About

I live and write in rural Alabama, not far from the small-town world that has shaped much of my fiction, my memory, and my questioning.

I am a novelist, observer, and builder.

Those three words are not separate identities so much as different ways of paying attention. I write stories. I notice what life is doing. I build practical things with my hands — cabins, paths, systems, places where a different kind of life might have room to breathe.

For much of my adult life, I worked in more formal worlds. I was a CPA and later an attorney. I spent years inside systems that promised order, structure, answers, and authority. I understand the appeal of those systems. I also understand how fragile they can become when life stops cooperating with the story they tell.

I came to fiction later, but once I began, I kept going.

My novels are rooted in and around Boaz, Alabama — not only as a location, but as a moral landscape. Small towns remember what they pretend to forget. Churches shape what can be said. Families carry old wounds. Reputations become a kind of currency. Silence can last for generations.

That is the ground my fiction keeps returning to.

I am interested in buried truth, inherited belief, moral contradiction, grief, loyalty, justice, and the quiet moment when a person begins to see clearly. Sometimes that person is an attorney. Sometimes a private investigator. Sometimes a teenager. Sometimes someone who has spent a lifetime inside a story that no longer holds.

Fiction lets me explore those moments without reducing them to argument.

That matters to me because I have lived through my own long loosening of certainty.

I grew up inside Southern Baptist fundamentalism. For many years, I inherited its assumptions about God, purpose, morality, identity, and meaning. Eventually, those inherited answers stopped answering. Doubt did not arrive all at once. It came slowly, quietly, and then unmistakably.

What followed was not merely a change in belief. It was a change in how I understood life itself.

Purpose no longer seemed like something assigned from outside. Identity no longer felt fixed. Certainty became less valuable than honesty. Presence became more trustworthy than performance.

Over time, I began calling that way of living The Pencil-Driven Life.

A pencil makes a mark without pretending the mark is permanent. It allows revision. It leaves room for humility. It reminds me that a life can be lived attentively without being forced into a final script.

That sensibility now runs through almost everything I do.

It is there in the fiction.

It is there in the reflective essays.

It is there in The God Question, where I continue examining faith, doubt, and religious claims.

It is there in Oak Hollow, where practical work, land, cabins, dogs, weather, and ordinary days keep pulling me back from abstraction into the physical world.

I am less interested now in persuading than in noticing.

Less interested in defending answers than in asking better questions.

Less interested in performance than in living honestly.

This site is where those strands gather: novels, reflections, inquiry, practical work, and the continuing attempt to see clearly.

Nothing here is asking you to arrive anywhere.

But you are welcome to linger.