Diamond Lake [NOOK Book]

I am glad you stopped by.

My name is Dave and I’m a story teller.

As well as fiction novels, short stories and epic poems, I write a blog.

I have been doing a kind of blog for several years to keep my friends over in the Valley up to speed on what’s happening in Eastern Oregon, about as far from any place you can get and still have electricity.

I am what you would call a red neck. Most of the red neck jokes aren’t funny………..to me.

Like the one about how if you have more than three rigs up on blocks in your front yard? Yeah. That’s not fair. I’m working on one of them, one of them is a friends, he’s in the joint for something he didn’t do, and the third one is for parts.

I live with my wife and assorted dogs in a small town with no police force.

A county mounite drives though once in awhile, on his way to someplace else.

So protection of one's own property and possessions, is up to the individual.

I’m up for that. Ex City of Portland cop. All the other happy horseshit that goes with being who I am.

I have security lights that are motion activated and can usually, when they come on and the single ping alarm sounds, be up, dressed in a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, feet slid into Burkies and grabbing a hooded camo jacket off of a hook by the door; so that I’m not a big white target, be out in the alley in 45 seconds to a minute. Oh, and armed with a Mossberg factory issue sawed off 12 gauge with a pistol grip, full of 00 buck and equipped with a weapons light.

Not long ago, the alarm pings and I slid my feet onto the floor and picking up my pajama bottoms, slide my feet into them and pull them up. Knee high. I try again this time standing up, nearly fell over, and at some point into the past 30 seconds mark realize that I am standing naked, in a flannel pillow case.

It did nothing for my tough guy image.

It’s a full two minutes until I get outside.

There are two deer there, both does, looking disgusted that I took so long.

I tossed a couple apples down the alley, past where the sensor will light them up, thought about it and threw four more. Yeah, it was a blatant bribe. But over here your reputation is on the line when you screw up like that.

What I write about is people. Some of them I know and some of them introduce themselves to me as the story progresses. Writing to me is like watching a movie. Going in I kinda know what it’s about, but not who’s playing in it or what part they have.

I use a lot of dialogue and the people in the books introduce themselves to me as well as to you as the story unfolds.

Stix is a good example of that. I was writing about this private detective and somewhere along about a hundred pages into it, I realized that the book was not about him at all, it was about Stix.

I write with no outline, and I don’t do much in the way of rewriting.

I don’t always use full sentences.

And my people talk like real people, at least like the real people I run with.

I don’t use profanity except in the dialogue of these people and some of them are not too well schooled in the art of conversation and use profanity in place of verbs, pronouns, adjectives, oh yeah, and nouns too.

Northeastern Oregon is comprised of three remote counties that cover over nine thousand square miles, with a population of less than forty-nine thousand.

La Grande and Baker City account for twenty-one thousand which are both on I-84.

That doesn’t leave many people scattered over the rest of the ground. Mostly, they hole up along the creeks, or in one of the small towns. It depends on just how antisocial they are, or what their main source of income is. Don’t get me wrong, we live here because we like it here. Or sometimes, because we don’t much fit in, in a big city.

Because we don’t have a big enough population base to attract media, or to afford media representation, we don’t have the opportunity to showcase our artists and authors. There are some real good artists and writers that we want you to get to know.

Catherine Creek Press will do a feature article on someone at least every month, so when you do come over here, you’ll have someone to stop and see.

The blog gives you the shotgun seat in my pick-up as I travel the highways, back roads, and on foot up into some of the most rugged and remote country in the United States. And through weather that will stop you in your tracks. It gets cold here, zero and a twenty plus mile per hour wind, is not uncommon. But, hey, it’s a dry cold. And it gets hot, sometimes a little over a hundred with an east wind. But, like they say over here, it’s a dry heat.

Just remember, I’m a story teller, and will, at times, embellish enough to insert a little humor into my blog.

I will sometimes put an epic poem in the blog instead of a narrative account.

Because even here there are times when really, Nothing Much Ever Happens.

From Where Nothing Much Ever Happens

Dave Mead