By More books arrived in the mail today! Thanks, Ray. I’ve previously enjoyed two of Ray A. Randolph’s cop novels. Now I can catch up with the Indianapolis PD and the world of crime. Ray’s a busy writer. He’s been writing a novel every year for the past five or six years – and that was …
McCoy Wins Spur Award
Prolific Kansas writer Max McCoy has won the Spur Award for best original mass-market paperback novel from the Western Writers of America. He will receive the award in June for his novel, “Hellfire Canyon,” at the WWA Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. As Max mentions… Winners of the Spur Awards in previous years include Larry McMurtry …
Didn’t Make the Cut
Native Kansan Tracy Million Simmons read Sara Paretsky’s novel, “Bleeding Kansas” and, well, didn’t think much of it. Tracy’s review. At least someone’s writing shines here – Tracy’s. She makes her case beautifully.
TSCPL
I hadn’t been in this library since about 1980 – and they’ve done some major renovations since then. There’s a cafe and a used bookstore and gobs of meeting rooms. And books, I’m sure there were books in there. The lobby. (I was going to call it the foyer, but that word always sounds silly …
a book I’ll never forget
Have you ever wanted to know what it was like to trudge through the jungles of Vietnam, a knife in one hand, rifle in the other, death looming around you? Well, me neither. But nevertheless, now I have a better understanding of what the Vietnam War was like. I read a first-hand account of the …
More Books in the Mail
On Friday, a delivery came from Amazon. It was a Christmas present from my mom (who loves me very much). The book hadn’t been published yet (at Christmas). Mom reads Joshilyn Jackson books and knows I’m a fan also. Now the book is out and now I have it. I started it over the weekend …
Charley Kempthorne
Today’s mail brought a book from a writer friend who lives near Manhattan. I met Charley Kempthorne several years ago when he gave a talk about writing family history at Barnes & Noble in Topeka. In the ’70s, Charley began teaching writing workshops in Manhattan and encouraged people to write memoirs and family histories. His …
With Love, Stan
I heard from a friend of a friend the other day. Karen Ross Epp sent an e-mail. She knows Beverley Buller who wrote From Emporia: The Story of William Allen White. Karen Ross Epp told me a little about the book she wrote about her brother, Stanley Ross, who died in Vietnam in 1969. With …
Breathing Words
Here’s a great essay – about words, about life, about writing. From a Southern writer –River Jordan: “When I was a child I had this belief that when you were born you had a certain amount of words assigned to you and stored up (who knows where) inside your body. When you used up your …
a neat idea
From X365.org: Dan Waber turned 40 on January 12th, 2006, and wanted to mark the occasion in some positive fashion. So he got this crazy idea (not an unusual event) to write 40 words (no more, no less) every day for a year, and each day he’d write about a different person (in no particular …
Winter Kill
WINTER KILL Winter killed her sure as a knife in the back. It could’ve been the body-stiffening cold that sucked the life from her body as it weasled into the house under the door or through the frost-laden window. But I know it was the gloom of gray that pressed down to the earth so …