Things that are making me happy.  Cheers:
1. Justified.  A really kickass show starring  Timothy Olyphant.  He plays a US Marshal named Raylan Givens who gets reassigned to his homestate of Kentucky after shooting a gunrunner in Florida “justified”, he says, because the man drew first.  Givens is an old style lawman, throwing down what the [...]

Like Saint John of Patmos.  Except I have fewer many-headed and horned beasts in my writing.  I say fewer.

My exile has done me a lot of good.  And a lot has happened.  Chief among these things is that I just finished my third book.  It came in at 102,128 words.  Shorter than I anticipated, but [...]

I’m considering abandoning most of the networking sites I frequent.  This will stay up because it’s my author website, but other than that, no more tweets, no more facebooking.  Probably limit the blogs I read to the literary ones.  It’s not you, it’s me.  Well, it’s you a little.  I’m putting myself through hell by [...]

Gray skies again in Riverside.  We’ve had a lot of rain, enough to make your cowboy hat-wearing protagonist get comically splashed by passing cars, and enough to make him thankful he brought his leather hat. (I’m like those old Batman action figures.  I come in Original, Rainproof, Snowproof, and “Jesus fuck, it’s 106 degrees and [...]

Taking a leap from the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, presented to me and you by 20SB, I give you my year in reading, approximately.  I say approximately because there’re a few here I can’t remember if I read in 2009 or the close of 2008.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  The only non-fiction [...]

A little late, but I just stumbled upon this article at Huffington Post, detailing the suppression of footage that followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  You can find a video and smaller article from the author here.  The video is graphic.  Then there’s this photo series at the Denver Post, following a new soldier [...]

There is a tendency for people to call me by my last name.  I don’t know why this is.  Furthermore, they have a tendency to shorten my name to Shonk, or Shonky.  I hate this with a passion.  What I don’t hate, though, is when my name gets turned into a verb, which has now [...]

I imagine some of you folks aren’t familiar with that name.  Let’s rectify that.

That Evening Sun is an adaptation of one of Gay’s short stories.  I can’t believe I haven’t heard about it until now.
Here’s an excerpt of Provinces of Night, in my opinion, his best work.  In Provinces and in his first, The Long [...]

It’s the colors that I remember most.  The room is dim but lit sourcelessly. I can see the walls, cream colored, and the sheets I’m tangled in as pink like a conch.  And your hair, dark as the corners of the room, dark as the door.  You get into bed and I put my arm [...]