“A small collection of books well worth your time — in my opinion”
In 2013, my wife and I moved to Franklin, Kentucky — a small town built around a late 19th-century courthouse square, the kind of place that still has Friday night concerts in the summer and an antique car show in the fall. A little Mayberry. We bought an 1880s house three blocks from the square in quite the rundown condition and spent the better part of a year putting it back together.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, we signed a lease on a storefront six feet wide and thirty-five feet deep and opened a bookstore. We called it bFranklin Bookseller — a nod to Benjamin Franklin, the town’s namesake. Turns out that connection wasn’t as obvious to everyone else as it was to us. But it was ours, and it was quaint, and for a little while it was exactly what I wanted it to be.
Who knew you couldn’t make money selling books from a six-foot-wide storefront?
I needed a job, found one, finished the house, and closed the bookstore. All that in 2014. Life moved on. But the love of books never did.
So What is Second Mountain Media?
Second Mountain Media is the name of my company. Granddaddy Can’t … Yet is the website which includes a new bookstore. This will be my second attempt at bookselling: smaller inventory, no lease, considerably less financial risk.
Everything here is something I wrote, which means I can vouch for every word. These are short books by design. Not because the ideas are small, but because your time isn’t. I’ve tried to say exactly what needs to be said and stop.
If something here speaks to you, I’d be grateful if you’d leave a review. Reviews are the currency of independent authors, and even a few sentences make a real difference.
Grab your own coffee, sorry I can’t give you one, but the books are short.
Grace and Peace —
Scott Walker
The book is written and currently being edited for publication. Expected publication in August.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Read First. See Jesus.
Jesus may be hiding in plain sight in the Bible you’ve already read your whole life.
Hidden in Plain Sight makes a simple, almost radical argument: before you reach for another commentary, sermon, study note, or Google search, try something simpler — just read the Bible. All of it. Repeatedly. Without an agenda.
Drawing on Scott Walker’s four decades of teaching Bible classes, this short book explores why we inherit lenses we never examine, why some passages were never meant to be fully resolved, and why reading Scripture like a story you can’t put down — rather than a discipline you endure — changes everything. You’ll meet an atheist who set out to disprove the Bible and ended up believing it, and discover what happens the second, third, and tenth time you read it again.
Read first. See Jesus. Let understanding grow.
This book is still in the drafting stage, no publication date at this time. Coming Soon.
Keep Talking
Why AI Gets Better the Longer You Talk to It
Most books about AI will teach you five hundred prompts. This one makes a different argument.
Keep Talking is about what happens when you stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a thinking partner. Scott Walker came to AI tools late — a retired programmer, not a tech evangelist — and what he discovered surprised him. The longer and more honestly he talked, the better the thinking got. His. Not just the AI’s.
This short book is not a technical guide. It’s a conversation about conversations — about how sustained, honest dialogue with AI produces something that optimized prompts never will: better questions, clearer thinking, and the occasional idea you didn’t know you had.
Why AI gets better the longer you talk to it.
This book is still a “good idea” but not yet started. Coming Soon.
Learning the Sky You Have
The Suburban Star Gazers First Steps
You don’t need dark skies. You don’t need an expensive telescope. You don’t need to know anything yet.
Learning the Sky You Have is the first book in the My Backyard Universe series — written for the person standing in a suburban backyard, looking up, and wondering where to start. Scott Walker has been that person. He still is, most nights.
This book won’t show you the Milky Way arching over a mountain meadow. It will show you what’s actually above your house — planets, clusters, double stars, and a moon that rewards every look — and how to find it, understand it, and keep coming back to it. Because the sky you have, however light-polluted and imperfect, is more than enough to last a lifetime.
The suburban stargazer’s first steps.
This book is just a “twinkle in my eye” right now. Coming Soon….
Granddaddy Can’t Cook
Simple Recipes. Real Life. Good Food.
The smoke alarm is not a cooking timer. Granddaddy had to learn that the hard way.
Granddaddy Can’t Cook is a collection of simple recipes, honest failures, and hard-won kitchen lessons from a man who spent fifty years letting someone else handle dinner. Scott Walker came to cooking late — retirement late — and discovered that the kitchen is a lot like everything else worth learning: humbling at first, surprisingly rewarding once you stop being afraid of it.
These are not complicated recipes. They are not trying to impress anyone. They are the dishes a granddaddy actually makes, tested on real family, written down so the grandkids might someday make them too.
Simple recipes. Real life. Good food.
Scott Walker Bio
Scott Walker spent his career on the technology side of banking — writing software, managing development teams, and helping other people use tools necessary to do their jobs. He retired in 2025 and promptly began learning everything he had been too busy to learn before.
He has been married to Glenna for over fifty years. They have two daughters and six grandchildren. Active in his church he has been teaching adult Bible classes for more than forty years.
He is not a theologian, an astronomer, a chef, or a golfer. He is a granddaddy! But he is working on all five. GranddaddyCant.com exists to document the attempt — and Second Mountain Media exists to share what he finds along the way.
He signs everything Grace and Peace, and means it.