On boots and bars and motorbikes...

I mentioned this in my last submission: blank screens for three days, trying like hell to write just 500 words. We were asked to read a couple of poems from "WEE-satch" and form a story around them. It fought me like a pissed off cat, but here's the result: “You need to let yourself get hit a few times so you can see it’s not so bad or so you can see how bad it really is.”             Those words somehow seemed to make perfect sense as Jesse stood there holding his ratty old football on the edge of the practice field. After all, his big brother Jake had said them, and he knew what he was talking about. He was the starting quarterback on the varsity team, and Jesse was certain his big brother knew everything there was to know about football. Jake had been star athlete for as long as Jesse could remember. No matter what sport he played, he always rose to the top — baseball, basketball, soccer, wrestling — but where he tru...

It has been a while, I know. But I've never been far away from the written word. Not at all in fact. I was asked for my fiction writing class final to write a personal narrative on my experience through the class. It's a bit long for this format, I know, but I thought it worth the share: Call me arrogant, ignorant or perhaps even foolish — I’ve been called worse, today in fact — but I truly thought this whole writing journey would be a cinch. I’d turn in a few words and everyone would be so unimaginably impressed, publishers would beat a path to my door. The college would quilt me with degrees. I’d be the new voice of my generation, the Redneck Laureate. Everybody would want to say they once knew me… I’d earned my chops, I thought. I’d been writing professionally longer than most of my fellow classmates had been alive. Considering I can date that back to the late 1980s, it was hardly unimaginable, at least that’s how I pictured all those phantom writers in my online cl...