My writing started in 7th Grade, when I was the Sports Editor for the school’s magazine, The Sentinel. I found out I liked to write and was told by my English teacher that I was good at it

As a freshman in college, away from family and friends, I was very unhappy. But I found a way to escape my unhappiness; by writing. Influenced by J.D. Salinger’s character, Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, I reinvented myself into Chris Butler, another screw-up in his freshman year in college.

My English professor, praised my writing and characterization. At one point he wrote in the margins of one episode “…I can’t wait to see what happens next!”

The idea for this book stemmed from a series of articles in The New Yorker Magazine, published in the early 1950s. Like so many things in the unconscious part of one’s mind, the impression about the ship The Great Eastern lay dormant in my mind until it surfaced in the early 1990s when I sat down to write the book.

If you enjoyed following the characters of Susannah Eddings and John Beauregard, you’ll also enjoy the follow-on to Blockade Runner, currently being written. It tracks both of them out West, where many Southerners fled after the South was devastated.

I live in the historic village of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which may have something to do with my writing historical fiction.