Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Until recently, my only experience with audio books was through the cassette player in my old Subaru, listening to some Louis L'Amour tapes my mom loaned me for the long drive from Montana to Philadelphia. Maybe it was the road noise, or maybe it was Louis L'Amour, but somewhere on a particularly tedious stretch through Indiana, I concluded that audio books were not really my cup of tea. Listening to books, my attention tends to wander. Sometimes half a chapter will go by before it returns. By then I'm not sure who's shooting who, and trying to rewind to just the right spot when you're driving is sort of like texting when you're driving -- the sport of fools. Also, I have this problem when male readers do women's voices, and vice versa. It just seems faintly ridiculous, and takes me out of the story. But recently my friend Yvonne showed me the wonders of the New York Public Library 's audio book collection. For a flat fee you get access to thousands of t...

So little is certain in this crazy world. But one great truth remains as constant as the stars: When two rednecks say they have Bigfoot in a freezer , they don't. I mean, this is pretty basic. And yet for a week or so, even reputable news services were covering the claims of Ricky Dyer and Mathew Whitton as news. Some even ran the ludicrous picture supplied by the pair, showing what appeared to be a Planet of the Apes mask, a couple of doormats and a platter of link sausages jammed into a freezer. Not sure what the garden hose was for. But that's Sasquatch alright. I'd recognize him anywhere. Now it falls to a web site devoted to Bigfoot-related dumb-assery to set the record straight. "I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot," wrote Steve Kulls of the Sasquatchdetective site. Science triumphs again. You'd think this sort of thing might somehow embarrass Mr. Kulls, but I guess if you run around calling yoursel...

It is with great regret that I learn of Hasbro's plans to market the game of Clue without the revolver. That little gun was one of my favorite game pieces of all time, second only to the iron in Monopoly . (I'm not talking about the lame card at left, by the way, but the little metal gun that looked like you could load it with little metal bullets). Getting rid of the gun is a puzzling choice by Hasbro, since statistics indicate that firearms remain a favorite means of homicide among Americans. Certainly guns figure in more slayings than trophies, dumbbells and poison, all of which Hasbro has seen fit to add. If the company really wanted to bring the game into the 21st century, it might have changed the gun to a Glock 19 and added a pimped-out Escalade as one of the rooms. Now we're talking murder, baby.

They say that when your plot starts to flag, you should kill somebody. In the story, I mean. Fine. But if I did that, pretty soon I wouldn't have any characters left. Now I'm in the last stretch of this book I started a year ago and about the only thing I can think of is a large meteorite wiping out all my characters except for the protagonist, who is left to wander away contemplating vague epiphanies. That's fine too, except it's not really a meteorite type of book. It's more of a Fried Green Tomatoes type of book, without the lesbians. And, I'm beginning to understand, without the sales potential. I'm really not sure what I was thinking when I started it. But now it's acquired a life of its own. A crude sweater has taken shape, missing a hole for the head, and still I keep knitting away. But such is the glamor of the writing life. You hammer blindly at the keyboard, hoping there's an invisible muse out there leading you along by the nose, and that ...

Finally home after a 3,600-mile road trip, with a new resolve to post here more frequently, finally finish that damned novel, and mow the lawn, which has gone primitive during my two-week absence. That last will have to wait, since it's raining now. You can mow a lawn when it's wet, or you can mow it when it's a foot high, but you can't do both. So, to the blog. I renewed ties with a lot of friends and family and was lucky enough to catch my home state of Montana at its best: dry sunny days and cool nights scented with hay or lupine or alpine fir, depending on where I happened to be. The only bad weather to be seen was in Wyoming. No problem, since I was just passing through. Back here in Wichita, where summer is not the gentlest season, I'm thankful to have missed the past couple weeks of 100-plus heat and the woolen humidity so common in the Midwest. September can't come soon enough. Above is a picture of yours truly at the stick of a Dimona motor glider, soa...