I came to fiction late.
Before publishing my first novel, I had already spent much of my life doing other things. I worked as a CPA, farmed, practiced law, and owned and operated a restaurant. Along the way, I spent years inside churches, courtrooms, businesses, family relationships, and small-town communities where people often know more about one another than they say.
I published my first novel after turning sixty. Then I kept writing.
Boaz and the Stories
Most of my fiction is rooted in and around Boaz, Alabama.
I know the landscape, the churches, the schools, the roads, the farms, the courtrooms, the football fields, the family histories, and the quiet ways reputation and memory can shape a life. That familiarity gives me a place to begin.
The fiction itself goes wherever the characters take it.
What Life Gave Me to Write About
My earlier work has given me more than settings and occupations.
Accounting taught me to look closely. Farming taught me how physical work shapes a day. Law taught me how differently people can describe the same event—and how power, evidence, memory, and judgment interact. Running a restaurant taught me something about work, people, pressure, and the lives that unfold around ordinary tables.
And simply living long enough has provided the rest: loss, certainty, doubt, mistakes, loyalty, regret, change, and the strange persistence of memory.
All of that eventually finds its way into fiction.
Still Learning Story
I am also a Fictionary Certified StoryCoach Editor.
The deeper I study story structure, character, scene design, conflict, and reader experience, the more useful that work becomes in my own novels. I keep the coaching side of my writing life intentionally small.
My primary work remains writing books.
A Place to Write
I publish A Place to Write, a Substack for people who write novels—and people who have always wanted to.
There I write about beginning, story development, the craft of fiction, and what I continue learning while writing my own novels.
The Writing Archive
Over the years, I have written more than two thousand essays about fiction, story, belief, ordinary life, and the questions that have shaped my work. They remain available as a record of a writer learning over time.
Earlier nonfiction and essays associated with The Pencil-Driven Life are also preserved here as part of my writing history.
