Timothy C. Phillips's blog

Added a Scribd button to www.southerncrime.com so that you can go directly to my stories with but a click of a button. Voila.

SCRIBD is Cool!

I recently discovered SCRIBD and have been uploading stories and other writings to it like mad. Just go to SCRIBD.com and look me up (Timothy C, Phillips) and let me know what you think of my stuff. While you're there, upload something of your own and let me know, and I will be more than golad to return the favor!

SCRIBD is part of the community that includes to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and bunches of other cool sites, so feedback is a snap! And, of course, as always, you can contact me on my official website,

www.southerncrime.com

Am I buggin' you?

The Edge is the frikkin' MAN. It's 3:30 am, it's raining, and stuff isn't falling into place, you dig?

Stuff should fall into place, like Synchronicity, or something. All the good decades seem to be over.

Calling it a night. Edge is still the man, though.

International Events and the Media

The American media, as I have noted here, drives me crazy. They are nothing but a propaganda machine for the government and Big Business. They ignore human tragedies on a huge scale (like those that take place in Nigeria, Darfur or Somalia on a daily basis) and publish a million lines a day on every Missing White Female from affluent backgrounds.

And there's Israel. The whole "whatever Israel does is good" attitude is something that the media panders to because they are afraid of what will happen to them if they, well, tell the truth. The fact is Israel sanctions murder, assassination, constantly and fragrantly breaks international laws and UN resolutions, and is pretty much a rogue state and a danger to the entire Middle East. But we have been coerced into making enemies our of more than 445 Million people for the sake of political expediency. Israel can't defend itself, so it has made the USA its bitch, and so we do it for them. They have poisoned our domestic discourse so that any Arabic or Middle Eastern person is immediately thought of as a terrorist, or at the very least as an extremist.

Just today I read a story that was pretty much an afterthought on the recent massacres in the African nation of Nigeria. The reporter, if he is to be called such, stated that "200 people have been killed in religious clashes."  Okay. Who was killed? Who killed them? What were the factions involved?

So, I go to the BBC website and learn that over 200 ethnic Hausa people, mostly old people and children, were massacred by marauders from rival ethnic groups. The Hausa are predominantly Christain, and their killers Muslim, but this is in fact incidental. As people who know anything about the Niger-Nigeria region know, in the North the Sahara is expanding every year, and arable land is shrinking; as more and more people are forced south to the delta, different groups are coming increasingly into conflict over what's left, which isn't much.

A responsible media would report such things. But our media reads a cue card, if you will, and if it's something really unpleasant or truly enlightening, they toss it, or dilute it, or pretty it up, or just talk about something else. Like the Super Bowl commercials. Now, that's news.

It's Saturday. I need to call some old friends and see how they are doing. Time is getting away from us all.

Days of Wine and Roses

My ex GF 42 times removed keps posting all these heart-rending pictures on facebook. I am whining but no one cares. Everyone I used to know is either dead, or in prison. Nothing I can do about it. I like Sawyer and Sayid. I don't like Jack and Kate, they have no morals. Locke is the man. But I am through with, television, now.

Zen and the Art of Writing a Frikkin Novel...Revisited

I will be up late all this week trying to enlarge my readership yet again by hammering away and finishing up the latest installment of my Roland Longville detective series. I have received some very kind emails from readers, and no writer can ask for better validation. What I wrote, others read, and like. Liked enough to go to the trouble of looking me up online and letting me know. So the least I can do is keep it up.

Now is the editing/final rewrite phase.

I dread this phase, with every book. I have to go over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb and make it all flow seamlessly. Writing is painstaking hard work. It takes a certain type of personality to do it. It helps if you are obsessive/compulsive about certain things. A little. It's like writing a 300 page term paper, with no one there to insist you finish it but you.

But someone once told me, be what you are. I am a writer. Everything else I do is merely to facilitate this end, until, some sunny day, I am able to make this avocation into a vocation.

Thanks to everyone who has offered me moral support over the years. It's meant a lot.

Now, I am entering seclusion, and will emerge from cloister only when the sacred manuscript is made flesh, and the muse has finished her song. Then I will go get a beer, and listen to some Iggy Pop, and call my friends, so thin on the ground these days.

I have t4ken a w33k 044

Digg it. If you will. I am up too late. I am  going to have some time off to get meine scheissen zusammen.

Und das ist sehr gut, jahowl? Peace out.

A Hot Day in January

For some reason I keep waking up with the lyrics of songs from the early 1970s going through my head. Songs I didn't know I knew. Tanya Tucker songs, for the most part. Although Cher (young, hawt Cher) has played a role also. "Lizzy and the Rainman" (Tanya Tucker) was first. Then, "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" (Cher) followed. After a lapse of several months, "Wilson Green." Tanya Tucker again. Another pause. Then, like some Peyote-fueled madness that recurs after long abstinence, it came over me again. This time it was another song from the dingy past, something I must have heard and forgotten before I was out of knee socks; I found myself murmuring these words as I submerged from the blissful nexus of sleep: "That Georgia Sun was Blood Red and Going Down." Tanya Tucker has returned anew. Now, perhaps this type of music was very important to me in my formative years. All this Southern Gothic stuff, I mean, just look at the imagery in all of these songs. Guess it's just another manifestation of me being a little off the chart compared to most people. Oh, well, guess I'm gonna go pick up a Tanya Tucker "Greatest Hits" CD; maybe some Sunny & Cher, too?

Wonder how it will go over with all of my hardcore Punk CDs.

I'm working on several different novels at the moment; finishing up Roland Longville 6, while simultaneously working on a novel about a man who returns to Anniston after ten years in Kilby Prison only to find that it's very hard to stay straight in the Model City in the middle of the Great Recession.

I have other things going, too; I have a novel about a killer who has a religious experience every time he kills someone. That's all I'll say, so far it's coming along really well.

For those who like something more local, I hope to soon put the finishing touches on a three-novella epic about a sheriff of Calhoun County that follows him from his election at the age of twenty-nine to his retirement at the age of fifty...when he is faced with the most trying case of his career.

I'm also working on a book that concerns the horrors of another successful nuclear attack on the USA...yes I know I work on too many things at once.
That's why I've added this blog!

I welcome your feedback, and everyone is welcome to email me with your thoughts and comments.