Raymond L. Niblock - Author

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Downtown Fayetteville, AR
Raymond L. Niblock - Author

Trial lawyer. Mediator. Author. I am a trial lawyer and certified mediator in an active law practice that my father established in 1961.

When I’m not working on a case, I’m writing novels. I also hold a private pilot’s certificate, so my dreams tend skyward. That’s “what I do.” What makes me happy, you ask? My husband, family, friends, flying airplanes, writing, and adventures. Life is precious and must be lived without reserve or apology.

10/28/2026

10/25/2026

Heading back to Italy. There, I intend to complete “The American of Venice.”

For fans of , don’t lose heart! I’m working the sequel!

Ray Niblock
Raymond L. Niblock - Author

I need to walk the streets and float the canals of Venice once more to bring The American of Venice manuscript to a close.I wonder where its protagonist, Elliott Pembroke, will lead me in Venice’s misty, cool, wet November?I’m departing at the end of the week. I’ll be in Umbria with family for...

10/25/2026

Sunning in the cul-de-sac with the dogs.

10/25/2026

Having a morning sun with the girls in the cul-de-sac sac. They say it is good for one to do so. I agree! It gets the writing juices flowing, because I have a bunch if it to do. What will Jon Freeman do today? Or Siggi? Will he confront the Draugr of Hekla? Will Elliot have coffee with the Widow Nonna in Venice?

Ray Niblock

10/15/2026

Utterly transported!

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic--almost myth…

08/29/2026

Sometimes you need to get out of the convention hall.

During a break from the New Mexico State Bar Convention, I slipped away for a few hours and headed to Mesa Verde.

I have been enamored with the Southwest for most of my life. I first encountered New Mexico as a kid in 1981, when I went away to military school in Roswell. I don’t know what I understood then about the place that affected me so deeply. I only knew that it did. More than forty years later, it still does.

The Southwest has held me in its thrall ever since.

This wasn’t my first visit to Mesa Verde. I came here in the summer of 1991, and again in the winter of 1993. Returning all these years later, I found much of what has always drawn me to this country: the enormous sky, the changing light, distant rain falling beneath the clouds, mountains fading into haze, and miles and miles of country stretching toward a horizon that never seems quite reachable.

The cliff dwellings remind me that people have been making lives in this beautiful, difficult country for a very long time. But as remarkable as they are, I kept finding myself looking outward.

There is something about the wide-open spaces of the Southwest that gives me room to breathe in a way I seem to find nowhere else. Maybe it is the scale. Maybe the emptiness. Maybe it is simply standing beneath that vast canopy of blue and being reminded that the world is much bigger than whatever happens to be occupying my mind that day.

I carried my Sony, but I also took some photographs with the iPhone when I wanted a view wider than the lens I had with me could give me. Between the two, I hope I caught a little of what the afternoon felt like.

Forty-five years after that kid first arrived in New Mexico, I’m apparently still looking toward the same horizon.

Not a bad way to spend a break from a bar convention.

08/23/2026

Another video. This one is, for me, iconic. It leads me to the land of my dreams, where I see, hear, and experience everything more keenly. God, or whatever you choose to call that which exceeds our understanding, must surely be omnipresent. But there, for some reason, I experience the Presence more directly than most other places on the planet. You can experience it too by turning off of US 550 at San Isidro, NM, and let NM 4 lead you toward the and Jemez Springs, New Mexico, and then on to the Valles Caldera National Preserve and beyond. I have made this drive countless times since I first encountered it in 1987. Not once has it ever failed to inspire and cover me with a blanket of gratitude and awe.

08/23/2026

In a previous post I showed the approach to the Valles Caldera National Preserve, a place that has captured my imagination for nearly 40 years - because it was the Summer of 1987 when I first laid eyes on it, when it was a working ranch and inaccessible. It has inspired much in me, including a star role in my debut novel, . While I was on my visit out there last week, I had a deeply personal encounter with an old friend from my post-military school days. His mother and step brother had recently passed, with whom I was also close. My friend, who lives with his family now in Santa Fe, is a regular visitor to Los Valles, and has given it an apt name, referring to the place as his church. I like that. The whole of the Jemez Mountains is like a church to me, as well, except it is a church that is free and God-given rather than a man-made place one must pay for. On my last day there I drove back into the backcountry - at first I wasn’t going to share the video and photos, but I changed my mind - to meet him, but I was late. The afternoon monsoons had come which offered a magnificence all their own. Anyway, here is some video of my drive back into the backcountry of this vast caldera at 8,300 feet in elevation. I agree with my friend. It is a sacred place.
Ray Niblock

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Downtown Fayetteville, AR

Website

http://www.raymondlniblock.com/, https://rayniblockauthor.com/

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