Let’s write!

You're here with a book project brewing—or perhaps it's an article, column, essay or grocery list. It might be just a nebulous idea for now or notes in a journal. Whatever form it takes, you've quickly realized that writing is a tough, lonely road. With the right touch, however, the finished product engages readers long after the final page and packs a literary wallop at the same time. 

That's where I can help. A for-fun writing contest in third grade (I won!) got me hooked on words and shaped my life. Infused with inspiration since those nascent storytelling days, I channeled a passion for prose into a collection of 50 book titles, editorial lead roles, mentor to new writers, and many other related projects. Along the way I honed and improved a natural talent to blend strategy and creativity to deliver can’t-put-it-down end products. I’m an investigator, ambassador, and most of all, trusted ally.  

I bring exceptional writing skills and extensive publication experience from hatchling idea to print, with a laser editing eye (line editing, copy editing, developmental, proofreading) and borderline disturbing fascination with stories that show readers what's out there. With a natural finesse to craft writing that attracts, celebrates, and inspires, I'm ready to take your project into the world with a flourish. 

I’ve worked with some of the best publishing teams in the U.S., including Falcon/Globe Pequot, Mountaineers, Trails Books, Big Earth, and Quarto, and contributed dozens of feature articles to Backpacker, Outside, Bicycling and other regional and national titles. I also earned a hand-selected nod from Nat Geo to lead development of an exciting new book series and recently published the first in my learning adventure children's book series.

 I take great pride in weaving a strong sense of place with an author's genuine personality and end goal. Your book is my book. Together, we’ll build something amazing.

Get in touch through my contact page on this site or email me directly at outhikin@gmail.com.

Just a few riveting titles from exhilarated clients…

Samples

From Success in a Nutshell (Marty Harrell)

Inspiration in a Burlap Sack

Providence bloomed beyond a barbed wire fence. Sun-baked, gnarled wooden posts escorted rusty barbed wire defining the periphery of my family’s rural home in Baconton, Georgia. On the other side, 4,000 acres of pecan trees, upwards of 100 feet tall with six-foot-diameter trunks at full maturity, grew in one of the state’s largest commercial orchards. I was eight years old and didn’t know that every day, I was looking into my future.

All those trees belonged to Lee Collins, a quintessential southern gentleman and longtime fixture in the pecan industry. Everyone called it the Lee Collins orchard and Mr. Collins regularly offered area residents the opportunity to earn money picking pecans dropped to the ground by mechanical shakers. Pecan tree shakers are modified tractors equipped with giant, extendable hydraulic arms that clamp branches in an iron grip and give them a vibrating shake, dropping the nuts to the ground like so much plump brown, oblong confetti. Ever the businessman, Collins saw cheap labor running around the neighborhood and left burlap bags along the fenceline as inert temptation and then hooked the kids with jingling coins. I joined my siblings many of my friends walking the orchard rows, filling the bags for a penny a pound.

During the pecan “high season,” our routine was almost always the same. After school I usually followed my brothers William, Ray, and Joel into the orchard with an armload of empty bags and anticipation of walking out with a fistful of money. I was just a little guy, all pipe cleaner arms and toothpick legs, but had a voracious work ethic. Stuffed with pecans, those big burlap bags looked like Santa’s Christmas sack to me and had the heft to match. I wasn’t strong enough to lug them around so I found an empty five-gallon bucket, loaded it up with nuts, and zipped back and forth between the trees and my bag like a high energy honeybee. When the bag was full, I grabbed another and started over. I also developed a keen savvy for identifying some of the hundreds of different pecan varieties simply by their size, shape, and quality. I knew, for example, that lighter weight nuts were underdeveloped and left those on the ground. Only the best pecans were bag-worthy.

One week I picked 350 pounds of pecans and when Mr. Collins came by, I proudly showed him my nutty loot. He asked who helped me pick all those pecans and could hardly believe I had done it all on my own. I beamed with pride as he handed over my haul of $3.50 for five days’ work.

I was number seven of twelve kids in our family, with three older and two younger brothers, and six sisters, three older and three younger. Ours was a lively household, to be sure, and we were all infused with strong work ethics and solid Christian moral values. Even with busy days picking pecans, school homework and everyday household chores still needed attention and tasks like laundry, cleaning the house or taking out the trash took concerted efforts. Working hard was part of life and no one questioned it; such a big family required cooperation on all fronts.

There were few lazy days at the Harrells. We all knew what needed to be done and just did it. We were “poor” but didn’t know it; in fact, the entire family was happy, very close, and looked at the world as it was. We had plenty of food to eat, clothes to wear, great friends, and a nice home. Life was good.

It’s Not Work, It’s a Way of Life

Great leaders are not born as such. There is not an exclusive club reserved for people “naturally” equipped with skills to lead the way. I grew up with a work ethic molded by many strong leaders but as a greenhorn general manager, quickly realized leadership traits can be acquired. Link them with desire and nothing can stop you from becoming a great leader.

A clean desk helps, too, and mine wasn’t. Sam changed that in one dramatic moment. Borderline obsessive organization was a key attribute to his tremendous success. To my good fortune, he recognized my potential and spent countless hours teaching effective, organized, management skills and the importance of leadership by example. In my first year as GM, I had barely touched the surface of what was required to successfully lead others and apparently it starts with a clean desk.

One day, Sam walked into my office and said, “What’s all this?” I was cocooned in lopsided stacks of invoices and manuals, paper squares of scribbled notes scattered like my thoughts, an old stapler, and pencils lying prone beneath a hunched desk lamp. “What’s this damn mess on your desk? How do you know if you’re coming or going?”

You always knew where Sam stood on his views and this was one of those times. He dropped his arm to one side of my desk and raked everything onto the floor. The resulting heap didn’t look much different than it did on top of my desk and his lesson was clear. “I did that for a reason,” he said. “I’m teaching you the value of organization. It’s okay to have things on your desk but keep them organized.” I took that to heart, raised it by infusing what I learned from other leadership examples in my life, and applied it to everything I did in my career.

From Adjusted Reality (Dr. Sherry McAllister)

In an enchanting realm of possibilities, a remarkable journey awaits that unravels the tapestry of the past, weaves the threads of imagination, and embarks on an odyssey to reshape the future. Picture a world where misconceptions crumble, trust is restored, and the key to robust health lies not in the pill bottle but in the embrace of a philosophy yet to be fully explored.  

Einstein’s imagination quote hearkens to the positive piece that so many people are missing in today’s world. If you just stop for a minute and pretend you're a little kid in a sandbox. What can you create, and what would that creation look like? How much fun could you have in doing it? Indeed, imagination wields a mightier force than knowledge.

But imagination can also inspire fear of the unknown and the lurking foreboding of bad things. For many of us when we were young, this happened when the lights went off at bedtime. There was no telling what was hiding under the bed, behind a closet door, or in the shadows outside the window. We created our own monsters in a variety of ways and America’s people today are faced with similar unknowns, seemingly one after another. With no brighter, reasonable alternative, we tend to revert to that chilling childhood place.

Indeed, there is an ogre among us, siphoning our physical and spiritual energy for its own yield. It beckons a promise of healing, uttered in language laden with extravagance but void of benevolence. Ensnared in cramped antechambers, we receive the fiend’s veiled hope and snake oil remedy yet are ejected hastily back into the same world of discomfort and pain from whence we came.

The ogre is like the mythic nine-headed Hydra, a monstrous entity born from the shadows of past injuries, illness, traumas, drugs, lies, addiction, betrayal, guilt, and death. Each head represents a facet of this overwhelming force, poised to strike at any moment. The Hydra’s immortal heads generate an all-encompassing fear, their sinuous tentacles wrapping around you insidiously and slipping into the recesses of your deepest nightmares if you let your guard down.

A dramatic but not altogether erroneous depiction of the portrayal of the body as a cohesive whole, intricately composed of interconnected and interdependent parts. A Whole Body beginning connected with the mental aspect, which can bring in spiritual as well, becomes a Whole Self. The sum of the parts—Whole Body and Whole Self—is a Whole Being. Paired with someone who understands the philosophy of the sum of these parts, we can heal from a whole perspective.

The ogre is like the mythic nine-headed Hydra, a monstrous entity born from the shadows of past injuries, illness, traumas, drugs, lies, addiction, betrayal, guilt, and death. Each head represents a facet of this overwhelming force, poised to strike at any moment. The Hydra’s immortal heads generate an all-encompassing fear, their sinuous tentacles wrapping around you insidiously, slipping into the recesses of your deepest nightmares if you let your guard down.

A dramatic but not altogether erroneous depiction of the portrayal of the body as a cohesive whole, intricately composed of interconnected and interdependent parts. A Whole Body beginning connected with the mental aspect, which can bring in spiritual as well, becomes a Whole Self. The sum of the parts—Whole Body and Whole Self—is a Whole Being. Paired with someone who understands the philosophy of the sum of these parts, we can heal from a whole perspective.

From Leaving Planet Simple (Dr. Alex Gold)

Since the dawn of humanity, we have gone about life in our own worlds. This hasn’t been too much of a problem until recent decades, as mounting global challenges indicate something isn’t quite right. Perhaps our worldview—our view of how the world works—is a bit too simple.

The late Stephen Hawking said that the solution to issues such as resource depletion, overpopulation, deforestation, and climate change, is for humans to leave Planet Earth. Hawking is not alone. Carl Sagan, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and many others have made similar suggestions. In this book, I will make the argument that the solution is not to leave Planet Earth. Instead, we must leave what I call Planet Simple, a mechanical, reductionist, human-centered worldview that has dominated Western society since the Enlightenment. Leaving Planet Simple does not involve rocket ships, but perhaps something more challenging—a paradigm shift in how we see ourselves, the world around us, and the organizations we lead.

The Planet Simple metaphor is inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argues that scientific understanding does not progress in linear, incremental fashion, as is commonly believed. Instead, scientific research occurs on a foundation of a commonly accepted paradigm, or mindset, of how the world works. Science goes deeper because its practitioners can take this foundational paradigm for granted—research depth would be impossible if researchers kept arguing over the basics. At some point, however, researchers encounter real world anomalies that throw the field into crisis. Eventually, the awareness of anomaly lasts so long and penetrates so deeply that the only resolution is the adoption of a new paradigm. Kuhn himself is considered to have brought “paradigm shift” into common use.

Paradigm shifts are never just increments to what is already known. They require the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact—an intrinsically revolutionary process. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals. Kuhn goes so far as to claim that after a paradigm shift, it is as if we had been suddenly transported to another planet. Referring to the Copernican revolution, he states, “The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world.”

We think we live in a different world—Planet Simple—and this mistake is the root cause of the issues noted by Hawking. Leaving Planet Simple, however, requires a paradigm shift that is already facing resistance from established stakeholders comfortable with the prevailing paradigm. According to Kuhn, this resistance is typical of paradigm shifts. To apply his words to our own subject matter, Kuhn may suggest that these stakeholders will convince themselves that they can fit the reality of Planet Earth “into the inflexible box supplied by [Planet Simple].”