Since Panhandlers has been finished I’ve been slowly working on my third novel. This one is slow going. I’m attempting to write a Southern as opposed to a Western. I’ve always loved Westerns and wanted to write one, but I don’t live in the West. I’ve never lived in the West. I have no family that live out that way either. I felt it would be disingenious if I attempted to do so. But I do live in the South and have always lived in the South. And not many books have been written about the Post-Civil War South that didn’t center around plantations. So I’m writing one of a young kid traveling from Pensacola to New Orleans on horse back through the swampy, piney woods of the Gulf Coast during Reconstruction. I spend more time on research than I do on writing, but it’s all part of working on the craft. Today I knocked out over 800 words. That’s a big accomplishment for me. Some writers easily write 1,000 or more words a day. I don’t know how they do it. But for now, it’s slow going. I’ve got about 50 pages or so finished – roughly 15,000 words – which is about a quarter of the way finished as far as word count goes. Hopefully, I’ll get better disciplined and have a rough draft completed by the end of the year.

In the time that I’m not reading for research, I’ve been reading books for pleasure that don’t center around the Reconstruction south. Currently reading Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. Prior to that I read Dan Fante’s Spitting off of Tall Buildings.

Please check out my previous novels Native Moments and Panhandlers available on Amazon. And if you have read them, if you got a few minutes to leave a review, that would be greatly appreciated as well.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway