June 22nd, 2009

According to the folks at Hallmark Films “we may be able to get this one (Thunder Over the Prairie) set up this fall!!!” I certainly hope that’s the case. People don’t always mean what they say. What a blessing it would be though. Howard and I were guests this morning on a radio program out of Sacramento called Insight and spoke quite extensively about the four lawmen in the new book. I’ve got another signing coming up this weekend and will be talking to book buyers about the title then too. I’m doing everything I can think of to keep the momentum going for this tome. I really like the book, but the window of time needed to get everyone else to like it is very short. Soon, very soon, it will be old news. It’s moments like these that make me wish I had gone into some other line of work. Maybe I should have been a lawyer. Not a dishonest, grotesquely rapacious pimp like the one who let my brother go down, but a good lawyer motivated by compassion and concern. I didn’t always have such low opinions of lawyers. The word “lawyer” used to conjure up images of an upstanding, tireless advocate for the little guy. An Atticus Finch or Clarence Darrow, who was passionately dedicated to truth and justice. I think the law has been bastardized by a band of hucksters (like the dishonest, grotesquely rapacious pimp and his staff who let my brother go down) who have made it so cryptic, so utterly puzzling and arcane that Moses and Judge Judy working around the clock for twenty years could not understand it. The average person walking into a courtroom (like my parents and I) have long abandoned any expectation of justice. Because the American legal system has been turned into nothing more than a baroque multitiered Vulcan chess game where the rules have become too intricate for the average citizen to play and where the loser is no longer the guilty party but rather the least clever of the two. Okay, maybe I don’t want to be a lawyer and it’s too late to change careers now anyway. So, it’s back to writing and the struggles inherit with that. By the way, did I mention Thunder Over the Prairie is in book stores everywhere?