Frequently Asked Questions

I’ve been told that I can turn the answer to almost any question into a story. The snippets and vignettes that you read in my fiction often come straight from my imagination. But sometimes they grow out of an idea that I got from a story that my Dad told me. He loved to tell stories, especially funny ones. And almost always, they were about some facet of the kind of simple country life that he loved.

The Morgan Crossroads series is an expansion of two short stories that I published earlier – Gertrude’s White Knuckle Ride and Dinner On The Ground: a not exactly true short story from the Eva Jo Clomper and Friends series. After a short time of being available on Amazon, I removed them and allowed them to grow into something different and better. During that growing process, some of the primary characters changed and the stories took on lives of their own.

I am very much a pantser. That is, I write by the seat of my pants. I’ve tried plotting and outlining, but stories just don’t come to me as freely when I do that. I may know what the big thing is that will happen by the end of the story, but almost everything that happens on the way to that big thing is a mystery to me until I type it out. For me, stories unfold in the telling, not in thinking of plot points ahead of where I am now.

I don’t know. I’ve thought about writing a follow-up, but for now there are no concrete plans for one. I am busy writing my fiction books and other writing projects. But who knows? I may wake up one morning with a driving compulsion to write part two. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Not in the sense that you could point to it on a map. Yet, to some readers it will be a real place or at least a composite of many places they have been. I hope it is very real to you.

Whipper County, Alabama exists only in my mind. But if I had to stick a pin in it on a map, I would stick that pin in North Alabama approximately where Paint Rock Valley is. That area holds a significant place in my memory because it was through that very real valley that I drove several times a week to visit the young lady who in 1974 became my bride. There is one other place where Whipper County exists. That is, in the pages of Long Time Coming and the other books in the Morgan Crossroads series of novels.

I’ve thought the same thing at times. In reality, though, each character in my stories is a composite of potentially hundreds of people who I’ve met over the past five or six decades. They may use a favorite word or phrase that I remember from my school days in Texas, New Mexico, or Alabama. They may walk the way that I saw someone on a sidewalk somewhere walking.

The characters that I write about usually come to me from some invisible place. Some call that place inspiration or the muse. Whatever name that place has, characters tend to show up when they’re needed. Sometimes they’ll have the hair of someone I saw or knew as a child, or they’ll dress like someone else from television or my imagination.

Here’s the honest answer. I don’t know. I can tell you that I foresee at least five books. The series begins with Long Time Coming and continues with book two which is titled Welcome Back Mister Starnes.

No, they aren’t. There is a romantic element in the first two books and I expect each following book to continue the tradition. But they are not romance novels as one normally thinks of books in that genre. Romance happens in real life everywhere, including Morgan Crossroads, Alabama.

You will find love in every Morgan Crossroads novel. There may be a romantic twist, but there will always be another kind of love – the love that tight-knit members of a small rural community can have for each other.

No, you won’t. There is no danger of your friends or family complaining of such things as sexual situations or strong language in the Morgan Crossroads Series. They might complain of a lack of such things, but if they do, there are other books on the market that will fit their tastes.

It’s easy. Just submit your name to my mailing list using the form at the bottom of this page. I’ll let you know how things are coming in Morgan Crossroads and whenever a new book in the series is being released.

You are absolutely right. Cursing and sex are a very real part of life. In fact, one can hardly live through a day without encountering one or both. But there are people for whom “four letter words” and sex related discussions are not part of their everyday lives. For them, such language and discussions are not required in order to live a full life.

I’ve read comments from readers who practically demand that the books they read include cursing, sex, and more. For them, it takes such things to fully develop the “grit” that makes up a large part of some people’s personality.

I agree that some characters in certain genres don’t come across as fully developed if the writer tries to make them too good or pure. In this series, I’m writing stories that are lighter in general. I firmly believe there is a place for stories with hilarious fun, heartache, disappointment, and the full range of emotion that life entails without the use of strong language or graphic sexual situations. That is what I try to do with the Morgan Crossroads series.