Ah, the good old days. When using the bathroom meant taking a little hike to the outhouse. Or sliding a chamber pot out from under the bed during the night so you could do your business. Ah, the good old days. Har har har! Working on my latest novel, which is set partly in the nineteenth century, the lack of bathrooms has been on my mind. I don’t know about you, but I’m a very twenty-first century kind of person. Gotta have indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, and hea

I’ve had a couple of people ask me already if my latest book, A Daffodil for Angie, is about me growing up in the Sixties. The short answer: Hell, NO! Here’s the long answer. Like Angie, I was a teenager in the Sixties, although I was a bit younger than she is. Both our dads were in Vietnam in 1966-67. But Angie’s dad is not my dad at all. We both lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, so anyone who knows the area will recognize many locations mentioned in the book. But the h

As I write my new novel set in the 60s, sometimes I feel like I’m traveling back in time. The teenage character in my book, due out this fall, is one year older than I was that particular year. And while Angie is definitely not me, we do have some things in common, including that our dads were serving a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1966. Doing research for Angie’s story has brought back the ugliness and futility of that war. Like Angie’s dad, my father told me the rationale beh