About Me

I retired after more than fifty-five years in Washington State, and now live in a rural area just outside of Nashville Tennessee. I search out people who think like me to share discussions of mutual worldviews. I also search out people who DON’T think like me, but who are willing to calmly share their own views and listen to my own.  I seek to understand, and at times to “agree to disagree”. As long as we can discourse courteously and collegially, then we can fellowship, whether or not they are Christian, agnostic, atheist, or from a completely different faith system.

How did I get into writing books? 

Frankly, I’m not sure.  As a kid, I even hated writing those two-line ‘thank you’ notes after birthdays and Christmas. It didn’t mean I wasn’t a voracious reader, though, of all genres which could either teach me something I wanted to know, or transport me to a fictional world and hold me spellbound in a suspenseful, nail-biting, pedal-to-the-metal storyline. Books were my friends, my portals to other times, places, and dimensions where heroes took all the risks, although my own hands were sweaty as I became caught up in their daring exploits and narrow escapes from certain death.  Characters with flaws and quirks, conversations that aren’t contrived, but rather flow naturally, and of course suspense and drama in a riveting account of good triumphing over evil when all seems lost. I’ve vicariously lived hundreds of incredible lives from the safety of my living room couch, and plan to live hundreds more.

My writing

The biggest frustrations I’ve had with Christian fiction books over the years are what I call the “candy stories”. What I mean is that they tend to be highly sanitized, inoffensive narratives with an often forced salvation message plugged into it at some point in the plot line.

My first foray into fiction writing began as a short story urge following a radio sermon. The preacher was talking about when Lucifer rebelled, mentioning that he had already fallen by the time he had tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Since a third of the angels fell with him, according to John’s book of Revelation, the question became that of timing. That got me thinking about the concept of a world before the one we now know, even before Creation Week. A place where the Sons of God lived before Lucifer’s pride took hold and resulted in a global war of good and evil. A place that God ultimately destroyed, then rebuilt again during “In the beginning…” for the Genesis account.  A place where for-all-time decisions were made, dividing angels from demons.

What started as a short story soon became a full-length novel, an epic.  By the time that manuscript was completed, the seed for the next one was beginning to sprout almost immediately. And so it has continued, with the next novel ready to write as soon as the previous one ends. In fact, initial attempts to outline my books have failed every time. By the time the organics of circumstances, relationships, and conversation begin to occur, the storyline has taken off in a completely different direction, to the degree that I often have to keep writing just to see how the story ends.