I was born in Bryson City, North Carolina, and I was raised in an Air Force family in Japan, Washington D.C., and San Antonio, Texas. My family finally settled back in North Carolina after my father retired from the Air Force. Upon my graduation from High School I joined the Army, and I have spent the major portion of my life in the military service in one branch or another - Active, Reserve, and National Guard. I have jokingly said that I am collecting Honorable Discharges. I am currently working toward my fourth, which will be arriving soon. 

I am married with three sons, who, like me, are all avid North Carolina Tarheel basketball fans, and I have spent my entire adult life working in the medical field in one form or another. For the past twenty years I have worked in Nuclear Medicine for the Greenville Hospital System in Greenville, South Carolina.

I began writing in High School, and I have continued it in various forms since that time. I began writing poetry, graduated to song lyrics, which I mostly sing to myself; and I eventually decided to try my hand at full blown fiction. This has culminated in my first novel, A Sound of Distant Thunder, which is set in the last year of the Civil War in Virginia. The story revolves around the Stoner family, who live outside of Petersburg, Virginia, and from the time that a small militia force of mostly old men and teenage boys holds off the advance of a much stronger Union Calvary column into Petersburg, the lives of the Stoners is thrown into turmoil.

The book looks closely at life in the Federal prison camps in Point Lookout, Maryland, and Elmira, New York. It also follows the path of Sheridan's ravaging of the Shenandoah Valley and the nine month siege at Petersburg, which directly led to the death march of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to its final surrender at Appomattox. Throughout all of this the book does not lose touch with the women who are left behind in Petersburg and are forced to fend for themselves in the midst of a devastation which they could not have possibly imagined.

A Sound of Distant Thunder is set in the midst of war, and it is a story of war, but it is far more than that. The book tells of hatred which can consume a man and totally change the way he pursues his life. It tells of a determination to overcome which enables men and women to endure when endurance does not seem in the least possible. It tells of love, which, in spite of all else, ultimately empowers the healing of scars burned deep into the souls of those caught up in these horrific events and enables change. 

Perhaps with this novel I bit off more than I could chew at the time I started it; but with time and determination I have finally completed it, and I hope that others will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed the journey of the telling.