The short fiction of j hardy carroll
It is not my usual practice to share work in progress, but I wanted to post this to illustrate how research will often do far more than create believable filler for a story. My character, Hawser, finds himself back in his hometown of Tucson. He is back at the boarding house where he spent his…
It’s pretty fun (an a little embarrassing) to look back on my first forays into the impenetrable jungle of fiction writing. I was like a guy on vacation in the tropics who wanders off the path from the hotel to the beach, takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a stew pot surrounded by…
World War Two is making a comeback. Look at the movies. Unbroken, The Imitation Game and Fury, all within this last year. Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, The Pacific, not to mention the upcoming Mighty Eighth. Books, too. The Book Thief, Flags of Our Fathers, Flyboys, In Harm’s Way. World War Two has long been considered a good war, a just war. Evil was…
In the early days of the Überhaus site I liked to experiment with format. I came across a post I did sometime in 1998 that was constructed of framesets that randomly linked to one another. For those who don’t remember, a frameset was an HTML hack that allowed multiple web pages to display on the…
Everybody has heroes. Baseball players, soldiers, fictional characters on TV and in movies. Hell, even actors (hear that, Humphrey Bogart?). Writers have heroes too, and not just Ernest Fucking Hemingway. Denis Johnson? Annie Proulx? Sure. I have a few. Michel Tournier, Trevanian, Patrick O’Brian and John D. MacDonald. But one of the greatest is Robert…
You know when you see a movie where the protagonist stops in the middle of a crosswalk and there are few piano notes and the camera does a slow pull-in and the guy starts to smile? And then the music swells and there’s a montage of typing, printing sheets, biting a pencil, crossing things out, going for…
Here’s another one from September 1998. It was one of those long, end-of-summer nights that filled me with restlessness. I remember wandering all over downtown Portland, which back then still had its share of transient hotels and seedy dive bars. I was restless when I got home, so I fired up the giant 486 with…
New Year’s Eve. For many folks, that means one thing: TIME TO DRINK UP. Not me, though. I didn’t know the extent of my drinking problem until stopped drinking. I was clued in to how bad it was when I told my friends I had sobered up. Every single one of them reacted the same way. “Oh thank God.”…
Guess where I am? Yep. 500 miles per hours, the speed at which (according to John D. MacDonald) a .45 bullet travels. Travel is always strange for me. Strange and delightful. Perhaps this is because airplanes are one of the only places where I see large groups of people reading books (albeit “airport books.”). I make…
Having just concluded reading Little Big Man to my daughter, I have a new and deeper appreciation for Thomas Berger. For whatever reason, he has been largely ignored by modern literary culture–so much, in fact, that I was unaware he died back in July. The man wrote twenty-two novels of many different types, each one a paragon…