I was cleaning carp out behind the house one afternoon when the rawboned neighbor guy walked over. He had been fiddling on a junk car. “Nice ones,” he said, looking down at the fish. And they were, a bodacious passel of Ictiobus bubalus, as my carp-shooting buddy Mills and I like to call them when we’re all dressed up in camo on our secret log, sweating in the sun and smelling of fish slime and Off!. A little Latin to offset the caveman behavior and stink. Mills got me into bow fishing, and now it’s a problem. I sneak off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills smokes them up with apple and hickory in his old concrete smoker, but first I have to clean them. The neighbor stood there silent while I sawed off heads and peeled out guts. Every now and then he took a drag on his Marlboro and a pull on his Pabst. Finally, he spoke.

“So. Yer a writer.”

“Well, yeah, I mean…”

“You do poetry?”

“Well, I’m not much of a…”

“I do some poetry.”

“I, uh…”

“Good shit.”

He walked back to his car. We never spoke again.

Here’s something from the Young Adult book I’m working on:

If you see me you will know me because I wear a leather vest sewn from the hides of one dead badger and two dead deer, all skinned by myself and also I stripped the lettering from that old car and stitched it to the vest across my shoulder blades using copper wire so that in polished steel you can read my name and know it: [TO BE REVEALED LATER]

There are also two other possible book thingies in the hopper. Grateful to be busy.

He’s always out front talking up a storm, but in the back you hear all the ringing clang and clamor and in there you’ll find his wife Freda at the bellows, who is 4137 Freeder dr cross of Old town hall, hemlock

P.S. To my friends John & Julie, thanks for playing along.

might be better to delete this, since the sentence indicates “lowland” and this seems confusing, since it’s visually bringing the reader to a creek bottom only to find treetops, so to speak. I suspect you may be referring to the bottomland (low-lying land along a watercourse, says Webster’s) around Cotter Creek but again, the wording seems confusing here when you try to envision it.

from Le Tourneau company of Peoria; see old ads at, e.g., http://www.classicmachinery.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=198

: there is a hyphenated adjective but here the function is passive verb with adverb, hence no hyphen

I’d suggest something like “the World Court in The Hague,” since The Hague itself is a city of a half-million people. The World Court is technically the International Court of Justice, and the city also of course holds the International Criminal Court, but both of those names are long-winded, of course, so the shorthand World Court seems better. Could even just say that and drop “The Hague” altogether

And this represents only a page or two…

I have nothing to add to what I wrote in this post from a happier day:

But this I firmly believe: if hell ever shows up at my doorstep, I hope there will be journalists on the order of Anthony Shadid who will – at risk beyond any amount of compensation and far removed from the swivel chairs and golden microphones of the studios – do their best to set the story free.

Yes, those two typos were for fun.