Nic Schuck has a theory about why the Gulf Coast has the best sunsets in the world: it’s the humidity. He also claims, reliably, to see the green flash — the rare optical burst that can appear the instant the sun slips below the horizon — just to watch the reactions of the people around him. Both habits say a lot about the Pensacola novelist, whose third book, Green Flash at Sunset, arrived in early June via the self-publishing arm of publishing giant Ingram.
The novel, loosely set in Pensacola and Key West, grew out of a honeymoon. Schuck and his wife Julie traveled to Key West in 2019 — his first trip back since leaving Miami — and the memories it triggered revived a manuscript he had abandoned for nearly fifteen years. “I like fiction,” he says. “You can still tell the history of a place, but play around with the narrative. You can take any bar you’ve been to and move it to wherever you want.”
A Hemingway girl left a book at a camp
Schuck’s route to novelist started with a wrong turn. A Pensacola native, he was 14 when his father — a retired Navy chief petty officer at Pensacola Naval Air Station — died of complications from Agent Orange exposure. He describes his teenage self as an “undisciplined surfer beach bum” with no plans after high school. At 19 or 20, a friend proposed a cheap three-month trip to Costa Rica. They went.
At the end of it, the friend ended up in an unnamed Costa Rican hospital — an experience that later became the seed of Schuck’s first novel, Native Moments — and a girl left Schuck a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “I knew he was in the hospital, but I didn’t know which one,” he says. “I was recounting the adventure to someone at our camp, and they said, ‘You should write that down.’ That was the catalyst for me to become a writer. I decided I wanted to write like Hemingway.”
He enrolled at the University of West Florida to study English — “I went to college to learn to write” — under Hemingway scholar Allen Josephs, graduated at 24, and moved to Miami to teach English in 2004. The Key West habit started there, when teacher friends told him about Fantasy Fest: he boarded a 6 a.m. Greyhound dressed as Gilligan, stayed up all night to avoid the cost of a hotel, and caught the 6 a.m. bus home. “It was crazy.”
Seventeen years to the first book
Native Moments took 17 years from first page to published book. The first draft was finished in seven; the rejections lasted another decade. Schuck adopted Ray Bradbury’s advice literally — hang your rejection letters in one room and you’ll get a yes before the walls fill up. He stopped writing for almost five years. What brought him back was his daughter: “I had this inner monologue: how am I going to convince her to follow her dreams if I give up on mine?”
He reopened the draft in 2012 and published Native Moments in 2016 through Waldorf, a small Texas press, followed by Panhandlers in 2018 — a collection of self-contained stories that work like a novel, spotlighting, in his words, “the characters living amongst us that you don’t know exist.” When Waldorf closed in 2020, the rights to both books reverted with the files included, and he self-published them rather than lose them to history.
For Green Flash at Sunset, he went straight to IngramSpark, citing the economics and the clock: e-books, audiobooks and print are all on demand, the revenue split is better, and after seven years between books he didn’t want another lap through “the querying and rejection gauntlet of traditional publishing.”
The barroom historian of Pensacola
Schuck’s day job is teaching English at Escambia High School, with adjunct work at the University of West Florida. His side hustle, launched in 2012, is Emerald Coast Tours — Segway tours of historic Pensacola for groups of up to eight, plus walking pub tours that mix beer with stories of the city’s past. “I like to tell people that I’m a barroom historian,” he says. The tours, running 13 years now, are also where the writing happened: the downtime at the Main Street storefront is when Native Moments finally got finished. “Finishing and publishing my first book was important to me. I had to prove to myself and my daughter that if I start something, I’ll finish it.”
Adventure is the connective tissue. At 27 he ran with the bulls in Pamplona — sleeping on a park bench, woken by two Americans with a beer and a warning that the run was starting, then running the full course into the Plaza de Toros. He and Julie, who is from New Orleans, attend Jazz Fest every May for the second weekend and support Gulf Coast musicians like Grayson Capps, whose father wrote Off Magazine Street, the basis for the film A Love Song for Bobby Long. “We love visiting the Frog Pond in Silverhill,” he says of the Baldwin County venue.
Writers hearing from readers
His influences run from Hemingway and Jimmy Buffett to Barry Hannah’s Airships, Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade, Patrick Smith’s A Land Remembered and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country. Brad Watson, the writer-in-residence at UWF during Schuck’s student days, read one of his short stories and told him, “You might be cursed as a novelist.” “I took that to mean that I should become a novelist,” Schuck says. After Watson died in 2020, Schuck made a practice of emailing his favorite living writers to tell them what their work means to him. “I think it’s important for writers to hear that from their readers.”
The release party for Green Flash at Sunset doubled as a hometown affair at his “office” — the Pensacola Bay Brewery — with musician Pat Meusel playing and artist Dan Dunn exhibiting. He and Julie are already talking about Pamplona in 2026, for the centennial of The Sun Also Rises, the book that started it all on a Costa Rican camp bench.
Green Flash at Sunset is available at Panhandle Books and wherever books are sold — a fun, sun-bleached beach read with a Pensacola accent, just in time for summer.