Well this is the spot on my website where I tell you a little bit about me so that’s what I’m going to do. First things first; my name is Dave Sea. Actually, that is only half true. My first name is Dave but my last name isn’t really Sea, its Cook. Sea is the first letter of my last name. I love to throw darts and I used to play a lot of darts in the town I was living in at the time, Nashville, Tennessee. Whenever I would enter into some of the nightly tournaments (we called them blind draws because everyone would put their name in a hat and then we’d draw out 2 at a time and those 2 were partners for the nightly tournament) I would always put my name in as Dave. Now when another guy started playing that was named Dave, I became Dave C. and he was Dave M. I just liked the way that sounded so when I officially started my writing career, I felt like that and because of some other things I had going on, a pen name would suit the situation better so I started using the pen name, Dave Sea.
That being said, I grew up in a small town in southern Middle Tennessee about 50 miles due south of Nashville. It was a small town of about 4000 or so people. There wasn’t really anything that special about Mt. Pleasant (well it was Phosphate capitol of the world at one time), just an average, small southern town full of friendly and nice people. My parents moved there from south Florida in about 1958/1959 which was before I was born. I was the last of 5 kids (2 older sisters then 2 older brothers) and the only one born in Tennessee. We lived on a full, working farm, way out in the country and raised everything. We had milk cows, beef cows, hogs, chickens, horses and mules. We had crops that we harvested, milk from the cows, eggs from the chickens plus chickens to kill for the freezer. We had a huge garden in which we raised almost everything we ate. About the only thing we bought that we didn’t raise on the farm was flour (we didn’t raise any wheat) and we bought stuff like butter and other condiments. I was a little young to remember much about it but we moved off the farm and a lot closer to town right after my oldest sister got married in 1969 when I was 7. The house in town was a nice new brick house; the house on the farm was not. It was the classic “old rickety farm house”.
Eventually we all went through school and slowly, one by one, my brothers and sister went off to college and moved out. My childhood was pretty much stereotypical except at the age of 12, my father and I started a janitorial business and we worked that for years until I got tired of it (had to work when everyone else was off – not much fun for a teenager) and got a job in a restaurant (Kentucky Fried Chicken) in my late teens in Columbia, a town about 12 miles north of Mt. Pleasant. I also worked on a neighbor’s farm as a teenager which got me outdoors a lot. You have to remember, this was before 300 tv channels (we had 3) and before VCR’s, DVD players, video games or anything like that so if there wasn’t much to watch on TV, you spent a lot of time outside. A lot of my first fiction book, World’s Greatest Quarterback, paralleled my life in many ways except my mother wouldn’t let me play football. She had met too many men in her vacuum cleaner salesman days that were permanently disabled and she just couldn’t stand the thought of “her little darling” being in that condition. She always told me I was destined for greatness and football wasn’t it. So, I didn’t fight it too much and just went through school like a normal teenager. After I graduated and took some college. My mother wanted me to go through college and get a job with a big company, like General Electric (where she worked) then I could work my way up in the company. Well that didn’t happen, I went to college to be a Chemical Engineer and even though I was good at it, between working in the cleaning business 4-5 nights a week and just not being that interested in being a Chemical Engineer, I didn’t make it through a whole year. So basically, for the next 10 years I bounced between the restaurant business (I even owned my own restaurant at one time called the Crash Landing Deli – it was by the airport) and the cleaning business until I got tired of the late-night hours and started working for my oldest sister in the sign business in Nashville. And I still help her as an installer even today.
I always had a knack for writing. I remember when I was in high school, whenever I had to write a paper or story of some sort, I would just start writing and the ideas and words would just flow. I never seemed to be at a loss for wording or anything; I would just write however much I needed. But I never did sign up for the school yearbook, I’m not sure why.
When I worked at the sign shop, my sister was president of her local Business and Professional Women’s Club and she became in charge of their monthly newsletter. Well she would just have ideas to write about and kind of knew what she wanted to say but never seemed to be able to put it into words so I told her to put her ideas and all down and I would fill in the rest. I wrote a year and a half’s worth of newsletters and I actually enjoyed it, I just wish I could find copies of them. I got to where I would insert my personality into them and ended up having a lot of fun with it and she actually got a lot of compliments on it.
I got married in the mid-1990’s (to a wonderful person named Deborah – from west Texas) and a few years after we were married, she went to work for a magazine called “The Church Connection”. It was a magazine that was geared toward, can you guess?, churches. Well, after talking to the publisher one day, I got the (job, gig, joy) of writing an article every month. What I was doing was testing bible and related software then I would tell about it. The magazine didn’t last very long which I was about done with it anyway because the &%^*^$# editor took my articles and took all my personality out of them which obviously didn’t sit too well with me. She was a good designer but a terrible editor.
That pretty much wound up my writing career for many years. I did a little ad copy here and there, like we did a little tri-fold brochure for the sign company that people seemed to enjoy. We tried to do a little newsletter type thing but it never really got off the ground. After many years I had to leave the sign company because of the dust from all the plastic we used to cut with the saws was just burning my sinuses up. I then parlayed over into the tile printing and trophy business and that didn’t go anywhere until I was just about to get out of that kind of business completely when a business acquaintance bought a small printing company and wanted me and another guy that owned a printing company to all merge together – which we did.
I did get to do a little more writing there but most of what I did was sign-related, like signs, banners and things like that along with awards here and there. We had a guy come in one day with a book that was already written and he wanted us to print it. Well, I was saddled with the task of formatting the book into something we could print. I also did the cover design, both front and back. I didn’t have that much experience in printing but I was sure figuring it out pretty quick. Another time, we had a guy come in wanting a book printed. Come to find out, this guy was born Amish but he had recently left them. Well, when people found out they would ask him tons of questions. So, what he decided to do was to write a book about it so he came in with handfuls of notes that were basically answers to questions people had been asking. And most of you may not know it but 23 year old Amish kids are not masters at spelling and grammar. I spent the next month or so trying to decipher what he was trying to say. I would be sorting things out so I would ask him questions to what I (and many other people) wanted to know and he would bring me the answers. We finally got something he/we thought he could sell so we printed him up 100 copies of “The Ex-Amish Kid” and he hit the roads selling them (he eventually sold 500 copies). The first book was mostly about the Amish lifestyle. He wanted to do a second book, “The Ex-Amish Kid 2” that was more about his life now, which I also co-wrote with him, that sold well but not quite as much as the first one. He wants to do a 3rd book by combining the first 2 plus some more but I think he is going to go through a regular publishing company as that is beyond the scope of my capabilities – at this time.
So where am I now? I’m still co-owner at the printing company, PaperWeight Printing in Mt. Pleasant, TN and I have launched my writing career (with little fanfair). I have a son (Daxtyn P. Cook) in college at Full Sail University in Winter Park, FL who is studying for a career in Film and Movie Production. He is studying to be a movie director. As of the time of this writing, early 2020, I have finished my first book, a non-fiction, self-help book called “Stop Counting on Your Fingers”. It is a book on teaching you to how to add and subtract small, single-digit numbers in your head and also teaches you how to do large columns of numbers either in your head or the very least, without a calculator.
My second book that I’m working on is a fiction book entitled “The World’s Greatest Quarterback” in where it chronicles the life of a young Danny Cooper and how he figures out how to get a bunch of high school kids to work together as a team and also, how his exercise routine and field philosophies changes the way the game of football is played today. Even though this is a book written as fiction (it never happened), there are a lot of things in this book that could actually be implemented. And I have to mention, Daxtyn loves the story and can’t wait to make a movie out of it.
I have a few more works of fiction bouncing around in my big head that will be coming out after this second book is done (sneak: “Crumbs from the Table” and “The Day the Wind Stopped Blowing on the Beach”) plus I’m working on a series of children’s books. I’m not exactly sure in which order these will come out but visitors here will be the first to know, after my family and I.
Thank you for visiting my site and if you got far enough through to read this line then you have my deepest gratitude and I vow to produce groups of words worthy of reading over and over again. And, since my son Daxtyn P. Cook is in college studying Film and Movie Production, maybe you’ll get to see the movies someday as well. J