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Readers of the novels of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, sometimes think they recognize people they know, places they’ve been to, or events they have witnessed. They ask me, “Is that So-and-So?” Or they declare, “That must be Such-and-Such a store in Such-and-Such a town.” Or they say, “I’m wondering if there was someone who stimulated your thinking about This-and-That.” Or they question, “Does that culture really allow pre-marital sex in the parents’ home—like you say in your book?”

I must remind these readers, “It’s just a story.” I originally set out to write an updated history of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle, with pages and pages of footnotes to document the objective facts of my objective history.

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Nov 19
Nov 19 What Would Happen If Your Culture Was Disappeared and Erased?

Once upon a time, the Comanche people ruled the Texas Panhandle. Then they were disappeared and erased—saw both genocide and “cultural genocide.” Tammie’s Destiny, Volume 6 of my historical romance series, tells the coming-of-age story and forbidden love between an adolescent Comanche girl from a reservation in New Mexico and a young man from a Texas millionaire ranching family. The tale’s background is the generational hatred between Texans and Native Americans, seemingly making such a relationship impossible.

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Oct 20
Oct 20 Jim Crow is Always Watching!

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.”

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Oct 13
Oct 13 Valley of the Fallen

being an author, historical fiction

The background of my latest romance novel, Colleen and the Statue, is the on-going controversy over what to do with Confederate statues scattered ubiquitously across the states of the Old South, including Texas. For example, is the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a park a symbol of States’ Rights and the Southern Way of Life, or rather is it a symbol of slavery and white supremacy? If the former, it should stay; if the latter, it has to go somewhere else—perhaps to a museum.

It is instructive to compare this American controversy with a similar, recent controversy in Spain over what to do with the to-be-exhumed body of Gen. Francisco Franco. Was he a hero, who saved Spain from Communism and restored the Catholic Church to its proper place or rather was he a brutal dictator, who fought only to acquire power and money? How you answer that question about Franco will determine what you do with his body.

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Sep 19
Sep 19 “YOU CAN’T REWRITE HISTORY!”

being an author, historical fiction

I recently had a phone conversation with a good friend—a lady in her mid-70s—who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. She’s perhaps typical of older white Southerners, whose grandfathers served under Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. My friend said that although she deplored the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted from the “Unite the Right” rally of August 11-12, 2017, she agreed with the rally organizers that the City Council’s order to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Lee Park was a mistake. “You can’t rewrite history!” my friend emphatically insisted over and over again, during our long discussion about removal of this and other Confederate statues—including that of a Confederate soldier in Ellwood Park, Amarillo, Texas, where I grew up.

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Sep 1
Sep 1 "Build That Wall!" - What Do You Think When You Hear That Phrase?

I think about that border over there, first of all, because I’m Irish on my mother’s side and Scotch-Irish on my father’s side. That is, my mother’s Catholic McDade family came from what is now the Irish Republic; and my father’s Protestant Nicholl family came from what is now Northern Ireland. And secondly, I think about it because Volume 5 of my Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle series—a romance novel entitled, Colleen and the Statue—has as its main female character an Irish teenager who has immigrated to Texas, in great part, as a political refugee, leaving her homeland to get away from “ethno-nationalist” violence.

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May 15
May 15 A good love story is timeless and “place-less”

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.”

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Mar 14
Mar 14 Memories

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.

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Jan 27
Jan 27 Writing About Forbidden Themes

In writing my stories, I have to keep in mind that certain themes are forbidden.

I’m not talking about pornographic material or sex scenes that might be too explicit for some readers. And I’m not talking about political correctness in my choice of words for describing different ethnicities and groups of people. I’m talking about certain cultural and historical themes, which in some countries, government censors would not allow, and which in this county, could cause my book to get “black listed” among certain groups of readers.

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Jan 15
Jan 15 Creating Fictional Towns For Your Books

For the novels in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, I invented a town named “Mackenzie,” after Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie. In retrospect, I think a better name would have been “Leetown,” after Gen. Robert E. Lee. Underlying my stories is the idea that in the decades after the American Civil War, bands of ex-Confederate soldiers and their families established new towns across the Texas Panhandle that would continue the values and ideals of the “Old South” and the “Southern Way of Life.”

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Dec 14
Dec 14 How I Write