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Read "Gone and Also ... A Work in Progress" | Claude Hall
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Commentary June 6, 2011 Good people, good news! Chuck Blore is heading home to continue his rehab. Glad to see this. Strokes are not a whole bunch of fun. Of course, cancer and those other ailments are not any picnic. At this stage in life, you just weather through as best you can, sip a cool one if you can, and fight the good fight because you can. Speaking of fighting, I’ve become a big sissy in this elder stage of my life. Lord, but do I hate it when they stick a needle in my arm to draw blood. These people at the clinic up the street are vampyres. I know it for a fact. And now you’ve got Lee Baby Simms and George Wilson and Samual H. Hale teamed up and trying to pick a fight with someone I know and put me in the middle and I’m resisting like crazy. Too old for this kind of nonsense! Fight if you will, but not on my doorstep. Of course, being a gossipy soul, I would like to be kept in the loop. There’s little in this world to compare with a knock’em down and drag’em out brawl. I will never forget the fight one night in Port of Call in Greenwich Village. Me and Raul Cardenas were peacefully drinking something horrible like Ballentine Ale and, no, I did not start that fight either! Those things – battles, especially radio battles -- used to be a lot of fun, though! And we had some good times. Chuck Blore, Bill Stewart, Jack Thayer, Gary Allyn, Kahn Hamon, Ron Jacobs and Robert W. Morgan, Joey Reynolds, Ted Atkins, Red Jones who has decided to retire after at least a million years behind the mike (he was the first DJ, to my knowledge, to play an Elvis record in Texas on the air, which means, of course, he was second in the world behind Dewey Phillips). Never a dull moment. And I’d like to believe that all of us, you and me and most of the men and women in radio, achieved something valid. Noble. Worthwhile. I would definitely be sad if I thought that all we did, you and me, didn’t amount to a hill of beans. No, I believe we mattered and we mattered a lot. God bless Chuck Blore! To your good health, sir, I dedicate my first Diet Pepsi of the day! Today, however, my big fight is to get some of my novels published. And I may have some better news about that in the near future. Some of you, of course, read these things when I posted them, chapter by chapter, on my blog. If not, soon you’ll have a chance. You want to see something interesting? Checkout Amazon.com and search for Claude Hall. I haven’t done this in quite a while. Appears that my western “Huecos” and my science fiction novel “Down on the Corner of Earth” – both printed in so-called trade editions -- have bitten the dust, as us old western writers say, and are no longer for sale. Pity. “Huecos” got a lot of great response, including from Bobby Vee and Tom Donahue’s widow, Raechel who commented “laughed my ass off.” “This Business of Radio Programming” is still for sale. Both the original and the reprint by Dan O’Day. My new project? To move the greater majority of my books over to Amazon.com as eBooks which you can download really cheap via Kindle, iPad, or computer versions. I plan eventually to put even “Huecos” in a Kindle version. Why not? I didn’t exactly sell a terrible amount of copies as a printed trade version. Whups! I later noticed that printed copies of “Huecos” and “Down on the Corner of Earth” are still for sale (but ain’t, I guess, since I’ve certainly received no royalties in more than a year). The books were listed together with Claude this and Hall that. So, I don’t really know what’s going on at the moment. But Dan O’Day paid me more than $260 last year on “This Business of Radio Programming,” so it’s still selling after more than 30 years! Amazon.com has it, too. It’s straight from the “horse’s mouth,” so to speak, by the guys who did it. Don’t let anyone, barking trash, tell you it didn’t happen that way. I’ve been writing since I was about nine years old. At that age, believe it or not, a boy in Brady (TX) High School took one of my poems and turned it in as his and received an A grade. It was a direct steal from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” The first line: “It happened on a midnight clear.” I also wrote a 10,000-word “novel” that year. Fortunately, it has been lost. So has the poem. Right after I graduated from high school, I received $75 from Ray Palmer’s Other Worlds magazine for something I’d written. Then came the army and afterwards college. While in college, I sold a short story called “Sixth Street” to Manhunt magazine for forty bucks. Sixth Street in Austin, TX, has change a lot since my college days when Jim Russell, Adrian Roberts, Raul Cardenas, and Fernando Corral went there. A pre-med student named Frederick Whitaker was the fountainhead behind the story, the guy who got the knife in him. He also introduced me to stereo via a tape deck and earphones. “Bolero!” Circa mid-50s. About the time I joined Billboard magazine, I was working on a novel and Bill Mason and wife came by the apartment in Riverdale one night and he offered to read the novel. His comment: “Well, you’ve certainly got a novel here.” Worse thing a writer wants to hear! Henry Miller was right; passion, even if it be deferred a thousand years! I went back to work and rewrote and rewrote that novel. Studied writing, too. The great Russians, the great Brits, the great Frenchmen. I’d read a book, then study all of the criticism I could find, then read the book again. I may not know everything there is to know about writing, but I would suppose that I know more about it than the average bear. So, after retiring, I finished my great American novel and worked on a huge list of other books. Now, my project is to get them read. I’ll be submitting books to Amazon.com asap. My fight! “I Love Radio” and the coming “Radio Wars” collection of short stories will be available only through this website. But if you like murder mysteries and westerns and fantasies, go to Amazon.com. Find Kindle Books. I’ll be adding one or two books as I can. Therefore, if you would, now and then look my name up at Amazon.com/Kindle Books and if you have a favorite aunt who happens to have a Kindle or an iPad, well…. Books Science Fiction/Fantasy “My Name Is A.N. Archy” “Down on the Corner of Earth” “Hurt” “Malibu” Smitty series (three novels) “The Girl Who Looked Like Marilyn” “The Rattlesnake Who Enjoyed Elvis” “Howard Hughes Is Alive and Well and Living in the San Fernando Valley” “WALL” General “Brady” “I Love Radio” “Radio Wars” -- short story collection about finished Mystery “Murder at the Busted Bird” “The Music Convention” “Hill Country” “Xtreme” Children “Dark Castle” Westerns “Huecos” “Mountain” – collection of six western stories Camp “Snake and the Spider Lady” e-mail claude@claudehallonline.com |
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