During
the day, I'm a horticulturist. While I've spent much of my career
designing landscapes or diagnosing dying plants, I've always been a
storyteller. My writing career began with magazine columns, landscape
design textbooks, and a gardening column at the Post and Courier
(Charleston, SC). However, I've always fancied fiction.
My
grandpa never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in
the mid-70s. He was uneducated, but he was a voracious reader. I
remember going through his bookshelves of paperback sci-fi novels,
smelling musty old paper, pulling Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov off
shelf and promising to bring them back. I was fascinated by robots that
could think and act like people. What
happened when they died?
I'm
a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and
carry me to the end. I'd rather sail a boat than climb a mountain.
That's the sort of stuff I want to write, not the assigned reading we
got in school. I want to create stories that kept you up late.
Having
a story unfold inside your head is an experience different than
reading. You connect with characters in a deeper, more meaningful way.
You feel them, empathize with them, cheer for them and even mourn. The
challenge is to get the reader to experience the same thing, even if
it's only a fraction of what the writer feels. Not so easy.
In
2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open with Four Letter Words, a
short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer's Disease. My first
step as a novelist began when I developed a story to encourage my young
son to read. This story became The Socket Greeny Saga. Socket tapped
into my lifetime fascination with consciousness and identity, but this
character does it from a young adult's struggle with his place in the
world.
After
Socket, I thought I was done with fiction. But then the ideas kept
coming, and I kept writing. Most of my work investigates the human
condition and the meaning of life, but not in ordinary fashion. About
half of my work is Young Adult (Socket Greeny, Claus, Foreverland)
because it speaks to that age of indecision and the struggle with
identity. But I like to venture into adult fiction
(Halfskin, Drayton) so I can cuss. Either way, I like to be
entertaining.
And I'm a big fan of plot twists.
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