Call me a perpetual piddler, sometimes peddler and always proud purveyor of the grand dialects of the American South, where what started as a French invasion on a wee island to give birth to the Anglican tongue went and caught itself a big steaming pile of YEEHAW!
You can’t deny that some of the finest storytellers who ever graced these lands— folks like Poe, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Abbey, Grisham, King, Brown, Carver, Baldwin and Urrea, to name but a few — notched their respective places in the literary canon via those very same country accents and inflections.
But a few of us were also fortunate enough to know the likes of Joplin, Lansdale, Garcia, O’Brien, Nelson, Jennings, Kelton, Graves, Vaughn, Creager, Keen, Hollandsworth, Fowler, Larsen, Strait, McMurtry, Forsyth, Gibbons, Clark, Nugent, Jefferson, Thornton, Hopkins, Canada and Walker. All were blessed to hail from these Lone Stars, and all were handy with a turn of phrase. More than a few in that list are pretty handy with a six string to boot.
If you look way down to the bottom of that list, buried there among the asterisks and footnotes, you might be able to find a piece by our page’s author. He’s another literary Texan. More Texan than literary, most days. But he can still crank out copy like his ass is on fire and he needs to use up all the paper before things get truly heated.
Well, he DID, at least…
Six-and-a-half years he served as editor of five small town South Texas newspapers, which effectively made him head cook and bottle washer in a staff spread across four offices in three counties. One of those three counties, incidentally, lies noncontiguous with the other two. It’s set apart from the rest by a full county, in fact. A full hour away…
That’s OK, though, because he took that particular paper straight to the top — the Luling Newsboy & Signal became the Texas Press Association’s 2025 Sweepstakes Award winner for small Texas weeklies in June 2025 — which made the timing of our editor’s sudden exit, a scant two months hence, curious, at very least.
It’s as if someone yelled, “Away, with all your journalism and striving for excellence and whatnot. We’ll have none of that nonsense here, by God!”
Well, that much is obvious…
Ironic, too, no doubt. Moronic, unquestionably. Still, life moves on.
As I face 2026, conveniently free of the ties that so recently bound, I stare my fourth decade in this crazy business dead in the eye. The first of April, appropriately dubbed the Fool’s Day, will officially mark my 40th year since taking up my sordid (sworded?) quill to chase other people’s stories on deadline for the cheap sheets, all while trying to steer clear the pitfalls and bill collectors.
Still, knuckles bleeding and fighting like hell, it’s business as usual for Bobby. Just another Tuesday…
And ol’ Bob, grinning his wild-eyed toothless grin, saying:
C’mon Cupcake… That all you got?
Bobby’s original blog came via Blogger
—Bobby Horecka
On boots and bars and motorbikes…
Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies (Madville, 2020) shortlisted for the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2021 First Book of Fiction Award, is ideally sized for leveling tables and heavy appliances.
Get yours today because, well, you just never known when that ricking refrigerator will get on your last damn nerve. May as well be prepared, because a hundred million Boy Scouts likely said something similar at some point or another. With endorsements like that, how can you possibly go wrong?
Looking for one of Horecka’s older blogs?
Some of his more recent posts can be found at the link above, but if you want to read some of his latest works, visit his profile at Authory.com. Until then, we hope you enjoy this random sampling of some of his older posts:
From an old San Martian: This stings just a bit…
The rambling road through grad school classes…
Excerpt from ‘Trouble in Paradise’ (Or Senior Living at Its Finest) Part II
Excerpt: ‘Trouble in Paradise (Or, Senior Living at Its Finest)’ Part 1
Piquing a recovering journalist’s curious bone…
Overcoming the I don’t wannas…
Excerpt: Opening lines from “Finding Nancy,” a crime thriller in progress…
Oh, the weather outside is… keeping us from work (well, some of us, anyhow)…
Bobby Horecka, Author 