Alec Clayton Do you have a friend who is a writer and who has published one or more books either with a small, independent press or self-published, and have you read your friend’s book(s) and enjoyed them enough to honestly recommend them? If so, then please do so. Recommend them publicly on Facebook and/or other social media …
At some point not too long ago I created a document with the opening lines of all my books. I had forgotten about it but I just now came across it. You might enjoy reading them: “Painting can be an evil mistress. She can love you tender and she can love you raunchy, and she …
I was sitting on my couch looking out my window at the trees and the houses across the street, and I started to mentally write a description of what I was seeing as if it were a scene in a novel or short story. This is a typical thing for me to do. Then, I …
by Alec Clayton My dad died 35 years ago, and my mother died 38 years ago. This week I received in the mail a large box of family memorabilia from Pat Parish Ackland, one of my many nieces. Inside were photographs, more than half of which were of people I don’t recognize, and newspaper clippings, …
One More Day review After reading Diane Chiddister’s debut novel One More Day, it is almost impossible to believe that Chiddister has never worked in or been a resident in an assisted living home or known a loved one who worked in or lived in an assisted living situation. How else, could she know so …
My longtime friend, the painter Thornton Willis, died June 15, 2025 from complications due to COVID and pneumonia. As soon as I heard about his death from his wife, Vered Lieb, I wrote a brief memory of my friendship with Thornton and sent it to her. She immediately wrote back asking if she could get …
Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett, the guy who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for …
What’s in a name One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters—names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. Like Driver and Punkin, the Lumpkin twins’ parents in Tupelo. The inspiration for giving them nicknames (if I remember correctly I never called them …
Thirty years ago, give or take a few years, a couple lived on our street who would not speak to us. If we tried to engage with them in any way, even such a little a thing as to nod and smile in their direction, they would look away or stare right through us and …
… So you read the first book, and then you got to that time period in the next one, would you wonder why there was no mention of the trial? It was too big to be ignored. It would be like a story about Money, Mississippi in 1955 with no mention of Emmett Till. So I had to retell the story but make it different—and believably so. I wrestled with that problem but finally came up with a simple solution. …