My book Choices is a coming-of-age novel based on actual events that follow a resourceful, yet flawed, young man through four tumultuous years at the University of Arkansas during the 1950s. The story is told in the first-person, 45 years after the events took place, just as the author’s marriage is disintegrating and he is reflecting on the seminal choice he made between two dramatically different women on the night he left college.

This non-fiction, autobiographical account is relayed by protagonist Stuart “Sandy” Carson and is written under that pen name. I attended the University of Arkansas during this time, and the setting and situations are drawn from my firsthand experience, blended with fiction.

Many fiction and non-fiction books chronicle the lives of young men and women during their college days. However, I believe that the style of Choices— with intermingled plots involving larceny, love, and Southern campus life in the 1950s—sets this novel apart from traditional works.

Sandy, for example, has a unique talent for breaking and entering, which helps to get him through school but keeps life on the edge. One sub-plot involves Sandy’s vengeful theft of an Arkansas football playbook before the “big game” with Texas. Play diagrams are sold to a Texas student and then passed on to the Texas defensive line coach, leading to disaster for the Razorbacks.

I have enjoyed success with my first book, The Red Scarf, (www.theredscarfbook.com), a historical fiction middle-reader based on the author’s life at age 12. August House (www.augusthouse.com), which published The Red Scarf in 2007, projects that 10,000 copies of the book will be in circulation this year. I speak at educational and literary conferences, and have designed an ambitious marketing plan for Choices, which will be handled by the publicist who worked with me while I promoted The Red Scarf. Our advertising for The Red Scarf included ads in The New York Times

Book Review and a Times Square billboard. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran a two-page spread about my work on August 31, 2008, and I have been published in The South Arkansas Historical Journal and Between the Lines. For the past several years I have been a newspaper columnist and author of the statewide environmental column, “Natural Solutions.” I also write the monthly column “Our Town” for the South Arkansas Leader and host a weekly radio program of the same name.

In addition to the Choices manuscript, I have recently competed two other adult manuscripts. One is a novel based on my son’s Special Forces experiences in Afghanistan; the other, a historical novel set in a 1920s boom town, is called The Queen of Hamburger Row.