While Aransas Morning is a novel, as the cover clearly states, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some real characters, locations or situations.
The novel began as a short story I wrote after a visit to the beach on the one-year anniversary of the death of my first wife, Debra. She was born and raised in Victoria, and I decided I wanted to spend that first anniversary morning on the beach and then visit her family. While standing on the sand at sunrise, a man approached me and asked a question that stirred my imagination: “When you look out at the water, what do you see?”
I came home and wrote a short story based on that brief conversation and my imaginings of what had happened in that man’s life. I was done with it, but then several people read it and asked, “What happens next?” I said, “Nothing.” They kept pushing and that worked on me, and before long I found myself on a writer’s journey to a full novel and a sequel.
Aransas Morning is full of places I’ve been and frequented, and most of the characters contain pieces of people I have known. That includes the main character, Sam, who is the nameless man I met on the beach that morning at sunrise. I dedicated the book to him, and every time I’m back on the beach I hope that I might see him again.