About My Writing…

I need to find that picture. The one where I water skied directly over a five-foot alligator, while on the edge of the Pearl River Swamp outside New Orleans with my friend Stewart Sheffield and a couple other high school buddies. We took it a few minutes after I hit the gator, dropped the rope and climbed a cypress tree with my skis still on! Turns out the gator was already dead, so being young guys, of course we dragged it in the boat and took pics with our heads in the massive beast’s mouth, his head in our mouths, dancing with it, fighting…until our Kodak 126 Instamatic ran out of film. I have a couple of the pictures and one creepy hand with jagged claws preserved in a jar of formaldehyde to prove it.

I scribbled down that story while in high school, along with some speeches for student council, scouting adventures and other snippets of my history, which I find from time to time. And a journal from the weeks I spent working miles at sea on an oil-rig, the right of passage for many Louisiana boys, which was the first long-form writing sample I can remember. There was a lot of emotion—mostly fear and loneliness in those words, scratched in my normally messy handwriting, made worse by the vibration of the rig.

I’ve always captured and told stories, from my time in New Orleans as a scout, to my magic act on Norwegian Caribbean Cruise Ships (a significant upgrade from the oil rig life,) through Fraternity life at LSU, where my oddity as a non-drinking fraternity boy allowed me to embellish previous nights’ activity of the brothers for all our entertainment. My storytelling as a producer is documented on the other side of this site, but let me say that working with broadcast crews kneaded by experiences from all over the world, on top of interactions with celebrities is a breeding ground for great stories!

I love adventure and will camp, climb, crawl and creep through just about anywhere for the experience! A lot of my stories coalesced under my character, “Sloughwater Steve”, and dribble out during gatherings around a campfire, when I relive the true adventures of my years in the swamps of New Orleans and along the Mississippi River, challenging those assembled to guess which ONE story is false, as all the others are absolutely-ski-over-a-gator-and-lived-to-tell-true!

And along the way, I spent more than a decade carving out a new novel, SELL MONTANA. You can take a peek here, while I go work on my next story…