Ronald E. Yates's Blog
September 5, 2025
Today’s Chicago: Not My Kind of Town
For the past 13 years, Chicago has had the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of America. And here are a few more ominous facts about “That Toddlin’ Town:” For seven consecutive years, Chicago has had the highest murder rate among U.S. cities with more than one million people. ...
September 4, 2025
Three things I learned while writing “Finding Billy Battles”
During a recent “virtual book tour” with several book bloggers, I was asked what three things I learned while writing the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. It was a good question because it prompted me to pause and reflect on the fiction-writing process in a way I had never done before. ...
September 3, 2025
The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction (Part Two)
At a book signing during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books a while back, where I was promoting my Finding Billy Battles trilogy, I was asked several times about the research process for writing historical fiction novels. I explained that researching the first book ...
September 2, 2025
The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction (Part One)
I am often asked what the most significant challenges were for me as I wrote the Finding Billy Battles trilogy. The trilogy falls into the Historical Fiction genre, and believe me, the challenges when writing historical fiction are many. Addressing them all in one post would be problematic. So I ...
August 27, 2025
California Dreamin’ or California Nightmare?
Like hundreds of thousands of other Californians, I am about to lose representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. That will occur if voters decide this November 4 to accept Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Election Rigging Response ” scheme to undermine California’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and gerrymander congressional district maps ...
August 11, 2025
By Hoping Trump Fails, Democrats are in Fact Hoping the Country Fails
One early summer day in 1959, when I was about 14, I was working on my cousin’s farm in Kansas, loading hay bales. After maybe two hours of heaving 60-pound alfalfa bales onto a flatbed trailer as it was pulled along by a Farmall IH tractor, we took a break. ...
August 6, 2025
My War Against Communism: Was it all for Naught?
When I was in the U.S. Army in the 1960s, one of the most persistent exhortations from my superiors was: “The only good communist is a dead communist.” Our job, we were told during basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, MO, and even during my advanced training in signals intelligence ...
July 31, 2025
The Legacy Media’s Bias of Omission & the Flap Over “Jeanetics”
Most of us are aware of the kind of anti-Trump propaganda the legacy media loves to disgorge. It’s easy to spot and just as easy to refute. What’s not so easy is when the media ignore stories or events that may reflect positively on Donald Trump, Republicans, conservatives, or anybody ...
July 25, 2025
An Invitation to Read Chapter 10 of the Award-Winning “Finding Billy Battles” Series
Dear Reader, For the past several weeks, I have been sharing, at no cost, several chapters of Book #1 in the Finding Billy Battles series on Substack. It was a way for me to introduce readers to the three-book series. Today, my experiment in book marketing will end with Chapter ...
July 24, 2025
Tomorrow, Read Chapter 10 of the Award-Winning “Finding Billy Battles” Series–Gratis
Dear Reader, For the past several weeks, I have been sharing, at no cost, several chapters of Book #1 of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy on Substack. It was a way for me to introduce readers to the three-book series. Tomorrow, my experiment in book marketing will end with Chapter ...
