My desire to write goes way back, but I didn't start until 1988, with my first book, Message of the Locust.   I'm not interested about characters like Superman, Spiderman, etc. for me.   They don't exist.   Give me something real.  That is what I like to write about.   We all have both good and bad experiences in life.   I take my experiences and exajerate them into my stories.    If life was easy, we would never learn anything.   Enduring pain, sadness, failure and success helps us learn and grow.

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I love to read real stories written by real people.  I am facinated by authors who appear to have had a similiar history of failures and successes as I have had.     Books by such authors as Harper Lee, John Steinback, Ernest Hemmingway, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Maya Angelou, John Grisham, Mario Puzo, Tom Clancy, and Larry MacMurtry.  

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As you can see this list includes some of the old, and some of the new, and both male and female.  Stories from afar that open my mind to places on earth that I have never seen, or take me back to time that I can only dream about.   Challenges such as ambition, failures, suffering, seeking revenge, hatred, greed, anger, and also throw in a tadbit of good and bad romance.  

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My father was a football coach and his winning record was not that good, so we moved around alot.   In Texas we lived in Abilene, Rising Star, Morton, Grandfalls, Odessa.  Then my senior year, we moved to Roswell, NM.   And after Roswell, I recieved a football scholarship to Texas Tech, so that moved me back to Lubbock, TX.   And FYI, back in West Texas.    

 

Prior to college I had never enjoyed any freedom growing up, so with this new freedom and whenever possible, I liked to go down trails where I was seeing and doing things that I had never seen, nor done before.   These trails included making many big mistakes and also a few rewarding wins. 

 

After Tech, and with a finance degree in hand, my first career job was as an accountant in Dallas, Texas.  Three years later, I got a better paying position in Ft. Worth, and then five years later I went back to Dallas, where for the next ten years I owned my own finance business, Capital Factors, Inc.  My business lasted for ten years and then the recession of 1988 occured... and guess what, I went broke.  In that same year oil prices dropped from $32 per barrel to under $10 per barrel.  Add to that, 450 Texas banks failed.   Thus, combined with going broke, there wasn't even an accounting job, never-the-less, a management position available.  

 

Yes, things had changed, but with no job, I had time on my hands, so I wrote my first novel, Message of the Locust.  Oh, I left out the part where I also got a divorce and moved to the other side of the world, Pensacola, Florida, where I worked teaching SCUBA diving in both Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama.  Fun that it was, it was NOT enough money to sustain my expenses, including child support payments.  So, I continued to look for a bettter paying finance or accounting  job.  Luckily I got a job in Walton County, Florida, as their executive director of  Walton County Economic Development Council.   I was to be selling the county and looking for grants, and of course, dealing with politicians.  Was it fun?  Not really, but my life was about to get much better. 

 

You see...there was this girl named, Johnene.  She was, a former SCUBA student of mine from Dallas.  We communicated often and soon she followed me to Florida.   As she was a banker and CPA in Dallas, she quickly found a job with a local Pensacola bank.  Within the year, we got married and I have  been a very happy camper ever since.   Yes, that was a huge success, my biggest success ever.  You can learn more about our thirty four years of life together inside this site. 

 

I hope you enjoy my books and scripts.  Each of the three writing projects on this website has an INTRO page with a Log-Line and Synopsis Page.  There you will also find an arrow at the top of the page.  Click the arrow and initiate a theme-song that I hope will help set the mood for you as you read the log line and synopsis.  There are also other pages with personal information about the experiences that my wife, Johnene, and I have enjoyed together and how they might impact the stories I try to tell.   

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Also, should you wish to contact me regarding the books and scripts, feel free to contact me via email at                                                                                                                   marcum8@gmail.com 

 

 

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