Aliases
Occasionally, I get asked why I’ve written under various pennames. The answer can be simple or complex, but either way it carries on a great literary tradition. Mark Twain, of course, was actually Samuel L. Clemens, Lewis Carroll was really Charles Dodgson and George Orwell was Eric Arthur Blair in reality. Likewise, numerous women have […]
A New Acquaintance
One of the things I enjoy about history is getting to meet such interesting people. In researching Civil War journalism for a talk as part of Angelo State University’s Civil War Lecture Series this week, I first met Peter Wellington Alexander. I was drawn to him because modern historians have called him the Confederacy’s Ernie Pyle, […]
Lomax Is Back
For an author, seeing one of your books return to print is like running into an old friend that you haven’t seen for years. So, I am excited to see the return of The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax, starting this summer. I wrote three books in this series in the mid-1990s, and the first of those, […]
Writing Influences: Mark Twain
For Christmas in 1960, my Aunt Ella Mae and Uncle Joe Whitworth gave me a copy of Huckleberry Finn. To my recollection that was my first exposure to Mark Twain, the last of the three writers I would say influenced my writing ambitions as a youth. Since I didn’t have a large personal library then, […]
Cover Art
When painters or sculptors finish their artistic endeavors, they have something to display. When writers finish a project, they have a stack of typewritten pages, nothing they can frame for the wall or display on a coffee table. That’s why it is always nice for a writer to see what the publisher is planning for […]
Writing Influences: Ernie Pyle
Probably the most influential writer in my life was Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and war correspondent for Scripps-Howard. Of course, he died at the end of World War II before my birth, but I could find his collected works of WWII newspaper columns in the Pease Elementary library when I was in grade […]
Writing Influences: J. Frank Dobie
Writing is a solitary occupation, just you and the blank screen or, before word processors, the blank page. Some would say reading is solitary as well, but I would disagree because you get to meet such interesting people, either the authors themselves or their subjects, through the printed or electronic pages they produce. Consequently, most […]