Dick Heaberlin writes . . . .
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My Poems
Literature
The American Southwest
The American South Central
Eighteenth Century England and Scotland
The oilfield
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nature, art, travel, teaching, parenting, grandparenting husbanding,
What's new?
April 21, 2022
I submitted the second edition of my Syntax book today. It will be for sell next week.
February 27, 2022
Wow, seven years later. Covid drove me to retirement. So now I may have time to work on my books and this website. Check back to see what I may add. I have lots of good pictures to put on here from Alaska, Spain, and Peru. And I plan to put up information about any thing interesting to me—maybe even doing some more blogging.
February 22, 2015
Lots of new stuff on my blog. Check it out. I have a couple of entries about English poetics.
February 1, 2015
It's cold this morning, so I made oatmeal and made a post about cooking oatmeal.
February 1, 2015
I wrote a 1,100 word post for my blog page today. It's important information for writers about the use of passive and active voice. There's lots of misunderstanding about how to use them. I'll have more about the subject in another post soon.
January 30, 2015
I have a new posting on my blog page: Southwestern Literature: An almost Forgotten Book of an almost forgotten Author. It's about Hold Autumn in Your Hand and its author George Sessions Perry.
I have a new blog on "The prejudice against coordinating conjunctions at the first of a sentence" here. It also features three translations of the first chapter of the book of Jonah, from that of Wycliff in the late 14th century to the present day New Revised Standard Version.
January 21, 2015
I'm teaching an advanced composition class this semester. I had to have some kind of focus. Inexperienced as I was with blogging, i decided to make that one of my focuses. I also have a subtitle for the course "Finding a personal style through models." We will be looking at the works of writers from the eighteenth century until now to discover what techniques they have employed that we might make use of. We are reading parts of an ebook from our library about blogging, Bloggers Boot Camp. The authors of it write that anyone serious about blogging will write 1000 words five days a week. So I'm asking my students to do that. To be fair to them, I have agreed to write the same amount. So beginning last Wednesday I'm posting online through Tracs. And if I am going to that trouble, I've decided to make my posts available to every one. I will be mostly probing what I think are the possible answers to sticky questions about writing and literature, but I'm not looking for a niche. I may write on anything that interests me at the time I sit down to write. My friend Jim said that I should write about racquetball, and I may. Although I have only been playing for three years, I love it, and I am telling my students to write about subject for which they have a passion. My posts can be found by clicking here.
May 22,2014
Here is a poem and image of mine from last November.
May 21, 2014
I'm back. After three years of not adding things to this page. I'll begin by featuring my lastest writing book, Skinny Writing: A Guide to Concise Prose For Writers and Editors. It's available at Amazon and other on-line book stores. Here is more about it.
April 6, 2011
I have a new page of images of handles, knobs, and hinges of furniture. These were taken at the Round Top Antique Fair on March 30. Here is one of the images.
December 20 , 2010.
In October, I took pictures of an unusual stone house. In the 1930s, the builder made use of many different kinds of rocks, and he built birdhouses and beehives into the walls. I have added images of the wall of the house today.
October 3 , 2010.
I went to the Round Top area last week for the antique shows. I have a page of images showing some of the things I saw.
August 17, 2010.
I'm back from San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, where they have been celebrating the two-hundredth year since Ignacio Allende and Father Hidalgo began the revolt against Spanish rule. I took a lot of pictures, and I have placed some of them on line here today. One of them is of a statue of Allende.
July 11, 2010.
I've been busy teaching, so I am just now getting around to posting some of the wildflower pictues I took during this wonderfully wet Spring.
These are from my Mexican Buckeye Tree.
And here are other flowers—all white from our Rusty Black Haw tree, our Pyracantha, and our blackberries.
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July 9, 2010.
Harness Bells is available at Amazon.
May 26, 2010.
Today I sent to my printer my second collection of poetry, Harness Bells. It will be available eary in June. Here is an image of the cover.
January 31, 2010.
Today I put up images of the new sanctuary of St Mark's Episcopal Church. It's at 3039 Ranch Road 12 in San Marcos.
January 1, 2010.
What's new? The year. And my punctuation book is now available at Amazon. And I put some comments on one of John Muir's essays in my nature writing section: A Metaphor Runs Through It: Agency in John Muir’s “Windstorm in the Forest.” I wrote this several years ago when I was teaching nature writing. Here is a pdf of the comments.
December 8, 2009
I sent my Purposeful Punctuation: A Syntactic Guide to English Punctuation—Writing Style 3 to the printer today. It should be available at Amazon in a couple of weeks.
December 6, 2009
Today I have put up two more pages of images, these of the Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park. I have general images and images of Casa Grande.
December 3, 2009
I added some November images today.
November 15, 2009
We went to the Fredericksburg Antigue Show Saturday. It was not as good as formerly, but I took a few pictures I like.
October 12, 2009
I am adding to the English Syntax page a pdf of corrections to some of the answers to the practice exercises.
October 9, 2009
I have added October Images of Palo Verde in Bloom, across from St. Marks Episcopal Church on the Texas State University Campus.
October 7, 2009
I have selected images from the Fall Antigue Fair in Round Top.
October 7 , 2009
I have more images from San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.
October 4 , 2009
I have a new page of images of Saguaro National Park, outside of Tucson.
September 2 , 2009
I have finished my revision of Purposeful Punctuation and plan to have it to the printer this month.
Here is a pdf document of Lesson 1.
July 10, 2009
I have new images of my trip to Mexico. I will put up more soon.
July 8, 2009
Gushers is available at Amazon.com. And Trotting With The Fox is there, too.
July 1, 2009
Orange House Books has two new books at the printers. They will available to buy from Amazon and other online bookstores later in July. Here is an image of the cover of Trotting With The Fox. The fox pictures were taken by Angie Campbell-Johnson. See other images by her at http://www.soulprintstudio.com/.
The second book available in July is the second literary history in the series, A Cavalcade of Oilfield Novels. The new book surveys novels written about the discovery of oil in Texas oilfields from Spindletop until the present.
April 17, 2009
Actuallly, it's old, but I put on this site today an article I wrote in 1990 about Andy Adams' use of a cowboy dialect in his novels, particularly The Log of a Cowboy.
April 14, 2009
I have put up some new images, pictures from our garden today.
March 19, 2009
I put new images up today, ones that I took this morning. It's beginning to look like Spring.
March 8, 2009
I've been too busy with doing school work, writing an essay about Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, and having a cold to get any pictures up.
Also. I had hoped to get my punctuation book to the printer before now, but I keep adding material to it. I now plan to have it off by April. Here is a punctuation quiz that I am adding.
February 9, 2009
I plan to put on this site in the next few days much more material about Southwestern Literature. My first new piece is a book review I wrote several years ago about Charlotte Whaley's excellent biography of Nina Otero-Warren.
January 23, 2009
I have loaded more images for January. Some are of the Aquarena Center and some are of tree canopies. Here is a tree canopy from Aquarena—
January 9, 2009
I put still more images up today in the January section, mostly from the land. What is the image below?
January 4, 2009
I have new images for December and January.
December 8, 2008
I put on line a website with images and information about my wife's collection of Mason's Vista Ironstone in Brown. I have some images here and others at her website.
November 30, 2008
I put up some images I took this morning in the December image folder.
November 29, 2008
I finished my November images and put up several new ones for December. I've featured art and furniture for the first week. Click here for the December images. Here is an example.
November 22, 2008
I have just planned and begun to write the fourth in my series of guides to writing style. This one is about word choice. I call it Word Wisdom: A Guide to Selecting Words for Writers and Editors.
November 19, 2008
New daily images for November are up. One is below. Click here to see others.
November 10, 2008
I still haven't finished checking over my punctuation guidebook. It looks like after finals in December now.
August 21, 2008
I'm getting close to finishing my Purposeful Punctuation.Writing Style 3. I hope to have it out by the end of September. Check back here for its progress. Answers for the Practice Tests are on the WS3 page.
April 22, 2008
Two new books are now out from Orange House. They are available at Amazon.com, BN.com, Alibris.com and Abebooks.com.
The most recent is the first of my Cavalcade of Oilfield Novels. It is Fountain Wells.
The other is another of my Guides to Writing Style.
March 8, 2008My first writing guide is availble at amazon. Here is more information about it.
February 24, 2008
I have just returned from New Mexico. Here is one of the images I captured with my new Nikon D40X. It is looking East from the Jemez Pueblo Visitor Center.
Here are others from the loop, starting at Los Alamos and ending at the visitor center.
October 22, 2007
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a poem about the oak wilt that I see as I drive to school. This weekend I went down State Highway 473 to Comfort This is still a beautiful drive in spite of the many oaks which are dying of oak wilt. I took a couple of pictures. Here are two pictures and the poem—oak wilt. I have another page about oak wilt.
October 17, 2007
I haven't put up anything on this website recently . I have been busy teaching and working on my books on writing style. But today I took some pictures. Fall is here except that it is still quite hot. These are some of the pictures that I took of my favorite rock. It's at the front of my property. I call it my Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. Normally my meadow doesn't have this much grass, but this summer we had lots of rain.
April 6
Newly mounted on the site are some of my Trotting With the Fox poems and Images of the Central Texas Grey Fox by Angie Campbell-Johnson.
Please email me if you have any questions or comments.
Home of Dick Heaberlin Writes
Orange House Books
A Cavalcade of Oilfield Novels
Fountain Wells: Oilfield Novels of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia
Gushers: Oilfield Novels of Texas
Poetry Collections
English
Syntax:
A Guide to the Grammar of Successful Writers—
Writing Style 1
Connecting
for Coherence:
A Guide to Building Sentences With Syntax And Logic—
Writing Style 2
Purposeful
Punctuation:
A Syntactic Guide to English Punctuation—
Writing Style 3
Skinny Writing:
A Guide to Concise Prose
for Writers and Editors—Writing Style 4