There were a few events in my life that I thought I would share with people reading this blog. This is one of those events that shaped my writing mind into what it is today.

The first one was where I lived. Most people know that I was born in Brunswick, Georgia, but you couldn’t tell now if you talked to me because the accent flattened out after moving north and living there for more than a few years. Anyway, we moved off the coast in 1987 about 30 miles to get away from the air pollution from the Hercules pulp mill in Brunswick that was contributing to my constant illnesses.

Some people joke that they live in the middle of nowhere. But where we moved truly was the middle of nowhere. Woods, woods, and more woods for, well, 30 miles until you hit town. We lived there for only a few years, but it was long enough to make an impression on my young mind.

It was at that time I found out that we had moved about 5 miles from a place that was immortalized by the Charlie Daniels Band years prior:

Yes, the place was as creepy as the song suggests. During the day, your biggest worry as a kid was running across a 10-foot-plus southern diamondback rattlesnake that had decided to get a suntan. At dusk, it was the owls the size of a Volkswagen. And night…well, there was all sorts of things in those thick woods that made sounds that would send chills up anybody’s spine. Sounds you never thought existed in nature but they were there and the things making them were hungry, pissed off, or both.

This is in addition to the strange lights you would occasionally see coming from the woods in places you knew nobody lived or could even possibly live due to quicksand.

To this day, I still have clear memories of that place out in the literal middle of nowhere. It was a fertile ground for a fertile imagination and sewed the seeds reaped years later.