Rough Way to the High Way - eBook

Author: Kelly Mack McCoy
Located in: Spring Branch, Texas
Submitted: March 28, 2023

    Tell us a little about yourself.  I was born into a poor family and lived in the shadows cast by the glitzy part of the city where I grew up - the part of town known to outsiders, you know, the desirable part of town. You've heard stories about people who were poor but never knew it? When you're a poor kid from a dysfunctional family in a big city, you know you're poor.

As a child, I didn't have much - we couldn't afford new clothes or toys, and there were often nights we went to bed hungry. If you are familiar with the movie Sling Blade, you know about biscuits and mustard. Onion sandwiches were my treat.

Look up dysfunctional family, and you'll see a photo of the McCoy family. My father was an alcoholic who stayed drunk for twenty-five years straight, as I recall - literally falling-down drunk. He actually did fall down drunk on the steps leading to the entrance to my school one day when I was in elementary school. In his defense, he came there to defend me because of the latest trouble I had gotten into, which I'm sure I didn't deserve because I was likely guilty of the infraction, whatever it was.

My mom was in and out of insane asylums (they were called that in those days). By some miracle, with that background, I managed to stay out of jail. But I did get expelled from elementary school, if that counts for anything.

One of my earliest memories is watching mom talk to the man in the watch she wore on her necklace (a treasured gift from her kids) before she was hauled off to the asylum for shock treatments. Another memory is visiting her there and being entertained by some patients who clung to bars and acted like monkeys. You can imagen how much fun it was at my house. Ahh...the halcyon days of youth.

Why do I tell these stories? If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that comebacks are possible - no matter how rough your background may be. When facing difficult times, remember that better days are ahead if you're willing to keep fighting for your dreams.

    What was your motivation behind this project?  Writing is something I've had in my heart since childhood. I've always loved to browse through bookstores, even as a kid. I would thumb through some of the books on the shelves and read parts of them at random. Sometimes I would be so awed by the prose I would think I could never be a writer. Then I would pick up another book and think, Man, this is really bad writing. Yet he somehow managed to have his book published and get it into a bookstore. If he could do it with writing that bad, I knew there was hope for me after all. But kids from my neighborhood didn't grow up and go to college or become writers or anything of that nature. I had it in my heart but believed it was unattainable, so therefore it was to me at the time. My main goal as a child was to survive to adulthood. That was enough of a challenge for me at the time. I thought I would be able to do something about my circumstances after I grew up, which I did, sort of. I hit the road in a big rig and drove away from it all - or so I thought. Although I had often dabbled in writing here and there until I was motivated to finish my book for the reasons stated above, I didn't have the confidence in myself as a writer to follow through with it. In spite of the fact that people would often tell me what a good writer I was, I didn't even call myself one until my book was published.

    What do you hope folks will gain from this project?  That God often works in and through our lives in unexpected ways, and He is always at work in ways we can't even fathom. So many people and circumstances are intertwined when events unfold in our lives; how can we expect to understand what God is doing in our lives or the lives of those around us? Sometimes, He allows us to take a little peek inside His realm as He is at work, but more often, we don’t get to see or understand what He is doing in any given situation. Isn’t that what faith is about? Not knowing, but trusting? In the novel, Mack’s whole life changes dramatically, and all his plans begin to unravel. When this happens to us, we want to hold things together ourselves. But you get a hint that God had different plans for Mack when you read the quote at the top of the back cover – ‘…When your plans unravel, it may be God who is pulling the strings…’.

    How were you personally impacted by working on this project?  I found an awesome writers group where I met some good writers who helped to draw out the writer in me. One of those, John Floyd Mills, was a former writer with the San Antonio Light newspaper. John had recently published a novel, Buried. He also started his own publishing company to help writers to see their labors of love through to publishing since he knew all the ins and outs of the industry and knew how the process worked from beginning to end. John liked my writing style, and he approached me with the idea of the two of us partnering together to write a series of novels about a trucker and his adventures out on the road. I had such a thing in mind as well for some time but never followed through with it, so I agreed. It turned out our writing styles were just too different for us to write together, so he moved on and wrote a sequel to his novel, and I ran with the other project on my own. Did I say ran? Stumbled and fell would be more accurate. After I started the novel, my crazy life got in the way once more, and my book was buried like the protagonist in John's novel. And just like his protagonist, there was no way my novel would ever see the light of day without some dramatic event to cause it to see the light again. That dramatic event was John's death. After he died, I decided it was do or die for me as a writer as well. Sadly, for most writers, it's die, not do. The scrap of manuscript that would become Rough Way to the High Way seemed to call out to me from that dusty drawer each day thereafter. It could no more be ignored than John's protagonist buried underground.

    Who are your influences, sources of inspiration or favorite authors / artists?  C.S. Lewis is the Christian author who probably had the most influence on me. And I love the styles of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, though Hemingway, with his rather sad obsession with death, could lead you to be a little depressed. I've always loved to read and was interested in a wide variety of subjects. Dictionaries and encyclopedias were my favorite books to read as a kid - true story. but in my early days as a trucker, it was a little more difficult. At the end of your day, you're often too exhausted to read or comprehend much of anything. And it was hard to focus on a book if you held it on the steering wheel with all the bouncing around and such. But then came cassette players, and then CDs, and now downloads, so it's been easy to listen to lots of books out there for quite some time. I listened to the Bible and many books of a more spiritual nature. At one time, I got into reading the classics. For some time, it was self-help – I decided I needed a lot of it. And I've always been somewhat of an information junkie, so anything I was the least bit curious about, I would get some books on the subject and learn about it. So, I listened to many of The Great Courses from The Teaching Company. I absolutely loved to get lost in a novel too. I drove a car-hauling rig for many years. Sometimes I would get so engrossed in a book that when I arrived at a dealership, I would have to listen to at least the end of a chapter before getting out to unload. I often got odd looks from some of the salesmen - especially when I had hot-selling cars on my truck they'd been waiting for.

    Anything else you'd like readers / listeners to know:  As long as God gives me breath on this earth, I will continue to write books that I hope will touch many lives and inspire others. As I said before, I have lots of irons in the fire, fiction, and nonfiction, so a lot of things can happen to help determine which iron is pulled out first. I originally planned to write a sequel to Rough Way to the High Way, but as happened with so many others, recent events have changed the course of my life and my writing journey. If the Lord gives me enough time on this earth, I still plan to write that sequel. But my latest book, The Sojourner's Road Home, is a reminder that we are all sojourners in this life. This world is not our permanent home - thank God! Have you ever been on a journey and longed for home? Felt lost and far from anything familiar? Most of us who travel often experience those feelings from time to time. The Sojourner's Road Home: A 40-Day Journey to the Heart of God is a book for travelers, dreamers, and anyone who has ever felt lost and alone. For believers and seekers, it is a reminder that no matter how far we wander, there is always a place where we belong. Do you travel for business or pleasure? Have you been called to a life of service in another country? Whatever the reason for your travels, this book will speak to your heart. Our sojourn takes us through a troubled land in tumultuous times, but we can find comfort in knowing we are not aimlessly wandering on the road of life. The journey has much more meaning when we realize we are heading home to the welcoming embrace of our loving Father in heaven. With this as our focus, we can turn away from the troubles on our road and towards a heart-throbbing expectancy because we know we are heading straight for that embrace regardless of how many times we may stumble and fall along the way. And stumble, we will.

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