Scott Douglas Vaughan

Facebook Live makes me think of a Mad Scientist This Thursday, March 8, from 8-8:45 p.m. ET, I'm going to read a chapter from my new book Hickory Trail. This is the third and last in a three-book series about my life - fictionalized to make it more interesting. The chapter I've chosen is one that I had a lot of fun writing. I've also referenced it in, well, in a sermon or two preached along the way. Neither of those churches invited me back, which is probably just as well for everyone involved. The chapter has nothing to do with a Mad Scientist, pictured at right, but Facebook Live makes me feel like a Mad Scientist. Incidentally, the chapter I'm going to read has nothing to do with Science of any kind - regardless of emotion (mad or not). You will need to visit my Facebook Page on Thursday night for all this fun. If you already 'Like' the page you may get a notification when the Live gathering starts. Click here for the page . The actual ...

Mark Your Calendars: Next Thursday, March 8, 8-8:45 p.m. ET, I'm going to use Facebook Live to read a chapter from my new book, Hickory Trail . If you visit my Facebook Page ( click here ) and Like the page you will get reminders about the event. The book will be out mid-October. So, check out the reading next week. You may enjoy the story, but you may also enjoy watching me make a fool out of myself, live, on social media. :) **** Readers of my book Elm Street have said they especially enjoyed when I detoured from stories to explain what was happening in the world. They also said that using music lyrics helped draw them into the small-town life of the 1960s and early 1970s. I refer to these historical notes and music lyrics as mile-markers. When my Vicki read through the first draft of Hickory Trail, she said the mile-markers were especially helpful in recalling the late 1970s, when Hickory Trail takes place. Honestly, I had a lot of fun researching and remem...

There's something special about typing that last period - that last little dot of a punctuation mark. Done. This past Sunday afternoon, I put the period in the last sentence of the first draft of my new book, Hickory Trail . This won't be the last book I write, but it's the final book in this three-book journey that began in 2014 with Brookwood Road and bridged over Elm Street in 2016. Oh, it's just the first draft. Over the next 10 months, this manuscript will be carved up, kicked around, rewritten more than once, and professionally edited - twice - before it's ready for public view in Octoberish 2018. It's just the first draft, but it sure feels good to have electronically sent it to a printer for spiral-binding and hard-copy reading. For those interested in a back-story, I started Hickory Trail on Thursday, Sept. 7 of this year. It took three months and 10 days to pound out - mostly at night and on Saturday mornings - 95,323 words. I suspect it wi...

It was Christmas 1973. I was in the ninth grade. I got a new 10-speed bicycle that year for Christmas. Every Christmas up until that one in 1973, my brothers and I received a bounty of Christmas gifts from Santa. In retrospect, I don't think my parents were lavish in their Santa-playing. We certainly weren't spoiled, but we generally got most of everything we asked for from the Sears Christmas Wish Book. None of it was that expensive, but it was a pretty good haul. We shared with one another and so it was like Christmas times three. That's why the Christmas of 1973 was a shock to the system. We came down the stairs on Christmas morning to find . . . that Santa had given each of us just one gift - a 10-speed bicycle. We were not mature enough to understand that the value of this one gift equaled or surpassed the bounty from the previous years. Through a greedy and Grinchy lens, we saw the reduction in volume. Several gifts down to just one gift. It was also raining ou...

My maternal grandmother, Carolyn Holmes Yarbrough, was a public school teacher for more than 35 years. She died in 2003 at the age of 92 frail but not invalid and certainly of a good mind. If you didn't know her, I wish you could have known her. We called her Mema. She was not a "crawl up in the lap for a hug and a story" grandmother (I had another one of those). She was the "help me figure out this problem" grandmother. She was educated and smart in a math and science kind of way. She was an academic. As a widow in her 50s, she went back to college and finished her degree work at North Georgia College. That enabled her to teach Algebra, which she absolutely loved. She also loved her azaleas and all of her other plants, and she knew the scientific name of them and why they grew the way they did. Plants were her never-ending science project. She kept a daily journal that included the day's weather, important sports scores, and a note about anything...

On Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2017, Richard Evans Sale, 83, died in Florence, SC. I saw the announcement of his death in the November 2017 issue of The Baptist Courier, the monthly newsmagazine of South Carolina Baptists. I immediately went to Legacy.com to read Rev. Sale's complete obituary. You can read it here . In short, Rev. Sale was a Southern Baptist pastor, but will forever be known for his 40-plus years as both a hospital and a law enforcement chaplain. He was a graduate of the FBI Academy's Chaplain Training Course in Quantico, VA. Within his obituary, it mentions Rev. Sale's 60 years of service to the local church, his community, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Within that long descriptive paragraph, there is the mention that Rev. Sale " was a member of the Kiwanis Club . " Kiwanis, as you may know, is one of our country's historic community service organizations born during World War I when suburbs were being created and service organizations ju...