Ronald Yates 
At least once every year I find it useful to take a look at the late Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. It is sage advice from a master. Every writer should read these rules and remember them. I’m doing my part by posting them here for your edification and …
Like a lot of people, I wasn’t aware that there is a week devoted to banned books. There is. It’s this week, and it began Sunday and runs to September 24. Below I have compiled a list of the most commonly banned books according to the American Library Association. These …
I belong to a lively online Historical Novels discussion group in which authors engage in lots of discussions ranging from how one researches historical novels to selecting book titles. Recently someone started a discussion about whether or not we authors should be politically correct when writing historical fiction. The result was …
What would happen if the Political Correctness and Cancel Culture Fanatics decided to rewrite a few 19th Century fairy tales to make them more suitable to the pliable minds of children in the politically correct 21st Century? I shudder to think. But someone already has thought about this, and I …
Vladimir Lenin, the man who in 1917 created the now-defunct one-party socialist state called The Soviet Union, understood how critical education is in molding pliant minds. “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” he once said. Lenin knew that …
A long time ago, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Kansas editor named William Allen White wrote an editorial in the Emporia Gazette entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In it, he railed against obtuse populist politicians and visionless citizens who he was convinced were running Kansas (my home state) into the ground. …
Given the mood of our country today, I am resurrecting one of my commentaries I posted a while back about white guilt and those terrible creatures known as “white men.” (Spoiler alert: I am one. Gasp!) White men, after all, are the ones that committed the unpardonable sin of writing …
Okay, inflation is killing us. Gas here in California is $6 and $7 a gallon, the shelves of the local Walmart and grocery stores are still half-empty, and the sidewalks of our cities are swathed with homeless tents and commanded by smash-and-grab thieves and vicious lowlifes. Meanwhile, our bumbling, mumbling, …
With baseball season in full swing and some teams, like my Kansas City Royals foundering, the conversation, as it often does, comes around to the greatest baseball players of all time. Discussions like that are exasperating and always incomplete—especially when the discussants represent multiple generations. Evaluating baseball players from different …
(I continue to receive requests that I repost my piece on Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” the classic book that lampoons foreign correspondents. I first read Scoop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in March 1975 as Communist Khmer Rouge guerillas surrounded the besieged city. Day after day, the Khmer Rouge bombarded the city …