Elvin is a native of Alabama, but when he was only six years old, his family moved to the deep Southwest, not far from the Mojave Desert.  Immediately he developed a love for the deserts and mountains there that he says has never left him.  When sometime later Elvin's family moved back to Alabama, Elvin vowed he'd someday return to the mountains and deserts of the West he loved so much. 

Early in his teens, he started playing the guitar and performing Western songs at every opportunity.  At the age of seventeen, he drove West in an old Plymouth, and spent quite some time roaming the Southwest---particularly the high desert.  During this period he started to write about the West.  Poetry, songs, short stories, anything Western.  His passion to write about the West had fully begun to blossom. 

Years later, after he was almost killed in a collision with a runaway eighteen wheel tractor-trailer, he was confined to bed for a very long time as a result of his injuries.  During those lost years his driving passion to write grew, even though he'd become convinced he'd never be able to sit at a computer or typewriter again.  Then one day an idea hit him "like a bolt of lightning."  He decided he'd put a small, heated swimming pool inside his house.  In it, the water's buoyancy would make him light enough to stand in the pool, so that he could reach outside it and operate a computer keyboard.  It worked!  Since that time, he has been grinding out poetry, short stories, and now, at last, the novels he'd always wanted to write.