active minds interfere with the timeliness of slumber.  Agreement and commiseration by "like" button was not adequately satisfying for some, prompting them to offer their thoughts in comments. They inspired me to leave a comment of my own. The therapeutic benefit was so great that I had to elevate the status of the collection of words from comment to blog post. Here it is:

Just let an idea for a murder scene in your novel pop into your mind in close proximity to the moment your head plops down on the pillow. I call it the plop and pop school of murder mystery writing.

In terms of impeding sleep, it yields compound interest. After you lay there and work it out in your head, you are compelled to get up and make some notes. The older I get, the more important it has become to pay heed to this. Otherwise that homicide will become a way cold case.  Once you are up committing the details to a memory medium other than your faulty brain cells, you can very easily fall prey to your inner muse, who, by the way, has already gone to the Keurig and fixed himself a good strong cup of San Francisco Bay Gourmet French Roast coffee. I ask you, who on the planet resist the smell of fresh brewed bold coffee?  So, with that fresh cup of bean beverage Mr. Muse persuaded you to brew in hand, you sit down to stroke  the grisly crime into your keyboard.  With both muse and caffeine stimulation, yet another opportunity to greet the front side of dawn has been created.

Now, I know that all of you are not writers, but the writing piece of this is interchangeable with any number of other pastimes and endeavors.  A frequent inhibitor of log-sawing productivity is reading.  Mystery and suspense novels are the biggest culprits,  You know you have fallen victim when you hear your inner voice say "just one more chapter" for the umpteenth time as the glow of the rising sun begins to creep around your drapes or blinds.  Bless you my friends.  I understand.

All that said, one of my biggest goals in life is to write mystery and suspense stories that will keep sleepy eyes open. Have a Fireball sidecar with that bold cup of joe. 

Payin' the Weather Bill

I was inspired today by disappointments in the weather.  It’s April 1, yet our wakeup temperature in Fairway today was 30 degrees.  We still haven’t forgiven Old Man Winter for delivering the coldest season in 15 years to Tybee Island for our first snowbird winter there.  Consequently, a storyline crossed my mind ... probably a short story.  I'd hope it wouldn't take a whole novel.

So here's the deal.  The doer is a weatherman, maybe Bryan Busby from KMBC-9 in Kansas City or Pat Shingleton from WBRZ-2 in Baton Rouge.  The story begins just outside Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the doer is trying to locate victim number one, Punxsutawney Phil.  I’ll refer to the doer as Weatherman, since it is still a tossup between Busby and Shingleton.  Weatherman believes he must strike a blow for Americans from sea to shining sea by capturing and water boarding the evil groundhog until he agrees to cast a vote to end winter.

Upon succeeding in forcing his will on the famous rodent, Weatherman should make haste to find his next victim, Phil’s Southern competition, General Beauregard Lee of the Yellow Game Ranch in Lilburn, Georgia, near Atlanta.  However, since he’s just across the Keystone State from Pottsville, he decides to take a side trip to enjoy a few Yuengling Light Lagers, before heading south.  What a blessing that decision was and not only because of the cool, crisp deliciousness of the beer.  After two of the wonderful brews, the proverbial light bulb illuminated above Weatherman’s pate.  It turned out that being a good old boy from the South made General Beauregard Lee an easy target for beer bribery.  It only took two Yuengling Lights to coax the little guy to cast a vote to end winter.

Weatherman is now full of himself and his mission for mankind.  With two down and one to go, he’s ready to strike off in pursuit of the last impediment to the arrival of spring weather.  His research tells him the culprit, he who is supposed to pay the weather bill, is located in Washington, DC.  Some digging reveals that this bad actor, who for simplification purposes I’ll call Payer, has found a home in the Obama administration.

Excited to have found employment in this tough job market, Payer smoked some rope … and inhaled.  Apparently confusion ensued.  Overhearing talk in the halls of the White House such as “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” and being in his rope-a-doped state, Payer mistook the comment to mean,  if you like your weather, you can keep your weather.  Unfortunately for US citizens, this misunderstanding occurred in the dead of winter.  Since Payer’s singular responsibility is paying the weather bill and since not paying the weather bill in the dead of winter would enable Americans to keep their current weather, Payer figured he could take some time off, smoke some more rope, and keep everyone happy.

As you might expect, all did not go well.  Continued rope smoking, coupled with disdain from the many who believed he was shirking his responsibilities in a most cavalier manner, caused Payer to become paranoid and go into hiding.  Though Payer is not so good at paying the weather bill, he is exceedingly good at hiding.  After a lengthy search for the seemingly vanished Payer, Weatherman had no choice but to return to the newsroom and continue to make the big bucks for telling fictional stories about the weather.

Another Dimension (and Sundry Asides, Digressions, Departures, and Parentheticals)

We went to the theater to see "Gravity" last night.  Mmm ... popcorn for supper.



Okay, that makes me want to discuss a peeve.  When I was a preschooler in the South, I had dinner around noon every day.  I had a deprived childhood.  There was no pre-kindergarten or kindergarten for me.  I went straight from unfettered childhood to the regimentation of first grade.  It was there that I had to start going to a place called the lunchroom to have lunch, a meal that had apparently replaced my dinner.  (Later on, they started calling the eating place at school the cafeteria, but I was no dummy.  Piccadilly was a cafeteria, and what they had at school didn’t compare.)  It wasn’t all bad.  I discovered some things that I liked but which my mom had not previously purchased.  The first of these revelations was fish sticks.  Oh, what a ketchup enhancer those were.

I discovered yogurt years later while at a basketball camp with Junior Shelton at Louisiana College in Pineville.  Mom didn’t like yogurt, so it had never found a home in our refrigerator.  My daughter, Regan, pronounced it yergurt when she was a youngster.  In deference, I now sometimes pronounce it that way myself.  She and her sister, Erin, also used to refer to Baskin Robbins as Basket Robbins.  They liked to go to the drugstore with me, as they knew I was a softy when they tried to coax me into procuring candy bars for their consumption.  They suggested trips to the K&B Drugstore, telling me that we should go to the K and the B.

On one of those K&B visits, I found some Seven Up candy bars.  My grandfather used to buy them for me when I was a little boy.  He died in 1958 when I was eight.  The Seven Ups went away for a really long time.  But there they were.  I bought the whole box for Erin and Regan … and me.  What a trip down memory lane.  These bars had seven compartments within them.  Each compartment had a different filling.  Seven Ups were like a fancy box of chocolates in a single candy bar.  We looked for them at K&B after that, but they never had them again.  There’s a page on the web that provides the histories of products like that.  I found the Seven Up story there.  Sure enough, they were around in the Fifties, went away, had a brief rebirth in the Eighties, and quickly returned to their status as a historical footnote.

Anyway, Bob and Jake’s Supper Club in BRLA (If New Orleans can be NOLA, Baton Rouge (aka Red Stick as in Red Stick Writer) can have BRLA, pronounced Berla like yergurt.) recognized the correctness of having supper in the evening after having had dinner at midday.  I can remember when that venerable eatery was in bankruptcy, a sad day.  At the time, Senator Russell Long, when speaking about some legislation to help avoid a potential bankruptcy of The Boeing Company, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate why, if the government could come to the aid of a big corporation like Boeing, couldn’t it come to the aid of his friends, the Staples brothers, owners of Bob and Jake’s.

Now, Suzie and I belong to a wonderful dinner club that is populated with delightful friends.  That said, I have to say that the food would taste better if it was called supper.  We could do the meals at midday to make the dinner terminology correct, but we’d be less likely to partake of adult beverages.  That would be a shame because these folks are way fun when they’ve imbibed a bit.

But I digress.  So, I had the popcorn for supper.  Sandra Bullock was my dessert.  Do you remember how they used to tell you that you couldn’t have your dessert until after the meal?  They said that would be putting the cart before the horse, and that would spoil your meal.  Well, I can tell you that Sandra was in front of, the middle of, and on the backside of my popcorn meal.  And she didn’t spoil a damn thing.

Seriously, Bullock performed masterfully.  In terms of face time, the whole movie was just her and George Clooney, and George’s part was limited.  The story was interesting and generally kept you pretty tense throughout and, at times, very tense.  We would have chosen to see the regular rather than the 3D version, but there were only two sessions for that version.  One was a matinee, and the other was late at night.  I didn’t want popcorn for dinner, and I didn’t want to eat supper too late.  It was not lost on me that the price for 3D was a dollar fifty more than regular, and I repeat, we would have chosen regular if it had been at an acceptable time.

This was my first 3D movie since a 1966 sci-fi feature called “The Bubble.”  It starred the gal who starred in “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and one of the guys from “The Mod Squad.”  Not big box office, it was sort Rod Sterlingish and dealt with a couple in an airplane forced to land as a result of a bubble descending to trap them.  I thought of it when the Stephen King TV series, “Under the Dome,” came out recently.

Over the years, 3D movies have popped up every so often.  The first 3D movie produced by a major studio was the Warner Bros. 1953 flick, “House of Wax,” starring Vincent Price.  I never saw the 3D version of this, but when you watch it, you can tell the glitchy things they did to leverage their 3D presentation.  There was a scene regarding the opening of the House of Wax in which a barker in costume and on stilts was using bolo paddles in each hand while rambling on about the stupendous things you’d see in the House of Wax.  The rubber bands would stretch to full extension with the red rubber balls on the ends seemingly thrusting on a collision path to your nose.  There was some of that sort of imagery in “Gravity.”

My only other encounter with 3D was the 1989 Super Bowl halftime show sponsored by Coca Cola.  I thought it sucked like something manufactured by the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company.   

I’ll grant you that the technology has improved.  Personally, though, I find it distracting.  I don’t like wearing the glasses.  I was underwhelmed … except for Bullock. 

The salt isle soothes my soul.

I wrote that title as a Six-Word Memoir at sixwordmemoirs.com. When writing the back story to accompany it, I decided to put expanded comments about our relationship with Tybee Island, Georgia, here at Red Stick Writer.

 

According to Wikipedia: Native Americans, using dugout canoes to navigate the waterways, hunted and camped in Georgia's coastal islands for thousands of years. The Euchee tribe likely inhabited Tybee Island in the years preceding the arrival of the first Spanish explorers in the area in the 16th century. "Tybee" is the Euchee word for "salt."

 

Wikipedia also says that pirates used the island to hide from those who pursued them. Nowadays ordinary folk go there to hide from hustles and bustles. Life there is laid back. The locals speak of “livin' on Tybee time.” Those are the watchwords for the place and the culture. There is an apparel and accessories store there called Latitude 32, which refers to the coordinates at which Tybee is situated, 32°0′24″N latitude and 80°50′58″W longitude. Just so you’ll know, they have good company, as they share that north-south orientation with San Diego. I equate those watchwords with attitude 32 in the same way that “The Big Easy” and “The City that Care Forgot” speak in a like manner about NOLA, the queen of my Louisiana homeland.

 

Suzie and I made our first journey to Tybee in 2005 and found a place with the serenity and innocence of the late Fifties and early Sixties. That’s when our love affair with Tybee began. We’ve been back every year except two since then. Beginning with our second trip there, we’ve always rented a cottage with a pool through Jim Heflin, who claims to be the janitor at Tybee Cottages. We know better and just call him Saint Peter, since he has the keys to this delightful suburb of heaven.

 

As a first adventure in my retirement which began on August 1, we spent the first two weeks of September there. On all of our other visits we flew and stayed a week. This time we drove and doubled the length of our stay. It was such a pleasure. We rented bikes for the two weeks and got three weeks worth of beach riding in during our stay. Most days we’d end our rides at Fannie’s on the Beach having what we think is the best version of the frozen concoction made so famous by Jimmy Buffet. His fans are called Parrotheads. Well, we never saw Jimmy or any members of his Coral Reefer Band on the Strand there at Fannie’s, but we did fall into the company of Roma Gene Harper (more about her in another post) and her delightful group of locals who call themselves Tybidiots. Their daily gatherings are called Meetings of the Bored, but I can assure you that these fine Tybee citizens are polar opposites to bored or boring. Either that or my judgment was clouded by the 'ritas.

 

We’ve talked in the past about getting a place of our own in Tybee, a home away from home. Last year we checked on a property we liked. It had been on the market for 570 days, and a contract was executed on it the day before our inquiry. On our last day on the island this year, we looked at another house that interested us, and this time things worked out. We closed on October 18 and from that moment forward have declared ourselves to be Tybidiots.

 

It is our plan to spend about four months of each year in Tybee with some time there in each of the four seasons. When we are not in residence, Mr. Heflin (By God, we love him even though he is an Ole Miss Rebel.) will help us rent it to other folks who want to have a taste of Tybee time. Between now and the 2014 rental season, we’ll be sprucing up the place with a fresh paint job and a new roof, and to add just the right finishing touch, we’re adding a pool.

 

It seems that most of the houses on the island have names, so we think it’ll be good idea to hang an appropriate sobriquet on ours. Since we are Dick and Suzie, the name we are currently mulling is The Doozy, which includes the first sound in my name and everything but the first sound in Suzie’s name. Merriam Webster defines a doozy as “an extraordinary one of its kind,” which is exactly what we intend to make our new home away from home.

 

If you have a hankering for a serene and innocent place to shed your stress, watch for a listing of The Doozy at tybeecottages.com around the end of the year or right after New Year’s Day. I speak with experience when I tell you that the boss man there will make sure that your dose of “livin’ on Tybee time” will cause you to have a hankering to come back again and again.

On the occasion of a dawning retirement

On my first day of retirement, I awoke at 6:00.  Watched Suzie sleep for 21 minutes.  Even though she looks cute when she's sleeping, it got boring after a while.  I should add that she's not always boring in bed.  So I got up and went to the study to read the many messages shouting out my reaching the finish line of my banking career.  As regards that, I'll make it simple:  I have found and am now gratefully consuming my cheese.  I took a picture out the window of the door that goes out to our screen porch to memorialize the image of the dawn of a new era.  I'll probably post that at Facebook.

Right now I'm enjoying our screen porch and my first cup of coffee from the deluxe Keurig coffee maker Suzie and Sarah provided in honor of my stepping off the merry-go-round ... Tully's French Roast Extra Bold K-Cup, a damn fine brew.  The machine is just like the one I fell in love with at the office, that faraway place in my past.  I had my blend of yogurt, sliced banana, and Kashi Crunch cereal out here earlier.  I'm facing the direction of our patio, which since the addition we put on last year, is surrounded on three and a half sides by the house, porch, and garage.  With Suzie's pots and gardens, it resembles the finest of the French Quarter courtyards, making this Louisiana boy feel right at home.

Oh, well, it is time to have cup number two from the miracle machine from Keurig.  I think I'll use the self-fill cup with some Community Dark Roast this time.  Now we're talking.  That will fuel the first writing session of my retirement, as I'll be adding some words to Tit for Tat:  A Novel of Retribution.

Drop by often, as I plan to spill words here often from now on.  Have a great day.

The Rich are Different

Chris Orcutt's The Rich Are Different just hit Amazon.  This author is the real deal.  That became evident just a few pages in for readers of his first Dakota Stevens Mystery, the best selling A Real Piece of Work, which came out in November.  The wait for this one has seemed interminably long.  FINALLY, the wait is over.

Here's the book summary:

THE PI SENSATION Dakota Stevens is Back in this Highly Anticipated Sequel to A Real Piece of Work!

The Rich Are Different, the 2nd novel in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series by Chris Orcutt, explores the rarefied world of a Long Island heiress and her murdered brother who owned an Old West resort in Montana. To hunt down the man’s killer, Dakota and his associate Svetlana Krüsh must go undercover as actors in a make-believe mining town straight out of 1885.

This much-anticipated sequel to A Real Piece of Work picks up a few months after that difficult case. Dakota Stevens is depressed. He’s lost his detecting mojo and hasn’t taken a case since A Real Piece of Work. Can he get his mojo back and find the killer?

Like bullets from a Gatling gun, the suspects come fast and furious: eccentric heiresses, greedy CEOs, catty thespians, sexy henchwomen, angry Native Americans, mysterious mobsters, menacing mercenaries, kinky housewives and contract killers.

It’s a classic case of East meets West as Dakota and Svetlana follow a trail of clues that takes the reader from the sophisticated setting of The Great Gatsby to the forbidding land of Pale Rider.

Click below to hitch a ride to Amazon:   

The forward lines

I’ve been providing reports from the front on the war against stress in the day-to-day world. Here’s a shot from the forward lines in this mortal combat. This is the view from the screened porch of Bead Cottage, one of the jewels in the treasury called Tybee Cottages where Jim Heflin turns island retreats into magic. Just beyond that corner is the pool, which you can see in the second picture. We refer to that sacred realm of relaxation as the Outer Bead. When we’re not out and about, it is where we spend 80% of our time ... Kindling, Scrabbling, blogging, and writing Tit for Tat: A Novel of Retribution.  Part of that other 20% is spent in the pool, also known as the Sea of Bead.

Just outside of the southwest corner of the pool shot, there is an outdoor shower behind a half wall with saloon doors and a shower curtain. We’ve enjoyed three one-week stays in the cottage now, and I’ve only taken a shower inside twice … once due to not knowing better and once due to a scattered shower. Outside showering is very liberating.  We have stayed at three other homes on Tybee, but none of them offered cleanliness quite as next to Godliness.

The cottage was built in 1938 and was renovated by renowned preservationist Jane Coslick in 2004. Since it fell into the loving hands of a new owner a few years back, we discover new and desirable refinements each time we return. At 812 Second Avenue, it is right on the bike path that runs the three-mile length of the island and is only five minutes from a dune bridge that eases you into the best beach peddling that can be found anywhere.

You just can’t ever tell who you might see here in the suburbs of heaven. Several years ago, we were three or four addresses away from John Mellancamp’s Officers' Row home. Two years after that we were only a few doors down Bay Street from Sandra Bullock’s manse on the north end of the island at a place where you can see both the Cockspur and Tybee lighthouses. Four doors down from Bead you can find Breeze Inn, the island home of the famous author, Mary Kay Andrews. Just last night we imbibed with the Tybee Pirate. And, of course, everyone knows that Second Hand Rose can be found on Second Avenue. If you want to find Suzie and Dick, just look in the Outer Bead or on a Fat Tire Bike on the sands of Tybee.

Whoever came up with that Disney catch phrase about the happiest place on earth has obviously not been to Tybee Island. Try it, you’ll like it. This is where we go when we have a need for Bead. Oh, about that mortal combat … Tybee trumps stress every damn time.

It always helps in life to have a good grip on who and what your are.  Part of what I know about myself is that I'm a Kansan by residence, a Missourian by employment, a Louisianan by birth, Southern by the grace of God, and a Tybee Islander at heart.  Soon I'll quit hanging out in a bank in Missouri on weekdays and spend more time writing and sneak over here to the suburbs of heaven more often and for longer stretches ... much longer.

  

More news from the front ...

I looked over the online menu for Olde Pink House before we headed into Savannah from Tybee and had decided that my appetizer would be Blue Crab Beignets, Creamy Old Bay & Lemon Dipping Sauce. As it turned out, that was not on the menu in the restaurant, so I had to pick another. The one that crossed my lips turned out to be a good choice … Fried Green Tomato with Applewood Bacon Sweet Corn Cream.

My entrée choice was subject to a John Sebastian moment. You know. Did you ever have to make up your mind? Pick up on one and leave the other behind. The choices:

Bourbon Molasses Grilled Pork Tenderloin, Sweet Potato with Pecan Vanilla Butter and Collards

versus

Pecan Crusted Chicken Breast, Blackberry Bourbon Glaze, Sweet Potato with Pecan Vanilla Butter and Collards

That decision turned out to be easy. I ended up pickin’ the chicken.

I topped it off with a cup of coffee. They serve Royal Cup from Alabama, and I must say it was excellent. I had never heard of them, so I looked them up on the web after we got back to the island. It looked like it costs over $8.00 per pound to order it online. Though the Bama brew was quite good, I think I’ll keep ordering my Community Coffee from Baton Rouge. Ordering in quantity and waiting for free shipping offers, I stay in the $6.00 to $7.00 range. Still it was good to have a good bold cup after the wonderful meal I enjoyed.

Claiming she was stuffed from all of the good meals we’ve already had on this vacation, Suzie steered clear of the entrées opting for a salad (Mixed Greens with Caramelized Apple, Pecan, Goat Cheese Fritter with Champagne Citrus Vinaigrette) and an appetizer (Pan Seared Jumbo Sea Scallops with Savory Sautéed Spinach). She was smiling after her plates were cleaned.

She will think it is over the top to write about a meal. As a Yankee girl from Illinois, that’s understandable. Being brought up in the Louisiana food culture, if you ain’t eating a good meal, you’re talking about one or thinking about one or remembering one you’ve already had. It is the nature of the food beasts of my homeland.

As I’ve mentioned before, I try to expose her to things Southern and foods Cajun and Creole. Why I’ve already taken her to Graceland once so she can get a grip on what we Southerners are all about. Bless her heart, she is a quick study and has mastered many Louisiana dishes, and I think she does the best fried okra I’ve ever had.

I know some of my Louisiana friends will be alarmed to see me write this, but one of the reasons Savannah and Tybee are so appealing to us is that the food is similar and comparable, yes comparable, to that found in the banana republic of my birth.  One of the main differences is that they use grits in a lot of cases where we might use rice.

I’ll have more to report from the front tomorrow. We’re having lunch tomorrow at Sundae Café with Jim Heflin of Tybee Cottages, our annual host here in heaven’s suburb. The have a mayor and city council and people responsible for tourism here, but they have no better ambassador for the delights of this Mecca of relaxation than Jim. As a purple-and-gold bleedin’ Tiger fan from Baton Rouge, I even cut him slack for being an Ole Miss Rebel. I know that lots of my Southern friends will be impressed to learn that Mr. Heflin was a high school bud of Lewis Grizzard, the late and great columnist and humorist.

Stay tuned, I still have to tell you more about Sundae Café, and then there's Breakfast Club.  Mmm.

A Report from the Front

We're sittin' on the porch of Bead Cottage here on Tybee Island hearing the pool gurgle in the background while listening to Little Richard soulfully oozing out the strains of Hank's Lovesick Blues. Our wake-up call was an island shower dancing on the tin roof, and by the time we carried our breakfast out here, Mr. Sunshine had opened his arms to welcome us to another beautiful Georgia day.

We'll be mounting our Fat Tire bikes for the first of two rides today on the Atlantic bordered sands ... it's like people watching on steroids. Since the Sundae Cafe doesn't do Sundays, we have reservations there tonight to eke out one more Mother's Day enjoyment for Suzie. No matter where you are, the food there will justify your commute.

Our nightcap will be a Chocolate Thunder at Wet Willie’s. We first discovered the frozen-concoction establishment of highest eschelon on Savannah’s cobblestone River Street and have visited them in Charleston. That they opened their new Tybee Island location the evening before our arrival struck us as hospitable in the Southern tradition.

We are proud to be here soldiering in the war to promote absolute enjoyment of relaxed and entertaining life. Watch this page for more reports from the front.

They do this, but they wrote that.

Since I became a Kindler, one who reads e-books and listens to audio books by means of a Kindle e-reader, my reading habits have changed immensely. My reading queue will always have room for the latest offerings from favorite authors like Pat Conroy, Michael Connelly, Greg Iles, and John Grisham. Anything Stephen King does outside of the horror genre is generally a must-do, as I think he is the best storyteller alive. Since Amazon makes it so easy to shop for and research books, I can hunt for books from new authors and writers from Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri, and other states to which I have connections. Authors I’ve met during my journey through the world of publishing and self-publishing get nods.

Another group of authors whose work piques my curiosity consists of folks who are known for something other than writing. Lots of people write non-fiction books about whatever it is outside of writing that has given them a claim to fame or credibility. Instead of them, I’m talking about talking heads or actors or politicians or political spouses or political offsprint or political operatives or spies or burglars who suddenly hatch into a novelist.

The first such writer who found her way to my radar screen was a rebellious former First Daughter. She actually preceded my Kindling days, as I read her erotic novel Bondage by Patti Davisway back in the mid-Nineties.

These are examples of such reads since I started Kindling:

The Cajuns by Gus WeillGus has written a number of books and plays over the years, but he earned his spurs as one of the most astute Louisiana politicos of his day. The taught Jim Carville everything he knows about politics. The protégé coaxed the mentor to write this novel. Being a Louisiana boy, I really enjoyed it, even though I believe Weill employed a smidge of caricature and hyperbole in his depiction of the Cajun culture.

Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder by Bill O'ReillyThe popular anchor of Fox News’ The O'Reilly Factor has written lots of books of political commentary and has had huge success with his recent historical Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, but this novel was new territory for him. His insider knowledge of television, especially politically charged television, enabled him to spin a gripping yarn set on familiar turf.

House Dick by E. Howard HuntHere’s what the book’s Amazon page has to say about him: “Before he became one of the most controversial figures in modern American history, going to prison for his involvement in the Watergate conspiracy, E. Howard Hunt was an award-winning novelist, and the author of numerous popular political thrillers and crime stories. Hunt once worked as a CIA spy, inspiring the “Ethan Hunt” character played by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible." As was the custom of the day of the 1961 original copyright, it came to a short 209 pages in print. Reading it was like watching a b-movie detective story of that period.
 
Hand of Fate by Lis Wiehl and April HenryWiehl, the comely talking head from Fox News, is a Harvard lawyer and law professor who was principal deputy chief minority investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in the late 1990s, including during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. This novel is part of the Triple Threat Club series that has similarities to James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club franchise. It is a serviceable read.
 
The Overton Window by Glenn BeckI have an audio version of this one. I started it once and didn’t get captured. It has been set aside for a later try in a different frame of mind.
 
The Campaign by Marilyn Tucker Quayle and Nancy Tucker NorthcottI am currently doing this one as an audio book. The story was a tad slow getting started. There are multiple readers involved. The former Second Lady of the land and her sister eventually hooked me. So far the story is giving me an interesting and pleasurable ride.
 
Have you encountered any pleasant surprises or shocking disappointments from novelists hatched from well known people of other stripes?

A Real Piece of Work by Chris Orcutt is Buzzing

My friend, Chris Orcutt, did a two-day free promotion of his novel, A Real Piece of Work on Wednesday and Thursday and got to #4 overall in the Best Sellers in Kindle eBooks Top 100 Free list.  After returning it to the $4.99 list price on Friday and Saturday, he is just about to break into the Kindle eBooks Top 100 Paid list ... currently at #120 overall.  His ranks in more specific categories are:

#10 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#10 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Literary Fiction

#16 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery

Here's how I recently reviewed it at Amazon:

5.0 out of 5 stars

Move over Spenser and make room for Dakota Stevens, February 6, 2012

Review by Dick Peterson "Red Stick Writer" (Fairway, KS USA)

This review is from: A Real Piece of Work (The Dakota Stevens Mysteries) (Kindle Edition)

Orcutt's characters have height, breadth, AND depth. Their personality, interesting quirks, and attitudes leap from the page. You'll like them so much you'll want to buy the action figures. (Personally, I'll be ordering the Svetlana doll.) New York's metropolitan and upstate backdrops are vividly included as characters, as well. Beyond the relationships and geography, the story has grab, tempo, sophistication, and well-researched intricacies of the art world. As soon as he released A Real Piece of Work, the author announced a second Dakota Stevens mystery was in the can, so to speak. I'm hoping other readers will join me in pressuring him to uncan it sooner rather than later, as well as to chronicle more adventures of my new favorite PI. He solves the case by hook or by crook and sometimes by the book, but he solves it.

Do yourself a favor and buy the Kindle Edition of this exciting mystery novel, the first of the Dakota Stevens Mystery series.  That way you'll be all caught up when the second book in the series comes out soon.  Click on the link below to get to the A Real Piece of Work page at Amazon.




You'll be coming back here to thank me for tipping you Orcutt's direction.  When you're done reading, also go back to Amazon to post a review.

Promotedness, Copasetic, and Glaukenstucken

From what I’ve read in publishing, author, and reader forums, a lot of folks utilize the “Liked” counter when making their decisions to purchase books at Amazon. It seems to me that the people so influenced would be the ones who arrive at my book’s Amazon page after searching for books of a certain genre. In my case, they might be searching at goodreads or Library Thing or Amazon or the like for genres or subgenres such as mystery, thriller, suspense, or romantic suspense, or niches such as serial killer or high quality murder books destined for decades of greatness.

If you have read By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide and liked it or have not yet read it but would like to help promote it, I am providing the following guide to register your “promotedness.” (I like to make up at least one new word for nearly everything I write. Who knows? One day I might earn reference in the Merriam-Webster for a word such as copasetic, meaning “very satisfactory” and often erroneously attributed to Bill Robinson (AKA Mr. Bojangles) or glaukenstucken, meaning “feelings of guilt for having had previous feelings of schadenfreude and fictitiously attributed to the Melanie Lynskey’s character, Rose, on the TV sitcom, Two and a Half Men.)

To exercise your “promotedness,” go to this address:

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Novel-Serial-Homicide-ebook/dp/B004IK9BI0/

Then click on the “Liked” button at the right of the 4.5 stars and the link to 11 customer reviews. You can see the orangish button with the thumbs-up icon on it in the example below
Your kind assistance with the promotion of my novel will be most earnestly appreciated. Please have a lovely day on me.

A History of Lies

Many of you have heard or read my rant about that lying rag, The Weekly Reader. They sold that trash to us when I was in school. Some of my teachers would use the arrival day each week to fill something close to half of the school day. It took years to determine, but the facts make it obvious that facts were not necessarily The Weekly Reader's stock in trade.

Let me rehash and update my rant:

They told me that I would spend my adult years driving a hovercraft, that a four-day workweek would be the norm during my years of employment, and that Prince Charles would be the King of England. As you can see, their batting average ain't too hot on these three items.

The façade of truth continues to deteriorate. A few years ago, it was determined by astronomers that though Pluto still has full status at Disney, not so much in the universe. So we dropped from nine planets to eight. Just recently, it has been reported by astrologists that the periods of birth associated with the twelve houses of zodiac have been incorrect all of these years. My daughter, Erin, who is an esteemed educator, reminded me I needed to be agitated about that one.

Now there are rumblings in mathematical circles that pi might not be a number on which we can hang our hats. (Link to article about math dudes who want to dump pi for tau.)  Instead, they say, we should worship the square of pi, a number bearing the new moniker, tau. Well, excuse me, but if pi ain't right, why should multiplying it times itself make it better. Isn't that sort of like saying that two wrongs make a right. I have always had a problem with pi anyway, because they say it is square, as in "pi r squared." All who are Southern by the grace of God know that pie are not square, pie are round. Cornbread are square.

In summary, given the continual surfacing of falsehoods, I'm beginning to think that The Weekly Reader might be a front organization for politicians. We all know how devoutly they embrace the truth. What do you think?

We’re talkin’ masterpieces here.

On Saturday, Suzie and I went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Though we are highly cultured people, we don’t hang out in art galleries just every day. On this particular day, we were witness to absolute masterpieces.

Our first stop at the Nelson was the display of Dr. James A. Naismith’s Original Thirteen Rules of Basket Ball. There they were in simplistic splendor. The two pages were mounted and described on an adjacent museum tab that spoke of typed ink and hand lettering on paper in the same way such tabs describe paintings as oil on canvas or oil on wood. Do these rules belong in an august art venue such as this? Of course they do. They are every bit as much the product of a creative human mind as the Mona Lisa. They are the reason that March is mad. From them emanate The Final Four and The NBA Finals. Thanks to them I gave up as much as three to four hours a day the year around in my younger years. I loved every minute of it.

The presence of the rules in the museum was the result of David Booth, a University of Kansas grad, acquiring them at auction for display at KU. It is likely that they will ultimately find a special home in the Booth Family Hall of Athletics. David, his wife, Suzanne, and their children are the benefactors of that facility. The sale price of $4.3 million less about a half million for the auction fees will benefit the Naismith foundation, which promotes sportsmanship and provides services to underprivileged children around the world and of which, Dr. Naismith’s grandson, Ian Naismith is a founding director.

After the rules, we saw the first reunion in over 30 years of the three panels of one of Claude Monet's most richly colored late Water Lilies triptychs, created between 1915 and 1926. The three panels are owned by and ordinarily separately reside in The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Collectively, they are 236 3/4 inches by 167 5/8 inches in size. It is one of only two triptychs by the artist in the United States. To stand a couple of feet away from these paintings and see the masterful strokes in detail is awe-inspiring and then some.

Speaking of masterpieces, I’d like to share a couple from my home state of Louisiana. One is Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, and the other is Steen’s Cane Syrup. The former can jazz almost any dish. I use it instead of salt and pepper. Morton’s Lite Salt contains half the sodium of regular salt. Chachere’s is roughly equivalent to that, but you only need to use half as much of it as regular salt. Consequently, I think you end up cutting your sodium usage to about a quarter of your normal usage of regular salt. Besides, it tastes better. As you will see in a moment, it is more versatile than you might expect. The cane syrup is dark and thick like molasses, but since no refined sugar is extracted from it, it is sweeter. Steen’s is the only maker left in the world. It can be an acquired taste.

A really good breakfast sandwich can be made on a biscuit (or sliced bread, a croissant, an English muffin, or whatever form of bread you choose). Add a sausage patty or split a sausage link. Add a fried egg. Sprinkle on a little cheese while you’re heating everything up. Before you close up your sandwich with the top of your biscuit, lightly drizzle on some Steen’s and sprinkle moderately with Chachere’s. Mmm … there you have another masterpiece.

How about messing with a classic: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich? You can do this with whatever favorite jelly, jam, or preserve you want. We have recently discovered spreads from E.D. Smith in Ontario, Canada. We have tried two of their flavors. One is a mixture of raspberry, cherry, and acai. The other is peach, apricot, and orange. They are the most robust fruit spreads I’ve ever tasted. I’ve done this spread and mixed. Spread is when you put the fruit spread on one piece of bread and the peanut butter on the other. Mixed is when you stir the spread and the butter together in a bowl until they are one substance. My artist daughter, Erin, swears this is the only way to do a PBJ. In either case, moderately sprinkle one side or the other with Chachere’s to achieve the pièce de résistance. Yep, another masterpiece is discovered.

Here’s another twist on the classic nutty and fruity sandwich: The Seasonal PB&J at Kansas City’s Blue Bird Bistro. It features house made Missouri northern pecan butter and organic house made preserves served on toasted house made bread. These guys can’t be beat when it comes to fresh and local. This is also a masterpiece, and they do it the hard way … without any Louisiana products.

It is time to close this post. I’m hungry and need a snack.

Red Stick Writer Book Club?

As I mentioned in my last post, I thought it would be interesting to make some comments here about books I’ve read or reviewed or am thinking about reading. I’d love to have some readers of this blog leave comments about books that are important to them. Of course, you understand that when I say readers it means you, right?

I’ve cut and pasted some information from my profile at "Smith Magazine," the home of the addictive six-word memoir. Two of the questions relate to the book discussions I hope we can have over time. The third one will give me the opportunity to expound on something I recently learned about my home state of Louisiana… the place I lived for my first 42 years. So, here are the questions and answers.

My favorite story of all time is:

Choosing one is impossible for me. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) has been with me the longest, but these books, each for a reason of its own, are equally loved: South of Broad (Pat Conroy), The Help (Kathryn Stockett), A Time to Kill (John Grisham), The Quiet Game and The Devil's Punchbowl (Greg Iles), and The Stand (Stephen King). Notice that the first six are very Southern. Come to think of it, the whole damn world went south in the seventh one.

Right now, I'm reading:

Right as Rain by Bev Marshall (Ms. Marshall is the author-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.)

If you were to throw up your hands in exasperation and yell "it's the story of my life," what would you be talking about?

I am a Kansan by residence, a Missourian by employment, a Louisianan by birth, a Southerner by the grace of God, and a Tybee Islander at heart. The exasperation... not enough hours livin' on Tybee time.

Okay, a lot of these writing or publishing sites where I have established a presence will include a cheesy question like that as a part of their profile questionnaire. Most of the time I sort of ignore them, but I decided in this case to mold a version of my own cheesy, though factual, description of myself into an answer to their question. Even though it does not relate to books or publishing, I included it to discuss my use Louisianan to describe myself as a person from Louisiana. Now that I have a book at Amazon and hold myself out as an author, I find that I am more conscientious about checking on the spelling of words when I am composing for public consumption. When I put this description of myself together, I was surprised when the spell check in Word said that Louisianian was a misspelling. So I went to Merriam-Webster to check it out. They were a little more forgiving in that they recognize Louisianian as a word but only as a secondary alternative to Louisianan. I clipped it out of their site for you to see:

Definition of LOUISIANA

Lou•i•si•an•an \-ˈa-nən\ adjective or noun

Lou•i•si•an•i•an \-ˈa-nē-ən, -ˈa-nyən\ adjective or noun

It just goes to show that you learn new stuff every damn day… even things about which you think you are already knowledgeable.

So now we get to see if you, my readers, are willing to spill some beans about what books you like, new books you think might be worthy reads, or whatever. I’m hoping to learn about some good reads in our exchange. And, if everyone is too shy to speak up, well I’ll just keep my monologue going. Come on, give it a try.

Why am I here?

When I first started blogging as Red Stick Writer, my purpose was to commit to writing and share my thoughts, experiences, and questions about my journey as a first-time novelist. It was my hope to have other authors or readers or agents read my posts and make contributions of enlightenment, encouragement, or commiseration. In order that they might find my site, I became a commenter at other writing and publishing blog sites.

Through SiteMeter, I know I get a goodly amount of traffic, but the back and forth enabled by contributed commentary never developed on my page. For that interaction, I have had to rely on my reading and commenting at the pages of others.

I hit the mother lode in that regard the day I discovered Nathan Bransford’s blog page. At the time, he was a literary agent in the San Francisco office of the New York agency, Curtis Brown Ltd. Interestingly enough, shortly after I found him, Nathan became the first-ever commenter on my page. He told me to e-mail a query to him regarding my then agent-hungry novel, By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide. Unfortunately, I had to respond that I had already queried him and that he had declined representation.

Despite not securing Nathan’s representation, reading his blog and the comments others leave there has become a part of my routine. Though he is no longer an agent, I and many others thank God his blog page lives on. He says he is now "a publishing civilian working in the tech industry.” Nothing could be more distant from the truth. On May 12, his debut novel, a middle-grade story called Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow hits bookshelves virtual and otherwise, and his blog page is still one of the premier go-to places to keep your thumb on the pulse of books... reading them, writing them, and selling them.

By the time I discovered that my blog page would not become a forum for writer discussion, I had also learned that I enjoyed occasionally writing my thoughts about life or family or humor or politics or writing or whatever else pops into my head or the intersection of any of these. So I have kept it going. Now instead of chronicling my pursuit of an agent, I spill the beans about my experience as an indie author with an e-book in the Kindle Store at Amazon.

Just as I once commented at sites to get noticed by others who might have an interest in representing me, I continue to comment to get found by people who might have an interest in buying and reading and possibly reviewing my book. My interaction with readers and other authors in those settings is both enriching and enjoyable.

Writing sites and communities I have been known to haunt:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/

http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/

http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/

http://www.goodreads.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/

http://tinyurl.com/amazon-reviews-by-dick

I enjoy these and a number of other nooks and crannies on the Web. Maybe I’ll bump into you at one of them.

You are always welcomed and E N C O U R A G E D to make your thoughts known here by leaving comments. One of the things I plan to do here in the near future is mention or discuss or review books I have read, books I am reading, books that I’m considering reading, and maybe even coffee table books that can become coffee tables. Regarding the ones under consideration, I’m hoping some of you will stick a toe in, test the water, join the discussion, and help me make informed decisions about the direction of my reading. I continue to keep alive the hope that this can become a place for discussion.

Indie Authors, Indie Publishers, Indie Jones Buckling Swashes in a Wild World

One of the publishing blogs I read with regularity belongs to Nathan Bransford.  He was until fairly recently a literary agent for Curtis Brown in San Franscisco but now considers himself a publishing civilian who works in the tech industry.  Despite this, he is still widely read among publishing insiders and wannabes alike.  The reason for his continued popularity is his knowledge of publishing, his ability to frame issues with center-of-bullseye accuracy, and his ability to communicate them in a very enlightening, understandable, and entertaining way.

On Wednesdays, he often throws an issue to his readers and invites them to tell him what they think about it.  He did that this week on the topic:  "Who Should Have the ‘Indie’ Label:  Self-Publishers or Small Presses?"  The link below will take you to his blog post and the numerous comments his readers provided.  After the link, you will find the comment I deposited on his page.

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/04/who-deserves-indie-label.html

I'm self-published. It's an e-book in the Kindle Store. I paid nothing to get there. Consequently, it seems there is a flaw in the "paid for=vanity=self-published," equation.

Since Amazon has provided a place where I can sell my story for free and make as much or more in royalties per sale than the vast majority of traditional authors make per book through publishers of either the indie or the big six ilk, color me hesitant to call them my corporate overlord. No, the corporate overlords are folks with whom I have no contact as a consequence of at least two degrees of gatekeepers, none of whom are named Kevin Bacon. I tried. They let me see through the keyhole, but in the end it made more sense for me to drive right through that double garage door at Amazon.

The traditional worlds of authoring and publishing are trying to enforce rules and terminology that make their universe feel like home. I don’t think they should hold their breath until they get their way. Popular culture will have its own way, industry pillars be damned.

Once upon a time large numbers of people got lumped together because they had happiness in common. Those happy people had to learn to share the word “gay” with people who are attracted to other people of the same gender but may or may not be happy. Sometimes that works. Sometimes the female people who are attracted to other females like to instead use the “L word.” This all sounds like the same old stuff that has made political correctness so tedious at every turn.

To use a famous quote from a guy to whom people rarely look for a good quote, “Can’t we all just get along?” I don’t know for sure, but I think Rodney is neither happy nor attracted to others of his gender.

The new publishing world, the one that includes people like me and people like the meteoric Amanda Hocking and people like J.A. Konrath, seems to be something akin to the Wild West. Given that, I think I’ll call myself an indie author. The name seems to go with the territory, and as an extra benefit, it rankles all the right people.

To sum up, Nathan has had it right all along. There’s room for everybody at the table. Agents and publishers will continue to determine who gets in the gate of the pasture known as traditional writing and publishing. The public will decide who succeeds in the rough and tumble open range of indie or self-published or vanity or whatever-you-call-it writing and publishing. The name calling and the fighting over names serves no purpose.  Call yourself whatever you want.  Folks will figure it out.  Just give the people what they want… whether it be entertainment or enlightenment or inspiration or space monkeys or space kapows of the cosmic kind. Why is Nathan’s batting average so good?

The reference to space monkeys is an inside joke for Bransford blog regulars, and the space kapow term refers to Nathan's debut middle-grade novel that is coming out on May 12.

Madness, Hoosiers, Bacon Numbers, and Mythical Birds

There’s nothing else like it. And it’s almost here. That most wonderful time of the year is very nearly upon us. I’m talking about March Madness. I’m excited. How about you?

If we were talking about geography, this week would be roughly comparable to foothills consisting of the various conference tournaments. Actually the new 68-team format will have play-ins for all four regions, so the NCAA First Round on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week will actually be a second range of foothills. Those games will determine 16-seed position in each of the four regional brackets.  Come the Second Round on Thursday and Friday and the Third Round on Saturday and Sunday, we’ll actually start climbing some real mountains.

There are always plenty good games scattered throughout the tournament, but unless you personally have a bona fide dog in the hunt, the first weekend is what puts the sizzle in the skillet. It’s when the giant killers emerge. Cinderella teams get fitted for glass Converse shoes and start boarding their pumpkin carriages. Being a Baton Rouge boy, I can remember when LSU lived that fairy tale in 1986 to become the first of only two 11 seeds to ever reach the Final Four.

As a Louisiana transplant living in Kansas and bearing street creds by way of my Jayhawk wife, I technically do have a very viable canine to follow this year. They’re pedigreed, too. It was so much fun watching them win best in show in 2008. I’m way hoping that KU’s mythical birds get nowhere near any giant killers or princesses until April 4 is marked off the calendar.

Since its release in 1986, it has been my tradition to watch the movie, Hoosiers, at least once during the month of March. It is very unlikely that I am alone. With the exception of The Wizard of Oz or The Ten Commandments, I’m thinking this masterpiece starring Gene Hackman, Dennis Hopper, and Barbara Hershey and graced by a very believable bunch of high school kids from Indiana might be the most repeatedly viewed movie of all time. That’s just a guess on my part. It is a beautifully made motion picture and will not fail to get your Madness cranked. If you are a fan of the sport that Naismith birthed and of the movie that makes love to it, you’d probably enjoy taking a look at IMDB’s trivia page for the movie by riding the following link.

IMDB: Hoosiers Trivia Page

I’ve had some brushes with basketball notables over the course of my life, many of them the result of my attendance of basketball camps when I was a high school player. One of them was Jay McCreary, who was LSU’s basketball coach from 1957 to 1965. I can remember Coach McCreary instructing us on how to get low and mobile in our defensive stance. He’d drop down low enough to swing his arm and touch the court with his hand at which time he’d say, “Grab a root and growl!” Anyway, he’s the guy who gives me my (Kevin) Bacon Number for Hoosiers. In the movie, it was 1952 and the giant killer was Hickory beating the big school from South Bend. In real life, the game on which the movie was based was little Milan beating Muncie Central in 1954. Jay McCreary coached Muncie Central to the Indiana State High School Championship in 1952, but Hollywood was more interested in 1954 when his Bearcats were felled by the Indians of Milan. The following link will take you to an interesting recent article that appeared in the Muncie newspaper about that 1954 game.

The Star Press: Milan vs. Muncie Central

Here’s one more link that will take you to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame’s member page for Jay McCreary. He might have been the model for the losing coach in the movie, but he had his winning moments. You’ll note on the Hall’s page that in addition to coaching State Champion, Muncie Central, in 1952, he was an All-State player for State Champion, Franfort, Indiana, in 1936, and an All-American player for National Champion, Indiana University, in 1940.

Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame: Jay McCreary

Good luck with you tournament bracket. If you’re picking the Jayhawks, maybe I’ll see you in the winner’s circle.

My Cup Ranneth Over

Yesterday was my birthday. I received greetings and wishes in the forms of cards, phone calls, e-cards, e-mails, and Facebook messages and posts and comments and tags. There were even confrontations in which people walked right up to me and expressed wishes about my oldness straight to my face. Some people reached out to me in as many as four ways. The number of expressions from family and friends was way beyond significantly greater than on any other anniversary of my birth.

The folks that came at me in more than one way made me so aware of my blessings to have them in my life. I was also very touched by those who put some thought or emotion or a chunk of words in the message they conveyed. That chunky thing works for this wordy boy. When it comes spoken and written communication, I’m a walking and talking equivalent of a big box store.

Beyond these mentioned overachievers, there’s a goodly group of people who, having been kind enough to befriend me on Facebook, get little reminders that old Dick is having a birthday. Some probably saw that virtual string tied around their finger and thought a nice thought about me… or otherwise. Others took the time to send a little communiqué to let me know that I had been on their mind for at least a moment.

It touched me to see how many sent positive vibes my way. Yeah, I said vibes. My tribe and I went through the Sixties. Hell, I am even unabashed in my use of groovy, which yesterday was. My knowledge of the good fortune all of these people represent n my life is deeply etched on a virtual slab of granite in my mind. Many who read this will nod and say, “I always knew that boy had rocks in his head.”

I have concluded through this experience that it is imperative that I send a friend request to Mark Zuckerberg. The movie was intriguing. The critics overstated the negative picture it painted of him. He is still unformed, but it seems as if he is growing into his wealth and influence. Only time will tell. All that said, I am in debt to the young man. I live in Kansas and work in Missouri. A big slice of my heart resides in Louisiana, and pieces of it reside in the four corners to which some of my life acquaintances have been scattered. His invention enables this Southern boy to draw sustenance from the many wonderful souls I’ve known. I’m glad to have them back. I’m glad he gave them to me.

Looking back at that paragraph, I have to mention that I taught Luke, my Oklahoma grandson, how to say “it is imperative.” You can feel the drama when he says it. He and my Louisiana grandson, Brady, are like sponges. I have to be careful what I say so as to not have them soak up something they oughtn’t.

The biggest blessing of all for my birthday was having Suzie’s surgery and chemo of 2010 in the rearview mirror. The fire marshal wouldn’t let me have a cake due to the number of candles that would have been involved, but had I had one, I would have wished for many years together with her just before issuing from my lungs an extinguishing blast of air necessarily of Katrina proportions. (That sentence might make a good entry to the Bulwer-Litton Fiction Contest. I already have one entry pending.) Absent the cake and candles, I deferred to the Man Upstairs with a prayer. I’ve got confidence in Him.

Odds and Ends

There are times when I’ll see several things in the news or on the Web that make me have an urge to express opinions. On a number of other occasions I have used this forum to do exactly that. Another of those moments has arrived.

If you’ve read Red Stick Writer in the past, you’ll already know that I have not only an opinion but also an attitude about politicians telling us that we have to make some hard choices regarding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Though both parties comment in this regard, the donkey party seems to think increasing taxes and tinkering with these programs are the highest priority targets. The elephant party would rather go after other spending first. The donkeys say that just going after other spending isn’t adequate.

The money that went into these programs came out of our pockets for the purpose of being there for workers when they retire. The politicians are shysters. They stole that money for all of their wasteful pet projects and other spending in order to avoid having to openly raise taxes to fund their shenanigans. I say that they should not make one change in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid until they have eliminated all the unnecessary crap they paid for with our money. I say they should not raise taxes until that is done, as well. And don’t even get me started on the estate tax heist they are bringing back. To force a farm family to sell off half of the farmland they’ve inherited in order to pay estate taxes is unconscionable.

I got a bit agitated yesterday when Harry Reid, poking back at President Obama about banning earmarks, said, “I think this is an issue that any president would like to have, that takes power away from the legislative branch of government. I think it’s the wrong thing to do. I don’t think it’s helpful. It’s a lot of pretty talk, but it only gives the president more power. He’s got enough power already.” Well I’ve got news for that old coot. A lot more people decided Obama should have power than decided it about Harry Reid. I wasn’t one of them, but I’m just saying. If the Senate was even remotely close to being a body of good stewards of our hard-earned money, he might have a point, but guess what. Personally, I think the only way any of this will ever have a chance of getting righted is to pass a line-item veto. Well, so much for that. I write fiction, but not fantasy.

Maybe you saw the article about the billionaire who donated a football complex at UConn. They hired a football coach he didn’t like, so he wants his family name taken off the stadium and wants his money back. Has he ever heard of public bribery? He doesn’t get to own the athletic department because he donated to it. I don’t care how much he gave. I wish they would eliminate putting corporate or family names on stadiums and bowl games and whatever else they’re doing it with.

Oh, and what about the big kerfuffle over Ricky Gervais’ jokes at the Golden Globes? Excuse me for remembering what names and adjectives these showbiz types used to describe George W. Bush. They never could get over the fact that he beat Gore in Florida in every recount that got completed. I’m sorry that the law of the land says we have an Electoral College and that’s how we pick ‘em. I remember how proud they were that John Kerry reported for duty, since he was so much smarter that Dubya. Then it came out that Dubya’s grades were better than the ones Kerry earned. They had no defense for that. Not one word of what Gervais said about them was false, yet they felt he was too mean spirited for their sensibilities.  If they are going to dish it out, they are going to have to man up and learn to take it when it gets dished at them.

Finally, I have to say that I get really angry when people start trying to tidy up history. I’ve got a problem with trying to erase the Stars and Bars from existence. Why is that flag any worse than the US flag? Okay, part of the cause of the Civil War was slavery. We know slavery was bad. Counting slaves as three-fifths of a person and letting their owners vote on the basis of that count was bad, too. Somewhere along the line, we have to recognize that history is what history is. They want to rewrite and say Truman was a bad guy for dropping the bomb. What about the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after one bomb? What about the fact that they started the hostilities between our nations? What if they had won the war in the Pacific? How would we like living under a guy who thinks he is God? That’s kinda what Japan had, right? What got me cranked on this? Well, new versions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are being republished. In the former there are 219 occurrences of the N-word, and there are four in the latter. These will be replaced by the word “slave” in the new editions. What ever happened to “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me?” The African-American people have triumphed over that word. Everyone should accept that and move on.  Leave classic literature the way it is.  Mark Twain is famous for his books, warts and all.  The dogooders who want to mess with them should create their own classics instead of tinkering with his.

I hope that my comments here today will not cause liberals to decide not to read my novel. Their politics don’t stop me from loving the likes of Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Rob Reiner, and Whoopie Goldberg as artists even though I think they are way off the mark politically. Boy, do I feel better getting all that off my chest or what? You betcha. We really do live in the best nation on the planet. The best thing about us is that we continually strive to be better.