I got lucky with my first book, Are You Lonesome Tonight and managed to hit the best seller charts around the world, including the all-important New York Times list. (Gotta give Elvis most of the credit.) One of my biggest thrills was walking into a bookstore and seeing the paperback version sharing a display with […]

An author, probably more than any other career, is a product of his upbringing and environment. When you write, you find yourself reaching into the past for inspiration, characters, emotion, and sometimes even tragedy. My father was a foreign service officer with the Voice of America — the official American government radio service that broadcasts […]

One of my favorite photos from my early childhood in Greenville, N.C. Hanging down by my beloved creek with my sister Mariane and my dog Cinder around 1962. I captured the spirit of this part of my life in the novel A Message to Jared, setting the story at my mother’s even smaller North Carolina […]

I was happy and content playing Little League baseball, hunting, fishing and generally being a good ol’ boy in the making. Then, my father came home one day and said we were moving. Some move. From the sticks of Greenville to bamboo reeds of Bangkok, Thailand. I was devastated — but as children so easily […]

After junior high, it was on the road again, this time to the Philippines. I was pretty bummed, as always, because I was really adapting to Thailand. Aside from hanging with the Ambassador’s son, riding klong boat taxis, and flying fighter kites with strings coated with powdered glass, I was scheduled to compete in a […]

I mentally returned to my Philippine experiences to provide the depth and color for the novel The Island of Passion and Rage, the fifth installment of The Chandler Chronicles. My father was stationed next in Rhodes, Greece, but I missed that one. Unfortunately, I’d grown up and had to go off to college — first […]

Handling a promotion gig for then University of Miami football coach Howard Schnellen-berger during my brief public relations career.

I polished my writing skills working for “The Hurricane,” the University of Miami newspaper. The last semester of my senior year, I interned at The Miami News, giving them a full 40-hour work week instead of the mere six that were required. I was hired immediately upon graduation. I snagged a prime reporter’s position right […]