"Professor Curmudgeon" by Bob Amason
– “Don’t mind him. He’s just crotchety like that.”
You get to have sway in the classroom and fix your students with a beetle-browed visage.
Award-winning author Bob Amason is a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and college professor. A Florida Writer’s Association member, Bob writes under his pen name, Frank A. Mason. His Journeyman Chronicles series of American Revolutionary War novels are Amazon.com bestsellers. Journeyman: Heart of Tempered Steel won the 2023 Florida Writer’s Association Gold Royal Palm Literary Award, Florida’s most prestigious writing prize. Bob’s writing has been published in four anthologies, academic journals, and books. He lives in Florida with his overachieving wife, a professor who is the author of a series of children’s books.
Author’s Talk
Bob Amason
About 40 years ago, I stepped into a classroom as an instructor for the first time. I had an epiphany: I was meant to teach. That moment of reflection set my life’s course. Mark Twain said, “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” The month I retired from being a college professor, I immediately started writing historical novels. Why? I still wanted to teach. What better way to teach than to write stories? Thinking back over all those years as an educator, I realized that my teaching always included storytelling. Transitioning to a full-time storyteller was a natural evolution.
Writing stories offered the chance to share my life-long interest in military history. Ancestry research added to my stories. I discovered that my fifth great-grandfather, Stafford Somersall, was an 11-year-old militia man in 1779 when British regulars captured him at the fall of Fort Morris near Sunbury, Georgia. It was not difficult to imagine him, still a child, carrying a musket that was longer than he was tall. Stafford appears in my second Journeyman Chronicles book.
I continue to hone my writing craft. Using my pen name, Frank A. Mason, I have written four books in the Journeyman Chronicles series of the American Revolution. I was honored by the Florida Writers Association with the Gold Royal Palm Literary Award for Heart of Tempered Steel, Book Two of the Journeyman Chronicles.
I have also published a stand-alone historical novel, Echoes of Liberty: A Novel of the Triumph of Four Women amidst the American Revolution, and two modern suspense novels: Blue-Green for the Grave and The Bronze-Wound Lament. I recently published the first novel in my Sunlit Silence World War II aviation series: Sunward I’ve Climbed. The sequel, The Shouting Wind, is coming soon. Writing as Bob Amason, PhD, I have contributed to five compilations of personal stories. I have plans for two other series and a screenplay.
A friend jokingly said I need to get a life. No, this is my life. Becoming a full-time author helped me to realize that I, too, am a journeyman: Military Officer, College Professor, Writer – always a storyteller. The journey continues.
