Way too often, the stuff I covered during my time doing hard-news writing — primarily at the Virginian-Pilot‘s North Carolina Bureau, 1999-2000 — tended toward the ugly, as it will. Assaults, arrests, convictions, evictions, mangled cars and their mangled occupants, death, reactions to death, death, still more death, and like that.
I’m a bit of a softie vis-à-vis the human condition, and yet I got a little too good at this kind of writing for my own tastes. Blunt-force human drama lends itself far too easily to vivid description, alas.
murder of edenton, n.c., musician
family deals with hardship as one suspect still at large; 2000
house-fire aftermath, elizabeth city, n.c.
Fire victim mourned; child recovering; 2000