Because I was one of those handicapped ones, unable to fit in because I didn't know how. Before writing this, I spent four years taking mental notes on how losers coped and winners won. It wasn't a pretty picture.

It came because I asked "what if?" Much of it is based on personal experience acquired by kicking around the streets.

A novel titled Burning Duck is nearly ready to go. It’s about a young woman who rallies a low-rent neighborhood to fight the city’s condemnation of their homes, and discovers the man she fell in love with is behind the rezoning. Several others are in various stages of completion.

Les Whitaker grew up on an Ozark farm in the 1950s, where at a young age he learned the value of hard work. When he wasn’t working, he read everything he could get his hands on. One day each week, the bookmobile parked at the post office for a couple of hours, and Les would check out all the books they’d let him take at one time.

He says, "I looked at the shelves and decided that one day, a book with my name on it would be up there, too. I went home and made a place in the smokehouse, got a leftover school notebook and a pencil, and started to write."

That commitment was made when Les was in the seventh grade. He says, "I’ve put more spare man-hours into writing than all other interests combined. I have to write. I changed shifts at my job to get on nights, where as a fast worker, I had plenty of time to write. Laptops hadn’t been invented then, so it was still longhand.

"When the notion for a story comes to me, I sit down and write a couple of chapters. I do not hold with the notion that one should try to force words onto a screen as a form of self-discipline.

"After I finished my very first full-length story—conceived in a fraction of a second and three years to write out longhand—I had no interest in even editing the thing, and that scared me. I feared I’d shot my bolt. Turned out to be a perfectly normal reaction."

After a very active and stressful working life, Les now puts a premium on calm. On any given morning he works on broken things in one of his three workshops. Then in the afternoon, he retreats to his upstairs lair to write. Later in the day he usually gets in another writing session.

Besides writing, his other interest include blacksmithing (only in cold weather); he goes to garage sales and flea markets and finds lots of interesting things, many of which he resells for good money, after repairing them; and he enjoys photography and plans to one day enter some of his best in a show.

Les still loves to read about many different things: the medieval economy of western Europe; the silent film industry; and he studies everything he can get his hands on about archeology.