Friday, February 21, 2020

Interview with Author Eric Meade

Eric Meade is a futurist, speaker, and consultant serving nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies. He teaches graduate courses on strategic planning and social innovation at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He lives in Superior, CO.

Website  → http://www.ericmeade.com

Twitter  → http://www.twitter.com/reframingpvrty

Facebook  → http://www.facebook.com/reframingpovrty

About the Book
We typically view poverty as a technical problem we can solve with more money, more technology, and more volunteers. But there is an adaptive side to the problem of poverty as well. Reframing Poverty directs our attention to the emotional and often unconscious mindsets we bring to this issue. Meade’s approach is as unique as it is challenging. Rather than trite tips or tricks, he offers a series of nested insights from diverse fields like political science, physics, complexity theory, and psychology. Most importantly, he provides a path of self-exploration for those eager to become the kind of people who can successfully navigate the tensions of a world in need.

Order Your Copy

Amazon → https://amzn.to/2PryNan 

 




Q: Welcome! Can you tell us a little bit about your writing background – how you got started, etc.?
I have been writing advanced technology concepts for the general public and professionals for 30 years. I have great success at creating new mind sets for people to grow emotionally, and behaviorally.
Q: What fact about yourself that would really surprise people? 

I have significant skills in hard science, but a great deal of success in stage performance and relating to the general public and the scientific community at large.

Q: How do you define success in regards to writing and publishing books? 

I have had many success in all areas of the general public and hard technology product developers to stimulate them to find creative new way to view reality. 

Q: Can you tell us about your new book? What’s it about and why did you write it? 

Tetrastatum, is a completely new way to view image time travel. We all have control to do this kind of time travel. There are existing technologies to do this: VR, dream work, etc. 

Q: When you are not writing, how do you relax? 

I am professional ball room dancer which feeds into my creative process in general. 

Q: Please tell us why we should read your book? 

If someone wants to find new meaning, via simple to understand, advanced technology concepts they can find new meaning to reality

Q: What kind of advice would you give other authors just getting their feet wet?
Think, at a deep level, of how you will change their view of reality.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

The Inspiration behind 'Riley' by Paul Martin Midden


I have always been fascinated by how relationships work. As a therapist for many years, I listened to many people talk about how their partners failed them, how they failed their partners, or how the threat of losing a partner was accompanied by terror and if he or she did, in fact, leave, by stark loneliness. 

Can’t live with them; can’t live without them. It was this conundrum that found expression in Riley, my most recent book. 

Relationships often call for decisions, and often those decisions, especially for young people, entail saying good-bye to someone who was once close. The story starts with such a farewell, and the writer who initiates it pens a novel filled with characters in a similar state. It had been a desire of mine ever since I read Herzog by Saul Bellow, whose eponymous character wrote lengthy letters to politicians throughout the novel, to do this novel-within-a-novel thing. It was fun to write, despite the various complications that arose in the lives of all the characters, ‘real’ and ‘fictional’.

Of course, the story has echoes of my own life, as one of the formative experiences of my own young adulthood was leaving a marriage and forging a new life. It was a challenging, difficult, emotional, but refreshingly liberating and ultimately rewarding. I have never regretted it.

Now, as I look back to those events, which happened decades ago, I appreciate the process even more. Liberation is a wonderful thing but is no guarantee of happiness. That requires continuing choices, a certain openness to new experience, and a commitment to be totally responsible for the lives we lead.

In this book, unexpected things happen, as is often the case in situations where risks are taken. Riley aims to chart both the inside (psychological) part of the equation and the outside (behavioral) part. We all live our lives with that inside/outside thing going on, and detailing it in the lives of my characters was a pleasure. Even when bad things happen. After all, liberation does not mean safety. It entails risk, and risk by its nature is uncertain. 


Genre:   Contemporary adult fiction

Author: Paul Martin Midden
Publisher: Wittmann Blair Publishing


About the Book:

Riley, a young writer, finally divorces her husband and begins a novel about a fictional couple in conflict. Supported by her best friend, Jennifer, she begins her life of freedom. In a complicated turn of events, she meets and beds Edward, a shy young man who falls for her instantly. She does not want to continue the relationship, however, and her refusal lays the groundwork for a series of dangerous events. Her conflicts and those of her characters play out in this psychologically intriguing story.



About the Author:

Paul Martin Midden is the author of five previous novels, each of which explores different writing styles. He practiced clinical psychology for over thirty years. Paul’s interests include historic restoration, travel, fitness, and wine tasting. He and his wife Patricia renovated an 1895 Romanesque home in 1995 and continue to enjoy urban living.

Character Guest Post: The Albino of Kiran Bhat's WE OF THE FORSAKEN WORLD #characterday



Today is character guest post day! We have The Albino from Kiran Bhat's WE OF THE FORSAKEN WORLD. Enjoy!

A post on a blog, one supposes, is not something to be dealt with lightly. One would suppose, considering the conditions that certain people of one certain or another would have to deal with, that one would have naturally come to it sooner in life. But, there are certain limits; Internet in the village is almost non-existent, and it would be hard to write long things on the phone. And, it isn’t like when people are reaching out for the best place to buy duct tape in the village, they are going to his son, long locked away in the last room of his hut, kept away from others due to the extraordinary inconveniences of his condition. A blog post is the last thing that such a person is often invited for, yes. So, forgive him if he isn’t the best at doing these sorts of things. He simply isn’t used to it.
A little bit more about yesterday, which was the day the milkmaid fainted. It was around the time the last shuttle to the city was leaving, but it wasn’t in fact leaving, because the engine was stuttering, and there were some women with large baskets who were demanding to be put on board. The street was equally hard to cross. It was busy with the many pedestrians who took advantage of the paved road as a sidewalk, and it was a tragedy for this driver, who was quick to honk loudly and often so that even from this distance the noise was heard, and as quickly as the noise would clear a cluster of children, the bus would become blocked again by men herding sheep from one side of the road to the other. Some of the passengers were weighed down by a little girl or boy on their laps, such as the mother who was holding her baby, naked, fiddling with the openings of her shirt to tease out her breast, while the passengers without children had others to tend to, like the older man with the beard long enough to reach his chest, holding a cage with a chicken in between his arms. Others, tired of sitting, knowing that they would have to continue to sit for quite a while longer, were standing, with their head banging against the roof of the bus, fiddling with their phones or talking to a friend behind them. The bus driver yelled at them to sit down, though he was yelling at the same time to those who were crossing, and at the men and women who were coming off and on trying to sell their fried potatoes and trinkets, and then a motorbike parked in the way and wasn’t in any mood to move. This were what occurred on the left side of the bus. The right side was obstructed by a simple fact called perspective.
         The music was loud, overbearing. It was a folk song that had been remixed to be danced to, but all such loud songs did was to keep the passengers as awake as the driver, as well as the people who lived by the main road. Most of the shop owners lived on one side of the shack and did business on the other. To think of how many others who peeked out of their windows because of the honking and shouting, who were being robbed of the comforting solitude of their book or their television time to hear a mixture of sounds they would never play willingly to themselves, and to have to hear it outside of their control. In truth, there were few so confined to their houses and to themselves. People here loved to talk. Their solution to boredom was to pick up the phone and find someone, anyone, anywhere, to talk to. Perhaps, then, they were not bothered by the music. A survey would have to be taken of all the other shacks that were on the same level as the main road and had to hear the ridiculous music that played from these modes of transport.
         Thankfully, by the time a handful of the songs had finished, the engine had started again, and the bus was off, not for too long for these poor passengers as it was to stop over in front of the carpenter’s store and the fork in the road before heading off into the various other villages alongside the plains. How the sun waited, festering each and every day along its route from the south to the north and south again. It was soon in it corner of its place in the sky behind the clouds where no one could bother it except for itself, and soon, it was to be caged by the night. It was a few more hours, then, when the sun would be in its prison, and the bats and owls and people who burnt in its rays were allowed to be free. Those cocooning shadows teased, and all the world was busy, except those to whom the world was lost. Mother was out selling fruits at her stand between the mobile store with very little selection and the convenience store owned by the neurotic man, while Father was at his own convenience store, on the right side of the shack, aided by my more able Brothers. Sister was on her way from meeting with her friends. They measured their worth to themselves by their day’s productivity, as proven by how much they talked about what was sold when they were outside, by the fire, cooking greens and fish, eating lunch, leaving a little food at the cot by the television with the excuse of the sort, “Well, dear, we would hate for you to burn.”
         Well, to be left alone in the shade and comfort of a common room burnt as much as the sun. Not that it was a bad common room by any means, though typical. There was the television in the corner, the boxes of goods as random as umbrellas and blankets in case they were ever needed, the cots where everyone slept, a door to the store and a door to the toilet. There was little to do but read, and one of the many good qualities of Sister was that when she wasn’t trying to find new members for her religion, she brought home those books her spiritual leader gave that no one else touched. What an inspiration they were to the imagination, much more than that horrid television those cravens huddled over during the night, talking to no one, staring as idle as idle may be. To think of them was as much a waste of time as staring out the window, and yet accursedly, it was impossible to do anything but both for the entire day.
         Speaking of, there was a most curious sight. It was normal to see at this time the women of the stands and the men of the goats walking home, as it was to see them board various buses and small vans taking them to the shacks alongside the main road. There was the milkmaid, recognizable from that dress she had inherited from her father when he died, from the dimples of her cheeks and her face, lunar to the touch. She had quite the interesting backstory, a father who had died mysteriously, an inheritance of enough cows to feed the village for decades, so many bids for marriage. She smiled and laughed so much, but personally, the more one smiles and laughs, the more one tries to hide the tortured wrinkles of the face.
         That day was the day when those wrinkles showed. Rather than driving down the main road, as she often did on her motorbike, she carried nothing at all, and she zig-zagged walking up and down the road. Motorbikes honked and the conductors of the shuttle vans stuck their heads out to yell at her. She was yelping to herself, not too loudly, something on the lines of  “I’m cured,” “I’m lured,” or “I’m pure.” Perhaps she was shouting obscenities to the shepherds with their trail of goats, random words over and over again to the women with the baskets on their head. Regardless, she ran, bawling frantically, until the sun was too much, and so she stopped, and she exhaled, and inhaled, as if to even stand was copious work, and after one step forward, one step back, she collapsed, first on her knees, and then completely to the ground. From when she was shouting to when she fainted, she had her arms folded across her breasts.
         What made the world this busy that no one cared to stop to help a fainted girl? It was like this more often than it should have been. People were hit by those passing shuttles, goats would go out of their way to attack the children that didn’t behave, and yet people continued with the branches and twigs on their back. It was disturbing, watching from what the clock said was a good ten minutes as people stepped over her, kicked her lightly with the foot to confirm whether she was dead or not, complained at her for having fainted because they had to swerve their carts onto another part of the street.
          There was another instance of this in the short time each and every one of us had to call life. Grandfather was once a hardworking and able man, inspirational for father because of how much of the land he had tilled but grew to be more of a pathetic nuisance than they ever considered this shadow in the corner as he aged. He was paralyzed by disease, crippled in his mind by dementia and fear, and despite Father’s love for his own father, he was not able to reconcile with the fact that the man he worshiped became what he was, and so he stuck him in this horrid corner of the common room as well, where no one else would be able to see his two sources of shame.
         One day, grandfather collapsed, wheezing, making a mess of spit and vomit on the floor. It was later learned that he had died of cardiac arrest. While the cell phone was not readily available, there had been no excuse not to act, yet fear crippled this boy, so easily slapped and yelled at and prayed against for whatever in this family went wrong, and so he did nothing as his own grandfather died in front of his eyes. Oh, his parents were furious, but things changed little. His father didn’t speak to him for what felt like an innumerable amount of scratches of day marks against the wall, and his mother prayed as always that this cursed child would be lifted from them someday, but these were things they did when no one bought their products as well. The mistake, however, was on the conscience of this boy, because no matter how little his parents thought of him, no matter how misshapen the pale skin around his eyes was and the almost whale-like forehead he had, he was indeed a human, and he repented for this mistake every day since he became a man.          
         It was no longer the time to hide, then, when a fellow human’s life was at risk. The hardest part wasn’t opening the door, or running outside, or hearing what the little children and women little in the mind were going to say. It was expected that women would shriek, the babies in their arms would cry, or the children between those ages would hide behind their mother’s skirt, point, and scream. The hardest part was seeing her face, already empty of life.
         “Wake up! Wake up!”  
         A few slaps to the face were enough to make her stir. She was conscious, indeed, but something had certainly knocked out of the color of her flesh. At least this scene was stirring the attention of others, albeit in the worst of ways.
         “What’s it doing?” asked one of the women. Most of the others had gotten enough from gasping and passing.
         “Mommy, mommy, look! It’s a whale man.”
         “Mommy, mommy, if I act bad, will I look like that?”  A man who was hauling cassavas in his cart stopped to stare. Some of the men from the stores were coming close, ready to attack, but when they saw that a girl had fainted, they merely watched.
         “Is he going to eat her?” asked another one of the children, tugging at his mother’s skirt. They didn’t enjoy much the view of this man as he took off his shirt, either, or at least alerted the gasps. While it was near dusk, for a body like this one, it was very hot, and the sweat was crawling from every orifice downward. It was also silly to assume a man who never left the house would somehow be built. Indeed, the various pouches from the belly could have given the impression of a whale man, or at least some man half composed of blubber.
         After some slapping around and throwing of water, she was coming to her senses, either in the fact she was tired of playing dead, or she was realizing at how much of a cost came the effort of this stranger, and as she awoke, she rested her body upwards on the strength of her hands, but dared not to open her eyes. When she felt that many eyes were upon her, she remembered where her hands ought to be, and she compressed into herself.
         “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” she kept repeating. “I know my arms are blotchy, and there must be puss and pimples all over my face, but please, don’t look at my body! It’s not what you think! Believe me, please.”
         There were no such deformities on her body. There was the pimple here or there on her chin or forehead, and she was developing an allergic rash over her chest, but her body, while voluptuous for so young a girl, was normal in every other aspect. Somehow, she was convinced that her body was more like the one holding hers, and as the children stared on and the older men chewed their sugar cane, she hid her face into my chest. There were a few things that being out and about in public during a time of weakness were helpful for, but shaping one’s self-confidence wasn’t one of them. It was time to make an exit.
         “Hey…hey!”
         She was heavier than expected. For someone who was short and gave the impression she could be lifted away by a strong wind if her feet weren’t rooted to the ground, every muscle in her body was tense, asking to be put back in her place. She was grunting, and she was kicking. Then, she grew accustomed to being carried because she was too weak to struggle. She was taken to Father’s store, after. They spoke for some time, gave her some water, talked aloud about why she covered so little of herself.
         What the men did to her after, this was something that only the roosters who slept under the stairs would have observed.




Inside the book

The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.
In, we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes of 16 people who live in four distinct places
on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

Like modern communication networks, the stories in , we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.

As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”

Bhat continues:  “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”

“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”

we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017

Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.

Order Your Copy

Amazon → https://amzn.to/2DQIclm

Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/2Lqe9Fi

 

meet the author

Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Website  → http://iguanabooks.ca/






Monday, February 17, 2020

Character Guest Post: Jamie Kendal of Eva Mackenzie's BURIED IN MY PAST @EVAMACKENZIE #characterday


Today is character guest post day! Our guest character is Jamie Kendal of Eva Mackenzie's BURIED IN MY PAST. Enjoy!

You know how I can tell when someone’s lying to me? This list is long, so we will only cover a few of these things. Yes, that’s right. I’m a human lie detector. I’m watching you move and I’m listening to what you say. I’m gathering data to make a decision on your deception. I didn’t mean for that to rhythm, or did I?

First, I’m not only looking at what you say, I’m watching your body language when you say it. Ah, ha! Did you just say you didn’t have that gun, but displayed a gun with your index and middle finger, I see your left-handed. That’s interesting to know. Body language speaks just as much as that lying mouth, good Sir. 

Why are you moving toward the exit as we chat, are you trying to escape my questions? This is another sign that you’re lying, or preparing to. Like when I asked you who’s Megan, the sender of a recent text message, and suddenly you have to pee (eye roll). 

Or what about the time you were explaining to me what happened when you left the bar with Megan and you recalled every detail, to the point when I almost fell asleep during the part about the color of the balloons from a nearby Birthday celebration, and then we get to the point when you dropped her off, and the details become vague and generalized, until you get back in your car and drive home passing exactly fifty-two mailboxes on your way. Ah, and just when we were getting to the good part. Do you see what you did there, skipping past your indiscretion, wedged between more details than a soil sample from Mars. 

Or how about the time I was listening to my boss asking you about that memo, the one about your mandatory drug test you forgot to go to. When I overhear him ask if you smoke weed, you laugh and answer, “I don’t think so. I think I would know, right?” Caught you. Answering a closed question with an open answer is an indication that you need to be sent for that drug test ASAP. As you think, can I get away with the whole glaucoma thing or will they check with HR?

Or what about the time I asked my best girlfriend about whether my butt looks big in these skinny jeans (everyone should know this is a set-up) and she falls for it. “Honesty, you look soooo skinny.” Prefacing an answer with honesty, to be truthful, or to tell you the truth all scream LIE. So, I guess I’ll stick with the bootcut, but shame on you. Runner ups are; I have no reason to lie to you, or I’m serious as a heart attack. Well, we can agree on one thing, both broke my heart.

And last, an old favorite, the third person statement. “I didn’t steal your Swingline stapler, but I’ll replace it for you if it makes you happy.” No! What would make me happy is if they put your desk in the basement, because now I know you stole my stapler and we can no longer be desk buddy’s.

As we move forward, I ask that you keep in mind all the victims or offenders are not real people and only written for your enjoyment. Last, don’t use any of these indicators on loved ones or relatives. I can assure you they won’t like it. This has been a lot of fun, thanks for the interview.





She’s desperate to stop the panic attacks. But the truth won’t set her free…

Jamie Kendal sees life through the bottom of a bottle. After surviving assault and betrayal, she is forced back to her hometown to care for her mother. Not long after her return, she’s plagued by terrifying slivers of memories from the night her twin brother disappeared forever…

Unearthing new evidence, she’s shocked to learn she’d been found wandering in the woods that same night—covered in blood. More than one person from her past hid the haunting truth that’s bubbling to the surface. The deeper she digs into the horrors from her past, the more she fears almost anyone could be a killer, including Jamie herself.

Can Jamie expose what happened that night, or will she join her missing brother?

Buy Link: http://evamackenzie.com/buy-now/

 


Eva Mackenzie is an author who enjoys twisty, emotionally engrossing tales. Her debut novel has been a work in progress for over a decade. Under the urging of a loved one, it’s finally finished.
She is a wife and mother living on the east coast. When she isn’t writing, she is spending time with her family, training for her next marathon or reading stacks of suspense novels. Some of her favorite authors are Minka Kent, Dean Koontz, Tami Hoag, and Lisa Jackson.
Her latest book is BURIED IN MY PAST.

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS

Website  → http://evamackenzie.com

Goodreads  → http://goodreads.com/evamackenzie

Facebook  → http://facebook.com/eva.mackenzie.3762




Monday, February 10, 2020

Book Feature: The Road to Delano by John DeSimone




THE ROAD TO DELANO
By John DeSimone
Historical Fiction

Jack Duncan is a high school senior whose dream is to play baseball in college and beyond―as far away from Delano as possible. He longs to escape the political turmoil surrounding the labor struggles of the striking fieldworkers that infests his small ag town. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died under suspicious circumstances ten years earlier, he’s had to be the sole emotional support of his mother, who has kept secrets from him about his father’s involvement in the ongoing labor strife.

With their property on the verge of a tax sale, Jack drives an old combine into town to sell it so he and his mother don’t become homeless. On the road, an old friend of his father’s shows up and hands him the police report indicating Jack’s father was murdered. Jack is compelled to dig deep to discover the entire truth, which throws him into the heart of the corruption endemic in the Central Valley. Everything he has dreamed of is at stake if he can’t control his impulse for revenge.

While Jack’s girlfriend, the intelligent and articulate Ella, warns him not to so anything to jeopardize their plans of moving to L.A., after graduation, Jack turns to his best friend, Adrian, a star player on the team, to help to save his mother’s land. When Jack’s efforts to rescue a stolen piece of farm equipment leaves Adrian―the son of a boycotting fieldworker who works closely with Cesar Chavez―in a catastrophic situation, Jack must bail his friend out of his dilemma before it ruins his future prospects. Jack uses his wits, his acumen at card playing, and his boldness to raise the money to spring his friend, who has been transformed by his jail experience.

The Road to Delano is the path Jack, Ella, and Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, their destiny.


Barnes & Noblehttps://bit.ly/381fQT9
Book Depositoryhttps://bit.ly/2Ld0z82

1933
Sugar Duncan was known around Lamoille County as a gambler who could farm, but Sugar called himself a farmer who understood a sure bet. He grew up a plowboy on a hardscrabble patch of Vermont hill country and had calluses before he knew he had brains. It was in the seventh grade, in Pete Colburn’s barn, waiting out a driving rain that he found his power. While playing seven-card stud he could see the patterns, he understood the odds. He lived by the bluff, and he lived well as far as a child of the Depression could. Before he reached high school, they were calling him Sugar because he was sweet about taking their money.
While his college buddies baled hay and slopped pigs to pay their way through Ag school at Vermont U, Sugar found it more profitable to relieve the hooligans and rumrunners of their easy fortunes at the card table above Markham’s Grill over in Providence. After four years of playing cards and a new degree, he left town to farm where the land hadn’t been wiped clean of its strength.
Sugar rode west to California’s Central Valley in a Pullman with a new pair of tan and white brogues stuffed with cash packed in the bottom of his steamer. FDR had just signed the Cullen-Harrison Act ending Prohibition, and a fifth of whiskey was now as cheap as an acre of California farmland. He hadn’t any choice. Returning to Vermont would mean he’d starve. With gasoline a luxury, his father had resorted to using mules to plow his hundred acres. Milk and corn prices had fallen so sharply, a farmer could live better by killing his cows than by selling their milk. California was the place he could make a living. And he intended to make that living as a farmer— eventually.
A couple of weeks after arriving in Frisco, Sugar stood on the running board of a dusty Model T on the road leading into Delano and surveyed the flatlands of the valley planted in golden September wheat. He removed his hat, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his seersucker suit, and his instinct told him there was a sure bet.
He ensconced himself in the Freemont Hotel on Nob Hill. Each night around six, he made his way downstairs to a back room where he took up residence with a fresh deck of cards and a new bottle of Jim Beam, thankfully back in production, and waited. It didn’t take long for his table to fill. About a year later, he bought his first section of land.
On a mission to see an angel, Sugar debarked the Nob Hill trolley at Taylor and California on a foggy Sunday morning, after a long night of wagers and bluffs. Grace Cathedral’s carillon was in full melodic stride, pounding out a hymn he hadn’t heard in years. He paused midway up the ascending concrete steps, the tip of its campanile obscured in thick fog, trying to recollect its name. He’d not heard that song since he’d left the Methodist church as a teen. The Methodists didn’t have bells that could sing like this stone and stained glass beauty now emerging from the mist of the rising morning. Neither did Methodists take kindly to boys who gambled.
The crowd swelled up and carried him along in a cavalcade of San Francisco’s best citizens in their finest clothes. The building itself was a monument to European Gothic, with soaring stained glass windows, buttresses, candelabras of beaten silver, and hard oak pews. Striding down the wide center aisle, he nodded at several men he’d become acquainted with in the back room of the Freemont. The altar was a majestic slab of marble, adorned with satin cloth and golden candlesticks. Three stained glass Palladian windows rose four stories behind it.
In the warm umbra of the early light, he waited to see for himself what Mr. Dalton, a colleague in cards, had meant by angels appearing during the service. Not that he disbelieved in the possibility of divine intervention, he just wanted to witness it for himself. The choir assembled in a rustle of white robes trimmed with red satin stoles.
According to the Order of Service, they began with Jesu, Meine Freude and while it wasn’t ordinary, it wasn’t angelic to Sugar’s tastes. At least not in the way Dalton had described a divine manifestation. At the refrain, a raven-haired singer stepped forward, a few light steps and she settled in a sliver of light from above. The choir hushed. The congregation quit their fidgeting. She lifted her voice, and something inside him ascended along with her, sweeping him up, so even the German lyrics took on a secret meaning. The importance of the lyrics magnified by her conviction, a message from God, undecipherable, but absolutely true. Her music expanded to fill every cubit of the vault. When she finished the quietness of the miraculous settled over the congregation, a hushed moment of wonder. She melded back into the white-clad choir. A part of Sugar refused to return, still soaring high, shiny and lit by the sun. He perused the Order of Service again: Soloist Miss Shirley Gray. Now here was a dark-haired angel he had to meet.
Shortly after purchasing his fourth section, Sugar drove his shiny black Model A back along the road to Delano, with a lovely and satisfied Miss Shirley Gray bundled in the seat next to him. She wore a white cotton dress in the new style almost to her knees and a silk scarf to tamp her beautiful black hair down against the sweep of dry valley air rushing across the flatlands. And she had the long slender fingers of a pianist, the daintiest of hands that Sugar wanted desperately to hold in his.
Sugar parked along the shoulder of the dusty county road. He helped her out, then led her through the scrub and mesquite. Not a tall man, but neither was he short, he had the build and stride of a man who had worked the land, though his hands had gone soft from playing cards. His black hair was swept back under a new fedora, and he was dressed in a new Brooks Brothers suit, with a pleat cut to the pants and two-tone white and tan oxfords. Shirley picked her way, slipping her slender legs through gaps in the brush, with dainty steps she skirted the holes and dips.
Not far off the road, they stopped on a gentle rise to survey the sparse landscape in silent awe. His suit jacket flapped in the breeze. Water in Spring Gulch that cut across the southwest corner glistened blue in the brightness. The sky appeared so translucent he considered the possibility of seeing straight through to heaven. She pushed her hair under her scarf and had to work to keep her skirt from flying up. Her hand shielding her dazzled eyes, she turned full around taking in the flat expanse and let out a low sigh.
“This would be a nice place to build a house,” Sugar said. “A farmhouse?”
He turned to her. “Why a farmhouse?”
She couldn’t conceal her smile. “I always wanted to marry a farmer and live on a farm.” Her cheeks now blushed. He took up her hand in his, fresh and light, the skin of her palm as smooth as a baby’s face.
“What about marrying a gambler?”
“Never.” She stepped away, letting his hand go before he could read her eyes. For all of his acumen in divining the facial expressions of card players, he was at a loss to understand the game she was playing. Driving home, he thought of explaining his view of gambling and farming, how they both entailed managing risks, calculating odds, and the subtle art of placing a bet. But she’d already revealed her hand. She would marry a farmer. He realized then that if she had said she dreamed of marrying a gambler, he would have no use for her. He had every intention of playing his last game—soon. He just needed a better stake.
A few days later Sugar visited the offices of Collette and Sons and signed a contract to build an impressive Victorian home on the site that had made Miss Shirley Gray sigh with undeniable pleasure. Something like the grand mansions that stood on Nob Hill, he told old man Collette, who listened while stroking his heroic mustache.
Mr. Collette built the three-story Victorian with two turrets, gabled roof with dormers, and a wide veranda on the rise Shirley had enjoyed, in the southeast corner where Spring Gulch swept by. A natural spring ran in a culvert fronting his acreage, bequeathing the riparian land rights.
In March of ’39, he escorted the new Mrs. Shirley Duncan down the aisle of Grace Episcopal Cathedral. Descending through the gauntlet of rice to their waiting Cadillac, he now owned four thousand acres of the most fecund soil west of the Mississippi. When he proposed to her, she had reminded him that she wouldn’t tolerate any more gambling. He sealed the deal with a promise that he had played his last card game and would plant his land that spring.
So the year before their wedding, he had planted all his land in durum wheat. When Sugar wasn’t watching his supervisor, Isidro Sanchez, work a crew of men plowing in John Deere tractors from an hour before dawn until an hour after sunset, he spent time in his farm office on the second-floor planning and figuring. Across from his office, Shirley set up her sewing room with the new Singer machine her mother gave her as a wedding gift. When she wasn’t sewing dresses and shirts or a new buckskin jacket for Sugar, she played her Steinway grand in the parlor, running through Chopin and Schubert. In the late afternoon, Sugar would lean against the doorway in the hall, one foot across the other, his planter’s hat askew on his head like a man on the hunt. She’d break into a high fevered Benny Goodman or his favorite jazz piece, and he’d sit close by, tapping his foot to the time and smiling like a man who’d eaten ice cream his whole life and was better for it.
In the evening, when the heat had dried out every ounce of a man’s efforts, Sugar took Shirley’s hand and led her into the parlor and stacked their favorite albums on the phonograph. The sound of jazz and swing filled the house. They fox-trotted across the floor, their bodies swinging and pulsing to the beat. Her scent a promise of her treasure. Sugar held her close as a certainty against all the uncertainties. And they kissed in the vanilla moonlight that streamed in through the tall windows, her slimness against his, warm and powerful and urgent.
One day Shirley brought coffee on a silver serving tray up to his office. She wore a new spring dress, white with purple violets splashed across it from the hem to the collar, one she made herself. Sugar introduced her to a well-dressed man with slicked-back hair black as coal. He rose when she entered, a tan planters’ hat in his hand. She set the coffee service down on a Queen Anne side table and poured two cups, and took one to her guest.
Both of the men stood. “Shirley, this is Herm Gordon.”
Herm held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Duncan. Sugar’s told me a lot about you.”
“And what do you do?”
“I’m with Lacy’s Farm Equipment,” he said while fingering the brim of his hat.
“Herm says they’re coming out with a new combine that’ll harvest fifty acres an hour,” Sugar said.
“You say so,” she said.
“Three times faster than what we have now,” Sugar said.
“You say so.” She handed him the cup and saucer.
He took the coffee. “I do,” Herm said a broad smile on his face. “Do you take sugar, Mr. Gordon, or cream?” She motioned toward the tray.
“No thank you. I always drink mine black.” He stirred the coffee with the silver teaspoon, tapped the rim once, and set it on the saucer.
“Herm’s been selling farm equipment in the valley for years. He’s seen it all. He thinks our place will be one of the most productive around.”
She handed Sugar his cup and saucer and looked over the salesman one more time.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Herm nodded. “Usually farmers aren’t too friendly to new ways, but not Sugar.”
“You look way too young to have seen that many harvests, Mr. Gordon.”
Herm smiled, and two dimples formed in the center of his cheeks, both fired with a flash of blush. “Good food and fresh air. It keeps me young.”
“Herm also said we might look into planting grapes. There’s a trade group over in Delano that’s made up mostly of grape growers. He thinks I should join.”
“You think so, Mr. Gordon,” she said.
“Grapes are the biggest cash crop. It’s the future of Delano as long as labor’s so cheap and we get the water.”
Sugar set his cup down and looked at her inquisitively as if wondering what she would say.
“Well,” Shirley said, touching her throat. “Then maybe we should plant some grapes.”
“A couple hundred acres in the east sector to start.” Sugar pointed toward the large plat map on the wall.
Herm nodded, and Sugar smiled, and he asked her to sit with them as they talked of hardiness and climate and varieties. Sugar favored wine grapes, Herm table grapes.
“I love Thompson Seedless,” Shirley said. “I could eat those forever.” The men gave each other knowing looks. “Well then, let’s start with Thompsons,” Sugar said.
Sugar prospered during the war years because everything that could be eaten was in high demand. The U.S. military coveted his high-protein durum. And his land had the highest yields an acre of any in the valley. Shirley took advantage of the good years and had a half-acre set aside behind the house. She reminded Sugar she didn’t want any planting up to the porches just to maximize the yields. He had a wooden fence built around her parcel where she planted a garden. Shirley in her woven sun hat and pedal pushers, she laid out neat rows of vegetables, and flowers and she purchased seedlings for apricot, peach, and orange trees. And in the heart of the garden, she built a grape arbor, cool and shady, where she often rested from the afternoon heat.
Around the oak in the front yard, she sowed Bermuda grass that would take the heat and wear of the large family she and Sugar were working on, but that hadn’t taken root yet. Soon the tree would spread its thick limbs, and she’d hang a swing from it and rock her boys in the silent rhythms of the Central Valley breezes.
The year the Sears and Roebuck opened in town, Shirley bought a brand-new Singer sewing machine, one that could do thirty different stitches, and had a foot pedal. She enlarged her sewing room on the second floor by taking over a second bedroom and turned out dresses and shirts for farmers’ wives who came to the house to be measured and choose patterns.
It seemed every few days she had a new dress—winter dresses with heavy fabrics; spring dresses white with flowers; bright summer dresses, light and swishy; and autumn always brought out the burnt oranges and browns. She sewed dresses to dine in, to dance in, and to listen to music in, and practical dressed to work in, which had all the elegance of the city, but with large pockets for gloves and scissors and trimmers and small spades.
Shirley didn’t like the cars being covered in dust from the wind that blasted from the foothills. So Sugar built a car barn on the east side of the house, in the same style of the three-story Victorian. They painted it tan with dark brown trim to match the house whose two turrets, dormer windows, slender brick chimneys, and peaked roofs with gingerbread trim rose three stories above the parched brown fields, a castle on an isolated plain.
In the years after the war life settled in for them and Sugar sold every bushel he grew. By 1950, Sugar’s first table grape harvest had grown to two hundred acres, and he knew the future was in grapes. Prior years he’d sold to vineyards where the picking and packing didn’t matter. But table grapes were different. Appearance and sweetness were as important as price, and table grapes cost three times what vineyards paid.
Some of what he knew about grapes he learned at the dinner table. Shirley would only set her table with grapes that were the sweetest tasting, had a consistent golden hue and had the fewest marks of rot and pests. If he could please her, he could satisfy any woman in America? His Thompsons pleased her immensely.
“It’s like eating raindrops coated with sugar,” she said one night at dinner, after plucking a few damp golden grapes from a bowl. There was a sweet satisfaction that ran across her smile that traveled right up into a happy squint in her eyes. If he could grow the best grapes in the Central Valley with his own brand, he could ship them all over the world. But he’d need a completely new way of farming. The work and cost to convert his land would stretch every financial resource. He’d have to do it soon because wheat just didn’t bring the profit it once had.
Though anything a man planted around Delano seemed to grow taller and thicker than in other parts, Shirley didn’t get pregnant until early 1950. One evening, both of them sat in the parlor, after she’d learned she was expecting their first child, listening to Benny Goodman on their Victrola when the announcer broke in. Shirley crocheted. Sugar read a book. They both set down their work at the sound of President Truman’s voice. The president spoke in a grave tone, one that matched his declaration of a national emergency because of the North Korean Communist’s attack on peaceful South Korea. He had considered using an atomic bomb to stop them.
Shirley stifled a gasp. “An atom bomb,” she said, shaking her head, “again?”
Sugar shushed her with a hand, and he bent to the radio. She pursed her lips and listened.
“He’s sending MacArthur to kick them damn communists’ butts,” Sugar said when the radio address finished.
“But a nuclear bomb, honey? If he used it the whole world would be in flames again.”
Sugar smirked at the sly grin that crept across her face. “See, already you understand the difficulty communist subversives would have in our own community,” he said. “We got MacArthur on our flank ready to reap havoc, Truman in DC ready to drop the A-bomb, and the mothers of America protecting our farms. Those dirty Reds can’t win for nothing.”
She laughed and held out her hand, and he took it. She drew him toward her, and placed his warm palm on her stomach, and went back to crocheting. “We’ll soon have more to think about ourselves.” Comfortable beside her, Sugar felt warm with that consideration. Later that year she delivered a 7lb. 4oz. boy on the third of December around midnight, as the silvery moon rose full over the land. She wanted to name him Jack, after her grandfather, but Sugar
wanted Paul.
“Paul? You don’t have any relative named Paul.” “I like Paul. It’s from the Bible.”
She looked at him, her head askance. “I know that.”
“I spent a lot of time reading the Bible when I was younger. It’s a good book.”
The baby made one of those sucking noises that distracted both of them. Shirley pulled him away and gently held him while Sugar placed a cloth diaper on her shoulder. She settled the boy on the white square and lightly tapped his back. After he burped, she held his tiny body in front of her.
“I think he looks like Jack? But then I can see Paul too.”
Sugar brushed at a tiny wisp of hair on his head. “You’re right about that. He’s going to be a man among men, well-trained in the ways of the land.”
After all the baby’s noises ended, she held him under his arms and lifted him high in the air, letting his little feet dangle. “Well then, how do you do, Mr. Paul Jack Duncan? Welcome to Duncan Farms.”
Sugar smiled and touched her cheek with the back of his hand Sugar and Shirley soon began calling their son Jack. Like his
father, he took to the details of farming. One cold morning, after the final wheat harvest, Jack rode the tractor with Isidro as he prepared the land for planting grapes. Year-old vines were stored in their canisters on the north side of the ranch. When spring warmed the air, they would begin planting. Jack rose early during that spring planting to watch the men loading the young plants on flat trailers before leaving for the fields. Rising early became second nature to him, like every good farmer. Before school, he fed the chickens in the small coop his mother built behind the car barn and brought in fresh eggs before catching the bus on the county road.
Summer evenings, with the land resting in the heat, the family would sit out on the large porch that wrapped around the front and side of the house. They watched the fireflies light up the night air and listened to the croaking of tree frogs under the starlight while they drank sweet lemonade squeezed from the fruit grown in Shirley’s own garden. Sugar told jokes and stories as the three of them rocked back and forth on the porch swing, Jack squished between them like a ripe watermelon aching to break open, while they swirled away the still evenings.
The year Jack turned eight, just after the grape harvest, Shirley sat at the kitchen table, one hand on her stomach the other over her mouth, a glass bowl on the table in front of her. Jack brought her a glass of water and set it on the table. Jack was hoping for a baby brother. She’d told him they wanted so many more brothers and sisters, but it had been hard for her to get pregnant. The doctor had advised extra caution, afraid she would miscarry as she had before. So she had decided to stay home when Dad went to the annual Association meeting in San Francisco where he’d been invited to speak.
On that Friday in November, after Dad turned out of the driveway on his way to Frisco, the phone calls started up again.
They’d changed their number three times over the past year and a half. Each time the calls would stop for a while, then a month or so later start up again. Every time the phone jangled in the hall or the kitchen, Shirley would sit up real straight and get this far-off look in her eyes as if she already heard what was being said on the line. She never told him who called or what they wanted, but Jack knew they disturbed her. Dad never said much about them either. But one night after Jack went to bed, when they thought he was asleep, he could hear the two of them up late talking about something. There was a sternness in their voices, so he knew it was something important. At times they argued. Then it would be quiet till the deep darkness of the morning, the phone would ring again, and between each metal jangle the house took on a vacant silence. He imagined his parents lying awake down the hall, staring into the darkness, holding their breaths, hoping it would stop. But it kept on. Then they would stop for a time. And they all breathed a sigh that maybe whatever had caused them to ring in the first place had passed by them.
Friday evening, Jack ran to answer it in the kitchen, but she called to him. He pulled up short, wishing he could lift the receiver to hear that voice. Maybe he might recognize him. He’d shoot his eyes out next chance he had, just for causing all this fear.
“Leave it alone.” She called to him in her don’t mess-with-me voice.
Jack held up, waiting for it to stop. Dad planned on returning after the banquet on Saturday night. He didn’t want to be away too long with Shirley needing him like she did. So in a day or so this ringing would pass.
When the kitchen phone rang later that afternoon, they both stared at it.
“That could be Sugar.” She stared at the black rattling instrument. “He’s probably in Frisco by now.” She rose and answered it. She listened for a while, her eyes turning frightened then angry. “Stop calling here.” Her voice was controlled, but Jack knew she was afraid. She dropped it on the cradle. From the slump of her shoulders, he could see her fear. She had one hand to her forehead, another on her mouth.
“Who is it, mom? I’ll kick his butt.” “You’ll do no such thing.”
He thought she dabbed at her eyes before she turned to sit back down. Jack ran upstairs to his room, loaded his BB gun, pumped it up, and leaned it against the wall by his bedroom door. He knew where Dad kept his hunting rifle and shotgun in the bedroom closet if he needed them. At the bottom of the stairs, he stood where he could see into the kitchen one way and another way to the front door.
When she didn’t hear from Sugar on Saturday morning when he promised to call, she paced the kitchen, a worried look on her face. She kept saying as much to herself as to him that everything was okay. After the Association meeting, Dad would probably make the rounds at the jazz clubs in Frisco, probably listened until the sun came up. Jack kept thinking to himself that Dad was just fine, having fun somewhere, telling jokes, laughing and smoking cigars. He would call soon.
She kept up a constant patter of reasons why he hadn’t called. When the phone rang Saturday at midmorning, she hustled to the hall extension on the second floor. She gave a cheery “Hello.” Jack could tell by the sudden tightening of her face, the voice on the other end wasn’t Dad’s. She held the phone in the air for a moment, then dropped it to the cradle as if it was contaminated, wiping her sweating palm on her dress.
“Who was that, Mom?” Jack stood a few feet down the darkened hall. When she didn’t answer, he asked again.
“Just a wrong number.”
After church on Sunday, she paced the hall by the telephone, forgetting the time until Jack called to her that he’d made a dinner of tuna fish sandwiches and lemonade. There were more calls, and out of her anxiety, she answered them all, but after listening for a few moments, she’d slam the receiver down hard on the cradle.
Late Sunday she called his hotel. He always stayed at the Fairmont, but they had no record of him checking out. They called back later to tell her his belongings were still in his room, but none of the hotel staff had seen him since Saturday. Was he home and forgot to pack and check out? Did she want his clothes shipped?
Monday she spent hours calling the hospitals. He hadn’t been admitted to any of the local ones, but one woman asked if she’d called the police. She did and was switched to a detective who handled missing persons. The man kept her on the phone, which made her wonder if they’d found his body and this cop was trying to figure out a pleasant way to deliver the news.
Tuesday she sat on the rose-patterned sofa in the parlor with her face in her hands when Jack left for school. When he got home, she still had not risen from her place by the phone. She asked him to make some lemonade and maybe sandwiches for them. When he brought in a tray full of food and drink, she took the glass he offered in one hand and ran the other through his longish brown hair, but she didn’t take a sip.
Wednesday he didn’t go to school. She sent him to the door when neighbors stopped by. Later that day, she heard men talking to Jack at the door, voices she didn’t recognize. Men in police uniforms—one tall and thin, the other short and stocky—stopped asking questions when they saw her. When she noticed the brown Plymouth parked behind them in the drive, something came untethered, and she moved around as if she was trying to float away. She squeezed Jack’s shoulder, and he held her hand tightly.
“Can I help you?” she said, talking to them through the screen.
“Mrs. Duncan,” the first man said in uniform, touching the brim of his white Stetson.
“I’m Sheriff  Gates. Can we talk?”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“We’re here about Sugar.”
She folded her arms and turned from the door. The two men stood on the polished wood of the cool hallway, hats in hand. The short one built like a whiskey barrel nodded toward Jack. She stood in the hall considering for a long moment. She invited them into the parlor and turned to Jack.
“Honey, come over here.” The two stood together in front of the sofa. “He’s a part of this.” She fixed her eyes on the two.
“If you say so,” the sheriff said. He introduced Detective Sergeant Kipps of the San Francisco PD.
“All the way from San Francisco, Detective Kipps?”
“Yes, Ma’am I was asked by Sheriff Gates to report on your husband’s stay at the Fairmont Hotel.”
“What did you find?”
Kipps hesitated. Sheriff Gates nodded at him. Kipps cleared his throat.
“We have his belongings from the Fairmont in the car, Ma’am.” She bit her lip. “Where’s Sugar?”
“That’s what we’ve come about,” the sheriff said. “We found his car on Highway 7, heading east, right over the Kern County line.”
Mom’s eyes turned suddenly hard as if she was tightening up expecting a big blow. “Yes.”
“As close as we can tell, he ran off the road and crashed into a deep gulley.”
“Where’s Dad now?” Jack nearly shouted.
Neither of the men said anything; their eyes turned furtive. “We found him in the vehicle,” Sheriff Gates said in a consoling whisper. “There was nothing we could do for him.” From his low tone, almost like a voice you’d use when telling someone good night, Jack wasn’t at all certain what he was saying.
Mom closed her eyes and stood motionless. All the air of expectation seeped out of her as if she could sigh right through her pores. Her whole spine went slack, and she slid right onto the sofa. Jack sat beside her, and she clutched his hand. The two men took a step forward, but she held up her hand. Her eyes were downcast for a long while as if she were gathering her thoughts.
Dad in a car wreck? People got in wrecks and were fine. But these men were acting strange, and Jack wanted to know where he was now. If they found him then why wasn’t everyone happy about it? There was a light tapping at the screen door.
“That’s Sugar’s luggage,” Sherriff Grant said. “You want him to bring it in now?”
“Why didn’t he check out himself?”
Kipps cleared his throat. “Witnesses report he spent the evening at the tables in the backroom of the Fairmont all night after his speech. He never went back to his room. Rumor is he ran into some trouble at the tables.”
“Sugar gave up gambling twenty-five years ago, Mr. Kipps,” Shirley said, getting her matter of fact tone back under her. She squeezed Jack’s hand tighter till the little bones in his knuckles hurt, but he didn’t say anything. Jack tried to figure where Dad might be, and why they couldn’t help him, and why the sheriff would have to bring Dad’s luggage all the way out here?
“I doubt if those rumors are true.” She put a finger to the corner of her eye and wiped something away.
“All five men who played with him had the same story,” Kipps said.
“He’s not a gambler, Mr. Kipps.”
There was another tapping at the screen.
Shirley glanced up. “Let the boy in.”
The sheriff went into the hall and returned with a young fellow carrying three pieces of luggage and a leather briefcase. He settled them on the floor right in the doorway between the hall and the parlor then straightened up. The nameplate on his breast pocket read, Cadet Earl Kauffman.
While the sheriff whispered to Shirley, Jack fixated on his father’s suitcase. If that was Dad’s stuff, then he wasn’t coming back. And the house around him that’d been so full of everything he could ever want was suddenly empty; a vast place opened inside, dark and vacant. His world slowed, and snippets of the talk reached him—“car crushed…gambling and drinking…morgue…must identify body… sorry for your loss.…”
He shot up from his seat and turned to his mother’s Steinway behind him, where Dad used to stand and listen to her play, and smile while he tapped his foot. And Jack thought he saw him there, holding his hat, brimming with satisfaction after a day of work, nodding at him to come over and join the fun, the room emptied, and he knew.
Scalding streams flowed down his cheeks, and he ran, banging through the kitchen. Mom’s plaintive voice, calling for him, faded as he slammed out the back door into the yard, trounced across her garden, and bolted flat out into the vines, screaming as he tore into Dad’s fields, green and freshly brushed by the afternoon breeze.
 


John DeSimone is a published writer, novelist, and teacher. He’s been an adjunct professor and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. His recent co-authored books include Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan (Little A Publishers), and Courage to Say No by Dr. Raana Mahmood, about her struggles against sexual exploitation as a female physician in Karachi. His published novel Leonardo’s Chair published in 2005.

In 2012, he won a prestigious Norman Mailer Fellowship to complete his most recent historical novel, Road to Delano. His novels Leonardo’s Chair and No Ordinary Man have received critical recognition.

He works with select clients to write stories of inspiration and determination and with those who have a vital message to bring to the marketplace of ideas in well-written books.

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