Scott Douglas Vaughan

I like it when authors insert song lyrics into a book to make a statement or help the reader with a place in history. One of the masters of this is Stephen King, who has used song lyrics in many of his famous horror novels. When I wrote Elm Street last year, I wanted to include lyrics from commercially popular songs of the 60s and 70s as one way to remind readers of the times. I used select lyrics from four songs - Three Dog Night's Joy To The World, Last Train To Clarksville by the Monkees, Larry Norman's I Wish We'd All Been Ready, and Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues. I didn't randomly choose these songs - each had a specific purpose behind its place in the book. Reading the first draft of Elm Street, one of my many editors advised me to get permission to publish the lyrics. Knowing that was the right thing to do, I sought permission. I received an interesting education and obtaining the publishing rights was relatively easy. I first researched the actua...

Of all the secondary characters appearing in either Brookwood Road or Elm Street , none has caused more curiosity than Van Piper. Van Piper is first introduced in Elm Street's introduction as all the junior high students are gathered for graduation. "There was Van Piper, who was just mean as hell, and everyone knew it and everyone stayed away from him. It was a miracle that Van was even at this graduation, but there he was, sitting close to his smaller sidekick, Travis Jackson. Neither of those two would have been chosen to speak (at graduation) unless they had scared everyone into voting for them." Van Piper is plain and simple the largest boy in the class and a first-rate bully who comes and goes during the book, at least once, to juvenile incarceration. Van disrupts first grade (Chapter One), assists a fellow student (Chapter Two), challenges a student to a dangerous playground competition (Chapter Eleven), instigates the torment of main character Frank...

This past Sunday, Vicki and I were able to visit with a book club that meets only a few miles from Brookwood Road in the southern end of Forsyth County, GA. There were about 15 ladies in attendance; most had read or they were reading Brookwood Road. This was not my first visit to a book club. My Vicki has been in a monthly book club for more than 20 years, and they have been nice enough to invite me to visit on occasion, specifically when I published both Brookwood Road and Elm Street . Visiting the book club, this past Sunday, in my hometown was especially fun. Vicki and I used the opportunity to go "home" to visit my mom, watch some football with family, attend church with family, and then attend the book club. It was also fun to be back "on location" in the exact area that inspired both books. At Sunday's club meeting, after a great dinner of Greek food, I told the club members my story, growing up with a passion for reading and writing my own storie...

The crossroads of Brookwood and McGinnis Ferry roads in 1980. Some of these stories are true. Some of these stories are based in truth. Some of these stories should have been true. That's the disclaimer appearing on the Dedication page of both Brookwood Road and Elm Street, and it will appear in future books as well. Yet people are always asking, "Are these stories true?" My answer: See the disclaimer. Let's look at Chapter 25 (The Crossroads) in my book, Brookwood Road. That chapter, like most of my chapters, is about 2,500 words. The gist of the story is that Frank (the main character) is finally allowed to ride his bicycle down Brookwood Road to the old crossroads. This was a big deal because riding a bicycle to the crossroads meant he was out of sight of his house and there was a bit of danger involved. Brookwood Road was notorious for speeding cars. I could have taken that synopsis, and flushed it out to about 700 words. Frank rides his bicycle on a d...

Let me give you some statistics about book publishing. In 2013, Forbes published a story that estimated 600,000 to 1 million books are published every year. (I know that's a wide range, but the story reported that there are a lot of conflicting sources.) Further, about 50 percent of the published books are independently published. (An independently published book is one published by the author. My books are independently published. The flip side to independent publishing is when an author contracts with an agent, who then works to sell a book to a publisher, who then buys the manuscripts and . . . maybe . . . publishes it.) The Forbes article also suggests that the average book sells less than 250 copies (I've seen other sources that project 150 as a goal) and a book has less than a 1 (One) percent chance of being physically stocked in a bookstore. Add to this another stark reality: People don't read. A 2015 Pew Research Center study showed that 72 percent of adults...

Brookwood Road, circa 1980 Since publishing Brookwood Road in November 2014, I've heard from a lot of people pleasantly surprised by the writing style and format of the book and its 2016 follow-up, Elm Street. The books are both written as episodic, meaning each chapter is a stand-alone story but that all the chapters (episodes) come together to craft a larger work of fiction. Think of the book as a television show and each chapter is an episode. In many cases, the episodes build on themselves. This is easy writing for me. Writing for newspapers, 1974-1994, any award-winning success that I had occurred through writing first-person columns that appeared on editorial pages. Through these columns, I told the stories of my life past and present. So, for 20 years I was trained to tell quick stories - usually 500 words or less. That form of writing became my sweet spot. I won awards from both the Georgia and the South Carolina press associations. In 1974, when I promised my Daddy...

In 1991, my maternal grandmother was 80 and her oldest sister was turning 100. I had the idea to bring them together and film them telling the stories of their lives. I especially wanted to hear my 100-year-old aunt talk about my grandmother's childhood. On a cold February morning, near my grandmother's birthday, the three of us gathered in my aunt's apartment at a Georgia assisted living facility. These two ladies - my Mema and her "Big Sister" - sat in comfortable recliners. I sat on a stool with my old VHS video camera on a tripod. I turned it on and started asking questions. It was a little awkward at first, but soon they forgot all about me and the camera. They just started telling stories - wonderful, fantastic stories - about family, first loves and marriage, parenting, school, and heartache. I've since had that recording saved to several DVD copies and stored away. I was reminded then and reminded again when I wrote my first book, Brookwood Road,...