Not Ernest Hemingway, nor one of his look alike contestants

When I was a boy, my mother gave me the serial installments in Life Magazine, I think, of Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Old Man and the Sea, which I devoured because I loved to fish. A few years later, I fell in love with the Florida Keys during a family vacation there. Later, my father bought a home in the middle Keys, and I was down there a lot fishing. Even later, I lived in Key West and up US 1 a little ways.  

A couple of weeks ago, I posted at my Facebook page the above 2016 photo of me at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park in Key West. 

One person commented, "Hemingway." 

I replied back:

Sloan Bashinsky

Yes, Hemingway lived, wrote, fished off shore, and drank mucho whiskey in Key West, and made a very good living off his novels. 

During an American novels course my senior year at Vanderbilt, our professor said you knew when the bad guy showed up in a Hemingway novel, because he didn't drink. 
Several times, people tried to persuade me to enter the annual Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, which consisted of old white men with white Hemingway-style beards, wearing Orvis fishing costumes, who drank mucho booze, standing before judges.
I told the people who tried to get me to enter the contest that I was not qualified, because unlike the contestants, I knew how to write and how to fish, and after some years had passed, I added to my excuses, I did not drink.
A reason I never gave, because maybe it was too painful for me at the time -
I wrote three mainstream non-fiction books, which some people said were fiction. I wrote several spiritual books, which in places were stranger than fiction, and sometimes were accused of being fiction. I wrote reams of mystical poems and some novels. And, I wrote maybe 20,000 pages on blogs, about things I was experiencing in Key West and Florida Keys politics, and with people who lived down there, and with beings that did not live on this planet, which people in the Bible called angels, and much of that was called fiction.
Although I tried to make money off my early writings, that didn't happen. Although I hoped to make money off some of the later writings, that did not happen. So, I just wrote, because it seemed I had to write. 
Now, thanks to a friend who is really smart and learned the tech skills to make it happen, some of my writings are already in Internet libraries and archives, as free reads, with no ads or solicitations. More of the writings will be there, as my friend is able to put them there. 

My last novel, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale, fell out of me April-June 2000, after its storyline was provided by a street performer I met in Key West. His jaw dropped after I told him I had lived about half of the novel the year prior. 

Set in Birmingham, Port St. Joe and Apalachicola, Florida, and the Caribbean garden island Dominica., HEAVY WAIT is a relentless, delicious, maddening romp through love, lotteries, broken hearts, enlightened psychiatry, unearthly romance, lawyers, good and awful, more enlightened psychiatry, and deranged politicians, and poetry, and none of it is true, except the parts you believe are true. 

Here's link to the free read on any laptop, tablet, kindle or other online reader or smart phone.

Heavy Wait A Strange Tale : Sloan Bashinsky Jr, : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Heavy Wait A Strange Tale : Sloan Bashinsky Jr, : Free Download, Borrow,... This free book starts with an earthly and metaphysical romp about how the novel came to be written, what it was ...