So he takes the bird and runs for the hills.

Based, loosely, on something that really happened when I was an aide to Canada’s Minister of Environment.

Sometime in the next few years, I’m likely to die. It doesn’t worry me. I’ve already come close, and it wasn’t all that bad.

https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/not-worried-about-dying-been-there-4d813da7186a

I published it several years ago in an anthology of creative nonfiction called Slice Me Some Truth.

https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/ice-and-mud-fire-and-water-d6f7e4a6832b

Yesterday, I kvetched about anachronisms I found in a limp continuation of Robert B. Parker’s Cole and Hitch series of hardboiled westerns.

And now today, the magazine Books & Buzz has reprinted “Playing in Another Author’s Sandbox,” the piece I wrote for John Scalzi’s “Big Idea” blog feature to promote Barbarians of the Beyond, my authorized companion novel to Jack Vance’s iconic Demon Princes series.

I picked up a novel at the local library yesterday.  Buckskin is a continuation of the late Robert B. Parker’s Cole and Hitch series of hardboiled westerns.

I’d never heard of the guy they hired to keep the franchise alive and I didn’t expect the prose to match Parker’s exceptional style.  Which it didn’t.

Then I started to encounter the anachronisms.   A young fellow of the 1880s Old West is planning to leave town.  He says he’s going to “take off.”

This at a time when Orville and Wilbur Wright hadn’t even got into the bicycle repair business, let alone flying machines.

Not many pages later, the narrating character, Everett Hitch, uses the expression “at this point in time,” which could well have been the twentieth century’s most useless contribution to the tongue that Shakespeare spake.

At that point in time, I closed the book.  I’ll take it back to the library.

One of the things—the many things—that Robert B. Parker got right was a feel for the times in which his westerns are set.  His dialogue came across as authentic.

But the hackwork now besmirching his memory is being produced—and worse, edited—by people who don’t know any better.

 A sad business.

Here’s the opening:

In the late 1980s, I invented the next big game after Pictionary. But it all ended in tears and thoughts of suicide.

Read on  https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/gender-bender-a-tragedy-ab35a907fb19

Here’s the opening:

If you’ve read any of the previous installments of this autobiography-in-progress, you will have come to understand that I was not raised in a happy and stable home. There was a lot of emotional turmoil and frequent dislocations, not made any better by the poverty. One of the things that this upbringing engendered in me was a determination that my kids, if I ever had any, would be raised in a loving environment where the rug wouldn’t regularly be yanked from under their feet without warning.

Read the rest here:  https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/my-lost-and-found-daughter-202716920a21

Here’s the opening:

I was born into a war.

It  was a war fought without restraint, no quarter given, no prisoners  taken. It had already been going on for eight years when I came along  and it continued until I was almost a grown man and finally able to  escape the battlefield.

https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/born-into-a-war-1c7a47c93e16

First para: When I was seventeen, I accidentally killed a man and saved another man’s life with my bare hands. It all happened within twenty-four hours.

https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174/orderly-days-fddad6c24ca2

I’ve been putting one up on my web site with almost every iteration of this newsletter, but taking the previous month’s down when the current month’s goes up.  Now they will gradually become archived on Medium, so if there are some that take your interest, you can check that site.  I’ll probably post one or two a week, in the order in which I wrote them.

The opening one is “White Picket Fence,” about how my father burned down our house in 1958, to get out from under a mortgage he couldn’t pay, and left me with nothing but the clothes I was wearing.

Here’s a link  https://medium.com/@matthewhughes_18174

Do me a favor:  tell your friends and associates about it.  Maybe I’ll get more readers.