There’s a strange advantage to living in a small town that most people overlook: you notice things.
Not just the obvious things, such as the empty storefronts, the aging brick buildings, or the familiar trucks parked outside the gas station every morning, but the deeper patterns underneath them. The stories people carry, the contradictions communities quietly live with, and the human details larger places often move too fast to see.
That’s because towns like Linton force you to slow down enough to observe.
You learn early how to read people. You learn that history matters here, even when nobody says it out loud. Communities remember things long after the internet has forgotten them, and over time that gives you a different lens on the world.
Somewhere between running a business, raising kids, writing for The Lintonian, and trying to survive ordinary life like everybody else, I somehow ended up writing books.
Quite a few of them, actually. Way more than I ever would have thought.
Some explored forgotten history. Others drifted into religion, philosophy, old conspiracies, strange manuscripts, and the kinds of cultural shifts that feel increasingly difficult to ignore. A few were inspired directly by Indiana itself because this region contains far more depth, tension, intelligence, and untold history than outsiders usually assume.
Honestly, maybe being from a place like this helps. Small towns tend to produce observers.
When you grow up in rural Indiana, you spend years quietly studying people without even realizing it. You learn who means what they say and who merely performs confidence. You learn which institutions are solid and which ones only appear solid from a distance. Long before anyone formally explains it, you begin to understand how power, reputation, and trust actually work.
That environment tends to produce people who become deeply practical… or deeply curious. Sometimes both.
One of the stranger realizations I’ve had over the past few years is that geography matters far less than it once did. A book written in Linton, Indiana can end up sitting on somebody’s shelf in Arizona, Germany, or the UK within a matter of days. That still feels slightly surreal to me.
Most people assume creativity only comes from giant cities, elite universities, or people surrounded by expensive credentials and carefully managed personal brands. History usually tells a different story, though. Some of the strongest ideas in America came from overlooked places filled with practical people quietly building things without waiting for permission first.
Coal towns.
Farm towns.
Factory towns.
Places where resilience wasn’t motivational language; it was simply part of daily life.
That spirit still exists here, whether people fully recognize it or not.
Maybe that’s also why Vatican mysteries, cipher writing, forgotten American history, and cultural decline fascinate me so much. Beneath all of them sits essentially the same question:
What gets lost when the world moves too fast?
That question feels increasingly relevant now, especially in places where people sometimes underestimate themselves because modern culture constantly suggests importance exists somewhere else — in larger cities, bigger institutions, or rooms they were never invited into.
Some of the smartest, funniest, toughest, and most perceptive people I’ve ever met came from southern Indiana.
No branding consultants, no personal PR teams, just intelligent people living real lives.
Truthfully, I never sat down with some grand strategy to become an “author.” I simply kept writing about subjects I found compelling enough that I couldn’t leave them alone, then wanted to share that.
Maybe that’s the better reason to create anything. Not because it’s optimized, an algorithm rewards it, but because something inside you quietly says:
“This should exist.” And so you build it.
Somewhere along the way, readers started finding the books on their own, even in foreign countries, which is still amazing to me.
In a strange way, it feels a lot like The Lintonian itself: quietly built, a little unconventional, rooted in southern Indiana, and reaching farther than most people might expect.
Small-town Indiana produces strange things sometimes.
Occasionally, one of them is a book.