I began writing White Sugar, Brown Sugar, at the age of 18, on an old black underwood typewriter. I was bound and determined to become a Hemingway.

After doing too many drugs after my parents divorced, I thought I was cured and I could help others avoid or stop using drugs.  But it turns out that I wasn’t ready to be trying to help anybody at that time

Once I did clean up, I continued writing the book for quite a while, including while studying creative writing at the University of Florida as part of my undergraduate studies in English.

I recall reading portions of it in class and getting good feedback. I received some great advice from the professor, Sterling Watson. I attended a talk in which Mr. Watson spoke at the Miami International Book Fair a few years ago and thanked him for writing, ‘Get closer to his head’ at the top right-hand corner of a short story that was part of the book.

I continued writing the book for many, many years, and sent it to the editor of my first non-fiction books, TOEFL Preparation Guide and its successors, published by Cliffs Notes, Inc. My editor pointed out correctly that my fiction book wasn’t deep enough. So, I kept writing.

In the book, I presented that we white kids on the beachside of Daytona Beach had certain types of drugs, like psychedelics, but when we wanted to go to narcotic drugs, we needed to go across the river and the railroad tracks. So, there were two different cultures now involved, and I decided to show how Blacks were discriminated against in oceanfront cities across Florida.

After working on that new interracial view for a few years, I was driving the family van on the northeast coast of the U.S when I was in my 30s, with the young kids fighting in the back seat, and I suddenly told myself that there was something wrong. I was dealing with race and the difference of cultures through only a white boy’s eyes. I needed a black character.

I used the first name of a teenager who was in drug rehab with me. And that guy had reddish hair, so everybody called him Red. So, he became a new character, and I created a family around him. I also had worked in a cafeteria chain founded in Mobile, Alabama as a teenager, and I thought it was racist, so I used that as well.

Much of the book is at least based partially upon many events that really happened, and people who really existed, but I embellished (or made more horrific) whatever I remembered, so it still is truly fiction. But my friends who read it knew instantly that I was describing much about my mother and father as well as myself. And many realized instantly that I was referring to a well-known Baptist Minister in the Daytona Beach area who founded a drug rehab center.

I finally self-published White Sugar, Brown Sugar in 2012, when I was 59 years old. You will realize that the characters have bit parts in my second book Cuban Roots and they and their children, who were young in White Sugar, Brown Sugar, are major characters in my third book, Giga Trouble.