When we grow to love something or someone with all our heart, we face great peril. When loving a person, we face the risk of not being loved in return or perhaps loved in a way with which we cannot live. Love can disappear or be taken away from us. Tragedies are made of such... Continue Reading →

The summer of 2019 reaching its unofficial close—although we’ll have the heat, now and then for a while yet—I pause to try and capture some of it, capture Summer, with a capital S, the proper noun, Summer. This summer marks one sixty-fifth of all my summers, so I suppose that I ought to be thankful... Continue Reading →

I had no business trying to read this book when I did, but one key scene stayed with me all the times after I read it at ten years of age. What I expected from the cover it once had—a boy in cut-offs, and old shirt, and a straw hat, fishing from a raft—was life... Continue Reading →

Howard’s Mind: A well of fantasy plots. According to the forward by Fritz Leiber in my 1978 printing of Marchers of Valhalla, this ambitious titular story of the collection shows the origins of “the Hyborean Age,” which later gave us the Conan stories. Mixing the dust of his native Texas with the dark soil of... Continue Reading →

“I write for my tribe,” Mike Brewer said to me one night around a fire. I can’t be sure, but I think that was a February night, about twenty degrees or so, and we were outside after midnight, leaning over a fire pit and bundled in heavy clothes that would smell like the aftermath of... Continue Reading →

In my Senior year at Durrett High School, I asked a very pretty girl to go to the Prom with me. All my buddies were going to the Prom and had dates already. So, I spotted a girl who sat across the class from me in Humanities and just up and asked her. My actions... Continue Reading →

M.J. Downing. The hot rods are in town, now, for the NSRA, and we did our annual trip out to Mike Linnig’s Seafood last night to check out the pre-show rally. Two years ago, we made that visit with my brother-in-law, Dan Krupp, who just recently passed away, and last night, I had the feeling... Continue Reading →

Just recently, having submitted the first full draft of the second Watson novel to my publishers, Burns and Lea Media, I have gone back to a coming-of-age novel, with the working title, Starling.  It’s a sea change, one of those moments where I must get my head into a better, clearer place for another project that... Continue Reading →

  Steven Pressfield wrote The Gates of Fire, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Like Bernard Cornwell, Pressfield has earned my trust. History comes alive in his hands. And, yes, Pressfield has written books not nearly as good as “Gates” or as successful as The Legend of Bagger Vance. But he has earned... Continue Reading →