Pet Peeves

This week I decided to jot down a few of my pet peeves. I don't know why because it's been a good week. My health is good, I sold some books, and beer didn't take a price hike, although it seems like everything else at the grocery store did.

Let's face it. As humans, most of us have a unique way of dealing with the large problems that life throws at us from time to time, but it seems like it's always the small, mundane things that really piss me off! Here are just a few of them:

• People standing in the aisle of the grocery store gabbing and blocking everyone else from getting by.
• Having to peel off the unnecessary stickers that are on fruits and vegetables.
• Parents letting their children scream at the top of their lungs in public places.
• People at the grocery store checkout who are talking on an expensive cellphones, and their bodies are covered in pricey tattoos and body piercings, but they are paying with Food Stamps.
• My wife opens a bag of chips just enough to get her small munchkin hand in, but it's impossible for my man hand to retrieve any chips for myself.
• People who smack and chew gum that eventually ends up on the bottom of someone's shoe.
• Prisons that allow the inmates to lift weights, only to release them into society bigger and stronger than when they went in.
• Women's handbags. Items (example: car or door keys) go in, but are never seen or heard from again until months later.
• Rachel, the robo-caller from credit card services, informing me that this is the last courtesy call I will receive to get a lower interest rate. I begin to get a little irritated after receiving a thousand prior calls that woke me up from my afternoon nap.
• Stepping in dog poop in my yard, and I don't even own a dog.

These are just a few of the irritants that invade my everyday life and I'm sure you have a list of your own. Fortunately, when these things occur, I have an outlet through writing. I just sit down at the keyboard and write, and I can assure you, in my story, someone is going to die!

Have some pet peeves to share? Comments are always welcome!

Book Trailers

Souls of the Desert 

A Mystery

The Monkey Toy

A Thriller

Holiday Rush

It's a busy time of the year for me between working on books and enjoying the holidays.

My next novel, "Souls of the Desert" is currently in the hands of my focus group who will render their opinions and suggestions within the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, I will get a thumbs up on the book and that will mean few changes. Their input is invaluable, and I, as the author, must determine the if the points of critique merit changes in the story. In the meantime, my talented wife, Susan, is working tirelessly on the book cover and promotional book trailer. If everything goes as planned, it should be published in January 2012. I'm very excited to get this one out to all my readers, and as a matter of fact, I can hardly wait!

As far as the holidays are concerned, Thanksgiving is a no brainer. We just cook enough food so we can have leftovers for a solid week. My wife and I are planning an escape to the Big Easy for Christmas. My pal, Bob, and his wife, Cindy, own a second home in New Orleans, so we'll impose and sponge off of them for a few days. After all, isn't that what good friends are for? But seriously, we did get an official invite from them and I need to do some research around New Orleans for a future thriller that keeps rattling around in my head.

I'd love to hear about your holiday plans. I invite you to share your comments below!

Gone, But Not Forgotten

As I mentioned in my last post, my freshman year in college started off by having to take fundamental courses that I was not overly enthused about.

The dreaded English 101 was at the top of my "uninterested" list.

To my surprise, Professor Mitchell was a different kind of English teacher that I had not encountered in the past. She wasn't focused on grammar, sentence structure, and the other building blocks of English, but was geared more toward creativity. She was all about writing stories, and testing our ability to tell a good story through writing, whether it be fiction or nonfiction.

I received high marks for my off-color humor and graphic detail in the stories I wrote. She never mentioned all of the misspelled words or incomplete sentences. It was all about good storytelling.

She wrote a note on my final exam (for which I got an "A"), that said, Continue writing. You're good at it.


Emeritus Grace Clayton Mitchell passed away in 2006. Although, I never saw her again after that Spring in 1972, her encouraging words remained in the back of my mind until I started my first novel, almost thirty years later.

Out of the Navy and Back to School

I managed to survive the Navy and the Vietnam War. Although, I didn't encounter any Viet Cong, thank God, there were some tense times sitting on top of 8 million gallons of jet fuel in a war zone.

Before I left Vung Tao in 1971 to be discharged from the Navy, I received a letter from my mother. Enclosed was a letter that had been sent to me from Uncle Sam. It stated that I had been drafted into the Army. The letter was a little late, so I had managed to dodge the bullet, literally.

Back home in Joplin, Missouri and in civilian status, I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. My friend, Bob, who had been discharged out of the service earlier, turned me on to college. Since Uncle Sam was graciously paying for it via the G.I. Bill, it sounded like a hell of a better idea than getting a job, so I enrolled right away.

Unfortunately, I found out you couldn't just take any courses you wanted to, because there are such things as prerequisites. English 101 was one of them, and I was definitely bummed out about that!

I had no idea this would be the class that would pave the way to a writing career many years later.

The Beginnings of a Writer (Continued)

It has been an exciting week! After I posted the first part of The Beginnings of a Writer, my book, The Monkey Toy, has become available on Amazon.com. I did make time this week to write on my next book, too, and now it is time to continue telling you about my friend, Bob.

Yes, as teenagers, we wrote stories and put them in comic book format. Our stories and drawings were quite amusing. Mine looked like stick figures, and Bob's resembled da Vinci. As the summer ended and the drudgery of another school year began, I guess the stories must have ended up in the trash.

As I look back on that summer, I wish we would have had the foresight to have kept the stories and drawings. Both of us are now in our sixties and are still friends. It would've been such a hoot!