When Bob Smith walks his mail route, nothing hints at the fantastic thoughts in his head.

Smith, gray-haired and bespectacled, seems a mild-mannered letter carrier, dressed on a hot day in U.S. Postal Service-issued blue shirt and shorts and black boots.

He keeps a towel on his left arm so his sweat and customers' Pottery Barn catalogs don't mix. He trudges up porch steps, limping slightly, the result of knee surgery for a torn meniscus, an occupational hazard.

Once the route is done, he heads to his home in Matthews, where he lives with his wife, son and three cats. Then he resumes his other life - as writer James Robert Smith, crafting tales involving zombies, ghosts and 10-foot-tall carnivorous dinosaur birds who are alive and well in Florida.

Today, he has sold more than 60 short stories and published two novels. And there's more.

In 2009, Hollywood producer Don Murphy ("Transformers"), working through Warner Bros., bought the rights to his first book, "The Flock."

Pretty good for a self-taught writer who never attended a writer's workshop, M.F.A. program or four-year college.

Lots of people talk about pursuing their dreams. But life gets in the way. The singing career is never launched. The café is never opened. Bob Smith, 54, is one person who followed through.

About 25 years ago, Smith decided to become a professional writer. He schooled himself about the science fiction and fantasy market. He researched, wrote and rewrote whenever he had a spare minute. He mulled over plots while delivering the mail.

It's been a slow road, but his tenacity has begun paying off. A screenplay of "The Flock" is now written. A director is being sought. Still, that doesn't guarantee the movie gets made.

If filming starts, however, Bob Smith the mail carrier gets a six-figure check. After juggling two jobs for a quarter century, he becomes Bob Smith the full-time writer.

A writer's beginnings

His obsession - with fantasy, horror, science fiction - began early. Smith's parents owned a used bookstore in rural Georgia. He was 8 when his mom handed him Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man."

Published in 1951, the sci-fi collection includes "The Veldt," a story about a technology-equipped nursery that entertains two young siblings by simulating an African veldt. The story ends when the children revolt against their parents, locking them in the nursery with lions that are perhaps not so virtual.

The first time Smith encountered the story, it terrified him. He mustered the courage to get through it only by following his mom around the house while he read. He was also enthralled.

"I thought, if I could do anything remotely like this, I'd be happy."

And so he began writing. Childhood works included novellas about a Tyrannosaurus rex, an Alaskan brown bear and a cat that was part bobcat, part domestic. He also read widely. But he didn't go to college. "Too poor," he says.

Instead, he spent years selling collectible comics, magazines and used toys. In the 1980s and early '90s, before he became a mail carrier, he co-owned Comics 'Nuff Said, a comic-book store at Central and Pecan avenues.

He kept jotting down ideas, writing stories when he had the time. Around 1986, he decided to get serious.

After a day at the store, he would head home to write on his Smith-Corona typewriter. He also did research to learn how to get published. "I just kept at it until I figured out how it was done," he says.

His first sale was to a small horror magazine.

Soon, he was selling to anthologies. Eventually, he got an agent. His stories include "Visitation," which tells of Edgar Allan Poe returning from the dead to meet an admirer. Another story, "Love & Magick," about a wizard, appears in a collection that includes a piece by his childhood hero, Ray Bradbury.

Along the way, Smith has gotten hundreds of rejections. It took him 18 years to sell the Poe story. He has been paid as much as $1,800 for a story, but also as little as a penny a word.

His novel "The Living End," about a zombie invasion, was released this year by a publisher called Severed Press. Only the zombie-obsessed reader is likely to encounter the book.

His biggest literary success has been Forge Books' publication of his other novel, "The Flock," in 2010. Forge, which is owned by MacMillan, rereleased the book after a small press published it in 2006.

Insult leads to big break

How did a Hollywood producer happen to get his hands on "The Flock"? It's a crazy story.

Producer Don Murphy's credits include "From Hell," starring Johnny Depp. The 2001 movie about Jack the Ripper was based on a comic book series by the same name. In 2007, Smith posted a comment in a chat room devoted to the comic. He said he hated Murphy's movie. He thought it should have been a miniseries.

Murphy, it turns out, read the comment.

"It was obnoxious enough to make me go, 'Who is this?' " Murphy recalls. "I clicked on his name and see, oh, he's written a book. I'm sure it's going to be some made-in-his-basement piece of crap."

Explore Murphy's website, and you see that he's not keen to hear your critiques. "If you have any comments or concerns about anything Don is associated with," the website states, "please write it out in triplicate so we can throw it out appropriately."

Smith's comment annoyed Murphy so much that he bought a copy of "The Flock," figuring he'd read it and dis it on the Internet. By the time he finished reading, he had changed his mind.

"This is one of the most solid books I have read in years," he wrote Smith in a 2007 email. "It would make a great film."

The terror birds from Florida

"The Flock" is an eco-thriller that stars terror birds whose remote Florida habitat is threatened when a powerful Disney-like corporation plans to develop the land. Smith got the idea after reading about a prehistoric bird, Titanis walleri, which once lived on the Gulf Coast. Titanis, also known as the terror bird, was a brawny meat-eater, 6 or 7 feet tall.

In the novel, a flock of terror birds survives in Florida, in remote grassland, undetected by humans. But humans have begun encroaching, in the form of a gated community called Salutations.

As the story begins, Ron Riggs, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer, is heading to Salutations to investigate reports of missing family dogs. Riggs learns about the culprit when he encounters Kate and Adam, scientists working with a wealthy environmentalist in a secret operation to save the birds. The creatures have survived, Adam explains in the book, by living in the last remaining expanse of savanna on the Gulf Coast:

" 'They know what they're doing. They hide from us. They've been doing it probably since the first Indians came down from the north fifteen thousand years ago.'

" 'How can you know that?' Ron asked.

"Kate rubbed her hands across her face, through her hair, as if taking all of the tension from herself and pushing it away. 'We've been studying them,' she said. 'We've seen them do things. Things that only a sentient, thinking creature could do.' "

The reader sees the terror birds do things, too, such as ripping a few people and animals to bloody shreds. But you can't read the story, which includes chapters told from the birds' point of view, without hoping the animals prevail.

Here's how Murphy pitched the book: "How about a monster movie, but the monsters are from nature? And you find out at the end that we're the monster."

Smith calls himself "just a layman" whose reading has been haphazard. But creating good science fiction and fantasy is an intellectual challenge. "The Flock" required substantial research - on birds of prey, paleontology and ostriches, among other things. It also required Smith to create a logical, functioning world. That's a point of pride.

"If you're going to write about something fantastic and strange, all well and good," he says, "but when you set up the rules of engagement, the laws of physics, you have to follow them."

Waiting for Hollywood

Smith sold Warner Bros. the rights to "The Flock" in 2009 and got a five-figure check. Though a chat room insult launched his relationship with Murphy, the two now get on well.

"He's a sweetheart," Murphy says. "He just didn't like my movie."

So what are the chances "The Flock" will get made?

"I think," Murphy says, "that now that we've gotten a good script, the chances are strong."

Smith isn't quitting his day job. Waiting for Hollywood, he has learned, "is like watching a glacier move."

Forge Books plans to publish "The Clan," his sequel to "The Flock," in 2013. He has plenty more projects, too, including a young adult novel featuring a Neanderthal wizard living in the present day.

The good news is more publishers are interested in his work, now that Warner Bros. bought his book. He never thought he'd get this far.

His mail route, though, just got tougher. The Postal Service recently restructured a number of routes and gave Smith a new assignment that requires more than three times as much walking, about 10 miles a day.

In Hollywood, things move slowly, like a glacier. In Charlotte, the fellow delivering your mail might be plotting his next novel.