Where to begin?
The Chevrolet Corvette and I entered the world in the same year. I was born at City Hospital in St. Louis, MO, into a home with my mother and two older sisters. My father was around some of the time.
My parents got divorced, and we moved to Illinois during the summer before I started fifth grade. The following year, we moved to Cahokia, Illinois, which I call the “birthplace of the Midwest.” It was founded in 1699 and is the oldest permanent settlement west of the Appalachians.
I joined the Army in 1972, and after basic training and technical training, my wife and one-year-old son found ourselves at Fort Carson, CO, where we remained for the remainder of my enlistment.
In 1979, while working as an auto mechanic at a Venture Department Store, I met my current wife, who worked there as a cashier. We got married in 1980 and have been together since then. I have a son and stepson, four grandkids, and a great-granddaughter. We retired and moved to Tennessee in 2016.
During COVID, I read a lot of books and decided to write a story that I had been running around in my head for a long time. I wanted to write a western that wasn’t all bang-bang shoot ‘em up. I thought about American Graffiti, set in the mid-1800s.
Once I started writing, the story took a different direction, and I wound up with Don’t Never Give Up.
I am an early riser and usually write as I’m having my morning coffee. I don’t write using an outline, I sit and let the story tell me where to go. I follow the advice of the Sean Connery character in the movie Finding Forrester, who tells his student, “Just write.” I let it flow, then edit the story later.