When I worked at the radio station I was able to keep some of the promo copies of albums that were sent there, and one of them was DAYS OF FUTURE PAST by the Moody Blues. It's a great album. "Nights in White Satin" is probably the best-known track from it, but really I liked the whole thing.
Things came up yesterday so that I didn't get any new pages done, but I was able to do quite a bit of editing. Then today I struggled a little but wound up with 20 pages, giving me 527 for the month of April, my best month since last July. My total for the year so far is 1803 pages. Not bad, but I'd still like to be doing better. It's been suggested to me that maybe I shouldn't be posting these numbers, that some people will think, "Oh, anybody who writes that much, it's got to be crap." I used to worry about that, too. Back when I was writing Longarm and Trailsman novels, I wouldn't talk about them much around other writers, at conventions and such, because I figured they might look down on what I was doing. But then I realized people are going to think what they're going to think, and everything is crap to somebody. So I'm just having fun and entertaining the people who like what I do, and anything beyond that is somebody else's problem, not mine. So we're looking at a 500+ page month of May, I hope.
This is the usual college football comedy with the usual team of misfits (in this case led by an overage quarterback played by Scott Bakula and a female placekicker played by Kathy Ireland) going up against overwhelming odds and triumphing. But it's fairly funny, with a good supporting cast including Hector Elizondo and Robert Loggia as the coaches. The real reason I like it, though, is because it was filmed mostly on the campus of North Texas State University only a few years after I graduated from there, so as I watched it could say "I recognize that building" and "I walked along that sidewalk to class every day". On top of that, the farm scenes (Bakula's character is a farmer before he goes back to school) were filmed out in the country not far from where we live, so I recognized those settings, too. Clearly, it doesn't take much to entertain me.
I was never a big Grand Funk Railroad fan, but I do like this song quite a bit. I had a chance to see them in concert but didn't go for some reason. I don't remember what it was now. But I sort of wish I had.
William M. "Bill" Tilghman had one of the most illustrious careers of any Old West lawman, serving as sheriff, town marshal, and deputy United States marshal in some of the toughest places west of the Mississippi. But he faced perhaps his greatest and most dangerous challenge when he rode alone into the wild Oklahoma Territory settlement of Burnt Creek on the trail of a gang of rustlers and outlaws with some unexpected allies . . .
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My friends and I sang this on the playground at school during recess. When you're eight years old, it's pretty dang cool. And to prove I've never grown up, I still like it.
I said I wanted to have a good weekend, and I think I did. Yesterday was very good with 28 pages written. Today was more of a struggle as the words just didn't want to come, but I managed to get 17 pages done. Starting out the month my goal was to hit 500 pages, and I'm a little over that now. April is going to be my best month since last July (when I did 579, and I'm not going to reach that level this month).
Never having read or even seen an issue of it myself, I can only assume that BEDTIME STORIES specialized in, shall we say, risque fiction. Possibly even peppy, racy, and spicy. All I know for sure is that that Earle Bergey cover is pretty daring for 1935. The only author names I recognize from this issue are Jack Woodford and the legendary Robert Leslie Bellem. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Jules le Vin and Frederic Charleaux, who also have stories in this issue, were Bellem pseudonyms.
Ever since Chuck Mangione (or an animated version of him, at least) appeared on KING OF THE HILL, that's what I think of whenever I hear this song. I've always liked it a lot, though, even before that.
Jerrold Mundis, who wrote under the name Robert Calder, has given me a heads-up that his novel BEST OFFER, which I blogged about a couple of days ago, is now available again as an e-book under his real name. So it's not really forgotten after all. I'll be picking this up, and probably some of his other books as well.
