A little research, a little writing, trips to Wal-Mart, Lowe's, and another stop at Half Price Books. Today's loot from HPB:

THE WAYFARER REDEMPTION, a fantasy novel that's the first part of a trilogy by Sara Douglass. Last year I read her novel BEYOND THE HANGING WALL, which is a stand-alone but related somehow to the trilogy, if I remember right. Thought it was pretty good. I don't read much new heroic fantasy other than David Gemmell's work, but Douglass strikes me as okay.

NEW STORIES FOR MEN, a vintage paperback anthology published by PermaBooks, with stories by Budd Schulberg, John Steinbeck, T.S. Stribling, John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw, and others. The Shaw story is "The Eighty Yard Run", a great piece of writing, but for my money Shaw's best story, and one of my all-time favorites by any writer, is "Main Currents of American Thought". You won't find a better look into the mind of a freelance writer (and it's a scary place in there).

HARD PURSUIT, an Executioner novel by an acquaintance of mine. I haven't read a Mack Bolan book in a while, but I enjoy them now and then.

TEXAS EXTRA: A NEWSPAPER HISTORY OF THE LONE STAR STATE 1835-1935. Just what it sounds like, reproductions of newspaper front pages from days when something historically important happened. Books like this are nearly always helpful for research.

When we got home, more interesting things had arrived in the mail:

From Bob Randisi, copies of the new book THE FUNERAL OF TANNER MOODY. This is a Western shared world anthology/braided novel or whatever you want to call it. Novelettes tracing the life of a bigger-than-life Western character named Tanner Moody, written by John Jakes, Elmer Kelton, Kerry Newcomb, Jory Sherman, Peter Brandvold, Marthayn Pelegrimas, Robert J. Randisi, L.J. Washburn (Livia) and me.

The new issue of MYSTERY*FILE from Steve Lewis, a great mystery fanzine.

The new mailing from OWLHOOT, the Western apa I'm a member of, with a lot of great material, as always. As with MYSTERY*FILE, I've already skimmed through it and will give both of them a thorough reading later.

I'm still reading Connelly's THE BLACK ECHO. It's a long book, and I read a lot slower than I did when I was a kid. Back then it was a book a day most of the time, plus the every-Tuesday big stack of comic books bought at the drugstore across the highway from where I grew up. No, I'm not going to wallow in nostalgia . . . but I could.