Corragion Audacity in Writing Award
About my books.
All masterminds have discriminated against me because I write long books, am verbose, and my DNA does not allow one word answers.
About half of my books have a historical fiction background (which has a dollop or two of my own take on how history should have been).
The other half of my books would be best described as action thrillers, e.g. Gog and Magog or Finders Keepers, Losers Weep. I admit to being opinionated and to have an axe to grind in each of my books. So, hang it in your ear.
I tend to write in my books much as I talk — rather professorial and with an obscure wit (I prefer “dry” wit). I am also sarcastic. So, hang it in your ear.
About me.
I am old and crotchety, almost always see both sides of a question or issue and take a middle position; i.e. there is no one for whom I can vote.
I can’t find stuff; my wife hides it. Computers are the work of the devil. If I had my way, we would be talking through tin cans connected with strings. When I was a boy, our telephone number was 381. Can’t see any good reason for such complicated numbers, PINs, or logins that plague us nowadays. Another work of the devil. Incidentally, I don’t believe in the devil, pixie dust, luck, magic, or most politicians (maybe all of that ilk). I do believe in science, doubt, experimentation, and questioning authority, even in print; but I do make an effort not to be a true curmudgeon.
I am too much of Christian to be a Republican, too much of a lover of children to accept the Democrats who foster the murder of millions of babies, and every Independent who has run in my lifetime was either mean, stupid, ignorant, or lazy. I have no problem with “others” — people with different skin color, slant of their eyes, of cut of their jibs. I don’t care where people came from or if they talk funny. I am decidedly not politically correct, never accept things at face value as expressed by proponents of any stripe, and would rather be right than popular. As the old song goes, “And, I wonder why nobody don’t like me… or is the fact that I’m ugly.”
I do not like political, religious, or ideological slogans, or mantras — too simple. I prefer to turn the rock over and look at the underside. In my books I like to expose some of the dirt and worms.
I am a navy vet (the recent unpleasantness in Viet Nam), a surgeon by training and disposition — to cut is to cure — and am a doer, more than a thinker, despite my outward professorial demeanor. I am a worker, but not all that good at obeying orders when I see a better way to do things. I have been a yard maintenance worker, service station attendant and inadequate mechanic, a teamster, a logger, a brig doctor, deep diving officer, a medical officer in a mental hospital, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, and a teacher of several kinds of martial arts. Oh, and a writer.
My personal motto is borrowed from Seneca. He borrowed it from Hannibal: During the most trying period of his crossing the alps to attack the Romans, his generals told him it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant or with an army. He responded (as rendered from Punic into Latin by Seneca), “Aut inveniam viam aut faciam.” — English: “I will find a way or make one.”