Title of Blog Rings True Yet Again

I received my very first check for a piece of writing of any kind...and the next night, my 25 year-old television gave up the ghost.

Plain wrong as it is to spend cash born of a book on a new TV -- hey, man, it's baseball season.

Stop lookin' at me like that.

DZ Allen's Muzzle Flash

DZ Allen was kind enough to post a story I submitted to Muzzle Flash, the fine online Flash arm of pulp mag Out Of The Gutter.

Check out the link on the right for "Thurston Ray" -- then bookmark Muzzle Flash. You'll want to make it a regular stop.

Movie: The Aura (2005)

Art-house noir from Argentina.

An epileptic taxidermist (really) gets a chance to live his fantasy of committing a heist by inserting himself into someone else’s scheme, and of course he doesn’t know the half of what’s really going on.

The proceedings are so hushed that every curse is like a gun going off, and every gunshot like a bomb.

The corners don’t all meet up as they might pretend to in an American product, but this one’ll stay with you.

Recommended.

Best Writing Advice

TODAY'S best writing advice comes from the great Charles Willeford -- care of Bill, retired Master Sergeant, in The Woman Chaser:

“…I know this much about writing. You have to write something….After you get enough pages done, you have something to read. If you can read it you can revise it. If you revise it enough times, you come up with something pretty good. All writing is like that; it couldn’t be any other way.”

The Art of Losing, by Keith Dixon

Keith Dixon's The Art of Losing is the best novel I've read this year.

Degenerate gamblers hatch a harebrained scheme to take some money from some bad, bad men; the plan fails, but too late to do anyone any good, and one of the plotters turns out to be a weak sister.

Sounds familiar, but it's not.

The characters buy into the scheme with the same confidence they would have betting their rent--it probably won't work, but it might. The bookmaker's disgust for their clientele has never been so well captured. And that weak sister? I can't think of another character in a noir who cracks the way this guy cracks--leading to the finale, which left me with the deep Catholic jitters.

Dixon has one previous novel, Ghostfires. After reading The Art of Losing, you'll want to get your hands on that one too, and God help anyone who gets in your way.

Greetings

Here goes nuthin'.