I​​​​​​​​​​​After saving hundreds of emails from fans since the first novel I wrote and published two years ago I decided to take the plunge...to get rid of all the emails in my gmail account and create a website. So...here I am. Now to write a summary...of what? Of my life or what I have been doing the last few years?  In this small box? ​

I reckon I was a wild child in my younger years. How many kids did you know in high school who got into three fist fights with teachers and never got suspended? That distrust of authority ran strong in my blood. After getting kicked out of UCF university for discliplinary reasons, I started to settle down and realize that there were more important things in life. I eventually went back to that wasted endeavor and graduated with honors...sort of. But that is another story.

My editor/ shrink/ wife is telling me to quit being a smart ass and tell you about the final path I found in my life which caught me unaware....writing. Marcia and I have known each other well since she was in the first grade and I was in the third. We went to school together and church together. She was the first chick to tell me I was a great guitar player at the Methodist Church talent show when I played Purple Haze for the crowd on my JCPenney guitar and amp. I knew something was up when I saw Reverend Dawsey sitting in a corner of the room praying while I was rocking out.

After school we found different paths in our lives for twenty five years. I constantly tell her if she had gone into the woods behind the church on any given Sunday, got buck naked and put out that day we would have not missed those years. She was a good girl while I was from the other side of the tracks. Oviedo historians will validate this claim about the boys from Chuluota. It might take a generation or two.

Twenty five years later after dropping off my kids for Christmas Eve to spend with my ex I was returning home at ten thirty at night when I saw one of the few seedy bars in Oviedo was still open. With ten bucks in my work sweat pants and looking like a grub I decided to go inside and have a seven and seven. There were two women sitting at the end of the bar. One was a looker and I looked like something that just crawled out of the Florida swamps so I sat far away feeling sorry for myself. The looker approached me and asked. 'Are you Rex Riepe?'. I didn't recognize her at first. When she was in the tenth grade she hadn't filled out if you know what I mean and I might not have been looking at her face when she asked the question. I said yes and we have been together ever since. It was divine intervention. The next morning I couldn't wait to call the kids at my ex's home to tell my oldest daughter, 'Guess what Santa brought your daddy last night?'

Everyone wants to be a writer, to put down in words that something they want to say and I reckon to move a million books and become wealthy. To become known and maybe...to leave a legacy after they are dead and gone. I did it because after a scary health incident in my life I became bored lying at home watching Wilkos and Springer after the first week three years ago. Found out that I needed to hone some skills. Being a college educated union carpenter wasn't enough. After that first year of getting rejections, the usual things a writer goes through, my son turned me on to Amazon and my life changed. Now, publishers suddenly want to speak with me. Rejection letters will be framed and hung on the walls at RER Publishing, just to keep me in check.

There was a lot of hard work involved and I was blessed with a great editor, my wife Marcia, who also pulls double duty at RER Publishing as my shrink. I could not have produced seventeen novels in two years without her and she has turned out to be a great writer with a gifted imagination. She tells me that being married to a crazy will do that to a woman. Now, life is getting better.