Jeffrey K. Walker's Blog, page 19

Bring Back Earmarks

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: In gratitude for the awards, fine reviews (average 4.9 stars on Amazon!), and amazing support of readers like YOU for my first novel, None of Us the Same, I’m offering the Kindle ebook for a VERY limited time for 99¢. Here’s the link to the Amazon page.] Back in 2010, the sometimes maudlin, often wine-swilling, and […]

John Harvard’s Toe

John Harvard’s Toe I had an unremarkable childhood in an equally unremarkable town in totally unremarkable Flyover Country. The two or three of you who read this blog with any regularity are aware of that unremarkable fact. But you’ll shorten your time in Purgatory by continuing to read anyway. So yes, as my kids like […]

Clowns for Peace

Back in the ‘90s, right in the middle of my Thoroughly Unremarkable Military Career, I got my dream assignment. It didn’t start out that way. First, after being converted from a devil-may-care nuclear bomber navigator to a sober and serious judge advocate, the Air Force sent me off for three years of lawyer ripening on […]

You’re Not Entitled to Your Own Facts

I’m writing this in a white-hot rage just a few hours after the twenty-second fatal school shooting so far this year, this time outside Houston at Santa Fe High School. We have now had more high school students killed with assault rifles in 2018 than we have had soldiers in Afghanistan killed with assault rifles […]

Tiny You-Are-(L)

I heard recently that my novel Truly Are the Free was named a Discovered Diamond. This is kind of a big deal in historical fiction, so I was feeling rather puffed up. Then I remembered how I felt last August, watching the solar eclipse in Charleston. Tiny. Really, really tiny. And that was a good […]

Two Stiffs Writing Hist Fic (Part the Second)

[The first time I played verbal baseball catch with fellow historical fiction writer Wayne Turmel, I got more than triple my usual number of page views. So I thought we’d toss the ball around again, this time on character and setting in historical fiction.] So which comes first when you’re at the back-of-the-cocktail-napkin phase of sketching out a […]

Welcome to the e-Cave

[I’m off to San Francisco for my grandson Goober’s birthday and to let him run me ragged for a week, so I’m dusting off an earlier post. I haven’t seen this one in quite some time–there’s some good stuff in here, promise. Back with a new one next week.] I’ve had a running battle with […]

Sublimity of Stooges

True story. One of the salient things that initially attracted me to my wife was… The Three Stooges. At the risk of serious gender stereotyping, let me just say that 99.999% of all Late Baby Boomer-aged girls/women I have ever met, spoken with, attempted to date, or dated—and that funnel gets very narrow by the […]

The Perplexing Problem of Mr. Jefferson

Friday was Thomas Jefferson’s 275th birthday. Those of you who do not reside in the Commonwealth of Virginia may be forgiven for not knowing this. For us Virginians, forgetting Mr. Jefferson’s birthday is punished with points on your driver’s license. I’m pretty sure. The other piece of news is that I recently passed the mandatory […]

Me & Lee & Grant: What I Learned At Appomattox

[Tomorrow is the 153rd anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, so I thought it might be good to re-run this blog post from last year. I’ve had a long writing week struggling to finish the initial draft of No Hero’s Welcome, the last book in my First World War trilogy, so I need a weekend off. […]