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Drew Tolbert: Alabama Author & Storyteller

Always Smart… Often Irreverent. Books and stories about how one thing becomes another.

I’m Drew Tolbert, an Alabama author and storyteller who spends an unreasonable amount of time asking:

How did THAT become THIS? A small decision becomes a life-changing moment. A family story becomes a tradition. A forgotten solution becomes “the way we’ve always done it.” I like pulling those threads and seeing where they go.

What are you looking for?

Books & Fiction

Clean, character-driven stories about friendship, time, consequences, regret, and the tiny decisions that change everything. Start with The Five Minutes Series, a coming-of-age time-travel trilogy rooted in Alabama.

→ Explore the Books

Stories & Rabbit Holes

Personal stories, observations, humor, family history, small-town Alabama, memory, strange assumptions, and the occasional idea that gets way more complicated than expected. Some are thoughtful. Some are ridiculous. The better ones manage to be both.

→ Fall Down a Rabbit Hole

The short version

I grew up in Corner, Alabama, and now live in Pell City. I write novels and stories. Some of them make you think. Some of them involve livestock. Occasionally it’s both. My favorite kind of story usually begins with something that looks completely unimportant. Then you pull the thread. And suddenly the thing that looked small explains everything.

→ More About Drew

Books

If you prefer getting lost in a story, start here. The Five Minutes Series was first published as the Oak Tree Series. Same stories, new names.

Five Minutes Sooner: One Call Before Goodbye: A coming-of-age story built around friendship, regret, and a mysterious path through time. Read Chapter 1 free.
Five Minutes Later: The Future We Broke: The story expands as time travel becomes less of a mystery and more of a problem.
Five Minutes Forever: The Cost of Never Dying: The consequences grow larger as the story moves beyond where it all began.

I’m also writing Cornered, a humorous memoir about growing up in rural Alabama and discovering that the little moments of a life have a habit of stacking up. The idea at the center of it: Nothing is isolated. One small thing compounds.

→ See the Books

Get the story under the story.

New chapters of The Five Minutes Series and true stories from Corner, Alabama and beyond, sent to your inbox when they go up. One email per story. No sales funnel. No “one weird trick.” Just the next thread worth pulling.

The story under the story

Most things have one. The company policy nobody remembers creating. The family tradition everybody assumes has always existed. The five minutes that looked ordinary until you learned what happened next. Those are the stories I’m interested in. Not because every little thing is secretly profound. But because sometimes the only way to understand where we are is to figure out how we got here.

Still rooted in Alabama

I grew up in a place called Corner. The name is not metaphorical. It sits where counties meet. Growing up there gave me a lifelong appreciation for small towns, family stories, local legends, churches, strange traditions, and people who can give you directions without knowing the name of a single road. A lot of my stories still begin there, even when they end somewhere completely different.

Pick a thread.

Read a book. Find a story. Wander down a rabbit hole. You don’t need to know where it goes yet. That’s usually the interesting part.

→ Books → Stories & Rabbit Holes → About Drew