About

I live and write in rural Alabama, where my days are shaped by early mornings, long walks, and time spent paying attention—often more than producing anything measurable. What matters to me now is not efficiency or output, but presence: learning how to live without scripts, performance, or the pressure to arrive at conclusions too quickly.

This site reflects that practice.

The Pencil-Driven Life is a way of living oriented around attention, honesty, and responsiveness rather than certainty or control. It grew out of years of writing, questioning, and gradual simplification—both internal and external. What began as a search for answers slowly became something quieter: a willingness to notice what becomes clear when life is lived slowly and without pretense.

The Pencil’s Edge blog is where that practice is tested. It’s a working surface rather than a polished presentation—a place for reflection, fragments, narrative thinking, and occasional fiction. Some pieces are exploratory, some incomplete by design. All of them are attempts to stay close to lived experience rather than abstraction.

I also write fiction, not as a separate identity but as another way of paying attention. Stories allow complexity to remain intact in ways explanation often cannot. The novels that emerge from this work grow out of the same concerns found throughout the site: belief and doubt, loss and loyalty, moral tension, and the quiet ways people change.

This writing is connected to a broader life. My inquiry into belief and meaning continues at GodOrDelusion.com, where The God Question reflects an earlier and ongoing season of honest questioning. The values explored here are also embodied physically through Oak Hollow Cabins, a place designed for stillness, simplicity, and unscripted time.

I’m less interested in persuading than in noticing.
Less interested in answers than in clarity.
Less interested in performance than in living honestly.

If something here resonates, you’re welcome to linger.
Nothing is asking you to arrive anywhere.

This site is not a destination. It’s a practice.