I’m so pleased with the blurbs that will accompany the publication of The Home Guard on March 4, 2019. Here is one from the incomparable Margaret Evans, the editor of Lowcountry Weekly: “With a large cast of unforgettable characters – both historical and fictional – and a backdrop of indelible splendor, John Warley has spun a tale of adventure, romance, and reckoning set during a pivotal moment in our nation’s fraught history that reverberates profoundly, even today.” But wha

Remember a few blogs back when I talked about writers compulsively asking themselves, “What if . . .?” Beaufort’s Civil War history so engaged me that I became obsessed. “What if,” I asked myself, “one--no two--people stayed behind when all the whites fled? And what if one of them was an old woman, and the other a young boy, her grandson, only twelve years old? And what if they had to hunt and fish to stay alive? And suppose the Rebels recruited the boy to spy for them? And w

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Previously, I explained why John Grisham need not worry about me threatening his throne as king of the mystery, thriller, suspense genre. Talent aside, I lack the inspiration to write it. But what about historical fiction? My mother’s maiden name was Barnwell. The Barnwells are an interesting clan in the way Southern families can be, with plenty of “characters” to spice up the primordial soup. Like all families they were, very originally, hunter-gatherers, but the Barnwells

In last week’s blog I described the literary summit of three dead writers (Faulkner, Proust and Nabokov) and one very much alive writer, Pat Conroy. Today I want to tell you about the day Pat became an editor. A restaurant in Beaufort, South Carolina called Griffin Market specializes in Italian cuisine from the Piedmont region of Italy. Pat’s time in Rome made him passionate for the food, so that the opening of this restaurant by Chef Laura and Sommelier Riccardo was a bit li

Last week I disclosed my dilemma in combining two short novels, A Southern Girl and Just a Dance, into the single story they cried out to be. The solution was neither painless, nor quick, nor even mine. Dante famously warned at the gateway to his Inferno, “Abandon all hope, you who enter here,” and I had abandoned all hope of getting A Southern Girl published. But in 2012, I appeared with Pat Conroy at the Savannah Book Festival. Pat always draws a large crowd, and the crowd

A Southern Girl (ASG) began as a short novel, by word count almost a novella. It began with the infant’s abandonment as the U.S. family, the Carters, debated the wisdom of adoption. It ended with the resolution of the conflicts on both sides of the world (hey, it’s a novel, it has to resolve conflicts). But then that question set in again: what if? What if the infant thrives and something happens that devastates the family unit? That led to what would have been my third novel

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Last week’s blog identified three forces in Mexico that inspired me to more and hopefully better production in my writing. But motivation is not the same thing as inspiration. Today, I want to address inspiration. Writers are routinely asked where they get their ideas. I have long suspected that those most inclined to ask are the people for whom the idea of writing a novel is a foreign (and as magical) as pixy dust on faireys’ wings. I am equally in awe of anyone who can pain

Six weeks on the road is a stretch, and when forty-three events in four states are factored in, there is only one logical question that can be asked: are you insane? Maybe. I kicked off the Southern Girl book tour on May 8 near Columbia with Friends of the Irmo Library, the first of a number of library events on the schedule. The crowd was small but eager to learn about the book. The crowd was anything but small the following evening at a private party on Hilton Head Island.

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Last week’s blog mentioned some challenges presented by Mexico that required adaptation. For me, the challenge above all others was to write a good book which, after all, was the reason for coming. Three forces shaped my time and influenced the results. The first of these was my writing group, the core of which consisted of Donna Meyer, Roy Sorrels, Barbara Covarrubias and yours truly. Donna had been, some years earlier, in the original cast of the European production of the

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Last week I wrote about our move to Mexico in 1993, a move that promised to give me the time to write the next novel at hours later than 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. I should say a bit more about that decision. Why Mexico? The three most compelling reasons were culture, distance and dollars. As long as we were planning to be gone for a year with our two younger children, ages 14 and 13, we wanted a cultural experience that broadened the horizons of all four of us. Barbara and I felt the

When I left you last week I was on the cusp of literary stardom with my first novel, Bethesda’s Child. I had what I had been assured was a very good story, one of the top literary agents in New York had signed me up as a client, and the timing of the genetic science, which anticipated issues and tensions springing to world consciousness a few years later when Dolly the Sheep was created (invented?) seemed perfect. All the elements had fallen into place for a best seller with

In last week’s blog, a Wizard in the form of my youngest son, Carter, helped me take the first step along the road I am still traveling. Ironically, the next step on that road also involved a son, the middle one, and soccer. My copy of A Dare on the Bridge stayed on a preferred corner of my desk, and every time I saw it I got the urge to write something. I took that as a good sign. The urge to write needed to become irresistible, and it did. I read in the local newspaper, the

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Last week I wrote about the attrition of the spirit I felt after eighteen years in the legal arena, butting heads with judges, opposing lawyers, and at times my own clients. But as human experience tells us, to identify a problem is not to solve it, although it is a crucial first step. I wanted something that I suspect we all want: fulfillment. But what? The answer for me began to reveal itself after a youth soccer match. My youngest son played on a team called the Williamsbu

My writing life began with a short story I wrote in 1990 called The Dare on the Bridge. The bridge, in case you’re curious, is the Coleman Bridge that crosses the York River between Yorktown and Gloucester, Virginia. It is a non-fiction account of a day spent with my youngest son and four of his teammates on a youth soccer team called the Williamsburg Wizards. I’ll have more to say about that story in a future blog, but today I want to focus on the time at which it was writte