I’ve written a few short stories. A couple were included in small anthologies, and in creating them, I realized they required a different technique.

I recently finished one that will be included in the Rough Country anthology I’m editing for Roand and Weatherford publishing. After I wrapped up Where the Road Forks, I remembered talking to Joe Lansdale about that idea and others a few years ago.

Joe is the accomplished and successful author of the Hap and Leonard books that eventually became a television series. Talking over sushi in Nacogdoches, Texas, I asked him about short fiction.

“I really don’t have that many ideas for short stories.”

“You’re surrounded by them.” He waved his chopsticks in the air, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d snapped a fly from the air like Mr. Miagi. The slender bamboo utensils seemed to fit his hand, because Joe is an International Martial Arts Hall of Famer and even created his own style of fighting. Those experiences often show up in his work. “I can prove it. Tell me something that happened when you were a kid.”

I thought about it as a chunk of wasabi burned its way through my sinuses, making my eyes water. The shock that went through my frontal lobes gave me time to think. When I could breathe, I told him of something that happened to my older cousins way back in the late 1950s.

Sporting flattops and one slicked-back duck tail haircut, they were three of the coolest and toughest guys in their little rural community, riding motorcycles and rolling cigarettes in their T shirt sleeves. When they heard Elvis was coming to town, Tom announced to the others they were going to meet the famous singer.

Dick and Harry allowed it was something to do, and they rode their Indians to the Grand Theater where the future king of rock and roll was waiting to go on upstairs in the “green” room at the top of a second floor exterior fire escape.

The boys parked their bikes in a nearby alley and came up to the theater opposite the bright entrance. Stomping up the metal steps in their square-toed boots as if they had backstage passes, they were met at the top of the stairs by the Memphis Mafia who heard them coming up.

One of Elvis’ buddies told them they weren’t welcome.

Harry said they didn’t care and intended to say howdy to Elvis, and they tried to push past the obstacles between them and their hero.

As Tom told me. “We thought we were tough, but those boys were tougher and more experienced. They handed us our asses, and threw us back down the stairs. When we rolled to the bottom, and we dusted off, got up, and went home.”

Joe laughed and took a sip of iced tea. “There’s your short story.”

I came home thinking about it, but haven’t yet written it down. But it’s there, perking along until the day I write the first sentence, “The boys finished their Schlitz beers and decided they were going to meet Elvis Presley, come hell or high water,” or something like that.

Those stories come easier than I expected. Maybe it’s because I write mini-stories every week for my newspaper columns in The Paris News, Country World, and now for Saddlebag Disptatches magazine. They come to mind as a single sentence, and then I watched as my fingers tuype out 950 words in one sitting that will “go to press” the next day. They’re mini-short stories, a snippit of time or experience, in which I give readers a quick glimpse into the view from my own hill.

When we’re working on novels, authors create whole new fictional worlds and can revel in taking their time to describe these worlds and establish character backgrounds and settings. In a short story, we create a can of condensed soup in a sense that, if we wanted to, could sometimes expand into a novel.

I think of them as that tiny world inside a globe, those glass spheres containing a tiny piece of a mythical world. In this case, these miniature scenes don’t always have snow, unless it’s essential to the plot.

Essential to the plot. In short stories, every element, word, character, and bit of dialogue has to be informative, moving the story forward, and must relate to everything else. The logic of the narrative has to be short and concise.

To me, it’s like flipping through the pages of a novel and picking out the necessary bits and pieces to write a book report. A quick read of what could be more, but isn’t.

There’s no room for sweeping descriptions and extensive development. In my view, the author has to know the character’s entire backstory at the outset, and the setting’s history that’s revealed by bits of information dropped in a sentence or two, or as action dialogue tags.

Readers must be swept into these juicy stories with the right words, phrases, and pacing. I suppose it’s like satisfying our need for immediate satisfaction these days. In other words you have about 6,000 words to set up the story arc, very short Acts 1 and 2, before that last couple of pages in which the bombshell drops. In fact, some authors set off that climax bomb in a couple of paragraphs, or even one breathtaking sentence.

Writing short stories is an excellent way to warm up, to refill the creative basket between novels, and to achieve the personal satisfaction of a job well done.

Growing up, I lived in the Urbandale neighborhood of Old East Dallas, a post-war collection of neat little white frame houses that could have stood in for a television neighborhood like Leave It To Beaver, only with a different title.

Folks think I went to school in rural Lamar County, Texas, but I graduated from W.W. Samuell in Dallas’ Pleasant Grove, which is much different today. This misconception about my roots is because I tell everyone I lived on my grandparent’s farm in Chicota. We’re talking semantics here, but I mean this little scrawny, asthmatic kid existed in the city, but bloomed and experienced life in the country.

That doesn’t mean my experiences on the concrete streets weren’t valuable. I fought against the monicker of City Boy, and believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish. We only lived there because the Old Man left the farm during the war and never returned after getting an assembly line job at Ford. He never wanted the gambling life of a farmer, always watching the market for cattle prices, or worried that enough rain would fall to sustain the cotton and corn crops they raised in those river bottoms in the 1960s.

So after school during the work/school week, I roamed the neighborhood with the other bike-riding outlaws who lived in our area. We did the usual, hung out in backyards, prowled the tame woods on the other side of the railroad tracks half a mile from our house, and organized pickup ball games at the school a block away (without adult interference and rules).

We kept the sidewalks hot running and riding back and forth between houses, and in the summer, they stayed that way all night from the heat of the sun. Summer in those days without air conditioning kept us outside, much to our parent’s delight. In the Texas heat, our bare feet toughened up to defy sizzling sidewalks, gravel, and even the street spiderweb patchwork of black, gooey hot tar in the concrete cracks that bubbled up and popped when we stepped on them.

Most folks in the neighborhood ignored us, as long as we stayed outside where we only came in after the streetlights came on. On Friday and Saturday nights we roamed even later, playing a made-up game of Run and Hide, our version of Hike and Seek, which involved hiding around every house, shrub, flowerbed, and driveway on our block.

We only had two old soreheads on our long block. One was Mrs. Grubbs, who lived in a on the corner up by the school and often stood on her tiny concrete porch to shout at us not to step on her grass when we made the 45-dgree turn on the sidewalk.

I think nothing grows today on that corner packed hard as concrete, where every kid in the neighborhood made sure to plant their foot just for spite.

The other sorehead was a case of mistaken identity, and I still regret it.

Sunbaked Mr. Pennington, who somehow misplaced his two front teeth at some point in his long life, talked with a soft whistling lisp through thin, loose lips that seemed to flap in the wind. He lived with his wife on the opposite end of our block. Each day he made his glacial, creaky walk down the sidewalk, using a heavy black cane to steady shaky knees.

I’d see him talking to the Old Man on occasion out under the big pecan tree in our front yard. I think Mr. Pennington like to stand there and blow for a minute, the old man’s euphonism for resting. It was an ancient reference to the days when Dad used mules to plow, and they’d rest in the shade for them to cool down and…blow.

When I was younger, I was always afraid of Mr. Pennington, mostly because his grizzled old wife who had a better mustache than mine, and only wore house dresses. She once scolded me when I rode my bike down the sidewalk and across the water hose she’d stretched to soak the parkway strip.

“Hey boy! Don’t run over that hose. Ride out in the street where you belong.”

Brother, that little outburst resulted in my mother-bear Mom roaring down there to “straighten that old $%@! out.” After that, Mom and Mrs. Pennington never spoke again, though they bared their teeth at each other when they passed on the street.

I didn’t pay the old man much attention when I was a kid. He was simply a fixture in our neighborhood, wearing work pants and shirts faded to a soft blue from thousands of washings and exposure to the sun on the clothesline in back.

As the years passed, more of his teeth disappeared and his hair turned snow white, what you could see under the John Deere cap he’d received somewhere around the time Eisenhauer was elected president.

The cap should have given me a clue.

I was home from college one day and sitting alone in the Old Man’s metal glider when Mr. Pennington crept by.

“Mind if I sit and blow a minute?” he asked.

I perked up at that comment and slid against the opposite arm. “Sure.”

“I always admired this shade.” He settled heavily onto the seat and leaned back, smelling of cigarettes and Old Spice. “It reminds me of one down in the Chicota bottoms when I was farming. I cooled off and took my dinner there when I could, and watered my mules of course.”

Shocked at the news, I probably gaped like a fish out of water. “You’re from Chicota?”

“Sure ‘nuff. Spent a lot of years walking behind them old mules, just like your daddy and grandaddy. I ain’t from around here.”

I couldn’t my ears. Here I was sitting next to still another fountain of information and stories, but in my mind growing up, he was just an old man walking past our house. I still wonder today how two men from that tiny little community would wind up on the same residential block 120 miles away.

For the next couple of years I got to know Mr. Pennington, and grew fond of the old farmer. I even forgave his wife for the water hose incident. Then one day he didn’t walk by and I learned he was walking a different, brighter trail where he didn’t need that cane, or his teeth, anymore.

I wish I’d sat at his knee a little earlier, and listened to what a quiet man had to say. His character, and those stories I missed would have inevitably found their way into my work. We spend too much time in our lives overlooking the world around us, while searching for unrecognizable opportunities we think we need.

I’m at the Tucson Book Festival as you read this, meeting folks and recharging my creative batteries. I attend as many conferences and festivals as possible, depending on the time of the year, finances, and potential return on the investment.

And I don’t mean in a monetary sense. One of my oldest friends, Steve Knagg, is a retired motivational speaker and he says that we spend an inordinate amount of time passing out all of our figurative apples from our mental basket by encouraging and doing for others, or working hard to be successful. Eventually, that basket is empty and needs to be refilled, and to do so, we have to find a way for it to happen.

I attend writers conferences for that reason.

That doesn’t mean I go to every “book festival,” though. I learned long ago that writers have to be picky when deciding which ones to attend. I’ve spent hours…no, days…sitting behind a table while maybe twenty people pass during that entire time.

I’d never even heard of conventions for fiction, though I’d once attended the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Dallas a few years earlier. At that time I was working onsomething far from literature, but I wanted to join a workshop they offered to get some sense on where I was going with, believe it or not, a travel book filled with humor, stories, and destinations.

Good Lord.

I found the conference stuffy, and that workshop almost made me want to quit the business altogether. Dispirited, I came home and wondered what I’d gotten myself into. I almost gave up this writing career, and that happened more than once.

As friends and fans know, I started out as a freelance newspaper columnist, writing outdoor humor, a niche that few others had attempted. Those I knew about were Pat McManus and Gene Hill, who wrote for Field and Stream and Outdoor Life magazines. In my mind at that time, i felt I didn’t have a chance to measure up to them, but I tried.

Experience and determination led me to eventually become prolific enough in the outdoor world to write for over 50 newspapers in Texas and Oklahoma. I joined the Texas Outdoor Writers Association, and the Outdoor Writers of America, meeting other authors, columnists, journalists, and contributors who shared my enthusiasm for the outdoors and writing.

Those folks shored up my obsession to write even more and hopefully publish a book, but what kind was a mystery to even myself. Someone eventually talked me into joining the board for TOWA, where I served for several years, until I lost my mind and eventually became president of that organization.

But I stalled there, partially because I fond the executive director had skimmed nearly $30,000 from the organization, leaving an unpleasant taste in my mouth. At the same time, the internet arrived with a vengeance and killed off newspapers with the ferocity of the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. Losing members, I wanted to do something to help and decided to bring in a guest speaker to excite the five-hundred plus attendees for our annual gathering.

Envisioning a conference that would set the world on fire, I decided to reach out to the most famous Texas writer I could think of.

I cold-called Larry McMurtry, getting the number from something called Information. Remember him, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Horseman Pass By (eventually becoming the Paul Newman movie, Hud), The Last Picture Show, and of course, Lonesome Dove?

Steve Knagg was with me the day I called, standing under tall red oak trees outside of a used appliance store. He was there to buy a thirty-dollar dryer he could barely afford, and just the other day remembered our conversation in the parking lot.

Shaking his head in wonder, he laughed. “You just used that old bag phone sitting on the hood of your truck and called the man who’d won a Pulitzer, like you were calling to order a pizza.”

I was a little more nervous than that, especially after McMurtry answered with a friendly hello. I’m sure he heard me gulp before I explained the call, but he was gracious in declining. “I’m committed to too many deadlines. Here, call this number and ask for Bill Witliff. He’s down in Austin and might be able to attend, but thanks for calling.”

I called Bill Witliff, screenwriter and author. You’ll probably know him as the man who took McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and turned it into one of the most famous miniseries in history, in addition to writing one of the most underrated movies I’ve ever seen, Barbarosa, featuring Willie Nelson.

Standing out there under the trees for almost half an hour, we talked writing and the business before he also had to decline. But in the course of our conversation, he was genuinely interested in my writing and I confessed I was on the verge of quitting.

I could almost see him shaking his head on the other end of the line. “Nope. You never quit. You stand back, take a look around, gather yourself, and continue with what you’re doing.”

It wasn’t long before writing became harder, and my first novel stalled. I didn’t know what to do with it, and needed to speak to someone who understood.

So I cold-called another Texas author named Joe R. Lansdale, who also spent almost an hour on the phone, explaining even more what I’d gotten into and telling me not to quit. Long ago, Joe decided all he was going to do was write, and for decades he lived so close to the edge of poverty they raised most of what they ate in a little East Texas garden.

He doesn’t worry about that kind of thing any longer, because his books have been turned into a television series, and more than a couple have become feature films. I recommend you watch Cold in July. You’ll thank me for it.

We’re now good friends and he keeps supporting my writing, and spends more time than you can imagine encouraging beginning novelists.

So why am I at another conference? Because I need time with authors who understand what I do, and I don’t cold call strangers anymore. These kinds of events are an opportunity to enjoy dinners with those folks, have drinks, and meet others who are successful, or just getting into the Game. After the Bride and I leave Tucson, other conferences are on the books.

In a little more than a month, my brother from another mother, John Gilstrap and I will be at the Pike’s Peak Writers conference where he will be the Guest of Honor. From there, it’s Western Writers of America, Bouchercon, The Will Rogers Medallion Conference, and anything else that catches my fancy when the apple basket is almost empty.

It isn’t just the conference or festival itself that I go for, it’s the people, the knowledge, and the inspiration to come home and hit the keys again.

While in the middle of edits for my upcoming novel scheduled for release in October, 2025, the development editor we’ll call Francis (because I just heard that name on the television)  had several questions about how and why I break chapters the way I do. He also wondered about the placement of character viewpoint breaks within a chapter, and had several suggestions about both. I have to admit, I ignored them after explaining why.

Considering those questions, I started wondering about freshmen authors, who tend to overthink everything and find they, too, are unsure when to break chapters. I’m afraid you’ll see the word “chapter” wayyyy to many times in this post.

The truth is, for me, these breaks come naturally both between chapters and character viewpoints. I don’t consciously say to myself, “Self, I think I’ll stretch this action scene for a few more pages, and wrap things up with a little witty banter before moving on to a different scene.”

If you dig around in books on writing, or the internet, you’ll likely see where a chapter break accentuates a change of place, point of view, or plot. The new chapter tells us we’re in a different place in the novel and the stage has been reset to advance the story.

It also gives the reader a break, kinda like a commercial on television, so we can go make a sammich without missing anything, risk becoming disoriented about the plot after we put the book down to feed the dog or get a grandchild off the roof before they fall into the pool like last time.

Our attention spans are getting shorter, and I like to blame the internet and social media, because social media should be blamed for most of life’s problems, and of course the internet is just a place to noodle around between repeated news stories and Best Of lists.

But there’s this thing called pacing that has to be considered, and it’s all tied up with the chapter above.

We can’t simply cut off a conversation in the middle of a sentence or thought, or can we?

Carlton the Doorman points at two men in blue seersucker suits. “I know you’re both innocent of fashion murder, and it was only by chance you put on these matching suits this morning…or is it?”

His eyes drifted to the body stuffed behind the palm tree, and wondered why the interior decorator decided to use a Queen Palm, instead of a Date Palm. It was all so mysterious, just like those two men who were comparing pocket squares.

Now we have a cliffhanger, and the reader starts the next chapter, which is a shift in plot or viewpoint.

Dammit! I wanted to know how those two put on such garish suits, and now we have a renegade interior decorator to deal with, but the author wants me to read about Elizabeth and her challenges in digging through a file cabinet full of incriminating evidence on the third floor.

So now that chapter plods along, and it’s essential to the plot, but does it have to so long?

My development editor might think so. Maybe he wants it to be a shift in viewpoint within the chapter. It could have worked, I guess, but I like a fresh start and broke both chapters at those specific spots to build tension and anticipation for the next one. It also ends the scene, because I’m tired of writing about it and want to move back to the Seersucker Twins after finishing with the antagonist’s viewpoint.

The truth is, my chapters are long enough to play out the scene without putting in stuff people don’t want to read and will skip ahead. Be they short or long, I break at a point that feels natural.

“Sonny Hawke found himself in an aloha shirt on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande without a gun or badge, and wondered if anyone would take him for a Texas Ranger . Maybe there was a way to play this out before the cartel leader figured out that not all Rangers look alike.”

There we have a break, making the reader wonder the same thing and anticipate the next time Sonny appears.

Then I’ve had copy editors ask why my chapters in the third act are substantially shorter. By the time we’re racing toward the end, chapters are even shorter. Why? Because it subconsciously builds tension. There are times they’re only a page or two, but those quick breaks make readers feel like they’re on a rapidly descending roller coaster.

This is also a technique to keep tired or sleepy readers engaged. We want them to sprint toward the end.

“It’s nearly midnight, but this book is moving right along.” Sleepy Reader flips a couple of pages. “Wow, these are short. I can read another.”

We imagine the reader propped on pillows while a spouse snores quietly. “I’ll turn off the light in a second, but dang this chapter is brief, too. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster and this thing is moving fast. This is like eating potato chips. I can have another, and another. I can finish the book tonight and it won’t be too late when I’m finished.”

The truth is, I’ve heard this from more than one fan, who tells me they slogged through the next day because they stayed up past one in the morning, because they had to finish the book, and it was a good read.

Don’t be concerned about word or page counts, just end the chapter at a natural break. You’ll find them easy enough.

Fifteen years ago, a coworker pushed into my softly-lit office one Monday morning and settled herself in one of the two chairs on the opposite side of my desk. I knew she was irritated by her body language and the way she sat on the edge of the chair, as if preparing to leap across and tear out my throat.

I didn’t like overhead lights, so they were off, and the room was lit only by two standing lamps and a green one on my desk.

“It’s too dark in here.” She pursed her lips like the SNL church lady. “This doesn’t look like an office.”

My first thought that I somehow held back was, Your mouth looks like a cat’s ass.

“It does too.” (I wonder if I meant her mouth, or the office.) Here’s a desk. There’s a computer, and I have an electric pencil sharpener. It’s a real workspace.”

“You know what I mean.”

You don’t know what I meant, though. Then I spoke aloud. “I thought I did.”

She got right to the point. “So just what do you do all day?” She hammered that word hard.

My puckered visitor was a director in another department, and apparently didn’t like the fact that I was behind my desk late one morning, pounding on my computer keyboard, instead of sitting in some other inane meeting like the one she’d just left.

I also knew she was miffed because I’d refused to attend her “mandatory” 4:00 PM meeting the previous Friday afternoon. In my opinion, the meeting was only a way to flex her administrative muscles over those who worked under her so they couldn’t go home until 6:00.

I was the Director of Communications and crisis management for the then tenth largest school district in Texas. We had 7,500 employees and 56,000 kids, and someone was messing up every single day.

Considering her question about my work ethic, I leaned back and propped my feet on my desk for emphasis. “What I do all day is exactly what I was doing when you rolled in.”

“And what’s that?”

“Keeping your people out of trouble and dealing with the media. Your people need direction that your coordinators aren’t providing, and since I’ve been in this business for almost thirty-five years, I have a little experience in crisis management to handle these issues so they won’t wind up on the shoulders of your building administrators where they can’t do their job.”

She glared. “You look like you’re just sitting there, twiddling your thumbs every time I go by, and you’re always on the phone. It never looks like you’re doing anything.”

“That’s because I’m good at my job. Looks easy, don’t it?”

“I think you make it appear like you’re working.”

“Okay.” As a visual aid, I reached over and sharpened a pencil. She stomped out and though we’re still “friends,” that day has never come back up in conversation.

Our little exchange came back not too long ago in a writing workshop when a young lady raised her hand when I asked for questions.

“So now that you’re an author, what do you do all day?”

“I sit behind a desk, or sometimes on the couch, or on the bed, or on a table-cum-desk at our cabin and think a lot of the time. Then I pound on the keyboard, making stuff up.”

“So you write all day?”

“Some days. But I don’t always look like I’m working. Sometimes I read, or look out the window. When I lean back and close my eyes, story lines, bits of dialogue, and descriptions roll past. Sometimes I watch TV. Writers are always thinking, so sometimes I have to pause the movie or program to take a note or two. They sometimes trigger a bit of dialogue, or a plot line, or even an idea for my weekly newspaper columns.”

“Isn’t that stealing?”

“Nope, according to academics, there are only seven basic storytelling plots that we all re-work, though a couple of overachievers say there might be as many as thirty. The basics are overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, rebirth, comedy, and tragedy. We all just build those same stories and do it in our voice.”

“Can your wife tell you’re working?”

“Why, have you been talking to her? Did she say something?”

Thankfully the conversation moved on.

I’m always working, though there are times when this author’s mind needs some relief. There are days when words flow from a firehose, but at other times I run into hills and the pace slows as I  struggle to the top. Good or bad, my mind wanders. I suffer distractions.

Squirrel!

After 37 years, I still write a weekly newspaper column that allows me to go in an entirely different direction in my writing. Changing lanes freshens my mind, and the little 900-word stories get me onto a different track.

There are other times, though, when I write a scene and need details I haven’t seen or experienced for myself. That leads to the Google and The Rabbit Hole. It isn’t a bad thing. As I research, or surf, I find ideas, stories, and anecdotes that make their way into my plot. But as all writers can tell you, it’s a huge time-suck that can impact your page or word count for that day.

But I’m still working, though I might not look like it.

Sometimes I need to put myself in that place. That’s when I watch a movie set in the period I’m working on, looking for details that might not have occurred to me.

I also feel guilty most of the time. I want to write, but at the same time, I really want to read whatever is in my TBR pile. That’s where books come in. For example, I’m working on my fifth western at this writing and needed some real cowboy lingo. While the Bride and I were in Alpine, Texas, for their annual Art Walk back in November, she found me a copy of We Pointed Them North, by Teddy Blue. That book is an encyclopedia of the cowboy way of life.

Within those pages he once referred to himself as a cow catcher, instead of cowboy. That went into the manuscript.  He also explained the origin of cow puncher. When a cattle drive was over and they finally got the herd to the railroad, the stock had to be loaded onto the cars. To get the cattle moving, the boys used long poles to punch them in the rear end, forcing them forward to make room for more.

Who knew?

So just what do authors do all day?

We noodle around on the internet, make things up, daydream, stare out the window–––

Squirrel!

––– find things to do in order not to work, read, think, stare out the window some more, and sometimes attend conferences where we interact with others, thereby finding inspiration to string words together when we get home, hopefully choosing the ones that carry readers along with us on the fictional journey created in our minds. Then we write.

Yeah, lady, I was working then, and now, but sometimes you just can’t tell it.

We all talk. Some of us too much, but good writers understand cadence and pacing in dialogue and you can tell because the conversation is smooth and familiar. I’ve judged a number of contests over the years, and below you’ll find a couple of my pet peeves. One pet peeve I have is the idiom, pet peeve, so let’s move on.

“Jack, I think we need to take over this train! The engineer’s dead! If you don’t, we’ll crash into the some stalled train in front of us, or maybe the end of the line where there’s a lot of concrete and maybe a big steel thingy that will crush this tin can!”

“What makes you think I can stop this train, Ethyl?”

“I don’t know, Jack, but you’re a man and all men think they can fly airplanes, so why not a train!!!???”

“Of course I can, but Ethyl, why don’t you do it?” Jack asked without shouting like his partner.

Ethyl exclaimed. “Oh, Jack! My role is to stand aside while you fight the Bad Guys and look frightened! Maybe I can cover my mouth with one hand, too, while you decide between blue and red wires.”

“Good lord! Pay attention, Ethyl. Wires are only an issue when a bomb is about to go off,” he hissed.

“This train is a rolling bomb!”she shouted, fearfully, “but I’m beginning to think you’re a dud. Pretty soon people are going to think we hijacked this train –––.”

“Hi yourself, Ethyl, but this isn’t the time for pleasantries. As we race down this track they’ll soon call some alphabet group to stop us.”

“I’m confused, Jack.

“So am I, Ethyl, but at least we know who’s talking!”

I distilled this from an entry and changed enough of the story for you to get the idea. Writers should imitate the way people speak in real life.

For one thing, we don’t use a person’s name in every sentence when we’re talking. I think the original author watches too many movies or sitcoms, where scriptwriters repeat names to excess in order for the audience to keep up. It doesn’t work in print.

At the same time, , we don’t need tags and attributions like “hissed” in this sentence, because are no sibilants, and for crying out loud, avoid exclamation marks! And if you do use one, there’s no reason to explain that he or she exclaimed or shouted!!!

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” Either Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald said that, and there’s some question about which one, but it’s a true statement.

That’s something I’ve seen when I judged humor writing in newspapers many years ago. The exclamation point comes up way too often in the punch line, or as emphasis at the end of a story. One example is so bad it makes my teeth ache, but it was the last line in what I figured was supposed to be a joke…I think.

“And I looked up that day as the storm approached and saw a squirrel laying flat and holding onto the tree limb. I kept going, but gave him a word of advice. ‘Hold on tight, Mr. Bushytail, it’s a good thing you’re in a pecan tree, because this is gonna be nuts!’”

Maybe he read too much Swiss Family Robinson (1812) when he was younger! It looks like he caught some of Johann Wyss’ bad habits! This except from Wyss is a good bad example of what to avoid.

The setup. A ship sinks, the family survives and winds up on a beach to salvage what they could.

“Well done, Franz!” I cried; “these fishhooks, which you, the youngest, have found, may contribute more than anything else in the ship to save our lives by procuring food for us.”

“All these things are excellent indeed,” said I; “but my friend Jack here has presented me with a couple of huge, hungry, useless dogs who will eat more than any of us.”

“Oh, papa! They will be of use! Why, they will help us to hunt when we get on shore!” (No tag here for some reason.)

“No doubt they will, if ever we do get on shore, Jack; but I must say I don’t know how it is to be done.”

“Oh, look here, father!” cried Jack, drawing a little spyglass joyfully out of his pocket.

All right. I know this was written two hundred years ago, and the issues I’ve highlighted are more for tongue-in-cheek fun than anything else, but I’ve seen examples that are just as bad in contest entries, and the sad part is they’ve been published.

You can dissect and rewrite the scene above in a million different ways, but avoiding all those literary death traps of attributions, the overuse of the exclamation point, and for the love of god…semicolons, is step one.

So let’s review.

Don’t overuse names in dialogue.

Write dialogue as real people would speak.

No exclamation points!

Fewer tags (and I know this steps on toes). Instead, give your character something to do.

Cut as many adverbs as possible.

Learn to drive trains and diffuse bombs, just in case.

Wearing sensible shoes and a dress with the hem only a few inches above the floor, stuffy old Mrs. Murphy stepped from behind her desk and scanned the room full of bored high school juniors. I figured she couldn’t see me, because my buddy Gary Selby and I practiced the now lost art of Classroom Invisibility.

We developed that carefully honed skill by sitting still as posts in our fifth grade math class seven years earlier, and wishing ourselves invisible for an hour a day, every day, in the hope that Miss Exum wouldn’t call on us to work a New Math problem on the blackboard. After the authorities abandoned arithmetic the year before, I was a lost soul wondering exactly how letters and symbols forced themselves into simple and understandable numbers and fractions.

Each time Miss Exum called our fellow inmates to the board for their fair share of torture, Gary and I remained perfectly still and willed ourselves to blend into the back of the room. We became one with the scarred, wooden desks so old they had inkwell holes in the upper right-hand corner of the writing surface.

In fact, at the end of that year when we rose to leave math class on the last day of school, Miss Exum was shocked to see that the desks had been occupied at all.

This camouflage worked just as well years later in English class, and Miss Murphy’s eyes skipped across the room. “Now that we’ve completed this section on Emily Bronte, your assignment for the weekend is a five-page report on the topic assigned specifically for each of you. Write these down please as I read the titles. Carolyn Anderson, your paper is entitled, A Discussion of the Victorian Themes in Jayne Eyre.”

Since my name was spelled and pronounced differently than Carolyn, and I had no idea what she was talking about, I drifted off into anticipation of a squirrel hunt I’d been promised for the next day. As imaginary bushytails scampered through my empty head, Miss Murphy went through her alphabetical list of tortures until she finally came to the last two.

“Gary Selby. Social Class Separation in Wuthering Heights.”

He groaned beside me. “I only read the comic book version.”

She frowned at the two empty desks in the back and finally located him. “Selby, have you been here all this period?”

“All semester.”

“You’re out of order on my rolls.”

“Wish I could help.”

She glowered in our general direction. “That just added a page to your report, mister.”

I grinned. “Smooth move, Ex Lax.”

She heard me and checked her class roll again. “Humm. Wortham.”

We made eye contact for the first time that year. “Yes ma’am.”

“I don’t recognize you.”

“It’s me. Five foot two. Brown hair and eyes.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Maybe you should do something to make yourself distinctive.”

“I’ll grow a handlebar mustache.”

“That would work.”

I went to work on it as she considered her notes. “Your paper will be titled, The Significance of Windows in Wuthering Heights. All right class, I’ll need those on my desk when you come into class on Monday.”

The bell rang and we disappeared like puffs of smoke.

I went hunting the next morning with the Old Man and finished Saturday off by hanging out with my cousin. Sunday arrived and I squirmed beside my grandmother on a hard church pew, vaguely remembering I had something else to do.

It was about six that evening and our black and white TV was tuned to reruns of Disney’s Wonderful World of Color when I remembered I had a paper due. I found the scrap I’d scribbled on and panicked at the title.

There were windows in Wuthering Heights???

I dug out my copy from underneath a pile of Louis L’Amour and Mickey Spillane paperbacks and flipped through the chapters. Yep, the author talked incessantly about windows.

I glanced out the similar opening in my bedroom and had an idea. I wrote, “Wuthering Heights was a good book. The windows in Wuthering Heights looked outside at the sky and moors that are big fields of grass that are not like the grass in the yards we have on my street….”

It drifted on from there and writing as large as possible, sometimes only five words to a sentence, I scratched out the assignment. Mom kept that paper for years, (along with the next year’s particularly well-written ten-page research project entitled, Voodooism), but it somehow vanished through the years.

We know today that windows in Emily Bronte’s work represent the barriers in that society, and I can go on about trapped emotions, Catherine’s memories, good and evil, life and death, and how Heathcliff symbolically let Catherine’s spirit inside by opening a window, but I wonder if Emily had all that in mind as she penned the manuscript.

I’ve always maintained she just wanted to write an entertaining story about her world. What do you think?

Like Miss Emily, tell your story and let the academics hash it out later.

If you’re like most writers, (me included) you’ve been off your game for more than two weeks during thus past holiday season. In a perfect world, we should write every day, but myriad distractions can keep the keyboard cool and gathering dust.

But it isn’t over, though the ball drop is history. There are decorations to store, food to finish from the fridge, and people still in the house and seemingly putting down roots. Others drop by to visit or exchange one last present or two. Then, the weather demands a different mindset. It’s windy and too warm here in Texas to get comfortable with writing again, while those who live in cooler climates are shoveling snow or hugging the potbelly instead of adding pages.

Then that manuscript that’s been sitting unattended all this time smells stale. Listless, you go back and tinker with a sentence or two, or punch up a paragraph. Bits of dialogue come to mind and you idly scroll up and down to find a place to plug it in.

One character has been ignored to this point, so half an hour is wasted on considering whether he or she needs more attention, and where. Then something comes up and you wander away to stop and wonder why you went into that particular room.

Around here I’m still picking up behind grandcritters, changing batteries in thousands of devices because everything in the world works on those expensive little cylinders. It seems they all run dry at the same time, and just in case, I went ahead and changed those in the manual smoke alarms before they start beeping at two in the morning. Light bulbs are the bane of my existence. I don’t care how modern they are, or how long they’re supposed to last. I change them with alarming frequency, and have a couple way high out of reach that need attention.

That one might wait until 2026.

Each time I finally sit down to work, an email pops up demanding upgrades for web hosting, cyber security, lawn services, pool services, registrations, and memberships. Everyone has been waiting for the work world to get back on schedule, so emails and phone calls are coming in at firehose volume.

The TBR pile beside the bed and chair is significantly shorter, and I need to finish that last book before writing consumed all my time. Here at the Wortham Ranch, I plowed through all my McMurtry books, and the output to date by James Wade and Taylor Moore. Mark my words, these two Texans are destined for greatness.

It’s been a great break from manuscripts, though in my world short stories took precedence for a while. I finished the third act of a serialized novella and sent it in. The first two installments have been released in Saddlebag Dispatches, a fine quarterly magazine from Roan and Weatherford publishing. In fact, follow the link below the first installation entitled Anniversary.

https://issuu.com/oghmacreative/docs/summer_2024_digital_final/s/55208784

The January, 2025, edition also contained a long feature on my life and writing. You might enjoy it and the photos on page 81. A couple of the shots are by my brother, John Gilstrap. Click the link below.

https://issuu.com/oghmacreative/docs/winter_2024_digital_final/59

These magazines are also available as hard copies. Simply order them from your favorite online bookseller, and speaking of books, if you’re gonna be a writer, write. Get back in the groove before you look up and find February is knocking on the door and your book is still on high center.

While we were off, Saddlebag Dispatches kept my own creative spark alive and now I’m hammering away at What We Owe the Dead, book three in the Comancheria series. The excitement I feel for this new fictional adventure feels as fresh as when my first novel came out fourteen years ago. I

This isn’t a New Year’s resolution, it’s a job full of possibilities if you can bestir yourself and get to work.

Just do it, and have a productive new year!

During the downtime between book deadlines, I’ve been able to catch up on my reading. As many writers can attest, when you’re writing you want to read, and when you’re reading it’s easy to wish you were writing.

Not to say I haven’t been dabbling with the next manuscript, trying to reach that acceleration point where the process takes over, but with the holidays, it’s slow. Oh, I’m getting five pages a day, but they haven’t sparked yet.

So for inspiration, I picked up an old favorite off one of the shelves behind my desk. It was Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a book that should be required reading for all future Texan authors. It’s not a long novel, and I finished it in one blustery afternoon when I couldn’t force myself into going outside. Putting it back, my fingers brushed Texasville, and I was away on another adventure with his character Duane Moore in Thalia, Texas.

After finishing all five books in that saga, my appetite for McMurtry wasn’t sated. I considered his Lonesome Dove books, but decided to read some of his more contemporary novels , and that’s when tragedy struck.

See, I’m a collector. When I find an author I can’t put down, I’ll search out all their works in first edition, and I’ve been a McMurtry fan since reading All My Friends are Going to be Strangers back in high school. I have them all, and went to find the next one. But I hadn’t put them order since we had the new bookcases put in. When the Bride and I bought this new house, we hired a craftsman to install my dream shelves that now groan under the weight of bound worlds.

Once the cabinetmake finished, and my librarian daughter quit climbing the ladder and rolling back and forth on the rail, and we simply unloaded all the books from the boxes, putting them only in author order, and I’ve never gone back and sorted them.

“Good lord!”

The Bride wandered into my office a few minutes later, unimpressed by my outburst. “What have you done now?”

“I’m missing a McMurtry.”

“Are you sure?”

I blinked at her for a long moment. “Of course I’m sure. I’m standing here on the ladder, looking at all the titles and In a Narrow Grave isn’t here.”

“You sure you had that one?”

“What’s with the interrogation? I remember all my books, and the day I picked that one up from a bargain bin long before we met. It was one of those little bookstores that just bought books and stacked them around.” I momentarily drifted away. “What a wonderful store.”

“Go buy another one.”

I shook my head “This was a first edition.”

“So?”

“The last one I saw was somewhere around eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, you need to find that one.”

We searched high and low. It wasn’t mis-shelved, or behind other books. It was simply gone. I might have lost it in one of the several moves over the years, but I swear I remember seeing it on the shelf in our previous house.

But then another lightning bolt struck as I put the remainder of McMurtry’s works in order. “Good lord!”

“Really?” She wandered back in. “What now?”

“The Late Child and Somebody’s Darling are gone too!”

Que the mystery music. Dum, dum, dum.

As the camera moves in, we exchanged perplexed expressions, and then understanding dawned.

I felt faint and placed both palms against my cheeks. “Someone’s borrowed them!!!”

Her eyes widened. “Without asking!!!”

I’m sure the Bride would have taken to the fainting couch, if we had one.

“Hannah!” The name unconsciously slipped out.

The Bride shook her head at the mention of our youngest daughter’s best friend. I like to blame her for many incidents and accidents through the years from the time they were children, but the Bride yanked me back. “She’s off the hook. She doesn’t read.”

I struggled with her statement “Hannah asked me for a recommendation one time, when she was in middle school. I might have given her a book, and I doubt she ever brought it back. Maybe she likes odd numbers and took two more.”

“You wouldn’t have given her either one of those.”

“You’re right.” I struggled with the enormity of what we faced. Someone borrowed two prized possessions. Why didn’t they take the dog instead, or one of the girls? At least they would have wandered back home at some point.”

“Burglars,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe there’s some hot, black market for those two volumes.”

I don’t own a lending library. I’d learned my lesson decades earlier when I loaned my complete collection of William Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series to a good friend who loved to read. We shared many fine hours talking books and authors, until he betrayed me. He finished those first editions and ––– gave them to someone else.

“I didn’t know you wanted them back,” he answered, perplexed when I asked for them back.

They’re as gone as the Library of Alexandria.

Today there’s only three people who are on the Loan List, and two of them have their own McMurtry collections. (I wonder if they completed those by borrowing mine…nah.)

Pouring two fingers of Buffalo Trace to settle my nerves and a great sense of loss, I resumed arranging my entire library, which took some time, leaving space on the shelf to replace those missing volumes.

Now the search begins to find quality first edition replacements. It will be a hard, bitter road, but the sense of anticipation, and then joy of discovery, is something to look forward to.

So if you’re considering a Christmas present for me, you now have an idea.

With that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Good luck to the writers, and happy reading to those who enjoy settling in with a good book.

We recently had several folks over to the house for a get together…no. Let me start again.

Our house was a zoo last week when we hosted our youngest grandson’s 4th birthday party. There were about a million kids I’d never seen. I knew our own grandcritters and a handful of others and that was all. The same held true for the adults. The rest were strange little apes who set up a howl that lasted for two hours.

The kids were loud, too.

Family and friends made up part of the attendees, but there were a lot of people I’d never met.

To preserve my sanity, I found a nice corner of our outside kitchen counter and settled in with a couple of dads clutching adult beverages to watch the action. My daughters and the Bride opted for an old fashioned home birthday party. No bounce house. No petting zoo. And thank God for no Chuck E. Cheese insanity. Instead, they had old-fashioned games for the kids, including bobbing for apples, which resulted in only one near drowning.

Who would have thought they’d take their shirts off and go in headfirst?

The only thing the girls didn’t resurrect was Pin the Tail on the Donkey. With our critters, there would have been a stabbing with the tail and the addition of paramedics would have just added to the cacophony.

Conversation wandered as the party wound down. What was a group of adults watching kids have fun evolved into a mixed confederation of grownups and tweens, young people between the age of 9 and 12.

I heard the twelve-year-old ask her mother, who was our youngest daughter’s best friend growing up, why I was wearing a tee shirt that didn’t match my unbuttoned aloha shirt. “Why is Da wearing that? The colors don’t go together. He should know that.”

“That’s because Da can’t help it.” Hanna has known me since she was seven, and I’m convinced she lived with us for a couple of years when she was a teenager. She was at our house all the time. In fact, I recently asked the Bride if we’d sent her to college along with our own girls.

Hanna gave me a sympathetic smile. “He’s colorblind.”

Hanna’s daughter looked at me with a frown. “You only see in black and white?”

I sighed. I’ve spent my whole life answering that question from adults. “No, I see color all right, but it isn’t they same as what registers in your brian.”

She plucked out the tail of her blouse. “What color is this?”

“I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

“Is it gray?”

“I’d be willing to bet it’s purple or something, but it’s green to me.”

“It’s turquoise.”

“It’s green.”

“What color is mom’s shirt?”

Remembering I was talking to a kid, I bared my teeth and smiled. “I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

I’ve been caught in that endless loop before with those who can’t seem to grasp that I don’t perceive what everyone else sees.

The Bride picked out my clothes each morning when I worked full time and had to wear suits and slacks. As the years passed and I moved up in our organization, seniority provided some leniency and adjusted my wardrobe to jeans, white shirts, and a blue or black sports coat. There was a time before we were married when I dressed myself.

More than once I walked into my office to find my secretary with her hand out. “Give me that tie. It doesn’t match.”

“Last week you said it matched this shirt.”

“Nope. Your other shirt is a different shade. Use the black tie on the back of your door today, or don’t wear one at all.”

Color is an issue in writing, also. I’ve described sunrises and sunsets, the light on trees and vegetation, or the changing color of rocks, hill, or mountains without ever seeing what registers in most people’s brains. It comes from asking the Bride wha see sees as we pass, or sit on the edge of a drop-off to watch the sunset.

If I describe the subtle colors of a Craftsman house restored to it’s original paint scheme, it’s a cheat, because I looked it up, or asked her.

She gets those questions all the time. “What color are those clouds?”

“Salmon. Pinkish. Tope. Chartreuse. Vermilion. Persimmon.” She really doesn’t include all those at one time, but they’re examples of what I hear.

“You’re making those up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Persimmon. If I don’t know the colors, how is persimmon going to help? What are those other colors I always have to ask you about?”

“Mauve. Coral. Lavender.”

“Just words. What color is mauve?”

“Dusty rose.”

“Sigh. Roses are red, or yellow So you mean red.”

“No.”

“Give me another color.”

She pointed at her shirt. “This is coral.”

It looked vaguely orange to me, so I gave up.

We recently hiked through Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle, and I spent half of my time asking her and the couple we were with about their descriptions of the canyon walls, or the vastly different layers we passed. As they walked ahead, I stopped and wrote it down in a small notebook.

The desert scrub plants I saw as silver, gray, or brown came in subtle shades I didn’t understand. I had to write them down, too, and when I set my novel, A Dead Man’s Laugh there, I resorted to my almost indecipherable notes.

For example, a creosote bush has, according to my companions, dark green leaves with brown-burgandy fruit. I saw waxy dark brown leaves with even darker brown buds. That’s because I’m red/green challenged.

It made elementary school art a living hell. My grades weren’t good because the crayons in class didn’t have their labels and I had no idea what colors I was using. trees were brown, grass probably turquoise, and people’s hair most likely began the punk movement.

According to Color Blind Awareness:

Being ‘red/green color blind’ means people with it can easily confuse any colors which have some red or green as part of the whole color. So someone with red/green color blindness is likely to confuse blue and purple because they can’t ‘see’ the red element of the color purple.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for me. I can identify the basic colors, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc, if they’re neon bright, but subtle shades leave me in the gray dust.

The Bride, the editor I sleep with, corrected those descriptions in A Dead Man’s Laugh to match what she saw in the canyon and I sent the manuscript off.

We always talk about using all our senses in writing. The scent and taste of chocolate. That one I can easily identify. The squeak of metal as a swing set moving in the wind. A smooth tabletop, or the hard slap of a gunshot.

For those of us who are colorblind, these descriptions are hard and we have to find a way around them.

I sincerely hope you don’t suffer the same malady.