Life That Changed Direction
People sometimes ask how someone moves from accounting to law, from law to business, and from business to writing novels.
There was no master plan.
I graduated from Auburn University with a degree in accounting and began my working life as a CPA. Years later, I returned to school, earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy, and practiced criminal defense law.
I also spent years operating businesses, including a barbecue restaurant.
Each chapter required a different kind of attention.
Accounting demanded accuracy.
Law required evidence, judgment, and an understanding of human behavior.
Business taught me responsibility, risk, and the consequences of decisions made under pressure.
Writing eventually gathered all of those experiences together.
But the path was not straight.
I changed professions.
I changed ambitions.
I changed convictions.
And, in one important period of my life, I changed the way I understood nearly everything.
Faith, Certainty, and Change
For most of my life, I was deeply involved in the Southern Baptist church.
I studied Scripture, taught Sunday School, served as a deacon, and took my faith seriously.
My eventual deconversion was not the result of indifference.
It came from continuing to ask questions I could no longer answer in the ways I once had.
That change affected more than my religious beliefs.
It altered my understanding of certainty, authority, identity, purpose, and the stories people inherit about how life is supposed to work.
I do not consider that change the whole of my story.
But it was one of its largest revisions.
It taught me that a person can care deeply about truth and still discover that some long-held conclusions no longer withstand examination.
It also taught me how costly revision can be.
Becoming a Novelist
I published my first novel at sixty.
By then, I had spent decades observing people in offices, courtrooms, businesses, churches, families, and small Southern communities.
Novel writing gave me a place to use all of it.
Fiction allowed me to explore questions that could not be settled by argument alone.
Why do people believe what they believe?
What happens when loyalty and truth come into conflict?
How do families protect themselves with silence?
What does justice require?
What do people owe one another?
Most of my novels are set in and around a fictionalized Boaz, Alabama.
The town is familiar ground, but the questions are larger than one place.
The characters live with belief, doubt, grief, ambition, responsibility, betrayal, forgiveness, and the consequences of the stories they tell themselves.
The Work Today
Today, writing remains at the center of my life.
I write novels and nonfiction.
I publish essays through The Pencil’s Edge.
As a certified StoryCoach, I work with fiction writers who want to strengthen the structure and emotional truth of their stories.
I also hold Pencil Sessions with people who need a thoughtful conversation and enough space to hear themselves think.
These forms of work are connected, but they are not identical.
Each grew from a different part of my life.
Together, they reflect what I have learned to value most:
careful attention, honest questions, strong stories, and the willingness to revise.
A Personal Note
I do not present myself as someone who has arrived at final answers.
My life has included too many changes for that.
I am a husband, father, former CPA, former attorney, businessman, novelist, and StoryCoach.
I live and write near Boaz, Alabama, on wooded land that has become part workplace, part refuge, and part setting for the life Donna and I have built.
Much of my work begins early in the morning with a pencil, a page, and a question worth staying with.
That is usually enough to begin.
The Pencil-Driven Life 