This series is appropriate for both young adults (ages 18+) and older readers alike. The history of the Panhandle serves as the backdrop of each book and is weaved into the character development and the story itself, so you are learning pieces of Texas Panhandle history while reading a fun and engaging book.
These books are family sagas and multigenerational – each story spanning across several generations from grandparents to parents to children and grandchildren. They tackle tough subjects like class differences, interracial relationships, PTSD, alcoholism, and family loss. Even with these tough topics, each book is still rich with humor, love, and personal growth. And one thing is known from the beginning – these stories all have a happy ending.
All tagged writing about reality
GLENRIO, book 9 of my series, “Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle,” is a novel talking about warrior trauma, romance, and love. Yes, it is possible to escape the remembered horrors of war. Both the warriors who survive and the people waiting when they come home may be able to put the thousand pieces back together again—through unexpected romance and healing love.
[Click the title of the blog post to read more.]
As an OWG (Old White Guy) who grew up in the Texas Panhandle in the 1940s and 1950s—before the Civil Rights era, I find it hard to understand antiracism. I’ve always insisted that I’m not racist. But Black folks tell me, “That’s not enough. You have to be antiracist.” In part, I wrote my novel, Colleen and the Statue, to try to understand what Confederate statues mean to African Americans, and thereby understand racism and antiracism.
[Click the title of the blog post to read more.]
I grew up on fairy tales. They always begin, “Once upon a time …” and always end, “… they lived happily ever after.” My romance novels are like that. They’re set in the Texas Panhandle of the 1950s, but actually they could be set anywhere, anytime. The town and the county where they take place are fictional. The characters—usually two young people—face a series of impossible obstacles to their love, but in the end they overcome the odds, kiss, marry, and live happily ever after—à la Hallmark, Disney, and traditional Hollywood. So when my Chinese international student friend, Doris, sent me to see the current Chinese blockbuster movie, Better Days, of course I interpreted it in the same way I would an American movie.
[Click title of blog post to read more.]
If I had to pick one of my novels to submit as a movie script, it would be Colleen and the Statue. The movie’s opening scene would be the novel’s Chapter 20, when Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, U.S.A. comes for his family in August 1865, after witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In war movies, the most emotional scene is when the soldier everyone thought had died, returns. Usually, this happens at the end. I would put it at the beginning, to set my story’s emotional tone. I would show Sgt. Ruff first slowly riding through his hometown in Nacogdoches County, Texas, accompanied by a platoon of Yankee cavalry, then going past the Ruff plantation’s Big House, and finally going out to the cabins where he had grown up as a slave. Along the way, I would zoom in on the faces of the spectators, to show their varied reactions to the totally unexpected return.
[Click title of the blog to read more.]
As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”
[Click the title of the post to read more.]
I was surprised when the public librarian in a small town in Virginia rejected the idea of placing my novels in her library, saying, “They’re too regional—they’re all set in the Texas Panhandle. I don’t think my patrons here in Northern Virginia are interested in stories that take place out West. They want stories set in their part of the country.”
I can’t say that she was wrong about her patrons. Maybe they really are that limited in what they will read. But she certainly was wrong in saying that a story can be “too regional,” and for that reason would not be of interest to anyone who is not from wherever the story takes place.
Good stories are timeless and “place-less.”
[Click the title of the blog to read the rest.]
“[Good-bye] to officers who put ‘duty’ above ‘ethics,’ and to the troops who regularly complained that the Army’s Rules of Engagement were too strict—as if more brutality, bombing and firepower (with less concern for civilians) would have brought victory instead of stalemate.”
Words of Major Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, who retired in 2018, after 18 years in the Army and 11 deployments, often to war zones. Words very unusual for a multi-medalist soldier who was teaching history at West Point. He had become a disillusioned pacifist after what he saw in his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan—and he gave up his once-promising career, in order to speak out.
[Click the title of the blog to read the full post.]
I’m different. I don’t want my memories to die with me. When someone I have known dies, part of my sorrow is that most of their memories have died with them. Most people don’t leave behind, when they leave this world, long diaries or extended memoirs or annotated albums of photographs or audio-videos or carefully-crafted CDs of their lives. And after a few years, even what memories they have left behind are stored in a box and stuck in a closet somewhere, and forgotten. Their memories died with them, in effect. I don’t want that to happen in my case.
So I write novels—historical novels, which are really my own history; romantic fantasies, which are the romances I lived or wish I had lived; tragedies, which entail the sad things that have happened to me or to my loved ones during my life.
[Click the title of the blog to read the full post.]
My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.
[Click the title of the blog to read the full post.]