Just finished the first of the last
Actually, it was last week, but I’ve been too busy with other (secret) projects to announce it.
But I’ve finished the first draft of the final book in my “By the Hands of Men” series.
Working title: “Ringside at the Circus of the Fallen,” but that may change.
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The Paper of Record Just Recorded They’re All Right with Racism. Really.
Or: “The black people were surprisingly good last night…”
One of my personal failings (well, the only one I feel like admitting) is I have a strong fairness impulse. It was the whole Martin Luther King thing, judge people by the content of the character not the color of the skin. My father, who had grown up in the deep South surrounded by virulent racism, introduced me to the concept, mostly by the way he lived his life, treating everyone he met with the same courtesy, fairness, and respect. It was what made me a nascent liberal as a young man.
That belief in fairness was the same thing that drove me away from Liberals. Growing up, my experiences with
…I’ve always liked donkeys
Don’t know why. Maybe it’s something about their faces. They seem to take life very seriously.
Turns out in Texas (where we moved and are enjoying a great deal), there are places with more donkeys than local forage for them. Rather than euthanize them, the state allows people to adopt these donkeys. Basically, you are fostering the donkey on your land.
Since I hate the idea of animals suffering (see my first By the Hands of Men novel for more on that)…
…once we get some good green East Texas acreage, I plan on adopting. Since they’re herd animals, it would be cruel to only have one, and so there are two donkeys in my future.
I’m going to …
I swear to the Lord Almighty…
This is the most frightening dog I’ve ever seen. I was taking pictures of the East Texas flowers, and this dog was sitting in the shade of a house. He never came into the sun.
I was convinced he was going to suck the soul from my body.…
The Elimination Process
By the way, there’s mass-shooting you haven’t heard about. A Sudanese immigrant went into a church and shot seven people, before one of the ushers (who had a permit for his own weapon) stopped the attempted massacre.
Strangely, it’s not leading the 24-hour news cycle, nor is it fodder for the spiritual leaders of our time (Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were too busy helping Chuck Schummer propagandize about the need for pre-socialized medicine to address it).
But in case you were asking yourself, “Hey, I heard that Gunz are Teh Badz. Why aren’t my leading moral lights telling me about this outrage?”, allow me to go through the Elimination Process that the good folks at Pravda Central …
I used to wonder
“When will I know I’m a real writer?”
Being younger (and certifiably dumber), I imagined the answer would be something like:
- Mansion and starlets rubbing coconut oil on my aching fingers.
- Riots at my book-signings
- Tabloid reports about my coke-fueled binges on croissants and women of questionable virtue during lost weekends in Vegas.
When younger (see above), I was expecting certain kinds of evidence to confirm that I was a “writer.” The fruits of success would be the proof.
And when those fruits (as I conceived of them) didn’t appear, I was downcast. I failed to achieve the rewards, and thus I was a failure.
Then, as so often happens when we’re not looking, I got older.
Fortunately, I …
The First Casualty
Welcome, Instapundit readers. My site, roymgriffis.com, which was briefly wiped out in the devoutly-to-be-wished-for Instalanche, is back up.
(Note: this is the original English version of an Op-Ed piece I was asked to write for Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger on what the election means for the United States)
Trump won.
That surprised not only the Hillary faithful, but a lot of conservatives as well, including me. Because, frankly, most of us (including the candidate herself) figured the end of this movie had already been written.
It may not be known in Europe, but Hillary Clinton had a vast machine behind her: a Democrat National Committee (which, per WikiLeaks, had colluded to suppress the votes of Bernie Saunders supporters), a …
Gettin’ her SteamPunkGal on
So, I was showing Christina (family friend, budding novelist at 15, assute reader <she loves “By The Hands of Men”>) this beautiful old portable Smith-Corona typewriter I have. She was enthralled…got her inner SteamPunkGal going. And she insisted on using it. She’s down stairs now, typing wildly (two-fingered like the old journalists).
Listening to her, I realized I missed that old typewriter sound…it was weirdly soothing.
I installed this app on my PC and it has that percussive sound to which I wrote so many plays and short stories. It’s kind of fun
I’m glad I introduced her to the manual typewriter. It makes the act of writing/creating a much more physically involving one. When she goes home tonight, I
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