Roy M. Griffis

Roy M. Griffis

Storyteller

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I’ve always liked donkeys

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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 …

The Elimination Process

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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

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“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

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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)

Image result for hillary clinton loss

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

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Christina Typewriter

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
…

The Wrath of a Righteous Wife

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Had shoulder surgery last Friday.  I was trying to be tough on Monday and skipped the pain meds, figuring I’d only need those to sleep.

I was sadly incorrect.  When the ortho doc heard my story, he encouraged me to use them.  So I dutifully swallowed them down when I got home.  Damn, what a difference.

So I’m writing this while under the influence.   My son happened to be home from college this weekend, and so he and I spent some time watching movies and chatting, as the shoulder surgery rendered me useless for our usual pursuits (bike riding, getting pizza, that sort of thing).  Tuesday, as we were driving down for my post-op appointment and to drop him …

Today in weird

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A few weeks ago, I commented on a book (“The Sword and Shield”), which covered, in 732 pages, the KGB archives that came out with a Russian Defector.  It dealt with nearly 80 years of the USSR’s attempts to influence and coerce.  The scarier tidbits (and there were a lot) covered how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was riddled with communist agents, the stories the Reds planted with the press to derail Presidential candidates (a job the press now does cheerfully for free against the “wrong sorts”).  Assassination (both character and mortal), overthrows, plots, millions of dollars a year to the “innocent” American Communist Party, to say nothing of their insanely focused efforts to steal technology from the US (from

…