By Hal Walter
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand …” – George Orwell
Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Typically, when I sit down to write something I have the middle in my mind. It’s the beginning and the ending that I often have trouble with.
Not so with a project I’ve been working on for the past nine months. It’s a book, with the working title of “Full Tilt Boogie,” and it’s essentially a memoir about about a guy – me – trying to make sense of the middle part of his life, raising an autistic son and struggling with dwindling career opportunities while trying to win an improbable 7th World Championship pack-burro race.
The idea for the book came from my friend Curtis Imrie, who left a copy of Tom Groneberg’s, One Good Horse, for me alongside Highway 96 with the inscription “For Hal – This is ‘your’ book. You have one in you … and better.”