Additional pages from
Billy Boat Learns To Float

Unpublished writers deal with a prime example of Catch-22; you can't get published without an agent, and you can't get an agent unless you've been published. With me it's like what Jook tells his great-grandmother in JOOK just before he leaves home: "My music is like that poem about a flower growing somewhere in the middle of a distant desert; the poem questions whether that flower is any less beautiful simply because no one will ever see it." So I keep writing, sending off submissions, and now I'm putting samples of my favorites on this site.

Here are three of my novels.

EVANGELINE & LITTLE MOSES
A movie waiting to happen
The story of slavery during the Civil War as seen through the eyes of a slave girl, Evangeline, and told to a chuch congregation when she is one hundred years old. Written from the slave's point of view, this novel is filled with warmth and truth.

“If anyone ever tells you the Civil War was not about slavery, you tell them they’re wrong. Every White man who died in the Civil War did so either fighting to preserve slavery or to abolish it, there was no in-between.” Sample Chapters

Evangeline is fourteen when the Civil War begins. Having lived the life of a privileged slave on the Cruder plantation, she knows how to read, owns her own horse, writes her own passes, and, as close friend and confidant to Colonel Cruder's youngest son, Daniel, she gets to go where slaves seldom go; she will also stand as Daniel's Second at a duel with the husband who catches him. But these sweet Magnolia days of summer all come to an end the day the overseer Shadrack Black rides into town.

JOOK - A Comedy
"What are the Blues anyway but dying face down in the mud after being shot in the back by a jealous woman?"

Jook leaves his home in Louisiana in 1947 with his guitar and bag of Blues harmonicas, and hitchhikes across Southern Mississippi looking for his elusive girlfriend, Bursitis, while playing his original songs in the bars and jukes along the way.

Sample Chapters

The year is 1947; no Oozies, no hoe's, no drugs, no gangs; just good music and good friends in this story from the back alleys, pool rooms and chain gangs of Southern Mississippi, where Jook becomes a man and comes face to face with his destiny.

Jook is a Robert Johnson - style protagonist. In spite of being five foot-five and blind in one eye from a rooster-fight gone bad, Jook transcends it all with his music and his personality; his passion for life a sponge waiting to be filled. I always wanted to read a novel like this, about the old-time Blues guys, but had to write my own to do it.

Katani, Queen of the Headhunters

"Fire is fire and hell is hell, and on earth they shall always meet and prosper. But that they should meet in the form of this particular young girl, now held tightly in the cruel, murdering fingers of a slaver, could only be the amused chuckle of God drinking the blood of Satan at the table of justice."

(This book took twenty-five years to complete.)
What began as a comic book in the 70’s, became a novel over the years. It is the story of a baby born of a white captive in a tribe of headhunters (Shuaras), who is taken away by the old woman, Zamora, to be raised as her own. It isn't long before Zamora discoveres the child has inherited her witchdoctor father’s powers of magic. Every name, custom and ritual in this novel is real.

Sample Chapters

LIMITED TIME ONLY. My short story, Texas Lawyer, is now a novelette, and I'm putting it on a link for you to read for free. Only a tragic comedy such as this could reflect the madness in which we live today. Dewey Ardonni, my protagonist, defends a man accused of murder. In spite of the Prosecution having twenty eye-witnesses, fingerprints, a DNA match, a signed confession, and the judge and jury against him, Dewey gets his client off! No gimmics, no tricks; just incredible courtroom talent. I know you will like it.

Recipe For Boiled Shrimp