Category: writing

How to Write Characters Who Do Stupid Things Without Making Your Story Stupid

Don’t Make Them Dumb. Make Them Desperate.

There’s a moment every writer dreads. You’re reading a review of your own work, or a beta reader’s notes, or a comment from a critique partner, and you see the sentence that stops your heart:

“This only happens because the character is an idiot.”

That’s the ghost that haunts fiction. The dreaded Idiot Plot: a story that only functions because its characters refuse to behave like thinking humans. Doors get opened. Warnings get ignored. Secrets get kept for no reason. And the reader closes the book feeling insulted.So writers overcorrect. We start scrubbing our characters clean of bad decisions. We make them cautious, competent, and reasonable. And then something worse happens.They become boring.Because here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: real people do stupid things all the time. They sabotage relationships. They chase desire over reason. They lie when the truth would be easier. They text the ex at 2 a.m. They touch the obviously cursed object. They open the basement door.The trick isn’t avoiding stupidity.The trick is making the stupidity psychologically believable.

Readers Don’t Hate Bad Decisions. They Hate Artificial Ones.

This is the distinction that changes everything.A reader will forgive almost any reckless action, whether infidelity, betrayal, self-destruction, or murder, if they understand the emotional logic driving it. What they won’t forgive is a decision that exists only because the plot needed it to exist.The difference isn’t in the action. It’s in the engine behind the action.An “idiot plot” character doesn’t check the security footage because the writer needs them not to. A believable character doesn’t check the security footage because they’re terrified of what they’ll see, or because they’ve spent thirty years learning not to look at things that hurt, or because their pride won’t let them admit they were wrong about the person on the other end of that camera.Same action. Completely different story.

Humans Are Not Rational Machines

Here’s where fiction has to catch up with psychology.We like to imagine ourselves as reasoning creatures who occasionally slip into emotion. The research says the opposite. We are emotional creatures who occasionally slip into reason. Fear, memory, shame, lust, anger, grief, and hope are running the show. Logic is mostly the press secretary trying to explain the disaster after it’s already happened.Or to put it more bluntly:

Humanity is not a rational species. We are emotional animals with car keys, Wi-Fi, and access to explosives.

If your characters make decisions the way a spreadsheet would, they’ll feel like spreadsheets. If they make decisions the way people actually do, through the fog of feeling, memory, and want, they’ll feel alive.

Give Every Bad Decision an Emotional Cause

This is the working rule. Every stupid choice in your fiction should be traceable to something underneath it. Not an excuse. A cause.Consider the difference:

A character ignores a clear danger because they need approval more than they need safety.
A detective withholds evidence because his pride was wounded by the person he’d have to admit was right.
A lover returns to a toxic relationship because desire feels like destiny, and destiny is hard to argue with at midnight.
A scientist activates the machine because being right matters more to him than being safe, and it always has.
A soldier disobeys a direct order because the past is louder than the command structure.

None of these characters are stupid. They’re human. And the reader, recognizing something of themselves in the wreckage, leans in instead of pulling away.

Pressure Makes Stupidity Plausible

Here’s a craft principle worth tattooing somewhere visible:The worse the pressure, the more believable the mistake.A character who makes a catastrophic decision while relaxed, well-rested, and fully informed just looks foolish. A character who makes the same decision while exhausted, aroused, terrified, ashamed, grieving, or cornered looks like a person.So before you let your character do something reckless, ask what’s pressing on them. Sleep deprivation. A dying parent. A secret they’ve been carrying for a decade. An old wound reopening. The threat of exposure. The nearness of someone they were supposed to have gotten over.Pressure is the writer’s best friend. It’s the atmosphere in which bad decisions become inevitable, and inevitability is the twin sister of believability.

Consequences Are What Make It Literature

Here’s where a lot of writers flinch.They set up a beautiful, psychologically rich bad decision, and then they protect the character from the fallout. The affair gets forgiven too easily. The lie gets buried too neatly. The reckless choice turns out fine.The reader feels cheated. Because they came for the crash, and you gave them a fender bender.If a character does stupid shit and nothing happens, the story deflates. But if the decision creates real fallout, whether guilt, danger, betrayal, revelation, or transformation, then the stupidity becomes story fuel. It generates the next scene, the next conflict, the next choice.Bad decisions aren’t a problem in fiction. Unearned consequences are.

The Rule: Don’t Protect the Character

This is the hardest part of the craft, and it’s where most writers, especially newer ones, get stuck.You will love your characters. You will want to shield them. You will feel the impulse to soften the blow, to let them off the hook, to write the version where everyone forgives them and moves on.Resist it.Let bad decisions cost something. Let the character lose the friend, the job, the marriage, the version of themselves they thought they were. That’s where tension lives. That’s where tragedy lives. That’s where comedy lives, too, because there’s nothing funnier than a person insisting they had no choice while the wreckage of their choices piles up behind them.Your job isn’t to keep your characters safe.Your job is to make their choices matter.

Stop trying to write smart characters. Start writing desperate ones.Desperate for love. Desperate to be right. Desperate to be seen. Desperate to escape a version of themselves they can’t stand anymore. Give them wants so loud they drown out reason, and then let those wants drive them into decisions that any outside observer would call stupid.Because that’s what people are. That’s what we do. We are magnificent, ridiculous creatures who know better and do worse, and fiction that pretends otherwise is fiction that isn’t paying attention.Don’t make them dumb.Make them desperate.And then let the reader watch, breath held, as your character reaches for the doorknob of the basement they were told never to enter and understands, with terrible clarity, exactly why they had to.

Yes, I need to plug one of my books that is close to this… The Girl Who Broke Everything

Ellie Morrow has spent six years in the foster care system learning one lesson above all others: she breaks things.

Televisions implode when she’s angry. Pipes rupture when she dreams. Crows gather wherever she goes, silent and watchful, as though waiting for a signal only they can hear. And deep behind her sternum, something that is not quite a heartbeat pulses with a power she never asked for: a residual fire left over from the night a mysterious golden light filled her parents’ car on Route 9, killed everyone inside except her, and left a seven-year-old child without a scratch or an explanation.“You are not broken, Ellie. You are not dangerous. And you are not disposable.”But the foster care system disagrees. And so, when an estranged grandmother named Agatha Morrow arrives to claim her, a woman who chose thirty years of silence over the burden of explanation, Ellie is pulled from the only world she has ever known into something older and stranger: the breathing, sentient world of the Morrow women.

A bloodline of immense power stretching back centuries. A house on a nameless mountain, built above a nexus of forces older than language. A legacy of magic and grief, of doors that should not be opened and things that sleep beneath foundations, of wards that answer to family and a home that has been waiting for the right Morrow to return.But Ellie is not merely inheriting power. She is awakening something. The blood moon is coming, and whatever has been dreaming in the deep places beneath the Morrow house, vast, impossibly old, and stirring for the first time in generations, has begun to rise, drawn upward by a girl whose emotions can crack buildings and whose light can fill a room with the color of old gold.

Part coming-of-age story, part Gothic supernatural mystery, and part meditation on grief, survival, and the terrible weight of belonging to something larger than yourself, the Girl Who . . . series asks one question and dares its heroine to answer it:

What are you becoming—and what will it cost?

A Story to Start or End with Wheels

A story from a prompt:

Imagine this: a room filled with the hum of creativity, the scratching of pens against paper, and the occasional burst of laughter as ideas collide.

That’s where you’ll find me, well by zoom since I moved to the country, a proud director of our small but fiercely passionate Writing Group in my old hometown.

This week? Oh, this week is special. The challenge is simple yet brimming with possibility: craft a story that begins or ends with a bicycle.

A single object, two wheels, infinite potential. Will it be a tale of freedom, of mystery, or perhaps of heartbreak?

The group is ready to dig deep, to wrestle with their imaginations and see where the humble bicycle takes them.And you?

You’re about to get a front-row seat to the magic that unfolds. Buckle up (or should I say, hop on?). The journey is just about to begin.

The following is my story from a somewhat childhood memory, and an imagination, as a girl with freckles and red hair is a part of the story.

The Bicycle and the Bay Mare

The summer Thomas turned twelve, the world smelled of hot asphalt and cut grass, and his blue Schwinn bicycle was the finest thing he owned.

His father had rescued it from a yard sale for eight dollars, sanded off the rust, and painted it the color of a robin’s egg.

Thomas rode it everywhere: to the creek, to the library, to the little store on Miller Road where Mrs. Halvorsen sold penny candy that hadn’t cost a penny in thirty years.

That Tuesday afternoon in July, he was flying down Ridgewood Lane with a paper bag of licorice ropes bouncing in his front basket.

The wind pulled at his hair. His legs pumped in perfect rhythm. He was, he decided, the fastest boy in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.

He was thinking exactly this when a horse came around the bend.

It was enormous, a mountain of muscle and gleaming chestnut hide, hooves hammering the pavement like a blacksmith’s anvil.

Thomas had just enough time to see the flash of a red-gold mane, both the horse’s and the rider’s, before he yanked his handlebars sideways and sailed straight into Mr. Peterson’s hedge.

The Schwinn went one way. Thomas went another. The licorice went everywhere.

“Oh my gosh, are you alive?”

A face appeared above him, upside down through the tangle of privet leaves. Freckles. Green eyes. Hair the color of a maple tree in October, spilling down in wild waves that seemed to catch every scrap of sunlight and hold it hostage.

“I think so,” Thomas managed. A leaf was in his mouth. He spit it out with what he hoped was dignity.

“I am so sorry. Dolly spooked at a plastic bag. She’s a total drama queen about plastic bags, and I couldn’t get her to …”

The girl paused, tilting her head. “You’re bleeding.”

Thomas touched his elbow. He was, indeed, bleeding. It seemed a small price to pay for continuing to be looked at by this person.

“I’m Ellen,” she said, offering a hand streaked with horse sweat and dust.

“Ellen Brennan. We just moved into the yellow house on Fox Hollow.”

“Thomas,” he said. His voice came out slightly strangled.

“Thomas Kepler.”

She helped him up, retrieved his bicycle (which had a new and interesting bend in the front fender), and gathered up as many licorice ropes as could be salvaged.

The horse, Dolly, watched all of this with the mild, unimpressed expression of a creature who had caused chaos and considered her work done.

“Come by the stable sometime,” Ellen said, swinging back into the saddle with an ease that struck Thomas as miraculous.

She clicked her tongue, and Dolly wheeled around and cantered off, and Thomas stood in the middle of Ridgewood Lane holding a bent bicycle and a bag of dirty licorice, and knew with absolute certainty that his life had changed.

He waited three days. Three days felt appropriately casual.

Three days felt like a boy who had many important things to do and only happened, in passing, to remember there was a stable on Fox Hollow.

In truth, he thought about it every waking minute.

The Brennan place was set back from the road behind a row of oaks, with a weathered red barn and a paddock ringed by white fencing that had gone gray at the posts.

Thomas leaned his Schwinn against a fence rail and walked toward the barn, and there, in the shadowed doorway, was Ellen, not in the jodhpurs and boots he’d half-expected, but in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in the shoulder, mucking a stall with a pitchfork nearly as tall as she was.

“You came!” she said, and her whole face lit up in a way that made Thomas’s ears go hot.

“Come meet everybody.”

Everybody, it turned out, was not just Dolly.

There was Dolly, yes, the chestnut mare from the road, but also a stocky black gelding named Pepper, a spotted pony called Bandit who had, according to Ellen, “opinions,” and an ancient white horse named Mr. Biscuit who was thirty-one years old and, Ellen said solemnly, the finest gentleman she’d ever known.

Thomas offered his palm the way Ellen showed him, flat and steady, and Mr. Biscuit breathed onto it with a warm, hay-scented sigh.

Something inside Thomas’s chest turned over.

“You should ride,” Ellen said.

“I don’t know how.”

“That,” she said, “is exactly why you should learn.”

He came back the next day. And the day after.

Ellen was a patient teacher and a merciless one.

She made him groom Mr. Biscuit for a full week before she’d let him sit on the old horse’s back, and even then, only at a walk, in circles, in the corral, while she called out corrections from the fence.

“Heels down, Thomas!”

“They are down!”

“Down like you mean it. Like gravity is your personal friend.”

He fell off twice. The first time he landed in soft dirt and Ellen laughed so hard she had to sit down. The second time he landed in something considerably less soft, and Ellen laughed so hard she cried, and Thomas found that he didn’t mind at all, because when she laughed her whole face crinkled up and her freckles danced.

By August he could trot without bouncing.

By September he could post.

By the time the leaves turned, Ellen let him ride Pepper, and the two of them went out along the trails behind the Brennan property, ducking under low branches, Dolly and Pepper’s hooves whispering through the fallen leaves.

The Schwinn stayed in the yard, propped against the fence.

Years unfolded the way years do: quickly, when you look back at them; slowly, when you’re inside them.

Thomas grew tall and lean, with a rider’s hands and a rider’s seat.

Ellen grew into her freckles.

They rode through four autumns and three summers together, through a hundred sunsets over the ridge, through a season when Mr. Biscuit lay down in his stall and did not get up, and Thomas held Ellen while she cried into his shoulder for the finest gentleman she’d ever known.

There was the winter Ellen’s father lost his job and she came to school with red-rimmed eyes, and Thomas learned that sometimes the most useful thing a person could do was simply be present, and quiet, and steady, the way Mr. Biscuit had once been for both of them.

There was the spring Thomas’s mother got sick, and Ellen rode over on Dolly every single afternoon, and sat with him on the porch, and didn’t try to fix anything, because some things can’t be fixed, only witnessed.

There was the first kiss, under the oak tree by the corral, when Thomas was seventeen and Ellen was seventeen and a half and had never let him forget the half.

There was the college years, and the long-distance letters, and the summer they both came home and knew, without saying it, that they were done pretending to be uncertain.

There was a small wedding in the Brennan’s front pasture, with folding chairs borrowed from the church and Dolly, gone gray around the muzzle now, watching over the fence like a chaperone.

The blue Schwinn stayed leaned against the fence rail where Thomas had first left it.

At first, someone would move it. Ellen’s father, when he mowed; Thomas himself, when he remembered. But the years wore on, and the bicycle wore down. The tires went flat. The chain went orange with rust. Ivy found the wheels first, then the frame. A morning glory climbed the handlebars one summer and never really left.

A robin nested in the basket the year Ellen turned twenty-four, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Nobody moved it anymore. It had become part of the fence, part of the yard, part of the place. A blue-green ghost of the boy who had once been the fastest in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.

It is a Saturday afternoon in late June, and Thomas is thirty-four years old.

He and Ellen are down by the lake behind what used to be her parents’ farm and is now, deed and mortgage and all, theirs.

A red plaid blanket is spread on the grass beneath the willow. The picnic basket, her grandmother’s, the wicker frayed at the corners, one hinge held together with baling wire, sits open and mostly empty.

There are the last crusts of a sandwich. A jar with two swallows of lemonade. A peach with two bites taken out of it, one small (hers) and one large (his).

Not far off, in the shallow slope of the pasture, two horses graze in the slow, unhurried way of horses who know they are home.

One is a bay mare with a white star. The other is a chestnut gelding whose sire, if you traced the papers back far enough, was a mare named Dolly.

Ellen is lying on her back with her head in Thomas’s lap. Her red hair, still absurd, still catching every scrap of sunlight it can find, is spread across his knee. He is twirling a piece of it around his finger, the way he has been doing for fifteen years, the way he suspects he will still be doing when they are eighty.

“Do you remember,” she says, eyes closed, “the licorice?”

“I remember the licorice.”

“It was disgusting. The licorice.”

“It was covered in gravel.”

“And you ate it anyway.”

“I did not.”

“You did. I saw you. You ate a piece with a leaf stuck to it because you were trying to seem casual.”

Thomas laughs. Somewhere up by the house, on the other side of the pasture, leaning against a fence rail nobody has repainted in twenty years, a blue Schwinn bicycle is quietly dissolving into the landscape. Weeds have grown up through its spokes. A morning glory is in bloom on its handlebars. If you didn’t know it had once been a bicycle, you might not guess.

If you did know, you might think it looked less like a ruin and more like a small, patient monument. To a boy who rode too fast around a corner. To a girl on a horse who couldn’t stop. To the exact and unrepeatable accident of two lives colliding on a summer afternoon and choosing, ever after, not to come apart.

Ellen opens her eyes and looks up at him. The freckles are still there. The green eyes are still there. Everything, somehow, is still there.

“Thomas,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I’m really glad you didn’t die in that hedge.”

He bends down and kisses her forehead. The horses graze. The lake laps at the shore. The picnic basket holds its small ruins with dignity.

“Me too,” he says. “Me too.”

A Whisper from the Past, a Chance at Redemption

If that little taste of my writing intrigued you, then you won’t want to miss my novel, Nothing But Time.It begins with a letter…a letter that arrives three weeks after Jack Harper stopped mattering.Jack gave everything to his career.

His marriage slipped through his fingers. His daughter grew up without him. Forty-one years of sunsets went unwatched, and the roses? Never smelled.

Now retired, redundant, and utterly adrift, Jack is left wondering if it was all worth it.

Then, out of nowhere, he inherits an old farmhouse from Ed, the friend who once tried to warn him.

Ed, who escaped to Vermont years ago, died alone, and left Jack with one simple instruction:

“Tend the roses. Stop and smell them. Live.”

But the farmhouse isn’t what it seems. The radio crackles with broadcasts from 1943. The roses bloom when Jack kneels in the soil. And at the edge of the orchard, Ed keeps appearing—smiling, waiting, calling Jack to finally understand what he refused to see all those years.Some second chances come with instructions. Some come with ghosts.

Are you ready to discover which one Jack will choose?

Nothing But Time

Your Voice Matters

If this story resonated with you, don’t hold back, leave a comment!

Your thoughts, your reactions, and your support are what keep this journey alive. I know you’re out there, and your presence means everything to me.

Go ahead, share your voice, and let’s keep this connection alive.
Have a blessed day…you’re the reason I do this.

-Scott

“From 9/11 to Flock Cameras: The Dystopian Novel I Started 15 Years Ago”

September 9, 2011, started like any other day. While stuck at a traffic light, I was on the phone with our New York office. Something happened; they put me on hold, and as I drove to the Dallas office, I listened to the world change. We can argue about the rumors that still surround Building 7, but suffice it to say, the world changed.

My normal way of dealing with grief is not to drone on about it with friends or family. My way is to write about it. If you follow me at all, you have no doubt read my blog post about writing letters or emails to people who are, let’s say, less than congenial. I use expletives and what have you to get the anger out of me and into the digital ethos, and of course, as much as I want to, I never send it. Burning bridges and being known as a hothead will get you nowhere.

Fast-forward six weeks after 9/11 and at least 3,000 deaths by “some people who did some things.” Bush and his administration enacted the Patriot Act, which is still alive and well today. The things those people did allowed our government to strip away some of our rights, trading them for safety. “Do you feel safe?”

Fast-forward to the Flock cameras, data centers, Alexa devices, smartphones, and, of course, drones. Do you feel safe?

Those Flock cameras, I learned, have microphones.

So, while spending these summer months of 100-plus-degree days clearing out old computer hardware, I found that file from 2011. I had started a book about a fictional city where a horrible event occurred, and much like the Patriot Act, what we see today closely resembles what I put into my book. Being a fan of Orwell, I wrote a dystopian near-future novel that is all but ready for one last edit.

Stay tuned for more updates and for when the book drops.

I am thinking about putting it on KDP Unlimited for those of you who can read it for free. Follow, hit that like button, and comment below if you have ideas you would like to share.Best,

Here is a link to my current books on Amazon.

What Are the Odds?

A Writer’s Honest Take on Contests, Scams, and Chasing the Dream

What are the odds?As a writer and author, I occasionally post a story from a prompt and feed the machine $5 for a “chance” to win a contest. I also play the lottery from time to time. Not that I have an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning, but I do it when I travel. Long car trips on flat, nothing roads are a great way to ask the proverbial “what if?”

What would I do with X millions if I won? It could happen, right? Fortunately, I know what statistics are, so I don’t get too carried away with the fantasy. The same is true for casting my story onto the Reedsy website. Often, I look at the winning story and ask, how the hell did that one win?! I think I know.

The Predators in My Inbox

Putting my own vanity aside, the same skepticism applies to the predators who comment on my books through email, asking me if I would consider allowing them to be my agent. Truthfully, I could use their pitch about my book as a cover blurb. Of course, AI wrote it, and of course, it’s a scam designed to prey on my ego.

So I ask once again: what are the odds?

I have at least five people with the first name “Lauren” as new followers on my Reedsy story site.

All of the Laurens have different last names, and each of them is tempting my ego to override my God-given good sense. They want me to hand over money so they can “take my writing to the next level.”

The Engagement Game

IMHO, if I really wanted my story to win, I’d get everyone on this blog to go over there and “like” my story. That would tweak the algorithm, and maybe then a judge might actually read it and think, “Wow, that’s pretty good.”

Again IMHO, I seriously doubt someone sits down and reads 300-plus stories, each week and carefully weigh the pros and cons of each before crowning a winner. Much like monetized social media with its clicks, likes, and comments, contest platforms probably use engagement as a tool. (If I’m wrong, feel free to comment.)

So Why Do I Keep Paying the $5?

Ever since I ran across a young woman on YouTube (I think her name was Laura) who was going through school at the time parroting what she learned in vlogs, I wanted her company to succeed. They’re a bona fide business now and offer many services. I write, and I pay the money for feedback from other writers that range from “Wow, that’s a great story!” to “You need to make your character feel more like a living person instead of a zombie.”

A Modest Proposal for Reedsy

I propose the following adjustments to the current contest model:

Introduce Written Feedback for All Entries Provide each contestant, regardless of outcome, with a brief written critique from a qualified reader or editor. Even two to three sentences of constructive commentary would deliver meaningful value.
Adjust the Entry Fee to $10 Increasing the fee from $5 to $10 offsets the cost of providing individualized feedback and positions the contest as a premium, value-added service rather than a low-stakes lottery.
Expand the Prize Pool A larger prize, funded in part by the adjusted fee structure, would attract a greater number of participants and elevate the prestige of the competition.

Anticipated Benefits

Increased Participant Retention: Writers will feel they are receiving tangible value for their investment, win or lose.
Enhanced Platform Credibility: Offering expert feedback reinforces the platform’s role as a professional development resource, not merely a contest host.
Higher Entry Volume: A larger prize purse combined with guaranteed feedback is likely to draw new entrants and reengage lapsed ones.
Stronger Competitive Positioning: Few writing contests currently offer feedback as part of the standard entry package. Adopting this model would differentiate the platform in a crowded market.

Feasibility Considerations

Assuming contest judging is conducted by human evaluators rather than automated tools, the additional effort required to generate short-form feedback should be minimal relative to the review process already underway. In practical terms, if judges are already reading entries to determine winners, capturing a few lines of impressions per submission is a modest incremental task with significant participant-facing value.

The proposed changes represent a low-risk, high-reward adjustment to the existing contest structure. By transforming the entry fee into an investment in personal development rather than a speculative gamble, the platform can strengthen participant loyalty, grow contest participation, and reinforce its standing as a trusted partner to the writing community.

A Note to My Fellow Writers

To every writer out there navigating this strange landscape with me, this one’s for you.

If you’re like me, your inbox is probably overflowing with “We love your book!” messages from “xyz Publishers” @gmail.com.

Go ahead, borrow that AI-generated blurb if it flatters you, have a laugh, and move on.

We’ve all seen them. We all know the game.

And if you, like me, still enter contests with your eyes wide open, take heart. The genuine followers you gain along the way, the ones who take the time to read your story and leave a thoughtful comment, are the real prize.

They aren’t trying to scam you. They’re walking the same road you are.There are too many of us to name, but we share something powerful in common: the desire to be the best writers we can be.

We keep showing up. We keep submitting. We keep writing, even when the odds feel long and the noise feels loud.

That shared drive is what makes this community worth being part of.

I’ve shared several tips on this blog to help fellow writers sharpen their craft, and I’ll keep adding more.

If any of this resonates with you, follow along for future posts, drop a comment below and tell me about your own experiences, and let’s keep lifting each other up.We’re in this together.

Have a blessed day!

MY Current Books

Fireflies and Front Porches

Old Tom eased himself down onto the weathered porch swing, the same one his grandmother used to sit on back when the world was smaller and Sundays lasted forever. The chains creaked out that familiar song, the one that had rocked him to sleep more times than he could count. He set his coffee down on the arm of the swing, just the way Granny used to, and let his eyes drift out over the yard.

Lord, how that yard used to sing.

He could still see himself, no bigger than a bushel basket, running barefoot through Granny’s sprinkler on a July afternoon so hot the crickets forgot to sing. His cousins would be hollerin’, and Granny would be shellin’ peas on this very porch, laughing that laugh of hers that sounded like wind chimes in a summer storm. There was a tire swing hangin’ from the old oak back then, the one Papaw hung the summer before he passed, and Tom reckoned he’d spent half his childhood spinnin’ round on that thing till the whole world went dizzy.

And then there was Ginger.

Ginger Mae Halloway, with her freckles like somebody’d taken a pepper shaker to her cheeks, and hair the color of a copper penny left out in the sun. She lived three houses down, and from the time they were both knee-high to a grasshopper, wherever you found one, the other wasn’t far behind. He remembered the first time he ever thought maybe girls weren’t so bad after all. It was a June evening, the kind where the sky turns purple like a bruise, and the fireflies came out by the thousands down in the woods behind Granny’s place.

“Catch me one, Tommy!” she’d hollered, and off they went, tearin’ through the honeysuckle and the tall grass, cupping those little glowin’ bugs in their hands like they were catchin’ stars. He caught her hand instead of a firefly that night, and she didn’t pull away. He was nine years old, and he knew, knew the way a boy knows things before he has words for ’em, that Ginger was his girl.

They grew up tangled together like the wild roses on Granny’s fence. Homework at her kitchen table. Church on Sundays, sittin’ three pews apart tryin’ not to giggle. High school dances where he stepped on her toes and she pretended not to notice. By the time they were eighteen, everybody in town just figured, well, that’s Tom and Ginger. Been Tom and Ginger since they were shorter than the corn.

He gave her his grandmother’s ring on the porch, right where he sat now, the fireflies just startin’ to blink awake in the woods. She cried. He cried. Granny cried loudest of all.

Then life happened, the way life does.

There was a job in the city, a good one, they said. Just for a few years, he told Ginger. Just till we get on our feet. She smiled that copper-penny smile and packed his lunches and kissed him goodbye at 5:30 every mornin’. The apartment was small, and the city was loud, and there were no fireflies, just streetlights that hummed and never blinked.

The job turned into a career. The career turned into a title. The title turned into a corner office with a view of somebody else’s corner office. And every year, Tom would say, Just till the next promotion, honey. Then things’ll slow down.But things never slow down.

Not for a man chasin’ something he can’t quite name.Ginger became what folks call a work widow, sittin’ at supper tables set for two with only one plate touched. She’d call him at the office and get his secretary. She’d wait up till 10, then 11, then she’d stop waitin’ up. She never complained. That was Ginger. She’d just say, I’ll be here, Tommy. You do what you gotta do.

The promotion came. And with it, more hours. More trips. More dinners with clients whose names he couldn’t remember the next morning. His boss clapped him on the back and called him a rising star. His secretary sent flowers to Ginger on their anniversary because Tom forgot. Again.

He didn’t make it home when Granny passed. Big meeting in Chicago. He sent lilies.

And now here he was, all these years later, back on that porch. The swing still creaked. The oak still stood, though the tire was long gone. The woods still whispered at the edge of the yard.

And Ginger, Lord bless her, Ginger was inside, humming to herself while she washed the supper dishes, her copper hair gone silver now, but that smile still the same when he’d walked through the door last week and said, Honey, I retired. I’m home. I’m really home this time.

The first firefly of the evening blinked on down by the tree line. Then another. Then a hundred more, till the whole woods lit up like Christmas.

The screen door creaked open behind him. “Tommy?” she said. “You comin’ in?”

He reached back and caught her hand, just like he did when he was nine.”In a minute, Ginger Mae,” he said, his voice soft as porch light. “Come sit with me a spell. The fireflies are out.”

The Moral

A man can spend his whole life chasin’ after somethin’: a bigger paycheck, a fancier title, a pat on the back from a boss who’ll forget his name the day he retires. He can trade his mornings and his evenings and his Sundays for a corner office and call it success.

But at the end of it all, when the swing stops creakin’ and the porch light goes dim, ain’t nobody ever laid on their deathbed wishin’ they’d spent one more hour at the office.

The job will replace you before your desk is cold. The money spends and it’s gone. The accolades fade quicker than perfume on a Sunday dress.

But the girl with the copper hair? The porch swing? The fireflies in the woods?

Those are the things worth keepin’ your eyes on. Because those are the things that keep their eyes on you.

***

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. If you have fireflies where you are…Well…you know what to do. =Scott

The Weaponization of Everything: Why I Never Let My Characters Trust the Government with Alien Tech

As a science fiction writer, I’ve built entire worlds around a single, unshakable rule: my characters never (and I mean never) turn over alien technology to the government. Not once. Not ever. And people ask me why. The answer is simple, and it’s rooted in something I’ve observed about the animal called man.Here’s what I know. The moment some newfangled thing shows up in human hands, one of the very first questions that pops into our lizard brains is, “How could I use this as a weapon?”Don’t believe me? Let me offer you a small, seemingly innocent example.

From Toy to Threat: The Drone Story

Remember that cute little toy the kids fly around the house or the back yard? The quadcopter drone. Charming, right? Now look at modern warfare. Look at the skies over conflict zones. That “toy” has become one of the most transformative weapons of the twenty-first century. And that’s just one example out of a thousand that illustrates how “we,” humanity, think.Give us a hammer, we build a house. Give us the same hammer five minutes later, we’re figuring out how it fits in a fist.

Every Technology Becomes a Weapon Eventually

Look around your living room. This computer I’m writing on? Weaponizable. Your television? A vehicle for propaganda, misinformation, and behavioral conditioning. And let’s roll the clock back to the 1940s, to the radio, that warm wooden box that brought families together in the evenings.Does the name Goebbels ring any bells?Joseph Goebbels understood something chilling: whoever controls the medium controls the message, and whoever controls the message controls the minds.

The Nazi propaganda machine turned the humble radio into one of the most devastating psychological weapons in human history.And let’s not forget the newspaper. Ink and paper. Why do you suppose that when a country is invaded, one of the very first things a conquering entity does is seize the media? Radio stations. Newspapers. Television networks. Because they know exactly what I know: information is the ultimate weapon.

The Modern Surveillance State: Sold Out to the Highest Bidder

Now fast-forward to today. We have “smart” devices in our homes that most probably spy on us, listening, watching, cataloging. We have media outlets lying to us with straight faces. We have corporations installing cameras on every corner “for our safety.”

Since 9/11, we’ve been sold out to the highest bidder. Fear became a currency, and freedom became the transaction fee.

The Porn Scanners and “Safe Radiation”

Remember those full-body scanners the TSA rolled out at airports? The ones lovingly nicknamed “porn scanners” because they essentially produced nude images of every traveler? We were told the radiation was “safe.”

I went after a reporter who parroted that line on national television. Because here’s the truth: there is no such thing as “safe radiation.” There are only levels. It’s like a tiger in a cage. If the cage is solid steel, sure, you can get pretty close and admire the stripes. If the cage is a little dodgy? Well … good luck, friend.

How much money did the manufacturers of those scanners make off our tax dollars while claiming to “keep us safe”? And did you know many TSA workers who operated those machines developed strange and rare cancers? That’s not conspiracy; that’s public record for anyone willing to look.

The Next Frontier: Your Thoughts

We need to tap the brakes. Hard. Because if history is any teacher, and it is, some company, somewhere, is already working on a way to monitor your thoughts. Neural interfaces. Brain-computer links. “For your convenience,” of course. “For your health.” “For your safety.”And once that door opens, it doesn’t close. There’s no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

Elections Have Consequences

Here’s the kicker: elections have consequences. And when the electorate is a product of an education system that hasn’t taught them a damn thing about history, critical thinking, or how power actually operates, you end up with radical numbskulls getting elected to positions where they hold the keys to every one of these weaponized technologies.An uninformed voter isn’t just a bad citizen; they’re a national security risk. They’ll hand over their privacy, their liberty, and eventually their thoughts, all in exchange for the illusion of safety and the comfort of a curated feed.

Film at 11

So yeah, in my novels, when the alien tech falls from the sky, my characters bury it, burn it, or blast it into the sun before they let a single government agency get its fingerprints on it. Because I know exactly what would happen next.We would weaponize it.We always do.Stay skeptical. Stay curious. And for God’s sake, stay awake.Film at 11.

And now a shameless plug for one of my novels:

As he re-encounters his family, a young JFK, and the love of his life before they’ve even met, he discovers that saving the future isn’t just about stopping a war—it’s about proving that humanity is worth saving. Along the way, secrets buried deep in Area 51, a chilling conspiracy within the U.S. government, and the cryptic motives of the alien beings reveal the stakes are higher than he could have ever imagined.

Echoes of Tomorrow is a sweeping tale of time travel, love, loss, and redemption. With the weight of the world on his young shoulders, one man must face the ultimate question: can the future truly be changed, or is humanity destined to repeat its greatest mistakes?
This gripping journey will captivate fans of thought-provoking sci-fi, historical intrigue, and heart- through time and the fragile threads of destiny.

Thanks for your attention to this matter… 🙂

Back in My Young Man’s Days: Have We Really Learned Anything?

There’s an old Max Bygraves song called “Back in My Young Man’s Days” that most of you have probably never heard of. Unless, of course, you happen to be an aficionado of Turner Classic Movies or music from that era. I am both, proudly, and perhaps a little wistfully. As I go about doing the things that men my age tend to do, my mind wanders. It wanders to the news of the day, to memories of the past, and sometimes, more often than I’d like, to the sting of death. And then I put on a song like “Back in My Young Man’s Days,” and I can’t help but ask myself a hard question:Have we learned nothing?

The Same Old Story, Just Louder Now

If the leaders, the megalomaniacs, the dullards, the people who don’t seem to mind putting your life on the line, had to face the same risks as the soldiers who die by the tens of thousands every time someone rattles a saber, one has to wonder how differently the world might look. Then I open up X or scroll through some other social media platform, and what do I see? You’ve seen it too. People behaving badly. Or as one influencer bluntly puts it, “chimping out.”

It makes me wonder: is there something in the water? Something in the food? Some invisible force driving us back to the basic animal instincts of lions and tigers and bears …Go ahead. Say it. Oh my.

Seriously though, if you’ve ever watched one of those nature documentaries where the narrator calmly describes the lions stalking their prey on the savannah, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The Camera in Every Pocket

Then it dawns on me. Back in my young man’s days, nobody had a video camera in their pocket. Back in my young man’s days, we barely had a Kodak, and heaven forbid, a Polaroid was a luxury. So I have to ask: What if we had? Would we have seen the same carnage back then that we see today? Would Andy Griffith and “Leave It to Beaver” have been the anomaly, or would they have been the standard?

I suspect the truth is uncomfortable.

The Mob Was Always There

Back in my young man’s days, I saw the mob mentality firsthand. I saw boys trying to prove they were men by picking on the timid, the frail, and the girls. Nobody was immune to the red-headed bully who was feeling his oats, or, as I now suspect, feeling his hormones running amok as curly hairs sprouted in places they had never been before.The cruelty was there. The mob was there. We just didn’t have the receipts.

25,000 Mothers a Week

But some things do feel bigger now. Heavier. More absurd. Do you ever think about simpler times? Do you ever wonder how leaders like Putin and Zelensky can be okay with 25,000 young men being killed each week?

Twenty-five thousand.That means 25,000 young mothers each week who have to live with the reality that their baby is never coming home. That’s not a statistic. That’s an ocean of grief we can’t seem to stop refilling.

Food for Thought

Were your parents like the Beav’s?

Mine weren’t. But they were both there, and looking back, that mattered more than I understood at the time. Maybe we didn’t live in a simpler time. Maybe we just lived in a time with fewer cameras, fewer platforms, and fewer megaphones for our worst instincts. But the questions remain the same ones humanity has always wrestled with: Why do we hurt each other? Why do we send our sons to die? And why, with all our progress, do we keep circling back to the same sorrow?Food for thought.

What do you think? Do you find yourself longing for simpler times, or just quieter ones? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Echoes of Tomorrow

When the world teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation, a retired Air Force general is given an impossible second chance: to rewrite history.Sent back in time to 1962 by mysterious alien beings, he wakes up trapped in the body of his ten-year-old self, armed with decades of knowledge but stripped of his power and authority. With the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, global tensions rising, and secrets hidden in the shadows of the past, he must navigate a world that sees him as a child while carrying the burden of preventing humanity’s self-destruction.As he re-encounters his family, a young JFK, and the love of his life before they’ve even met, he discovers that saving the future isn’t just about stopping a war. It’s about proving that humanity is worth saving. Along the way, secrets buried deep in Area 51, a chilling conspiracy within the U.S. government, and the cryptic motives of the alien beings reveal that the stakes are higher than he could have ever imagined.Echoes of Tomorrow is a sweeping tale of time travel, love, loss, and redemption. With the weight of the world on his young shoulders, one man must face the ultimate question: can the future truly be changed, or is humanity destined to repeat its greatest mistakes?This gripping journey will captivate fans of thought-provoking science fiction, historical intrigue, and heartfelt stories woven through time and the fragile threads of destiny.

Get your copy here…

Many of you are asking how do I get people to find my book?

How Authors Can Thrive in the Digital Age

Nothing But Time: A Story About What We Lose When We’re Too Busy to Notice

There’s a particular kind of silence that fills a downtown apartment at 3 PM on a Tuesday. It’s not the peaceful quiet of a weekend morning or the contemplative hush of a late evening. It’s the silence of a man who suddenly has nowhere to be, and worse, no one waiting for him to arrive.This is where we meet Jack.

The Weight of an Empty Calendar

For forty-three years, Jack’s identity was stitched into the fabric of a company logo. He knew the precise angle of morning light through his corner office window. He could recite quarterly projections in his sleep. His fingers knew the keyboard shortcuts of Excel the way a pianist knows Chopin.Then came the merger.They called it “restructuring.” They handed him a plaque, a modest severance, and a handshake from someone half his age who couldn’t quite meet his eyes. Just like that, the man who built departments, mentored executives, and sacrificed weekends for deadlines became… what, exactly?In “Nothing But Time,“ I wanted to explore what happens to a man when the thing he traded his life for suddenly decides it doesn’t need him anymore.

The Ghosts That Live in Silence

Jack sits in his sleek, expensive apartment—the one he bought because it was close to the office, not because it felt like home—and the memories arrive uninvited.His wife, Diane. The way she used to leave dinner in the oven, then eventually stopped. The way she’d ask him to come to bed, then eventually stopped asking. The night she said, “You’re already gone, Jack. I’m just making it official.”His son’s baseball games he missed for board meetings. His daughter’s wedding, where he gave a toast about “investments and returns” because he didn’t know her well enough to say anything personal. The grandchildren whose names he sometimes has to pause to remember.He built a monument to his career.He built it out of the people who loved him.

The Letter That Changes Everything

And then, one gray morning, an envelope arrives. Heavy paper. A law firm’s embossed seal. An roomate from college left him a farm, acres of rolling green somewhere far from spreadsheets and quarterly reports.What does a man who has spent his life optimizing efficiency do with soil, sky, and silence?That’s the question at the heart of “Nothing But Time.”

Why I Wrote This Book

I didn’t write this novel to entertain you, though I hope it does. I wrote it because I’ve watched too many good men and women trade the irreplaceable for the replaceable.Here’s the truth nobody puts in a corporate handbook:

The company will replace you before your desk is cold. But your daughter will remember the recital you missed for the rest of her life. Your son will remember whether you showed up. Your spouse will remember whether you were present or just physically in the room.We chase the watch. The title. The bonus. The corner office. We tell ourselves we’re doing it for the people we love, while the very act of chasing it takes us further from them.And then one day, the chase ends. The company merges. The title evaporates. The watch stops mattering.And what’s left?For Jack, what’s left is a farm and forty years of regret. What’s left is the possibility—maybe, just maybe—of learning a different way to measure a life.

From a large city to a small town Jack Harper gave everything to his career.

Now he’s retired, redundant, and utterly lost.

Then he inherits a farmhouse from the friend who tried to warn him, the friend who escaped to Vermont and died alone, the friend who left behind one final message: Tend the roses. Stop and smell them. Live.

But something strange is happening at the farmhouse. The old radio plays broadcasts from 1943. The rose garden blooms when Jack kneels in the dirt. And Ed, his dead friend, keeps appearing at the edge of the orchard, smiling, beckoning, waiting for Jack to understand what he spent a lifetime refusing to see. Some second chances come with instructions. Some come with ghosts.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re building the right kind of legacy… if you’ve ever looked up from your desk and realized the seasons changed without you… if you’ve ever felt the quiet fear that the people you love are becoming strangers… then Jack’s story is your story too.“Nothing But Time” is available now. It’s a novel about loss, yes, but more importantly, it’s a novel about what we can still choose while we still have breath.Because here’s the thing about time: we all think we have more of it than we do. Until one day, we’re sitting in a quiet apartment, holding a letter, realizing that time is the only thing we ever really had.And the only question that matters is:Who did we spend it with?

Don’t chase the watch. Chase the people. They’re the only thing that ticks back.Get your copy of “Nothing But Time” today—and maybe, tonight, call the person you’ve been meaning to call.

What the Flock?

Why We’re Obsessing Over License Plate Readers While the Real Surveillance Happens in Our Pockets

The Big Idea: Flock Safety cameras have become the villain of countless town hall meetings and Reddit threads. But while we argue about license plate readers on lampposts, we voluntarily carry the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history, and feed it our lives, minute by minute. Flock is the magician’s waving hand. The real trick is happening elsewhere.

The Flock Panic

If you’ve driven through an American suburb recently, you’ve probably passed one: a small black camera on a slim pole, quietly logging your license plate, the make and color of your car, and the exact time you passed. These are Flock Safety cameras. Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that have spread across thousands of U.S. communities, often installed by police departments or even neighborhood associations.And people are furious, understandably so. The concerns are real:

Persistent tracking of vehicle movements across networked jurisdictions
Data retention for weeks or months, searchable by law enforcement and private industy without warrant.
Minimal oversight and murky data-sharing agreements
Function creep, where a tool sold for “finding stolen cars” becomes a general dragnet

These are legitimate grievances. But here’s the uncomfortable question:

Why are we so fixated on the camera we can see, when the ones we can’t are infinitely more powerful?

The Sleight of Hand

Flock cameras are visible. They’re physical. You can point at one, photograph it, demand a city council remove it. That tangibility makes them a perfect target for outrage, and a perfect distraction.Consider what a Flock camera actually knows about you:

Your car passed a fixed point at a specific time.

Now consider what the smartphone in your pocket knows:

Data Source	What It Reveals
GPS / location services	Every place you go, how long you stay, patterns over years
Accelerometer	How you walk, drive, sleep—even your gait signature
Microphone permissions	Ambient audio, keywords, environment
App telemetry	Who you talk to, what you buy, what you desire at 2 AM
Purchase history	Health conditions, financial stress, life events
Social graph	Your relationships, affiliations, and influences
A Flock camera sees a car. Your phone sees a soul. And unlike the camera on the pole, you paid $1,000 for the privilege of carrying it.

A Brief History of Watching

Surveillance isn’t new. What’s new is its invisibility and predictive power.

The Panopticon (1791): Jeremy Bentham designed a prison where a single guard could watch any inmate at any time, but inmates could never tell when. The genius wasn’t constant observation; it was the possibility of it.
The Stasi (East Germany): At its peak, one informant for roughly every 6.5 citizens. Labor-intensive, human-driven, and yet still incomplete.
CCTV Britain (1990s–2000s): Cameras everywhere, but requiring humans to review footage…analog eyes on analog tape.
Today: No guards needed. No informants. No tape to review. Algorithms watch everything, and more importantly, they predict.

The evolution isn’t just more surveillance. It’s a shift from observation to anticipation.

Foucault Saw This Coming

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), used Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor for modern power. His key insight:

When you believe you might be watched at any moment, you begin to watch yourself. You self-censor. You conform. Surveillance becomes internalized until the watcher is no longer needed.

This is the profound difference between Flock and your phone. A Flock camera exerts external control…it catches you after the fact. But algorithmic surveillance achieves the Panopticon’s true goal: it shapes behavior before it happens.You hesitate before searching a controversial term. You think twice before texting a joke. You curate your digital self, knowing it’s all logged.

The prison has moved inside your head—and you built the cell yourself.

The Double-Edged Sword

Here’s the maddening part: the same technology that surveils us is genuinely useful.

Your maps app predicts traffic because it’s tracking millions of people, including you.
Your health app catches an irregular heartbeat because it monitors your body 24/7.
Your assistant answers instantly because it’s learned your habits.

Convenience is the currency we use to purchase our own surveillance.This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism: a system where human experience is the raw material, and the product is prediction. Not just predicting what you’ll buy…but nudging what you’ll do, think, and feel. Elections, moods, movements, and markets can be shaped by whoever holds the data.Social engineering at scale no longer requires a Stasi officer. It requires an A/B test.

Winston and Julia, 2026

Recall 1984. Winston Smith and Julia flee to a quiet field in the countryside to escape the telescreens, to find one unwatched moment of intimacy and freedom.Now transplant them to today.They leave their phones behind (good…that defeats the location tracking, the microphones, the app telemetry). They drive to the countryside. But:

Their license plates are logged by Flock cameras on the way out of town.
Satellites image the open field from orbit.
Their absence from the network is itself a data point, an anomaly worth flagging.
The purchase of gas, the toll on the highway, the cell tower ping from a phone one of them forgot to fully power down.

The countryside offered Winston a blind spot because Oceania’s surveillance was physical and fixed…telescreens on walls. Today’s surveillance is ambient and predictive. There is no field far enough.But here’s the twist Orwell didn’t fully anticipate: Winston wouldn’t need to be forced. He’d carry the telescreen willingly, in his pocket, and check it 96 times a day. Julia would tag their location in a photo. The Party wouldn’t have to install anything. We volunteer.

So, What the Flock?

Flock cameras deserve scrutiny. Fight them, regulate them, demand transparency. But recognize the disproportion:

Fighting Flock cameras while ignoring your data footprint is like installing a deadbolt on a house with no walls.

The cameras on the poles are the surveillance we’re allowed to see, the acceptable target, the visible outrage, the distraction that lets the real machinery hum along quietly. The genuine architecture of prediction and control isn’t bolted to a lamppost. It’s in the cloud, in the algorithm, in the terms of service you scrolled past.The most effective surveillance state isn’t one that watches you against your will.It’s one you happily fund, feed, and carry everywhere, while pointing angrily at the camera on the corner.

If there is enough interest, I will divulge other ways and places you are “observed.” Or you can just ask Alexa.

On a completely different note, I have released a new book that asks the question, “Are You a Witch?” The link will take you to my author page, where you can browse a multitude of books on a variety of subjects. There is something for almost everyone.Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to comment below.

So the next time you see a Flock camera and feel that flash of indignation, ask yourself: what’s in my pocket, and what does it already know?That’s what the flock we should really be talking about.

BTW does FLOCK mean (For the Love Of Cats?) Probabaly not… More like flock of birds, or cars…or people..

Best