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.
The Usurper King (The Plantagenet Legacy Book 3)
Description
<p><span style="color:rgb(15,17,17);font-family:'Amazon Ember', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">First, he led his own uprising. Then he captured a forsaken king. Henry had no intention of taking the crown for himself; it was given to him by popular acclaim. Alas, it didn't take long to realize that that having the kingship was much less rewarding than striving for it. Only three months after his coronation, Henry IV had to face a rebellion led by Richard's disgruntled favorites. Repressive measures led to more discontent. His own supporters turned against him, demanding more than he could give. The haughty Percies precipitated the Battle of Shrewsbury which nearly cost him the throne—and his life.</span><br style="color:rgb(15,17,17);font-family:'Amazon Ember', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;" /><span style="color:rgb(15,17,17);font-family:'Amazon Ember', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">To make matters worse, even after Richard II's funeral, the deposed monarch was rumored to be in Scotland, planning his return. The king just wouldn't stay down and malcontents wanted him back.</span></p>
Story Behind The Book
My mother in law told me an old pitcher lived across the street from her in Florida. One night my son and I went out there to play in the street. I could see the old pitcher by his ankles with his garage up a quarter of the way. This went on for three nights and then on the fourth night he came out and watched my son pitch. He then gave my son his philosphy of pitching and went back into his garage. I found out later he had won the World Series in 1968. That's how I thought of The Pitcher, the story of a Mexican American boy and and a pitcher at the end of his career who coaches the boy to make the highschool team.
