A Southern Missive

 I woke early this morning with much to do before I drive to Texarcana. Thankfully, the rain has let up and there’s a beautiful moon in the sky. I thought today I’d write about another writer, Karen Harmon. She is the head of the English department at Delta Community College here, and she has been very patient with me and a great help in my teaching at Delta. Besides that, she is just a great person.  A good writer in her own right, she is fortunate to have studied writing under James Lee Burke at her university. Here is a summary of her novel that recently was published. I think it will do very well. This is the short description on the back cover.

EGG-SHELL THIN Karen Harmon

Adrienne Hargrove has always been aware that humans are fragile creatures
walking an egg-shell thin line between innocence and deviance. Her own life
is a chain of guilt from poor choices she’s made. But as a private investigator in
the Deep South, she thought she had seen it all. That was before she was
hired by Catriona Kirby, wife of Galen Kirby, a doctor in a small Louisiana
town. Adrienne knew she was looking into the possibility the doctor was
involved in a drug scam with the sheriff. She even knew there was a possibility the doctor was involved in the murder of an ex-girlfriend. What she never
imagined was that Dr. Galen Kirby was a serial killer deeply involved in a baby
black market scheme. And in their wildest nightmares, neither Adrienne nor
Catriona could have imagined that he was producing his own babies to sell.

KAREN HARMON is the liberal arts coordinator and
an English professor at a junior college in northeast
Louisiana. She studied creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. Her hobbies include raising horses and traveling.

www.PublishAmerica.com

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the Books-A-Million in Texarcana, Texas. Will be another sell-out, I’m sure. Hopefully, I can get a bunch of teacher contacts for future programs.  I tried working the phone on that, but I started too late today to do it effectively. Most writers don’t realize how hard it is to network and how much time it takes.  It requires several hours of work for every hour of signing you do. Today, I finished up an editing project, and did more research on Jim Limber, running down more primary and secondary sources.
Tonight, I decided to post a couple of good quotes on writing and writers. Here is one by Faulkner:

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

Charles Colton said, “To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.”

Today has been spent researching and preparing for my college classes which I must go teach in just a few minutes. My office is trashed. I’ve got to get myself organized. I’m spending too much time looking for stuff! Anyway, in today’s entry I wanted to share the fruits of my research this morning: some quotes of Ernest Hemingway that I gleaned from Hatcher’s book, Papa Hemingway. Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy are without a doubt my favorite writers. I’ve read everything in print by both authors–and more than once. It was because of a reading of “A Clean Well Lighted Place” in my college 102 class that I became an English major and plunged headlong into literature and into writing.

“Every man’s life ends the same way, and it is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.”

“[W]riting is the only thing that makes me feel that that I’m not wasting my time sticking around.”

“Writing at its best is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone, and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity or the lack of it each day.”

“How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you’re a writer? You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously. But once you get the hurt and can handle it, consider yourself lucky—that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is faithful to his laboratory. You can’t cheat or pretend. You have to excise the hurt honestly.”

“Life is short and the years run away and you must do everything you really want to.”

“Only three things in my life I’ve really liked to do—hunt, write and make love.”