I write stories set in and around Boaz, Alabama — fiction shaped by memory, faith, family, buried secrets, moral contradiction, and the long shadow of small-town certainty.
I also write reflections on presence, attention, deconstruction, aging, work, and the practice of living without a script.
This site gathers the work: the novels, the ongoing fictional dispatches of The Tanner Files, the essays of The Pencil-Driven Life, and the practical record of a life still being built.
Fiction Rooted in Boaz, Alabama
My fiction begins in Boaz — not merely as a setting, but as a pressure chamber.
In these stories, the past does not stay buried. Old crimes echo through families. Churches shape what can be said and what must remain hidden. Reputations matter. Memory matters. Silence has consequences.
The novels and stories explore truth, justice, faith, grief, small-town loyalty, and the courage it takes to ask forbidden questions.
Some of the characters are investigators. Some are lawyers. Some are teenagers seeing through the world they inherited. Some are ordinary people who discover that what they were taught to believe does not match what they have lived.
The fiction is where story does the persuading.
Explore the Fiction
Featured Fiction: The Tanner Files
The Tanner Files is an ongoing Substack publication written in the voice of Micaden Tanner, the fictional Boaz attorney at the center of The Boaz Scorekeeper.
Micaden has a long memory. He remembers the scandals people tried to forget, the wounds families learned not to name, and the moral contradictions small towns often dress up as tradition.
Part reflection, part case file, part reckoning, The Tanner Files explores truth, faith, justice, and the stories communities tell to protect themselves.
Read The Tanner Files
The Pencil-Driven Life
Not everything I write is fiction.
Some of the writing here grows out of presence, attention, deconstruction, mortality, aging, and the ordinary practice of noticing what is actually happening.
The Pencil-Driven Life is my way of describing a life no longer organized around inherited certainty or externally imposed purpose. It is not a system. It is not a program. It is not an argument to win.
It is a way of paying attention.
The reflections here are not meant to instruct or persuade. They are meant to slow things down — to notice what is happening beneath habit, belief, expectation, performance, and fear.
Some days that takes the form of an essay. Other days it looks like a fragment, a journal entry, a question, or a moment that has not yet resolved itself.
Learn more about The Pencil-Driven Life
Builder
Some of my work happens at a desk.
Some of it happens with lumber, metal, gravel, cabins, tools, kitchens, land, weather, and the stubborn practical details of making something real.
The building side of my life includes Oak Hollow Cabins, The Q Commercial Kitchen & Commissary, and the ongoing work of creating places where simpler, more deliberate lives might become possible.
This part of the work is not separate from the writing. It is another form of attention.
A cabin, a paragraph, a walking path, a sentence, a kitchen, a porch, a story — each one asks the same basic question:
What is trying to be built here?
Read at Your Own Pace
Nothing here is optimized.
Nothing is packaged.
This is not a destination. It is a practice.
If you are interested in fiction, small-town mystery, faith and doubt, presence, attention, practical work, or living without scripts, you are welcome to begin wherever you like.
Start with the Fiction
Read The Tanner Files
Read the Reflections
Richard L. Fricks 