Pyle sat in his writing studio writing novels, or series of related novels. The last series of books he wrote was called Immobilized in Point and Shoot.

I never wanted to be a poet anyway
I'd carry a lunchbox like everyone else
if only the muttering would stop

William Wantling, Seven On Style

A WPA GUIDE TO POINT AND SHOOT, FLORIDA. January 15 - January 31. 26,000 words. How do you write a WPA Guide without being on a WPA Writers' Project. Just do it. What's to stop you? You have more freedom than Bukowski. I make up a pamphlet to send to agents and editors, A WPA Guide to Point and Shoot, Florida (Sample). I drive to Florida's Forgotten Coast on a day trip, and write a pamphlet, Walking Under Water at Wakulla Springs. I get a seven-week extension of my Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) benefits. I see that A WPA GUIDE TO POINT AND SHOOT, FLORIDA is the first book of a two-book series, The Cracker Table, end the book, and start writing the second book, AN EVEN 300 BOOKS, SINCE FORTY.

AN EVEN 300 BOOKS, SINCE FORTY. February 1 - February 9. 14,000 words. Brenda and I keep Rowan the weekend of Superbowl Sunday. The Cracker Table is about food, family, and enough is as good as a feast. Walter Anderson called himself Fortune's favorite child. He couldn't sell his paintings and was as crazy as a shithouse rat. He worked around Shearwater Pottery for pocket money and his wife let him live by himself in the Little Studio, visiting her and the kids on holidays. He went on sketching trips to Horn Island in a rowboat. I go to booksALIVE 2009! at Gulf Coast Community College, to hear Janis Owens talk about The Cracker Kitchen. Hear her stories. I'll buy the book, and read it at my leisure. She's from Marianna. Up the country.

CULTURAL OPERATOR. February 10 - February 14. 9,000 words. A cultural operator sets up and resolves oppositions in his life, then writes about them. In myth. Looks like AN EVEN 300 BOOKS, SINCE FORTY was short. Well, CULTURAL OPERATOR will make The Cracker Table book-length. I get an announcement for the 10th annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference and decide to enter BLACK HARVEST in the novel writing contest. It's a murder mystery. I read it over. It's as close as I can come to a novel. Is it fiction, is it non-fiction? Where did it come from? What's going to happen to it? Where did this book come from? What's going to happen to The Cracker Table? Is it non-fiction or fiction? A novel or a memoir? Or an online journal (OLJ)?

A STRAIGHT WHITE MALE, FROM THE SOUTH, OF A CERTAIN AGE. February 15 - February 22. 21,000 words. First day of school up to deciding to be a writer, in the Air Force. I am a guest lecturer at a non-credit Creative Writing class at Gulf Coast Community College. Two classes, one in Port St. Joe and one in Panama City. Older students. Retirees, who have always wanted to write. I see that Finding My Seat is about paying your dues. Many are called but few are chosen, pal. The odds are daunting. That's what makes it so rewarding. Every day you face the blank page and dredge the naked truth up out of your guts, you win. How great is that! No wonder everybody wants to be a writer. Naked Hick Town lives! I write agents and editors about my last book, The Cracker Table: Writing, Work, and Family Along The Redneck Riviera. My two classes are postponed a week. The rejection slips for The Cracker Table start to come back, like homing pigeons. My emergency unemployment compensation (EUC) benefits expire. My benefit entitlement is exhausted. No additional benefits are available to me at this time.

BUCK SERGEANT. February 23 - March 1. 12,500 words. Two hitches in the service, with a year of junior college in between. Oops. Disregard. I have additional EUC available credits of $1236. That will last me eight weeks. I can finish this book. Thank you, President Bush. I see that The Cracker Table and Finding My Seat combine to form Old Hick at Home. Three months of daily typewriting. I give Old Hick at Home the subtitle Beat Poet Blues. Then I transpose the two. Beat Poet Blues: Old Hick at Home. Then I drop Old Hick at Home.

PROFESSIONAL STUDENT. March 2 - March 6. 12,000 words. Major in anthropology. Graduate with high honors. Three years of graduate work in anthropology. Drop out and steal the last year of my fellowship, to teach myself to write.

MAKING THE LEAP. March 7 - March 11. 6,000 words. First year as a writer, as a DIY fellow. I get my sea-legs under me. It isn't the first book that makes you a writer but the second. And the third. I add the subtitle Still Scuffling After All These Years to Beat Poet Blues. It looks like I'll finish the book by March 15. Three months of daily typewriting. Three months in the life of an underground writer. An underground writer procedural novel. It's a novel that contains a memoir. And poems. And interviews. And film clips. How I got to here. From there. And where I'm going next.

A STATIONARY FEAST: CHARLES WILLEFORD AND THE AMERICAN DREAM. March 12 - March 21. 17,000 words. I go to the doctor and get a physical. Everything looks good, but I could stand to lose a little weight. I go on a diet, walk an hour a day, and quit drinking coffee. I quit drinking beer. I weigh 280 lb. When I got married, I weighed 190. Owen and Jean and Ella come down to Santa Rosa Beach for a week with baby Eb Hawk. I stay at home and clean the house, so they can spend the night with us, on the way to Georgia, to a pick-in at Lisa and Jimmy's. Just because you are an immobilized hero doesn't mean you can't eat well. Eating well is the best revenge. Hemingway didn't have anything on me, except his life, and I'm content with mine, so that's that. He didn't write what I did. Being the houseperson in the home, or latch-key husband, let me write as I pleased. Book after book. I am living the dream. Ha ha, rat now. How many 69-year-old writers can say that? Better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and strife therewith. I write about the four Hoke Moseley novels, plus Kiss Your Ass Goodbye and New Forms of Ugly. I add A STATIONARY FEAST to the end of FIGHTING ROOSTERS, call the book The American Dream: Charles Willeford, Myth, and the Practice of Daily Typewriting, and send the manuscript to Dennis McMillan. Also, I see that A STATIONARY FEAST is the first book of a series, Influences. The dream and the life influence each other. Faith without works is dead, being alone. But work without a dream is pointless. It lacks direction. What is its purpose?

MY STACK, DAILY TYPEWRITING, A WEB SITE ON THE INTERNET AND SELF-PUBLISHED PAMPHLETS. March 23 - March 30. 17,000 words. We keep Ella overnight and Rowan for the weekend. Take him to The Red Bar on Sunday to return him to Jennifer and Balder. Eat a hamburger and a bowl of seafood gumbo at The Red Bar. Hear Dread Clampitt play. I see that INFLUENCES is called AS-IS: STORIES THAT BUBBLE UP FROM SUBTERRANEAN SPRINGS, UNBIDDEN AND UNSTANCHABLE. My unemployment benefits run out. After I write MINOR POET I can write LAYABOUT: MY YEAR AT THE HOUSE ON UNEMPLOYMENT.

MINOR POET: CHARLES BUKOWSKI IN LOS ANGELES. April 1 -April 11. 15,000 words. The novels, Barfly, The Bukowski Tapes, Dangling in the Tournefortia and Septuagenarian Stew. Possibly the story collections. I see that AS-IS is Post Office, about underground writing, instead of a job. That is, underground writer is a job, like postal employee. I give myself permission to write it. I egg myself on. I change the name of AS-IS to UNDERGROUND WRITER. It's Post Office meets New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction. At The Daily Bulletin: A Newsletter On the State of the Culture, or, How To Write World Literature From Parker, Florida. Guthrie Trapp sits in with Dread Clampitt. We meet his parents, Joe and Mary. So many picker friends in common. I remember seeing Alison Krauss play with the Sally Mountain Show in Okeechobee, Florida, when she was 14 years old. Rhonda Vincent not much older. Little Roy Lewis with all them old-maid sisters. Show business. Children of the Dirt setting fire to the woods, like Thoreau and his brother. I change the name of UNDERGROUND WRITER to UNDISCOVERED WRITER. The heavens rejoice when a new star enters the firmament.

SEVENTY: STORIES, POEMS, AND A SCREENPLAY OF THREE-BOOK DEAL, A SERIES OF RELATED BOOKS. April 12 - May 7. 40,000 words. Looking for a job, pitching Three-Book Deal to New York. Approaching 70. Owen plays with the Blueground Undergrass in Santa Rosa Beach. We go to see them, keep Rowan for the weekend. Take Rowan to The Red Bar, to return him to Jennifer and Balder, and Guthrie Trapp is playing with Dread Clampitt. He cut a track on their new CD. Good music. I publish the pamphlets Research (a story) and Regional Writer (poems) and send them out with my proposal for Three-Book Deal. I decide to go to Potterfest. I'll see Grant Peeples there. On Lake Seminole, in Sneads. On the edge of the Sopchoppy - Hogtown Bayou - Two Egg SMSA. I decide to write a screenplay of Three-Book Deal. At the end of SEVENTY: STORIES & POEMS.