About The Author
The Long Winding Road
The Clay Cantrell mystery adventure series marked a new departure for me, what amounted to my third career. I had spent over twenty years as a reference book author--eventually publishing thirteen reference books. After that came another decade-plus of buying and renovating old houses in Virginia. Then finally, with Lost Treasure: Clay Cantrell Mystery Adventure #1, I realized my dream of writing novels. It was one of those long, winding roads to get there: Starting out on it many years ago, I was a young, would-be novelist looking for experience and things to write about. Now I’m just looking for time enough to write my novels.
Until recently I split my time between writing and renovating old houses here in Virginia. I’ve had a lifelong interest in carpentry, not to mention an abiding curiosity about how things are done in the building trades. Maybe it’s a genetically encoded blood lust, or just too much testosterone, but I’ve always found working with my hands very satisfying. So over the years I’ve eagerly tackled as much of the work myself as I could. And learned a lot too.
I actually am a licensed contractor here in Virginia, which had a lot to do with making Clay Cantrell, the series hero, a contractor working on old houses. And for now splitting my time between writing and physical work has its advantages. The physical activity in construction work gets my blood flowing and allows me to get some distance from whatever I’m writing at the time.
It’s more than a change of setting. The problems of getting old houses (reasonably) straight, plumb, functional, and finished are concrete, as opposed to the abstract and imaginary work of writing fiction. At times though, those concrete problems try my patience in ways you can only imagine. That gets my blood going too.
Career Hopping
The leap from career one, writing reference books, to tearing up and renovating old houses was a long one, but like many changes it proved unavoidable. I’d been lucky to find work as a freelance writer and editor for reference books back in the late 1970s, and then over the next twenty-plus years to write/compile those thirteen books of my own.
The two most notable (and certainly the fattest) of them are World History: A Dictionary of Important People, Places, And Events, From Ancient Times To The Present (1994, 10,000 entries; actually an updated edition of my earlier book) and The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies (1990). Both are out of print. I also wrote several books for Congressional Quarterly, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Winners and Their Achievements (1996) and a series of question-and-answer books on the federal government, state government, and the presidency.
Though these were not titles likely to make me rich and famous, I was writing regularly--millions of words ultimately--which was something I’d set out to do as a young man. Sort of. I’d left college in the mid-Sixties with the idea of following in Earnest Hemingway’s footsteps, to write novels after first becoming a newspaper reporter. Not the wisest of courses, but the Sixties were heady, idealistic times ripe for adventure. After stints as a reporter for a small city daily and a Navy journalist, reference book work gave me a foot in the door to book publishing, one I thought would lead to writing novels.
However, as a wonderful old proverb warns, “There’s many a slip, twixt the cup and the lip.” Writing the strictly informational reference copy required a completely different mindset from fiction. And researching and writing reference books day in and day out sapped whatever energy I might have had for writing novels in my spare time. Or even reading them.
I did make sporadic attempts at writing fiction. I’d get what I thought was a great idea, then sit down to develop the story as I wrote. But inevitably the initial burst of enthusiasm foundered on unforseen problems with the story, leaving me with a beginning and no end. I knew I had a novel in me, but I still hadn’t figured how to get it out.
Meanwhile, the mechanics of writing moved on. Desktop computers revolutionized the writing business, eliminating time-consuming nuisances like correction tape and white out (yes, I go that far back), xeroxing manuscript, and eventually even the need for sending a publisher hard copy. But who would have thought the internet would come along and virtually blow away the market for reference books? It did so with a vengeance in the late 1990s, the first of many upheavals in the publishing business yet to come. With the handwriting on the wall, I published my last reference book in 1999.
A New Lifestyle
The following year I got started renovating old houses and soon after the housing market took off. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Renovation work proved a new adventure, and profitable at that, but it was without a doubt physically demanding too. Five days a week of that kind of work usually left me hungering only for the chance to sit down and recover in my spare time.
My once-a-week day hikes--a favorite passtime of mine for years--came to a screeching halt because of that workload. And for the time being so did any thoughts of writing. I kept in touch with my creative side through landscape photography, and a new hobby of watching and collecting movies. To be sure, movie watching provided plenty of entertainment, but also amounted to informal research against the day when I might take up writing again. That I could watch them while sitting on the sofa with my feet up on the coffee table was a big plus.
The collection has since grown to over 500 movies and TV series. My favorites range from classics like Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North By Northwest to Clint Eastwood’s gritty Dirty Harry movies and many other action/crime thrillers. Add to that hundreds of other dramas, comedies, and war movies, as well as TV series like Rockford Files, Magnum PI, and BBC’s Inspector Morse, and you have some idea of why these days I’m struggling to find shelf space for the collection. I’ve screened virtually all the movies at least once and many several times over.
I grew up around books, worked in a bookstore, and had a career in book publishing, but it wasn’t until the housing market crashed that I began reading fiction for sheer pleasure--or maybe as an escape from the bad times. With more time on my hands, I plowed through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey series, Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, as well as a wide range of stand alone thrillers by Grisham, Baldacci, Brown, and others. Here again, the entertainment also had an ulterior purpose--the education of a would-be novelist.
Hooked on Writing
The turning point came unexpectedly in winter 2010, when I saw an ad for a short story contest in a local weekly magazine. I was tempted, but coming up with a good story idea proved harder than I thought--there were so many possibile stories and so many ways to style them. Besides, it had been almost a decade since I’d written anything.
Thoroughly discouraged, I’d all but given up on the contest. But my subconscious apparently had other ideas. As I woke up one morning, the plot for the story came to me all in one piece.
Having the run of the story worked out before sitting down to write made all the difference for me. I could focus on fleshing the story out as I wrote the manuscript, rather than trying to figure out how it should develop in the first place. A division of labor, so to speak, like building the framing for a house first, then hanging everything else on that. I also saw clearly how bits and pieces of my own experiences, situations and people I’ve known, things I’d read, and pure imagination could be cobbled together to make a story. Something clicked. I knew I could write that story.
Out of the Blue didn’t win a prize, but it opened the door to writing fiction and I was hooked. I wanted to do a lot more. Lost Treasure started out as an idea for a short novel, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it would make a good full-length novel--and that I could write it. Taking to heart the lessons learned with the short story, I spent a lot of time thinking about the novel and just jotting down notes. At the same time I started reading and researching facets of the book.
Then I wrote a detailed scene-by-scene narrative outline. That proved a project in itself, but a lot of problems got worked out. That’s not to say I didn’t make any inspired additions or encounter new problems while writing the manuscript, but having the plot and characters blocked in allowed me write each scene knowing what had to happen to get to the book’s surprise ending. And with the outline as a road map, I could write on my stop-and-go schedule of one full day, plus some spare hours, each week.
The finished book, Lost Treasure: Clay Cantrell Mystery Adventure #1, is a treasure hunt page-turner set in a small Virginia town. It’s a tightly plotted book, and there was a lot to keep track of. Without that outline I’d never have been able to pull it off, especially coordinating the modern-day treasure hunt-murder mystery with the flashbacks to the fictional Confederate supply depot in the last days of the Civil War.
There is no question in my mind that the time was finally right for me to take the plunge into writing my first novel. All those books and movies I’d been devouring certainly helped prime the pump and strengthen whatever muscle it is that drives the imagination. And I don’t know, maybe the stars were finally aligned in the right order. Whatever the reasons, that first novel gave me a solid start down a new winding road.
That momentum (and plenty of time for writing) carried me through the completion of two more installments to the series--Killer Fog and The Girl Behind the Wall. But my move from Staunton, a couple of renovations, and the sale of my rental properties together conspired to sharply limit my writing time these past few years. A fourth mystery is in the works, though, and I'm anxious to see where the winding road will take the series. I hope you are too!
Until recently I split my time between writing and renovating old houses here in Virginia. I’ve had a lifelong interest in carpentry, not to mention an abiding curiosity about how things are done in the building trades. Maybe it’s a genetically encoded blood lust, or just too much testosterone, but I’ve always found working with my hands very satisfying. So over the years I’ve eagerly tackled as much of the work myself as I could. And learned a lot too.
I actually am a licensed contractor here in Virginia, which had a lot to do with making Clay Cantrell, the series hero, a contractor working on old houses. And for now splitting my time between writing and physical work has its advantages. The physical activity in construction work gets my blood flowing and allows me to get some distance from whatever I’m writing at the time.
It’s more than a change of setting. The problems of getting old houses (reasonably) straight, plumb, functional, and finished are concrete, as opposed to the abstract and imaginary work of writing fiction. At times though, those concrete problems try my patience in ways you can only imagine. That gets my blood going too.
Career Hopping
The leap from career one, writing reference books, to tearing up and renovating old houses was a long one, but like many changes it proved unavoidable. I’d been lucky to find work as a freelance writer and editor for reference books back in the late 1970s, and then over the next twenty-plus years to write/compile those thirteen books of my own.
The two most notable (and certainly the fattest) of them are World History: A Dictionary of Important People, Places, And Events, From Ancient Times To The Present (1994, 10,000 entries; actually an updated edition of my earlier book) and The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies (1990). Both are out of print. I also wrote several books for Congressional Quarterly, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Winners and Their Achievements (1996) and a series of question-and-answer books on the federal government, state government, and the presidency.
Though these were not titles likely to make me rich and famous, I was writing regularly--millions of words ultimately--which was something I’d set out to do as a young man. Sort of. I’d left college in the mid-Sixties with the idea of following in Earnest Hemingway’s footsteps, to write novels after first becoming a newspaper reporter. Not the wisest of courses, but the Sixties were heady, idealistic times ripe for adventure. After stints as a reporter for a small city daily and a Navy journalist, reference book work gave me a foot in the door to book publishing, one I thought would lead to writing novels.
However, as a wonderful old proverb warns, “There’s many a slip, twixt the cup and the lip.” Writing the strictly informational reference copy required a completely different mindset from fiction. And researching and writing reference books day in and day out sapped whatever energy I might have had for writing novels in my spare time. Or even reading them.
I did make sporadic attempts at writing fiction. I’d get what I thought was a great idea, then sit down to develop the story as I wrote. But inevitably the initial burst of enthusiasm foundered on unforseen problems with the story, leaving me with a beginning and no end. I knew I had a novel in me, but I still hadn’t figured how to get it out.
Meanwhile, the mechanics of writing moved on. Desktop computers revolutionized the writing business, eliminating time-consuming nuisances like correction tape and white out (yes, I go that far back), xeroxing manuscript, and eventually even the need for sending a publisher hard copy. But who would have thought the internet would come along and virtually blow away the market for reference books? It did so with a vengeance in the late 1990s, the first of many upheavals in the publishing business yet to come. With the handwriting on the wall, I published my last reference book in 1999.
A New Lifestyle
The following year I got started renovating old houses and soon after the housing market took off. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Renovation work proved a new adventure, and profitable at that, but it was without a doubt physically demanding too. Five days a week of that kind of work usually left me hungering only for the chance to sit down and recover in my spare time.
My once-a-week day hikes--a favorite passtime of mine for years--came to a screeching halt because of that workload. And for the time being so did any thoughts of writing. I kept in touch with my creative side through landscape photography, and a new hobby of watching and collecting movies. To be sure, movie watching provided plenty of entertainment, but also amounted to informal research against the day when I might take up writing again. That I could watch them while sitting on the sofa with my feet up on the coffee table was a big plus.
The collection has since grown to over 500 movies and TV series. My favorites range from classics like Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North By Northwest to Clint Eastwood’s gritty Dirty Harry movies and many other action/crime thrillers. Add to that hundreds of other dramas, comedies, and war movies, as well as TV series like Rockford Files, Magnum PI, and BBC’s Inspector Morse, and you have some idea of why these days I’m struggling to find shelf space for the collection. I’ve screened virtually all the movies at least once and many several times over.
I grew up around books, worked in a bookstore, and had a career in book publishing, but it wasn’t until the housing market crashed that I began reading fiction for sheer pleasure--or maybe as an escape from the bad times. With more time on my hands, I plowed through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey series, Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, as well as a wide range of stand alone thrillers by Grisham, Baldacci, Brown, and others. Here again, the entertainment also had an ulterior purpose--the education of a would-be novelist.
Hooked on Writing
The turning point came unexpectedly in winter 2010, when I saw an ad for a short story contest in a local weekly magazine. I was tempted, but coming up with a good story idea proved harder than I thought--there were so many possibile stories and so many ways to style them. Besides, it had been almost a decade since I’d written anything.
Thoroughly discouraged, I’d all but given up on the contest. But my subconscious apparently had other ideas. As I woke up one morning, the plot for the story came to me all in one piece.
Having the run of the story worked out before sitting down to write made all the difference for me. I could focus on fleshing the story out as I wrote the manuscript, rather than trying to figure out how it should develop in the first place. A division of labor, so to speak, like building the framing for a house first, then hanging everything else on that. I also saw clearly how bits and pieces of my own experiences, situations and people I’ve known, things I’d read, and pure imagination could be cobbled together to make a story. Something clicked. I knew I could write that story.
Out of the Blue didn’t win a prize, but it opened the door to writing fiction and I was hooked. I wanted to do a lot more. Lost Treasure started out as an idea for a short novel, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it would make a good full-length novel--and that I could write it. Taking to heart the lessons learned with the short story, I spent a lot of time thinking about the novel and just jotting down notes. At the same time I started reading and researching facets of the book.
Then I wrote a detailed scene-by-scene narrative outline. That proved a project in itself, but a lot of problems got worked out. That’s not to say I didn’t make any inspired additions or encounter new problems while writing the manuscript, but having the plot and characters blocked in allowed me write each scene knowing what had to happen to get to the book’s surprise ending. And with the outline as a road map, I could write on my stop-and-go schedule of one full day, plus some spare hours, each week.
The finished book, Lost Treasure: Clay Cantrell Mystery Adventure #1, is a treasure hunt page-turner set in a small Virginia town. It’s a tightly plotted book, and there was a lot to keep track of. Without that outline I’d never have been able to pull it off, especially coordinating the modern-day treasure hunt-murder mystery with the flashbacks to the fictional Confederate supply depot in the last days of the Civil War.
There is no question in my mind that the time was finally right for me to take the plunge into writing my first novel. All those books and movies I’d been devouring certainly helped prime the pump and strengthen whatever muscle it is that drives the imagination. And I don’t know, maybe the stars were finally aligned in the right order. Whatever the reasons, that first novel gave me a solid start down a new winding road.
That momentum (and plenty of time for writing) carried me through the completion of two more installments to the series--Killer Fog and The Girl Behind the Wall. But my move from Staunton, a couple of renovations, and the sale of my rental properties together conspired to sharply limit my writing time these past few years. A fourth mystery is in the works, though, and I'm anxious to see where the winding road will take the series. I hope you are too!
