About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
Demon Seekers: The Journey Begins
Description
<p>Sayetta is an archangel who has been sent into the physical world to seek out eight archangels who have been reborn into the world. She knows that she cannot do it in the form of an angel so she takes on a human form to move through among us in the physical world. Gabe a mortal has the soul of a warrior angel. He is reborn in physical form to prepare for her coming. He is born with abilities that he is unaware he has.</p><p>All of his life Gabe had been having dreams of a ruined church. He never knew the name of the church, but the dream was always the same. In the dream, he was standing facing the ruins of the church. But he didn’t look like a human. Instead, he was an angel with pure white wings and a golden countenance. Another much larger angel appeared to him. The angel pointed towards what was left of the door and said “Enter, your journey has just begun and your guide awaits you.</p><p>Sayetta finds out from Archangel Michael that Lucifer has sent an old demon to find and stop Auriel from removing the demons he has imprisoned in the earth.</p><p>They receive a little help from the Archangels Azuriel and Gabriel as they journey to locate Auriel. It’s a race to find Auriel before the demon does. In the end, it’s a battle between two powerful beings, one good and one evil.</p>
Story Behind The Book
Mica Highways picks up where Tobacco Sticks left off twenty years later. 1968 brings Martin Luther Kings assassination and a crime that is hushed up for twenty more years. When a young man decides go down South and find out about the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death-we are led into a sort of who done it mystery. But Mica Highways is really about love triumphing over tremendous pain. Charlie Tidewater stays with his old grandfather who is on the last weeks of his life and we see his life spin out during his nocturnal journeys. We follow granddaddy as he races bootleggers, start a business, lose everything, then we watch as his wife slowly goes mad. Through it all this there is a central crime, a central wrong that was committed during the worst of the Civil Rights movement. But granddaddy perseveres and puts forth his simple ode to life-it is what we make it. So it is.
