Age: 52

Location: Winston-Salem, N.C.

What is your specialty or focus?
Narrative non-fiction in books (with a so-far unpublished historical novel, of course); travel and business writing for magazines.

What's the latest thing you've worked on?
My 25 Best Civil War Sites (Greenline Publications of San Francisco) was introduced at Book Expo America in New York City on June 3 and 4th. I was the fellow walking around New York City and Book Expo in the uniform of a member of The Iron Brigade (24th Regiment of Michigan troops) of the Union Army Of The Potomac. My Confederate compatriot, also in uniform, lives in New Jersey. I live in North Carolina. We are both reenactors with the 26th Regiment of North Carolina Troops, which also reenacts as the 24th Michigan. We are equal opportunity weekend historical soldiers.

What has been your most difficult assignment and how did you deal with its challenges?
I ghost-wrote They Call Me Big House - A biography of Clarence "Big House" Gaines (John F. Blair Publisher, 2004) , a famous basketball coach. (For all you long-suffering Knicks fans, Big House was the college coach of Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, star of the 1974 Knicks, when they won their last NBA championship). Big House, at 81, was in declining health when I started researching the book in November 2003 so the challenge was to do all the interviews with him, research his life and career, talk to his players and competitor coaches and get the book out before something happened to him. All during the three months interviewing and researching process, his older players and fellow coaches were dying off. He would tell me "I've got dying troubles today" (meaning a friend had passed) and we would talk about his own mortality, and how this book would be important one day because it would preserve what he did for hundreds of black kids going to college in the 1940's-90's. I wrote up to 12 hours a day from January-April, 2004. He died in May 2005, just eight months after the book was published (John F. Blair Publisher of Winston-Salem, N.C.).

What's the best or most helpful thing that an editor has told you?
Write it right the first time, because once you read it enough times in subsequent drafts and galleys, it will sound right - whether it is or not.

What's the worst writing or freelancing advice you've ever gotten?
"Give me five story ideas and I will pick the two that I like and I will assign them to you." - given to me by a newly-minted, MBA-possessing, smart-assed, probably-pretty-boy kid editor for a statewide business magazine here in North Carolina. When I asked for a $15 per article raise to pay me for thinking up the three wasted ideas, I was fired after writing for the magazine for five years without any rasies at all. If I ever meet that punk in person...

Can you tell us a little bit about what historical travel writing is like? That's a genre we don't hear about that often.
In 1995 I noticed a book store rack of travel books about North Carolina. The only thing missing was a book showing readers how to find Civil War sites in the state. I pitched an idea to John F. Blair Publisher on Touring The Carolinas' Civil War Sites. They bought it and I followed up with Touring Civil War Sites in Virginia and West Virginia, In The Footsteps of Robert E. Lee, In The Footsteps of Stonewall Jackson and In The Footsteps of J.E.B. Stuart. I like visiting historical sites and looking out on the landscape to imagine what that site must have been like when it was prominent in history. (My wife complains about battlefields "They are all fields. They all look alike.") I also like showing people how to find historic graves because the tombstones can make for fasicnating reading (One Confederate general who stood 6'5" and weighed more than 300 pounds has a monument with a Biblical verse from Job on it. When I looked up the verse it read something like: "I may have been fat, but I wasn't slovenly.").

When history is told using amusing/unusual stories about the great characters who lived in those days, I believe it comes alive even for people who claim history is boring because it only involves dates about who died in what battle. History can be as fascinating as any novel if told the right way.