Category: author

A Story to Start or End with Wheels

A story from a prompt:

Imagine this: a room filled with the hum of creativity, the scratching of pens against paper, and the occasional burst of laughter as ideas collide.

That’s where you’ll find me, well by zoom since I moved to the country, a proud director of our small but fiercely passionate Writing Group in my old hometown.

This week? Oh, this week is special. The challenge is simple yet brimming with possibility: craft a story that begins or ends with a bicycle.

A single object, two wheels, infinite potential. Will it be a tale of freedom, of mystery, or perhaps of heartbreak?

The group is ready to dig deep, to wrestle with their imaginations and see where the humble bicycle takes them.And you?

You’re about to get a front-row seat to the magic that unfolds. Buckle up (or should I say, hop on?). The journey is just about to begin.

The following is my story from a somewhat childhood memory, and an imagination, as a girl with freckles and red hair is a part of the story.

The Bicycle and the Bay Mare

The summer Thomas turned twelve, the world smelled of hot asphalt and cut grass, and his blue Schwinn bicycle was the finest thing he owned.

His father had rescued it from a yard sale for eight dollars, sanded off the rust, and painted it the color of a robin’s egg.

Thomas rode it everywhere: to the creek, to the library, to the little store on Miller Road where Mrs. Halvorsen sold penny candy that hadn’t cost a penny in thirty years.

That Tuesday afternoon in July, he was flying down Ridgewood Lane with a paper bag of licorice ropes bouncing in his front basket.

The wind pulled at his hair. His legs pumped in perfect rhythm. He was, he decided, the fastest boy in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.

He was thinking exactly this when a horse came around the bend.

It was enormous, a mountain of muscle and gleaming chestnut hide, hooves hammering the pavement like a blacksmith’s anvil.

Thomas had just enough time to see the flash of a red-gold mane, both the horse’s and the rider’s, before he yanked his handlebars sideways and sailed straight into Mr. Peterson’s hedge.

The Schwinn went one way. Thomas went another. The licorice went everywhere.

“Oh my gosh, are you alive?”

A face appeared above him, upside down through the tangle of privet leaves. Freckles. Green eyes. Hair the color of a maple tree in October, spilling down in wild waves that seemed to catch every scrap of sunlight and hold it hostage.

“I think so,” Thomas managed. A leaf was in his mouth. He spit it out with what he hoped was dignity.

“I am so sorry. Dolly spooked at a plastic bag. She’s a total drama queen about plastic bags, and I couldn’t get her to …”

The girl paused, tilting her head. “You’re bleeding.”

Thomas touched his elbow. He was, indeed, bleeding. It seemed a small price to pay for continuing to be looked at by this person.

“I’m Ellen,” she said, offering a hand streaked with horse sweat and dust.

“Ellen Brennan. We just moved into the yellow house on Fox Hollow.”

“Thomas,” he said. His voice came out slightly strangled.

“Thomas Kepler.”

She helped him up, retrieved his bicycle (which had a new and interesting bend in the front fender), and gathered up as many licorice ropes as could be salvaged.

The horse, Dolly, watched all of this with the mild, unimpressed expression of a creature who had caused chaos and considered her work done.

“Come by the stable sometime,” Ellen said, swinging back into the saddle with an ease that struck Thomas as miraculous.

She clicked her tongue, and Dolly wheeled around and cantered off, and Thomas stood in the middle of Ridgewood Lane holding a bent bicycle and a bag of dirty licorice, and knew with absolute certainty that his life had changed.

He waited three days. Three days felt appropriately casual.

Three days felt like a boy who had many important things to do and only happened, in passing, to remember there was a stable on Fox Hollow.

In truth, he thought about it every waking minute.

The Brennan place was set back from the road behind a row of oaks, with a weathered red barn and a paddock ringed by white fencing that had gone gray at the posts.

Thomas leaned his Schwinn against a fence rail and walked toward the barn, and there, in the shadowed doorway, was Ellen, not in the jodhpurs and boots he’d half-expected, but in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in the shoulder, mucking a stall with a pitchfork nearly as tall as she was.

“You came!” she said, and her whole face lit up in a way that made Thomas’s ears go hot.

“Come meet everybody.”

Everybody, it turned out, was not just Dolly.

There was Dolly, yes, the chestnut mare from the road, but also a stocky black gelding named Pepper, a spotted pony called Bandit who had, according to Ellen, “opinions,” and an ancient white horse named Mr. Biscuit who was thirty-one years old and, Ellen said solemnly, the finest gentleman she’d ever known.

Thomas offered his palm the way Ellen showed him, flat and steady, and Mr. Biscuit breathed onto it with a warm, hay-scented sigh.

Something inside Thomas’s chest turned over.

“You should ride,” Ellen said.

“I don’t know how.”

“That,” she said, “is exactly why you should learn.”

He came back the next day. And the day after.

Ellen was a patient teacher and a merciless one.

She made him groom Mr. Biscuit for a full week before she’d let him sit on the old horse’s back, and even then, only at a walk, in circles, in the corral, while she called out corrections from the fence.

“Heels down, Thomas!”

“They are down!”

“Down like you mean it. Like gravity is your personal friend.”

He fell off twice. The first time he landed in soft dirt and Ellen laughed so hard she had to sit down. The second time he landed in something considerably less soft, and Ellen laughed so hard she cried, and Thomas found that he didn’t mind at all, because when she laughed her whole face crinkled up and her freckles danced.

By August he could trot without bouncing.

By September he could post.

By the time the leaves turned, Ellen let him ride Pepper, and the two of them went out along the trails behind the Brennan property, ducking under low branches, Dolly and Pepper’s hooves whispering through the fallen leaves.

The Schwinn stayed in the yard, propped against the fence.

Years unfolded the way years do: quickly, when you look back at them; slowly, when you’re inside them.

Thomas grew tall and lean, with a rider’s hands and a rider’s seat.

Ellen grew into her freckles.

They rode through four autumns and three summers together, through a hundred sunsets over the ridge, through a season when Mr. Biscuit lay down in his stall and did not get up, and Thomas held Ellen while she cried into his shoulder for the finest gentleman she’d ever known.

There was the winter Ellen’s father lost his job and she came to school with red-rimmed eyes, and Thomas learned that sometimes the most useful thing a person could do was simply be present, and quiet, and steady, the way Mr. Biscuit had once been for both of them.

There was the spring Thomas’s mother got sick, and Ellen rode over on Dolly every single afternoon, and sat with him on the porch, and didn’t try to fix anything, because some things can’t be fixed, only witnessed.

There was the first kiss, under the oak tree by the corral, when Thomas was seventeen and Ellen was seventeen and a half and had never let him forget the half.

There was the college years, and the long-distance letters, and the summer they both came home and knew, without saying it, that they were done pretending to be uncertain.

There was a small wedding in the Brennan’s front pasture, with folding chairs borrowed from the church and Dolly, gone gray around the muzzle now, watching over the fence like a chaperone.

The blue Schwinn stayed leaned against the fence rail where Thomas had first left it.

At first, someone would move it. Ellen’s father, when he mowed; Thomas himself, when he remembered. But the years wore on, and the bicycle wore down. The tires went flat. The chain went orange with rust. Ivy found the wheels first, then the frame. A morning glory climbed the handlebars one summer and never really left.

A robin nested in the basket the year Ellen turned twenty-four, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Nobody moved it anymore. It had become part of the fence, part of the yard, part of the place. A blue-green ghost of the boy who had once been the fastest in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.

It is a Saturday afternoon in late June, and Thomas is thirty-four years old.

He and Ellen are down by the lake behind what used to be her parents’ farm and is now, deed and mortgage and all, theirs.

A red plaid blanket is spread on the grass beneath the willow. The picnic basket, her grandmother’s, the wicker frayed at the corners, one hinge held together with baling wire, sits open and mostly empty.

There are the last crusts of a sandwich. A jar with two swallows of lemonade. A peach with two bites taken out of it, one small (hers) and one large (his).

Not far off, in the shallow slope of the pasture, two horses graze in the slow, unhurried way of horses who know they are home.

One is a bay mare with a white star. The other is a chestnut gelding whose sire, if you traced the papers back far enough, was a mare named Dolly.

Ellen is lying on her back with her head in Thomas’s lap. Her red hair, still absurd, still catching every scrap of sunlight it can find, is spread across his knee. He is twirling a piece of it around his finger, the way he has been doing for fifteen years, the way he suspects he will still be doing when they are eighty.

“Do you remember,” she says, eyes closed, “the licorice?”

“I remember the licorice.”

“It was disgusting. The licorice.”

“It was covered in gravel.”

“And you ate it anyway.”

“I did not.”

“You did. I saw you. You ate a piece with a leaf stuck to it because you were trying to seem casual.”

Thomas laughs. Somewhere up by the house, on the other side of the pasture, leaning against a fence rail nobody has repainted in twenty years, a blue Schwinn bicycle is quietly dissolving into the landscape. Weeds have grown up through its spokes. A morning glory is in bloom on its handlebars. If you didn’t know it had once been a bicycle, you might not guess.

If you did know, you might think it looked less like a ruin and more like a small, patient monument. To a boy who rode too fast around a corner. To a girl on a horse who couldn’t stop. To the exact and unrepeatable accident of two lives colliding on a summer afternoon and choosing, ever after, not to come apart.

Ellen opens her eyes and looks up at him. The freckles are still there. The green eyes are still there. Everything, somehow, is still there.

“Thomas,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I’m really glad you didn’t die in that hedge.”

He bends down and kisses her forehead. The horses graze. The lake laps at the shore. The picnic basket holds its small ruins with dignity.

“Me too,” he says. “Me too.”

A Whisper from the Past, a Chance at Redemption

If that little taste of my writing intrigued you, then you won’t want to miss my novel, Nothing But Time.It begins with a letter…a letter that arrives three weeks after Jack Harper stopped mattering.Jack gave everything to his career.

His marriage slipped through his fingers. His daughter grew up without him. Forty-one years of sunsets went unwatched, and the roses? Never smelled.

Now retired, redundant, and utterly adrift, Jack is left wondering if it was all worth it.

Then, out of nowhere, he inherits an old farmhouse from Ed, the friend who once tried to warn him.

Ed, who escaped to Vermont years ago, died alone, and left Jack with one simple instruction:

“Tend the roses. Stop and smell them. Live.”

But the farmhouse isn’t what it seems. The radio crackles with broadcasts from 1943. The roses bloom when Jack kneels in the soil. And at the edge of the orchard, Ed keeps appearing—smiling, waiting, calling Jack to finally understand what he refused to see all those years.Some second chances come with instructions. Some come with ghosts.

Are you ready to discover which one Jack will choose?

Nothing But Time

Your Voice Matters

If this story resonated with you, don’t hold back, leave a comment!

Your thoughts, your reactions, and your support are what keep this journey alive. I know you’re out there, and your presence means everything to me.

Go ahead, share your voice, and let’s keep this connection alive.
Have a blessed day…you’re the reason I do this.

-Scott

“From 9/11 to Flock Cameras: The Dystopian Novel I Started 15 Years Ago”

September 9, 2011, started like any other day. While stuck at a traffic light, I was on the phone with our New York office. Something happened; they put me on hold, and as I drove to the Dallas office, I listened to the world change. We can argue about the rumors that still surround Building 7, but suffice it to say, the world changed.

My normal way of dealing with grief is not to drone on about it with friends or family. My way is to write about it. If you follow me at all, you have no doubt read my blog post about writing letters or emails to people who are, let’s say, less than congenial. I use expletives and what have you to get the anger out of me and into the digital ethos, and of course, as much as I want to, I never send it. Burning bridges and being known as a hothead will get you nowhere.

Fast-forward six weeks after 9/11 and at least 3,000 deaths by “some people who did some things.” Bush and his administration enacted the Patriot Act, which is still alive and well today. The things those people did allowed our government to strip away some of our rights, trading them for safety. “Do you feel safe?”

Fast-forward to the Flock cameras, data centers, Alexa devices, smartphones, and, of course, drones. Do you feel safe?

Those Flock cameras, I learned, have microphones.

So, while spending these summer months of 100-plus-degree days clearing out old computer hardware, I found that file from 2011. I had started a book about a fictional city where a horrible event occurred, and much like the Patriot Act, what we see today closely resembles what I put into my book. Being a fan of Orwell, I wrote a dystopian near-future novel that is all but ready for one last edit.

Stay tuned for more updates and for when the book drops.

I am thinking about putting it on KDP Unlimited for those of you who can read it for free. Follow, hit that like button, and comment below if you have ideas you would like to share.Best,

Here is a link to my current books on Amazon.

The Critique Question Every Writer Must Answer: Are You Here for an Ego Stroke, or Are You Here to Get Better?

Happy Friday Fellow Authors, Writers and those of you who are interested in such things.

Sit with that question for a moment. How you answer it, honestly, in the quiet space between your pride and your ambition, will determine whether you grow as a writer or spend years polishing the same unfinished draft while wondering why no one’s clapping.Every writer says they want feedback. Far fewer actually want it. And the gap between those two truths is where most writing careers quietly stall.

Why Critiques Matter More Than Compliments

Writing is a strange craft. You spend hours, weeks, sometimes years alone with your own words, and after a while, you can no longer see them clearly. Sentences that felt sharp in draft three read like sandpaper by draft seven. Plot holes disappear because your brain fills them in automatically. Characters you love become opaque to everyone but you.You cannot edit your way out of your own blind spots. That isn’t a personal failing; it’s neurology. You know what you meant to say, so your eyes read what you meant, not what’s on the page.A good critique is a borrowed pair of eyes. It’s someone standing where your reader will stand and telling you what they actually see, not what you hoped they’d see. That’s worth more than gold, and it’s usually offered for free.Critiques matter because they:

Reveal what isn’t working before an agent, editor, or reader silently closes the tab.
Sharpen your instincts by teaching you to anticipate reader reactions.
Break the echo chamber of your own preferences and habits.
Build resilience, a muscle you’ll need every day of a writing life.
Show you your patterns, both the beautiful ones and the ones you overuse.

Compliments feel wonderful. They also teach you almost nothing.

The Moment of Truth: How You React

Here’s where most writers reveal themselves. Someone finishes reading your work. They open their mouth to offer thoughts. And in the next sixty seconds, you decide, often without realizing it, whether this feedback session will actually help you.Watch yourself carefully in that moment. Do you:

Interrupt to explain what you meant?
Justify a choice before the critic has finished their sentence?
Point out that another reader loved that exact part?
Feel your jaw tighten, your arms cross, your tone sharpen?
Start mentally cataloging why this person “doesn’t get it”?

If so, congratulations: you’ve just told the person offering feedback that their time is being wasted. And if they’re wise, they’ll stop talking. Not because they’re offended, but because they’ve realized something important. You’re not listening. You’re defending.

A Rule for Critics: If They Get Defensive, Stop

This part is for the people offering the critique. You are a limited resource. Your attention, your honesty, your willingness to engage with someone else’s work: these things cost you something real. Spend them where they’ll be respected.If the writer becomes defensive, arguing every point, explaining away every concern, treating your observations as attacks rather than information, stop giving feedback. Politely, gracefully, but firmly. Say something like, “It sounds like this draft is where you want it to be. I’ll step back.” And mean it.You are not obligated to bulldoze someone into growth they haven’t asked for. A writer who isn’t ready to hear feedback won’t absorb it no matter how carefully you phrase it. Your notes will bounce off the armor and land nowhere. Worse, you’ll leave the conversation frustrated, and they’ll leave it convinced that critics just “don’t understand their vision.”Save your energy for the writers who lean in. They exist, and they’re the ones who become great.

What Listening Actually Looks Like

Listening, real listening, the kind that makes critique useful, is a discipline. Try this the next time someone offers you feedback:

Say nothing until they’re finished. Not a word. Not even “yeah, but …”
Take notes, even if you disagree. Especially if you disagree.
Ask clarifying questions, not defensive ones. “Can you say more about where you got confused?” beats “But didn’t you notice the foreshadowing on page four?”
Thank them, sincerely, and then go away. Don’t decide on the spot which notes to take. Let them settle for a day or two.
Look for patterns across readers. If three people trip on the same paragraph, the paragraph is the problem, not the readers.

You don’t have to accept every note. In fact, you shouldn’t. Part of being a writer is developing the judgment to know which feedback serves the work and which pulls it in a direction you don’t want. But you can’t exercise that judgment if you never let the feedback in to begin with.

The Ego Stroke Trap

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: seeking validation disguised as critique is one of the most common, and most invisible, ways writers stall out. You share your work with people you know will be gentle. You post excerpts to audiences who applaud. You ask for “feedback” but subtly signal that you want reassurance.And it works. You feel great. For about a day.Then you sit back down with the draft, and it still isn’t right, and you still don’t know why, and no amount of applause is going to fix it. Applause isn’t information. Applause is a mirror, and mirrors can’t tell you what your book looks like from the outside.If what you need right now is encouragement, that’s okay. Say so. Ask a friend to cheer you on. But don’t disguise that need as a call for critique, because you’ll waste a critic’s time and rob yourself of the actual help you claimed to want.

The Writers Who Make It

The writers who improve, really improve, the ones whose fifth book is unrecognizably better than their first, share a single trait. It isn’t talent. It isn’t discipline, though that helps. It isn’t even reading widely, though every serious writer does.It’s this: they can hear the truth about their work without flinching.They’ve decoupled their identity from any given sentence. They’ve learned that a critique of the writing is not a critique of the writer. They treat feedback like weather: sometimes pleasant, sometimes rough, always information about the environment they’re working in.That skill is available to anyone. It just requires answering the opening question honestly, again and again, every time you hand your work to another human being.So the next time you ask for a critique, pause before you open your mouth to respond. Take a breath. And ask yourself one more time:Am I here for an ego stroke, or am I here to get better?Your answer is the whole game.

As for me…What I’m Working On: The Ocean Within Trilogy

Readers, I have to tell you about the project that’s been keeping me up at night, and I mean that in the best possible way.I’m deep into a trilogy called The Ocean Within, and it started with a question that wouldn’t let me go.

Picture This

Imagine a hidden ocean. Not a metaphor. An actual, staggering body of water buried beneath the American heartland. It waters the crops on your dinner plate. It sustains the livestock that feeds a nation. Farmers from South Dakota to Texas depend on it, whether they know its name or not.It’s called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it’s disappearing faster than the earth can refill it.Most people have never heard of it. That is exactly why I had to write this book.

Then It Gets Worse

Now imagine money-hungry corporations looking at that same stretch of land and seeing dollar signs. Not for food. Not for the families who’ve farmed there for generations. For data centers. Massive, water-guzzling server farms that will drink from the same well feeding the country, planted right on top of one of our most vulnerable natural resources.Food, or servers? That’s the collision at the heart of this trilogy.

Book One: The Ocean Within

The story opens with fracking. A fissure cracks open where it never should have, and what follows is disaster on a scale that reminded me, as I was writing it, of Dante’s Peak, that same slow-dawning horror where the warning signs were there all along and nobody wanted to see them. Except this time, the ground isn’t exploding. It’s collapsing. Poisoning. Draining. And the people who live above it are the last to know.This is the book that introduces the Ogallala to readers who’ve never heard its name. By the time you turn the last page, you won’t forget it.

Why I Couldn’t Stop at One Book

Here’s the thing. I couldn’t leave it there, because the story isn’t finished in real life. Data centers are being built right now, in places they have no business being, and I believe with everything in me that if we don’t regulate this industry properly, it’s going to become a clear and present danger to the very ground we stand on and the food we grow.That’s not fiction. That’s Tuesday.So the trilogy grew. Two more books are taking shape, each one pulling the thread a little tighter, each one asking a bigger question than the last. What happens when we break what we can’t rebuild? Who profits from the wreckage? And is it too late to change course?

Stay With Me

I’ll be sharing more as the trilogy develops, sneak peeks, research rabbit holes I’ve fallen down, characters who’ve moved in and refused to leave. If the idea of a thriller that reads like tomorrow’s headlines sounds like your kind of read, you’re in the right place.The Ocean Within is coming. And once you know what’s beneath us, you won’t be able to unknow it. Follow the link to see my current books. Thanks!

The Weaponization of Everything: Why I Never Let My Characters Trust the Government with Alien Tech

As a science fiction writer, I’ve built entire worlds around a single, unshakable rule: my characters never (and I mean never) turn over alien technology to the government. Not once. Not ever. And people ask me why. The answer is simple, and it’s rooted in something I’ve observed about the animal called man.Here’s what I know. The moment some newfangled thing shows up in human hands, one of the very first questions that pops into our lizard brains is, “How could I use this as a weapon?”Don’t believe me? Let me offer you a small, seemingly innocent example.

From Toy to Threat: The Drone Story

Remember that cute little toy the kids fly around the house or the back yard? The quadcopter drone. Charming, right? Now look at modern warfare. Look at the skies over conflict zones. That “toy” has become one of the most transformative weapons of the twenty-first century. And that’s just one example out of a thousand that illustrates how “we,” humanity, think.Give us a hammer, we build a house. Give us the same hammer five minutes later, we’re figuring out how it fits in a fist.

Every Technology Becomes a Weapon Eventually

Look around your living room. This computer I’m writing on? Weaponizable. Your television? A vehicle for propaganda, misinformation, and behavioral conditioning. And let’s roll the clock back to the 1940s, to the radio, that warm wooden box that brought families together in the evenings.Does the name Goebbels ring any bells?Joseph Goebbels understood something chilling: whoever controls the medium controls the message, and whoever controls the message controls the minds.

The Nazi propaganda machine turned the humble radio into one of the most devastating psychological weapons in human history.And let’s not forget the newspaper. Ink and paper. Why do you suppose that when a country is invaded, one of the very first things a conquering entity does is seize the media? Radio stations. Newspapers. Television networks. Because they know exactly what I know: information is the ultimate weapon.

The Modern Surveillance State: Sold Out to the Highest Bidder

Now fast-forward to today. We have “smart” devices in our homes that most probably spy on us, listening, watching, cataloging. We have media outlets lying to us with straight faces. We have corporations installing cameras on every corner “for our safety.”

Since 9/11, we’ve been sold out to the highest bidder. Fear became a currency, and freedom became the transaction fee.

The Porn Scanners and “Safe Radiation”

Remember those full-body scanners the TSA rolled out at airports? The ones lovingly nicknamed “porn scanners” because they essentially produced nude images of every traveler? We were told the radiation was “safe.”

I went after a reporter who parroted that line on national television. Because here’s the truth: there is no such thing as “safe radiation.” There are only levels. It’s like a tiger in a cage. If the cage is solid steel, sure, you can get pretty close and admire the stripes. If the cage is a little dodgy? Well … good luck, friend.

How much money did the manufacturers of those scanners make off our tax dollars while claiming to “keep us safe”? And did you know many TSA workers who operated those machines developed strange and rare cancers? That’s not conspiracy; that’s public record for anyone willing to look.

The Next Frontier: Your Thoughts

We need to tap the brakes. Hard. Because if history is any teacher, and it is, some company, somewhere, is already working on a way to monitor your thoughts. Neural interfaces. Brain-computer links. “For your convenience,” of course. “For your health.” “For your safety.”And once that door opens, it doesn’t close. There’s no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

Elections Have Consequences

Here’s the kicker: elections have consequences. And when the electorate is a product of an education system that hasn’t taught them a damn thing about history, critical thinking, or how power actually operates, you end up with radical numbskulls getting elected to positions where they hold the keys to every one of these weaponized technologies.An uninformed voter isn’t just a bad citizen; they’re a national security risk. They’ll hand over their privacy, their liberty, and eventually their thoughts, all in exchange for the illusion of safety and the comfort of a curated feed.

Film at 11

So yeah, in my novels, when the alien tech falls from the sky, my characters bury it, burn it, or blast it into the sun before they let a single government agency get its fingerprints on it. Because I know exactly what would happen next.We would weaponize it.We always do.Stay skeptical. Stay curious. And for God’s sake, stay awake.Film at 11.

And now a shameless plug for one of my novels:

As he re-encounters his family, a young JFK, and the love of his life before they’ve even met, he discovers that saving the future isn’t just about stopping a war—it’s about proving that humanity is worth saving. Along the way, secrets buried deep in Area 51, a chilling conspiracy within the U.S. government, and the cryptic motives of the alien beings reveal the stakes are higher than he could have ever imagined.

Echoes of Tomorrow is a sweeping tale of time travel, love, loss, and redemption. With the weight of the world on his young shoulders, one man must face the ultimate question: can the future truly be changed, or is humanity destined to repeat its greatest mistakes?
This gripping journey will captivate fans of thought-provoking sci-fi, historical intrigue, and heart- through time and the fragile threads of destiny.

Thanks for your attention to this matter… 🙂

Back in My Young Man’s Days: Have We Really Learned Anything?

There’s an old Max Bygraves song called “Back in My Young Man’s Days” that most of you have probably never heard of. Unless, of course, you happen to be an aficionado of Turner Classic Movies or music from that era. I am both, proudly, and perhaps a little wistfully. As I go about doing the things that men my age tend to do, my mind wanders. It wanders to the news of the day, to memories of the past, and sometimes, more often than I’d like, to the sting of death. And then I put on a song like “Back in My Young Man’s Days,” and I can’t help but ask myself a hard question:Have we learned nothing?

The Same Old Story, Just Louder Now

If the leaders, the megalomaniacs, the dullards, the people who don’t seem to mind putting your life on the line, had to face the same risks as the soldiers who die by the tens of thousands every time someone rattles a saber, one has to wonder how differently the world might look. Then I open up X or scroll through some other social media platform, and what do I see? You’ve seen it too. People behaving badly. Or as one influencer bluntly puts it, “chimping out.”

It makes me wonder: is there something in the water? Something in the food? Some invisible force driving us back to the basic animal instincts of lions and tigers and bears …Go ahead. Say it. Oh my.

Seriously though, if you’ve ever watched one of those nature documentaries where the narrator calmly describes the lions stalking their prey on the savannah, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The Camera in Every Pocket

Then it dawns on me. Back in my young man’s days, nobody had a video camera in their pocket. Back in my young man’s days, we barely had a Kodak, and heaven forbid, a Polaroid was a luxury. So I have to ask: What if we had? Would we have seen the same carnage back then that we see today? Would Andy Griffith and “Leave It to Beaver” have been the anomaly, or would they have been the standard?

I suspect the truth is uncomfortable.

The Mob Was Always There

Back in my young man’s days, I saw the mob mentality firsthand. I saw boys trying to prove they were men by picking on the timid, the frail, and the girls. Nobody was immune to the red-headed bully who was feeling his oats, or, as I now suspect, feeling his hormones running amok as curly hairs sprouted in places they had never been before.The cruelty was there. The mob was there. We just didn’t have the receipts.

25,000 Mothers a Week

But some things do feel bigger now. Heavier. More absurd. Do you ever think about simpler times? Do you ever wonder how leaders like Putin and Zelensky can be okay with 25,000 young men being killed each week?

Twenty-five thousand.That means 25,000 young mothers each week who have to live with the reality that their baby is never coming home. That’s not a statistic. That’s an ocean of grief we can’t seem to stop refilling.

Food for Thought

Were your parents like the Beav’s?

Mine weren’t. But they were both there, and looking back, that mattered more than I understood at the time. Maybe we didn’t live in a simpler time. Maybe we just lived in a time with fewer cameras, fewer platforms, and fewer megaphones for our worst instincts. But the questions remain the same ones humanity has always wrestled with: Why do we hurt each other? Why do we send our sons to die? And why, with all our progress, do we keep circling back to the same sorrow?Food for thought.

What do you think? Do you find yourself longing for simpler times, or just quieter ones? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Echoes of Tomorrow

When the world teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation, a retired Air Force general is given an impossible second chance: to rewrite history.Sent back in time to 1962 by mysterious alien beings, he wakes up trapped in the body of his ten-year-old self, armed with decades of knowledge but stripped of his power and authority. With the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, global tensions rising, and secrets hidden in the shadows of the past, he must navigate a world that sees him as a child while carrying the burden of preventing humanity’s self-destruction.As he re-encounters his family, a young JFK, and the love of his life before they’ve even met, he discovers that saving the future isn’t just about stopping a war. It’s about proving that humanity is worth saving. Along the way, secrets buried deep in Area 51, a chilling conspiracy within the U.S. government, and the cryptic motives of the alien beings reveal that the stakes are higher than he could have ever imagined.Echoes of Tomorrow is a sweeping tale of time travel, love, loss, and redemption. With the weight of the world on his young shoulders, one man must face the ultimate question: can the future truly be changed, or is humanity destined to repeat its greatest mistakes?This gripping journey will captivate fans of thought-provoking science fiction, historical intrigue, and heartfelt stories woven through time and the fragile threads of destiny.

Get your copy here…

Nothing But Time: A Story About What We Lose When We’re Too Busy to Notice

There’s a particular kind of silence that fills a downtown apartment at 3 PM on a Tuesday. It’s not the peaceful quiet of a weekend morning or the contemplative hush of a late evening. It’s the silence of a man who suddenly has nowhere to be, and worse, no one waiting for him to arrive.This is where we meet Jack.

The Weight of an Empty Calendar

For forty-three years, Jack’s identity was stitched into the fabric of a company logo. He knew the precise angle of morning light through his corner office window. He could recite quarterly projections in his sleep. His fingers knew the keyboard shortcuts of Excel the way a pianist knows Chopin.Then came the merger.They called it “restructuring.” They handed him a plaque, a modest severance, and a handshake from someone half his age who couldn’t quite meet his eyes. Just like that, the man who built departments, mentored executives, and sacrificed weekends for deadlines became… what, exactly?In “Nothing But Time,“ I wanted to explore what happens to a man when the thing he traded his life for suddenly decides it doesn’t need him anymore.

The Ghosts That Live in Silence

Jack sits in his sleek, expensive apartment—the one he bought because it was close to the office, not because it felt like home—and the memories arrive uninvited.His wife, Diane. The way she used to leave dinner in the oven, then eventually stopped. The way she’d ask him to come to bed, then eventually stopped asking. The night she said, “You’re already gone, Jack. I’m just making it official.”His son’s baseball games he missed for board meetings. His daughter’s wedding, where he gave a toast about “investments and returns” because he didn’t know her well enough to say anything personal. The grandchildren whose names he sometimes has to pause to remember.He built a monument to his career.He built it out of the people who loved him.

The Letter That Changes Everything

And then, one gray morning, an envelope arrives. Heavy paper. A law firm’s embossed seal. An roomate from college left him a farm, acres of rolling green somewhere far from spreadsheets and quarterly reports.What does a man who has spent his life optimizing efficiency do with soil, sky, and silence?That’s the question at the heart of “Nothing But Time.”

Why I Wrote This Book

I didn’t write this novel to entertain you, though I hope it does. I wrote it because I’ve watched too many good men and women trade the irreplaceable for the replaceable.Here’s the truth nobody puts in a corporate handbook:

The company will replace you before your desk is cold. But your daughter will remember the recital you missed for the rest of her life. Your son will remember whether you showed up. Your spouse will remember whether you were present or just physically in the room.We chase the watch. The title. The bonus. The corner office. We tell ourselves we’re doing it for the people we love, while the very act of chasing it takes us further from them.And then one day, the chase ends. The company merges. The title evaporates. The watch stops mattering.And what’s left?For Jack, what’s left is a farm and forty years of regret. What’s left is the possibility—maybe, just maybe—of learning a different way to measure a life.

From a large city to a small town Jack Harper gave everything to his career.

Now he’s retired, redundant, and utterly lost.

Then he inherits a farmhouse from the friend who tried to warn him, the friend who escaped to Vermont and died alone, the friend who left behind one final message: Tend the roses. Stop and smell them. Live.

But something strange is happening at the farmhouse. The old radio plays broadcasts from 1943. The rose garden blooms when Jack kneels in the dirt. And Ed, his dead friend, keeps appearing at the edge of the orchard, smiling, beckoning, waiting for Jack to understand what he spent a lifetime refusing to see. Some second chances come with instructions. Some come with ghosts.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re building the right kind of legacy… if you’ve ever looked up from your desk and realized the seasons changed without you… if you’ve ever felt the quiet fear that the people you love are becoming strangers… then Jack’s story is your story too.“Nothing But Time” is available now. It’s a novel about loss, yes, but more importantly, it’s a novel about what we can still choose while we still have breath.Because here’s the thing about time: we all think we have more of it than we do. Until one day, we’re sitting in a quiet apartment, holding a letter, realizing that time is the only thing we ever really had.And the only question that matters is:Who did we spend it with?

Don’t chase the watch. Chase the people. They’re the only thing that ticks back.Get your copy of “Nothing But Time” today—and maybe, tonight, call the person you’ve been meaning to call.

Are You A Witch?

What the Bones Whisper: Meet the Bog Witch Who’s About to Change Everything 🖤🌿

Are you a witch? You might want to sit down before you answer that…There’s a girl in the bayou who talks to crows.Her name is Sarah Beaumont, and for fifteen years, the small town of Jefferson Davis has kept its distance from her. They whisper Swamp Witch behind cupped hands. They edge away in the locker room. They call her obsession with the black water “a coping mechanism.” But here’s what they don’t know: the bayou has been listening to her this whole time.And one afternoon, it finally answers back.

When “Weird” Isn’t a Diagnosis … It’s a Bloodline

Picture this: cypress knees rising from the shallows like ancient sentinels. Metal that stops corroding under your fingertips. A dying spider plant that springs back to life just because you felt sorry for it. For Sarah, the swamp has always been the one place where she belongs , where animals don’t flee from her, where the mud remembers the shape of her footprints, where a girl who eats lunch alone in the library can finally breathe. Then a voice rises from the black water like something that’s been holding its breath for fifteen years:

“Finally. Your mother used to stand in that exact spot.”

Her mother — who didn’t leave. Who the town says the bayou took. 😳

Grandmère Knows Something. And It’s Terrifying.

When Sarah runs home trembling, her grandmother doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t say “it’s just stories.”She goes pale as bone and whispers one word that changes everything:Magick. Turns out, the Beaumont women have been hearing the bayou at sixteen for seven generations — going all the way back to a woman named Mathilde who “walked out of the Louisiana bayou with nothing but the clothes on her back and a head full of knowing.” They’re traiteurs. Conjure women. Root workers.Bog witches. 🕯️But Sarah’s mother? She ran from the calling. And now something is coming for Sarah … early. 🐦‍⬛

Three Knocks. Black Salt. And a Word Planted in Her Chest.

That very night, the lights die. Footsteps cross the porch. Something hums her mother’s lullaby in the dark … and leaves behind footprints of oily black mud that refuse to dry. Then a crow the size of a nightmare opens its beak and says a single word straight into her bones:

“Soon.”

By morning, the protective salt at the threshold has turned black. A single feather waits on her windowsill. And a mysterious boy named Eli Corbeau , who stands on the water, not in it, appears at the edge of the swamp. Corbeau. Sarah’s rusty French unfolds the word like dark wings.Crow. 🖤

So… Are You a Witch?

If you love stories where:

🌙 A girl discovers she can untangle death itself with her bare hands
🌿 Southern gothic bayous hum with generations of secret power
🐦‍⬛ Mysterious boys who might not be entirely human show up on the water
🔮 The line between “gifted” and “hunted” is razor-thin

…then the swamp has been waiting for you too.Something is beginning. And once you hear it, there’s no going back to not hearing it. 💀

Are You a Witch? … A Bog Witch Novel. Coming from Purple Pen Publishing.

Yes, I just released my latest project. If you know someone who appreciates these types of stories, do them and me a favor and tell them about it.

Some questions, once the swamp asks them, can never be unheard. So before you turn the page, ask yourself one more time. Blessed be or dear reader?

I just published it today, so the link takes you to all of my books. It will show up as soon as Amazon does their thing.

Tell us in the comments: If the bayou whispered your name, would you answer… or would you run? 👇

If you could go back in time and leave yourself a message, what would it be?

We have all had that dream or thought, especially when we think of all the stupid things we did as kids. Some of us wonder how we survived it.

While my book Echoes of Tomorrow deals with this prospect in a science-fictional way, we all know that time, at least at present, does not allow do-overs.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom boils down to one question:

Just because we can, should we?

We just lived through a pandemic that still has lasting effects on many. COVID was most probably an early attempt at biological warfare situated in China (and other countries) to give the United States plausible deniability.

That is most probably why there were so many Biden-era Democratic pardons, including Anthony Fauci’s. To make a virus even more dangerous through gain-of-function research is about as irresponsible as creating other weapons of mass destruction, i.e., nuclear weapons.

We will never know if the dropping of the first atomic bombs was the only way to put an end to World War II.

Through treasonous acts, several spies shared (or sold) nuclear information to the Russians, making technological adolescence a real and immediate thing.

Today we are creating AI and robots that if given weapons would make The Terminator look like Winnie the Effing Pooo!

While Echoes of Tomorrow addresses this as a theme, there is another novel I am currently editing in which mankind goes to Mars after making Earth uninhabitable. Unlike Echoes in Time, where aliens facilitate time travel, Quiet Dust is set in a future where humans have already been on Mars for over forty years. Subscribe to this blog for more info on when it drops.

There are theories suggesting that evidence of humanity will be erased over time. The reasons humanity may never make it off the planet in any meaningful way are as follows.

The Great Filter from the Fermi Paradox is the correct framing of the problem. Sagan’s technological adolescence is likely a real and significant component of that filter, perhaps the dominant one for civilizations that reach our stage. But it probably is not the only filter. The total improbability of a civilization reaching interstellar maturity is likely the product of multiple bottlenecks, with self-destruction during technological adolescence being the final and perhaps most severe.

The darkest implication is this: even if a civilization survives its adolescence, it may face recurring filters. Each new transformative technology (nuclear, AI, nanotech, or whatever comes next) reopens the vulnerability window. Adolescence may not be a single phase but a repeating pattern, each iteration more dangerous than the last. If that is true, then the two frameworks converge completely. The Great Filter is technological adolescence, experienced not once but perpetually, with the cumulative probability of survival approaching zero over sufficient time.

So, before I leave you for today, I have an idea that needs wings. It needs to get to Elon Musk, who has the means to make it happen.

This device would visit the earth once in a lifetime to remind those here not to be an idiot!

We sent two satellites, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, off into interstellar space on one-way trips to nowhere. What if, like Halley’s Comet, we created a device with a similar elongated orbit that passes by Earth every hundred years, making itself known? In that way, after we either blow the planet to bits through our hubris or our flat-out stupidity, we could send future inhabitants a message, much like we might send to our younger selves:

“Don’t do this, idiot!”

Why the future? Have you watched the news? Do you see how irresponsible the media has become and how violence seems to perpetuate into more violence?

Money for clicks and viewership for advertisements are more important than the boring truth.

Dehumanizing your political opponent will trigger the emotionally unbalanced to act, and politicians know this. Politicians are desperate and will do anything to keep power, including importing twenty million new voters. Power is money and those two are addictive, much like Felony Glitter…

I hold little hope for humanity, and I have to wonder if Elon’s vision of Mars has him thinking the same thing.

Please like, comment, and follow, as well as read Echoes of Tomorrow.

Authors like me need all the assistance we can get in order to provide more thought-provoking, entertaining novels for you, when you are not watching hypnotoad programming, designed to make you disbelieve your lying eyes.

my version of hypnotoad feeding the masses lies.

When Signals Travel One Way: Exploring HF Propagation on 7.185 MHz

Last night, after three years of not using the ham radio, I was listening to a net on 7.185 MHz.

To be clear, I enjoy rag chewing. I want to get to know people, hear their stories, and just maybe include bits and pieces of them in some future book. (I am an author.)

While I was working in the shop, the net ended, and the group decided to chase DX, or distant stations typically located in a different country.

After a CQ call and things being slow, I picked up the mic and tossed my call into the ether.

KD2DMR eventually welcomed me; they were a friendly group of folks.

To my surprise, a station in South Africa responded to me.

Jeremy in Illinois heard him, but I did not.

The first point of this post is simple: if you’re a ham, you might want to listen to 7.185 at night. They are a friendly bunch.

The second part of the post, and clearly the question I was asking myself, is this: why could I not hear this fellow in Nimbini when he heard me?

Of course I knew what the answer was but…Why not share?

Think “asymmetrical propagation.”

On HF bands like 40 meters (7.185 MHz), asymmetrical propagation is actually quite common.

Here are the likely culprits:

1. Ionospheric Conditions and Skip Zones:The ionosphere’s state changes constantly. His signal may have taken a different propagation path to reach me than my signal took to reach him. At certain times, one direction might have a clear skip path while the other does not. This is especially true for long-distance contacts, where the signal bounces off the ionosphere at different angles.

2. Polarization Mismatch:My 260-foot horizontal wire antenna radiates horizontal polarization. When HF signals bounce off the ionosphere, the polarization can shift unpredictably. His receiving antenna may have been oriented to better capture the polarization of my transmitted signal, while my antenna was not optimally positioned to receive his return signal’s polarization state after it bounced back.

3. Antenna Directivity and Takeoff Angle:My long wire antenna has directional characteristics that vary with frequency and height. At 30 feet on 40 meters, my antenna likely has a relatively high takeoff angle, which is good for medium-distance skip but may not be optimal for receiving signals coming back from South Africa at a different angle than my transmission went out.

While the long wire is a perfectly fine antenna for general-purpose communication, including DX, antennas (which to me in 1973 were simply magic) are the stuff of amateur radio’s dreams and fascinations, and they are one of the simpler things to experiment with.

If I had a Vertical antenna that I was listening on, there is a high probability I would have heard him. Many DX chasers have two antennas, one for transmitting and another for receiving for this reason. Even a simple inverted V for 40 might have made the difference.

There is even something called a beverage antenna, for receive only…If you want to maximize receive capability specifically, a Beverage antenna is legendary for HF reception. It is a long, low wire (typically 1 to 4 wavelengths long, running 6 to 10 feet high) that is highly directional and excellent at rejecting noise while capturing weak signals. Many serious DXers use Beverage antennas for receiving while transmitting on a separate antenna. *

If you are interested in such things, I would encourage you to find your local ham radio group and get your feet wet. If you are a ham, I will make a point to be listening on 7.185 and chat with them more, if they ever simply rag chew.

Best, and 73 to the hams out there.

About the Cover Picture:

This gripping journey will captivate fans of thought-provoking sci-fi, historical intrigue, and heart- through time and the fragile threads of destiny.

Get Your Copy Here

*Why It Is Called a Beverage Antenna

The Beverage antenna is named after its inventor, Harold H. Beverage, an American radio engineer who developed and patented the design on June 7, 1921.

The name is entirely unrelated to drinks; it is simply an eponym honoring the man who created it.

A Bit of History: Harold Beverage (later known by his amateur radio call sign W2BML) was working at RCA when he invented the antenna as part of his efforts to improve the reception of transatlantic radio signals.

The design quickly gained popularity for its excellent performance in long-distance communication.

One of the most impressive early implementations was built by AT&T in Houlton, Maine, for the first transatlantic telephone service.

This massive array consisted of four phased Beverage antennas, stretching three miles long and two miles wide.

Why It Remains Popular

More than a century after its invention, the Beverage antenna is still widely used by amateur radio operators, shortwave listeners, and professional monitoring stations. Its ability to deliver an extremely low noise floor and a clean directional pattern makes it unmatched for receiving weak signals on the low bands, typically 160 meters through 40 meters.

The design is elegantly simple: a long wire (often several wavelengths in length) suspended low to the ground and terminated with resistors at one or both ends. This configuration allows it to function as a traveling wave antenna, capturing signals along its length while rejecting interference from unwanted directions.

That Flattering Email in Your Inbox? It’s Probably a Scam.

Let’s be honest: authors have egos. I’m no exception. We pour our souls into our work, and when someone notices—really notices, it feels like validation wrapped in a warm hug. Scammers know this. They count on it. And they’re getting disturbingly good at exploiting it.I’ve seen my fair share of suspicious emails over the years, but I have to admit—this one nearly got me.

The Email That Almost Fooled Me

Picture this: a polished, professional message lands in your inbox from someone claiming to be a “Consulting Publisher at Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).” The tone is warm. The praise is specific. They mention your book by name and describe it with the kind of glowing language that makes your heart skip a beat.Here’s what “Faiza S. Khan” had to say about my novel, The Ocean Within:

“I was genuinely impressed by its compelling blend of scientific speculation, environmental intrigue, and high-stakes suspense… The novel’s focus on the fragile balance between human progress and the immense, often unpredictable forces beneath the Earth’s surface creates a story that is both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling.”

Flattering, right? They even praised its “strong commercial appeal” and suggested it “extends beyond genre conventions.” This email knew exactly which buttons to push.

The Red Flags Hiding in Plain Sight

Here’s the thing about well-crafted scams: they sound almost legitimate. But when you slow down and look closer, the warning signs emerge:

Unsolicited contact from a major publisher. Traditional publishers like Bloomsbury don’t typically cold-email unknown authors gushing about their self-published or small-press work.
Vague next steps. The email asks about your “current publishing arrangements” and whether you have an agent—information that helps scammers tailor their pitch (or their ask for money).
Too much flattery, too little substance. The praise is elaborate but generic enough to apply to almost any thriller with environmental themes.
No verifiable contact details. A quick search often reveals these “consulting publishers” don’t exist on the company’s official website.

Why This Matters

Scams like this prey on our deepest hopes as writers. They exploit the dream of being “discovered” by a prestigious publisher. And once they have your attention? The requests begin…fees for “editorial reviews,” payments for “international distribution,” or contracts that sign away your rights.So what should you do if an email like this lands in your inbox?

Pause before you respond. Excitement clouds judgment.
Verify the sender. Search the person’s name on the publisher’s official website or LinkedIn.
Contact the publisher directly. Use contact information from their official site—not the email.
Trust your gut. If it feels too good to be true, it probably is.

The Bottom Line

I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted, even for a moment to believe that Bloomsbury had stumbled upon my work and fallen in love with it. That’s the power of a well-crafted scam. But the best defense we have as authors is awareness, skepticism, and community.If you’ve received something similar, you’re not alone. Share your experience, warn your fellow writers, and remember: your talent is real, even when the emails praising it aren’t.

Have you encountered a publishing scam? Drop your story in the comments—let’s help each other stay vigilant.

About the cover:

The Ocean Within is a gripping, science-driven thriller that explores the fragile balance between humanity and the forces of nature. Perfect for fans of Michael Crichton, Andy Weir, and Kim Stanley Robinson, this novel will leave you breathless—and questioning how much we really understand about the world beneath our feet.

Get your copy here.