About Me

I’m now retired, but call myself a writer since I’ve written a novel, Whittled Away, that some people I don’t even know have bought off Amazon. I’ve mostly completed the manuscript for a second novel, which my writers’ circle companions say is better than my first effort. I hope so, because surely I learned something from writing the first one. Don’t take me wrong: I love my first novel and people say they like the characters and the story. Please do buy it and read it if you haven’t yet. But it’s a first novel and I know I fell into several of the traps that confront fledgling novelists.

I’ve lived my whole life in Texas and have lived the past 32 years in the small farming town of Lockhart. My career as an educator included years spent as an English teacher, assistant principal, high school principal, curriculum director, and assistant superintendent. Before becoming a teacher, I was a night janitor, mail room clerk, flunky in the Texas State Senate during one session of the state legislature, tree trimmer, public playground leader, game warden’s helper on a lake, and shoe salesman. Before those college-era jobs were the teenage summer jobs: restaurant busboy, dish washer, steel factory slave, deliverer of office supplies, and mower of lawns.

Of all the jobs I’ve had, two stand out as the hardest: Working in a steel factory one summer in high school, and teaching seventh grade language arts.  Of all the work I’ve done, two activities stand out as the most fun: Being the game warden’s helper, which mainly entailed  driving a boat around a lake all summer doing odd jobs like retrieving drifting logs that ski boats might hit unseen, and writing my second novel.

Besides being a writer, I am also a husband and father. My wife Nita is truly the love of my life and we have been married for 42 years, having married at age eight, or maybe it was age 22. We have two sons, one a math teacher married to a history teacher, and one who does something involving other people’s money for an investment firm.  Nita is a retired English teacher, choir director, and school librarian, and is now my primary copy editor and booster.

In my career in education I did “write for money” in that I authored grant applications and program evaluations for several years. I also wrote school related articles for the local newspaper about things that we wanted our community to know about.

For the past thirteen years I’ve written some eighty articles for a niche hobby magazine, the Camp Chase Gazette, which focuses on Civil War reenacting.

The American Civil War has become a passion in the second half of my life. It’s different from the passion I have for Nita and our grown kids, but it permeates my free time. It started twenty years ago as I became a Civil War tabletop wargamer, painting thousands of blue and gray tin soldiers and studying thick rule books.  That led to never-ending reading about uniforms, tactics and battles, and every Civil War novel that came along. 

Then I saw the movie Gettysburg and discovered the hobby of Civil War reenacting, which seems to be a compulsive pastime for many men like me whose mental development partly stopped at age twelve. The hobby involves camping, dirt, burning bacon on campfires, shooting guns, dressing up like real Civil War soldiers on weekends, and marching.  After sixteen years I’m still an addict to the hobby and leave home several times a year to get my hobby “fix.”

That’s my introduction. My next post will be about writing Whittled Away and how Novel 1 impacted Novel 2.