Depopulating My Library, Part VI: Miscellaneous Stuff

I think I’ve reached the end of selling off all books by a single author. I’ve been letting my eyes roll through my shelves and my hands pluck items I won’t read again, important and interesting as so many of them where.

It’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction form Joseph Campbell to H.P. Lovecraft, a 1918 Zane Grey, and The First Man, the final work by Albert Camus that I tried to read and couldn’t get into. If you’re in KC and interested in any of these works, they’ll be at Wise Blood (if they buy them) at 300 Westport Road and now open for business.

I’ll keep at the random picking from my shelves and then write a post about which authors I’ve kept and why (as far as I can figure out).

Depopulating My Library, Part V: Some Books by Me!

Today, I stopped by Blood Wise, the soon-to-open used bookstore here in KC at 300 Westport Road, to find Dylan on a ladder hanging an outside sign in preparation for the store's Dec. 13 grand opening.

A co-worker was helping him level the sign and I went inside with my box of books to sell, and a hope.

The offering from me was a mix of Updikes, Saul Bellows, Rushdie, Stephen King, a mix of horror anthology paperbacks, and not-so-famous authors I’ve either read and won’t re-read or started and couldn’t get into.

And….

“Be willing to look at my stuff?”

He was. I came back later and found out what he was offering for the works of others and that he would buy outright to carry in the store three books by me! A small victory, but a victory none-the-less. I’ll be probing him later to see what attracted him to these particular works among my smorgasbord of genres. I didn’t really expect him to buy more. It’s an investment on the store’s part. They don’t know if these will sell. Hope springs eternal: if they do sell, Blood Wise may stock more, and buy other titles. Hope--which has been dashed often in my life--is hard to kill. Live on, Hope. Who knows.

They are creating a really nice environment for the store. Opening date Dec. 13 is a Friday and, who knows, maybe I’ll be there. If so, I’ll let you know what time.

Here are the three works you’ll find on the shelves at Blood Wise, placed, I hope, above a shelf of Margaret Atwood books and sporting a sign: “Read Our Attwood Books!”

Rabbletown: Life inThese United Christian States of Holy America

SPILL

Kansas Stories

Depopulating My Library, Part IV: Thank You and Goodbye Walker Percy

I thought I had more Walker Percy books than I found on the shelves. I had four and three of them have gone to Wise Blood, a soon-to-open used bookstore in Westport here in KC in December: The Message in the Bottle, The Last Generation, and Thanatos Syndrome.

I’m keeping The Moviegoer, the novel that put Percy on the literary map by winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zoey were also nominees. Percy was a Roman Catholic and many of his books have spiritual themes, but not overtly so. One critic called The Moviegoer “A Catcher in the Rye for adults only.”

By all accounts Percy was also a nice person. The mother of John Kennedy Toole called Percy up when he was teaching at Loyola and persuaded him to read her dead son’s novel, who had committed suicide because of his inability to get published A Confederacy of Dunces. Percy, should read it because, she said “It’s a great novel.”

Percy read it, concurred, and opened the avenue for her son's wonderful book to be published.

During my try-to-get published saga, I reached out to Percy. A friend had interviewed him for literary journal he was editing and had Percy’s home address in Covington, LA. The book I was trying to get published or find an agent for was The 41^st Sermon. I thought it would be up his alley: a middle-aged Episcopal priest finds himself in a mid-life crisis and mid-faith crisis. Every year he goes alone to a fishing resort to fish, drink, and write the outlines of the next year’s sermons. There, he unexpectedly encounters a blonde parishioner who, unbeknownst to him, is there as part of a phony kidnapping plot to extort money from her husband. The priest gets entrapped, too.

So I sent Percy the first few chapters. He sent the cover letter back to me with this written on it: “It reads well – I’d be glad to look at rest, but must tell you I had to give up finding agents or publishers for unpublished writers.—.I’d be doing nothing else. Everybody in the South is writing a novel – Best, W.P.”

It is hard for me to express my joy. Walter Fucking Percy said “It reads well”! Maybe I did have some talent. And so I waited. And I waited. And I….read six months later his obituary in The Kansas City Star. The manuscript never was returned to me. I learned later that soon after he responded to me he was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer.

When I published The 41^st Sermon I included a photo of my cover letter to him and his response. If you want to read the novel, it’s here.

The other books I sold were a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Among them: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon Vol 1 and Vol 2, Evan Connell’s Mr. Bridge, Larry McMurtry’s Dead Man’s Walk and an interesting, but depressing, book by Daniel DeFoe, A Journal of the Plague Year.

When I used the $15 so earned and spent it on a 12-pack of Warsteiner Octoberfest beer, I was reminded of Robert Heinlein’s price advice. A paperback novel should cost the same as a six-pack of beer.

Depopulating My Library, Part III: Len Deighton, Robert Heinlein, and maybe Adam Hall

I guess I started reading spy novels in high school when I grabbed any James Bond book that showed up in the row of paperback books sold at Knupp’s Drug Store in Larned, KS (yes, complete with cherry cokes at the fountain). The only Ian Fleming work I still have is his best Bond book and the best movie From Russia with Love. I might as well keep it.

My favorite spy author is John LeCarre and I have all but his most recent work. The writing is superb, the tales captivating and what wonderful movies were and are being made from them. I have 13 hardback copies (including a First Edition American one of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold complete with book jacket in nice condition that I got for $3) and 9 paperback copies, some of which replicate the hardback edition. Rereading them is like putting on a comfortable sweater. Not that his prose is easy, but it’s so fluid and it ages well, like wine. No doubt I’ll go back and take sips.

I also liked Len Deighton and have all his works. I’ve reread them a couple of times and very much admire his plotting and character developments. His tryptich of trilogies about the English spy Bernard Samson in Berlin were captivating. Ian Holm played that spy in a 1988 Granada Television excellent adaptation of the first trilogy, entitled Game, Set and Match, transmitted as twelve 60 minute episodes. I don’t know if they can be found these days because Deighton got into something of snit about them. Anyway, I’m not going to revisit his works. They are now in the hands of Wise Blood, a soon to open used bookstore here in KC's Westport.

Adam Hall’s Quiller series and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series present something of mystery to me. There were several times in my life when I was just down. I won’t call it a depression, but certainly a blue period complete with anxiety about my life, what I was doing, and what would happen to me.

I often turned to reread the Quiller or the MacDonald books, loving to do so in the order they were published. Why? Well, they’re good action reads and that takes you out of yourself. With Travis McGee it wasn’t so much the story as the character. You just wanted to be around Travis again. Adam Hall, the pen name Elleston Trevor adopted for the Quiller books, really knew how to do action. He knew when to stop a scene at its most dramatic and keep you on the seat of your chair. They are page turners, but I don’t need to turn those pages anymore. So Deighton is now gone and Hall may follow. I’m still undecided. I’ll keep my Travis McGee books. I might want to have a drink with him again (he turned me on to Boodles gin). These are books I’d more wish to give to a friend.

Which is what I did with my Robert Heinlein paperback collection. (Heinlein fans, if you haven’t read is The Door into Summer, I highly recommend it. Great use of time travel and looking at the book cover reminded me that in this 1957 book he uses a piece of equipment that won’t be invented for decades, the Cad Cam.) A new bartender at  Chez Charlie’s, my Midtown watering hole in KC that I’ve been patronizing for more than 30 years, has become a reader of my fiction and likes sci-fi, so I plopped my Heinlein collection on the bar top, said they were hers, and ordered a Bombay Sapphire and tonic (they don’t carry Boodles).

In any of these musings of mine make your curious about my own smorgasbord of fiction genres, visit the buffet here.

Depopulating My Library, Part II: A Farewell to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner

I started college early by going to summer school at the University of Kansas instead of waiting for the fall semester. I don’t remember I took any books with me, other than maybe the Webster’s dictionary given us as some sort of high school graduation honor. But across the hall from my dorm room I encountered a character who not only had books, but had racks of steel shelves to hold those books.

I became enraptured of him and his books. In the room next to mine was an older man who had finished his Navy tour and was taking courses to go to medical school. He had books. Art books, too that featured reproductions of fine art by Michelangelo, Di Vinci, and other famous artists.

All this was wonderful and new to me.

Through that first person, John Kiely (who would be come a friend, future roommate, mentor pictured right and now, sadly, long dead), I encountered Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway wrote in a simple, straightforward way that communicated directly with one’s perception by creating through words a sense of the reality of life. How is that possible using words? It amazed me. He created scenes, but also emotions. A couple of examples:

From the Nick Adams stories:

“In the fall the war was still there, but we did not go there anymore.” Wonderful use of the self-reflective “we” instead of the technically accurate “I.” And the repletion of “there” when most advice says don’t repeat the same word. Through his prose he distilled and found the essence of things.

The first sentence from A Farewell to Arms: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” That cascade of prepositions carries you along and again “in a house in a village” repeats a preposition that works perfectly.

His style entices young writers to imitate him. And, of course, brings the danger of being a copy cat. I took a fiction writing class at KU. The Southern writer Reynolds Price came to visit and would read what we presented to him. I had only a few paragraphs. Here’s one of them:

March Snows

The snows came in March and it was unfair because that same morning there had been the smell of spring in the air. But during the night the snows came, and I awoke when I heard the wind. I got up and parted the curtains and looked out at the street lamp and saw the snow blowing as it collected in drifts around the trees and her car in the driveway. A happiness I did not understand filled me when I looked down at the bed where she slept. I slid down under the covers again and she stirred, her lips slightly parted and her yellow hair everywhere. I pulled her close to me and slowly inhaled our warmth—man warm and woman warm together—as the wind continued to howl

Price called the paragraphs “quite lovely.” But then he was a lovely man. The Hemingway imitation is obvious. But I still like those paragraphs and I hope I learned that finding rhythms and sentences is a virtue, not an imitation.

Hemingway himself became a caricature of his macho self. And the prose ran its course in the same manner. Much wonderful stuff and should be read, of course. But I don’t need them anymore.

There is one Hemingway novel I will, however, keep. Oddly enough, it is one of his most panned works: Across the River and into the Trees. I still don’t understand why, but the evening of the day I received the phone call from my aunt telling me my father had died, I pulled that novel from the shelf and reread it with pen in hand. I underlined passages that were important to me at the unique time in my life.

I will keep that now battered, mutilated book. The other Hemingway books are now gone. Not gone is my desire to complete a simple sentence with the right rhythm to cast the right spell upon a reader.

Faulkner, with his denser prose, could cast spells, too. I enjoyed my swimming, wading, and sometimes slogging through his stories and sentences. But I have no desire to reenter his waters, lush though they were. Hemingway's popularity continues. The son of a couple we are good friends with opened a bar in Westport called "The Pressed Penny Tavern," which many Hemingway fans may recognize. He has an alcove of Hemingway books and memorabilia. I had given him many early editions of Hemingway's work and books about Hemingway. Encourage my KC Facebook fans to stop in and at find out why Gordon Roberts gave his bar that odd name.

So the Hemingway and Faulkner portions of my library have been purchased by owners of Wise Blood, a soon-to-open used bookstore at 300 West Westport Road here in Kansas City.

Selling those collections gave me enough cash for a couple of drinks over which I contemplated my few successes and my many failings. And realizing I am thankful for both and the so many people I have met along the way.

Depopulating My Library, Part I: But Dr. Fu Manchu and PKD Stay On My Shelves

In anticipation of a move from our current house in 2020 I have been depopulating my library. I had already done an initial culling a couple of years ago by simply giving away books from a table on my driveway for any one who waked by. Those were mostly books I was sure I wouldn’t read again or consult. For example, my philosophy books from when I studied that subject at KU and many of which I foisted on a young man who told me he would soon begin his studies at Rockhurst and major in philosophy. “Well, here, you must have St. Augustine’s “The City of God.”  And there was a whole mix of novels I saw no reason to keep.

This time I’ve become more mercenary. I learned of a place that was buying items to open a used book store and thought portions of my collection might appeal. And bring me a bit of money, though I knew it would not be much. This time I went to the heart of my collection. Let me explain.

Harold Bloom died the other day, a much admired but also often reviled literary critic. I thought his “The Western Canon” was not just a list of what he thought were the great works of literature like Dante and Shakespeare, but rather he established a criterion that was something like this: These are the works that made Western Man what and the way he is. (Bloom was not favored by feminists using the male pronoun in this context.) Anyway, it struck me that I should consider what works of literature I had read that made me who I am.

It struck me that as I free up shelf space I should put together the books in my library that formed who I am. I was an early science fiction fan. In high school there was a drug store that was the only purveyor of paperback fiction. I knew on what day the salesman came in to bring in new volume. I snatched up any Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, James Bond and Fu Manchu novel. Fu Manchu captivated me. The yellow peril. The exploits. The exotic oriental women. Knowledge of China by me was a black hole then. It was this mysterious place and our World History textbook didn’t give it much space.

I think that was part of the formula that I was smitten when I saw this oriental woman with long shining black hair walk into my Italian language course when I went to Italy to study that tongue. We’ve been married almost 50 years now.

Don’t think it followed that I excised my Fu Manchu collection. I won’t do that. And since I turned my son onto Philip K. Dick and he has added to the five-foot shelf we have of his works, they will go to him.

When I got to college, my reading expanding greatly. I also realized that I was a reader that when encountering a new author wanted to consume everything. I remember the summer in Lawrence when at the local library I came across their collection of Conrad in a set of volumes. In the volume Conrad wrote an introduction for each title, introductions that to me where the epitome of good writing, as was his fiction.

In one he wrote that his task was “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see.”

That became a kind of mantra to me when I started to attempt writing fiction that has remained my goal for the novels and stories I’ve created.

I collected my Conrad books (except for the 1942 714-page Book of the Month Club selection I’ve displayed above) and took them for sale. It earned me a whole $10, which paid for my bar bill that Saturday. Gave me something to reflect upon as I sipped my Negroni.

I don't know if any of Conrad can be detected in my fiction. I do know that

my novella One More Victim I consider my Heart of Darkness, that for a long time I reread every year. One of the things I admired about Philip K. Dick was his ability to start a story and immediately grab a reader. I hope I learned that lesson in 3 Very Quirky Tales. From Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu story I hope I learned pacing and I hope it shows in Tortured Truths and Heart Chants.

Hemingway, you’re going next.

Beginnings of Stories and Novels

Beginnings.

They’re important for a writer. You hope they’ll be interesting enough to hook the reader. Give them reason to read more.

Here are some of my beginnings I particularly liked:

It Was Me (I)

On my drive home from work Friday evening I stopped at a traffic light, glanced left over at the driver in the other lane and saw myself. No, not the me now, but the me I was some 30 years ago.

Tell Us Everything

Cricket carefully backed her crummy car, which needed a motor mount bolt replaced, down her cousin’s driveway. She was driving extra cautiously these days because her license was suspended and she had two weeks to go on her probation before she could pay the bastards another $90 to get reinstated, which was beyond bullshit because that last DUI was totally fucking unfair. She hit the breaks when she heard Samantha’s voice on the car radio.

The Notebook

 (Jeremy)

I had two phone calls from Don before he killed himself. Each call should have tipped me off. Maybe not the first one, but certainly the second. I couldn't have gone to him anyway, he lived in another state far away. Still, I could have done something, called somebody. I wonder if Don knew at the time of the first call–the first contact I had had with him in three years–that he was going to commit suicide. When do suicides know for sure, just before they pull the trigger?

Blow Up the Roses

Mr. Brown closed the door on the whimpers and walked up the stairs to take a shower. He stood under the stream of water and leaned his head against the wall of the shower stall. "Mommy loves me. Mommy loveth me. Mommy loveth me," he whispered to himself as his heart slowed.

Blue KansasSky

There really is a Kansas sky, wide as the land is flat. On fall mornings it seems as if the stratosphere drops down just before dawn to touch the trees, make crisp the leaves of brown and red and yellow, rise again to paint the sky a deep blue, and leave the air as clean and as fresh as a newly-cut lemon.

Crazy About You

Children who grew up on military bases are called Army brats. Asylum brats were those few of us who grew up on the grounds of state insane asylums where our parents, who worked there, had housing provided by the state. We weren't shoved from base to base, state to state, country to country, so we couldn't claim we didn't put down roots. Instead, we were buffeted between the bizarre personalities among whom we lived, if we chose to know the lives of those mostly benign inmates–excuse me, patients–from whose lunacy our parents earned their livings.

Dark Side of the Museum

I was on my way to report the extraordinary X-ray finding to the chief conservator when I encountered her in the hallway waddling like a penguin toward me in her daily dress of black pants, white blouse, black vest. Stella said, "Ah, Edgar, we need to talk."

Innocent Passage

The skies were cloudy all day.

Since morning, Fred and I had been peering out of the tiny windshield of his car as the overhanging sky loomed above us and met the horizon: flat and far ahead. The black metal skull of his even-then ancient 1935 Ford, with its sets of human eyes, prowled the sand roads across the prairie. It was late afternoon. I was driving. We were both irritable.

One More Victim

The most important summer of my life began with a house-shaking thunder-boomer that woke me up on a Thursday night in 1958 near the end of my fifth-grade school year.

I walked out of my bedroom to the living room and saw Dad, in his brown pajamas, standing at the window looking out and up at the fury in the sky. On a nearby table, the transistor radio was playing softly so he could hear the news of any tornado sightings. He held the flashlight in case the power went off and we had to go to the basement. His hand was tight around the aluminum cylinder, holding it as if it were a club he could use against the weather. Dad had good reason to be cautious.

Rabbletown: Life in These United ChristianStates of Holy America

Bob Crowley, drunk and very tired, almost tripped over the broken toy truck before kicking it out of his way then trudging around the side of the house to the back of a former duplex that now housed six families of 50-some Christian souls. Work on the Great Christian State of Kansas Cathedral went on from dawn to dusk, almost a 14-hour, hot, summer day.

The Saltness of Time

"I like these kinds of snows. They cancel things out."

The voice that broke the silence in the cold room had the gravel-grumble tone that smokers get and keep – even after they stop smoking. The nervous plucking of his hands at his worn, brown sweater said he still missed his cigarettes. His lined, but healthy, blood-perfused face meant he had smoked heavily most of his life before something had made him stop. Bypass surgery, I diagnosed.

SPILL

Fred Underwood was driving his 15-year-old, once-white, now rust-speckled Nissan pickup six miles oven several things happened to him.

He saw a sign announcing—as though proud of the fact—that gasoline at the upcoming station was selling for $4.15 a gallon. He looked into the rear view mirror when he heard a siren and confirmed that, indeed, a police car was chasing him. He uttered, “Shit,” but then felt his body swept with euphoria: an idea smacked him that would make him rich.

StopTime

David Lopez sat at a table on the patio of the most popular outside cafe at the Kansas City Plaza Enclave on a warm, early spring day and was depressed at the thought of how happy everybody around him seemed. How satisfied they all are with their own lives, enjoying this day, their meals and the music of Mozart from the string quartet. His model, Gloria Barnes was snarfling alfalfa-soy sprouts and babbling about her studies in Buddhist logic: "The thing that people don't realize is that Buddhism has a much better grip on what is real than any other philosophy," she said, pausing to curl her tongue to the side of her mouth to catch a wayward sprout. "For Plato, reality is truth. What is cognized as true is real. For the Buddhist, reality is efficiency. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that TOMORROW?"

The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley

Edward Hawthorne had no premonition of the first disturbing and later horrifying consequences that would result from his joining the Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society.

The 41st Sermon

At seven-thirty on a fresh, cool Monday morning in the forty-fifth spring of his life, under a sky the blue of which General Motors used for its 1957 Chevrolet, the Rev. Christopher Talley looked into the trunk of his BMW, aimed his thick, index finger at the objects stored neatly away, and stuck up his thumb.

"Bang," he said, as he pointed his finger at the portable typewriter, depressed his thumb, and heard the knuckle crack. He shifted to take aim at a stack of reference books, and then in rapid order went "bang, bang, bang, bang," at the dictionary, the thesaurus, the Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer. Father Talley aimed the finger next at the large, expandable file and, with the loudest mental bang of them all, blasted that well-worn cardboard structure and all of the pieces of paper the damn thing contained. He thought about pointing the finger at his own head, but reached down instead to caress the fly rod case, pat the tackle box, and run his hand across the stack of journals on studies into ancient Greece he had bound together with cord. He closed the trunk lid, listening to its satisfyingly solid click.

The Fat Cat

I hadn’t seen that good-lookin' motherfucker for almost a year when he walked into The Fat Cat with his partner to ask me about the dead dancer found that morning in our dumpster.

The and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All

I think back to the 1960s too much now. Not sane. A fixation on then is no way to deal with now. My fascination with those times is not the kind of healthy diversion with the past, the way an interest in history can become a worthwhile hobby. Maybe it's worse than a fascination or a fixation; maybe it's an obsession. Can obsessions ever be worthwhile? Probably not. I know I long too much for the psychology of those times, the psychology of others then, of the me then that is so different from the selfish, cynical, jaded, boring psychology of the times, other people and – I fear – the me now.

Why write this? To expunge the obsession? Can't hurt; might help. Maybe in the writing I'll find the worth.

A Short History of the Treatment of the Insane

The current talk about the need for mental health hospitals in light of mass shootings reminded me of a section in my novel Crazy About You, set at a insane asylum in the 1960s.

If you judged a civilization by how it treated its insane, it would modify your opinion of how advanced we were. And are.

Consider.

At first the insane were allowed to roam at will and whipped out of villages when they became a nuisance.When Dante was writing The Divine Comedy, the insane were believed to be possessed and were burned at the stake. In The Divine Comedy the word “bizarre” first appeared to describe a madman.

When Galileo was proving that the Earth went around the Sun, the insane were given holy water to drink from a church bell. If that didn’t work, they were burned at the stake. Want to guess how many times it worked?

About the time that Heidelberg and Cologne Universities were founded, Bethlehem Hospital in London became an institution for the insane. It was so poorly funded that its inmates were given licenses to go begging for food. The hospital was such an ungoverned mess that the way Bethlehem was pronounced, Bedlam, became a word for uncontrolled madness.

In the years Shakespeare was writing his plays, you could take your family on an outing for six-pence and view the madhouse chamber of horrors where the restrained violent, often egged on by visitors, would snap and snarl at you, or you could be entertained by inmates who believed they were Oliver Cromwell, Julius Caesar, and even the Virgin Mary. Great laughs.

In France, while Lavoisier was proving that air was a mixture of mostly oxygen and nitrogen, the inspector general of French hospitals reported that thousands of lunatics were locked up in prisons without anyone even thinking of administering the slightest remedy. The half-mad mingled with the totally deranged. Some were in chains. Some were free to roam. He called them the step-children of life.

Life for normal people in France wasn’t all that healthy, either. Out of 1,000 live births only 475 reached age 20. Only 130 reached age 60.

It was kind of an irony that our own Pinel Building for the Criminally Insane was named in honor of the French doctor during the French Revolution who freed the insane from their shackles. But ironies abound in the history of insanity.

While Harvey was developing his proof of circulation, the inmates at Bedlam were treated en mass. At the end of each May they were all bled, then made to vomit weekly, then purged. The attendants must have dreaded that time of the year.

Into the beginning of the 1800s, when John Dalton introduced the atomic theory into chemistry, the insane were treated with such loony cures as plasters of mashed up Spanish fly, or had the veins in the forehead cut so the head could be bled. Later, on an opposite theory, inmates were strapped in a chair called the gyrator that spun the inmate around so more blood would circulate to his head.

In the late 1800s when society was really getting civilized, Dr. David Yellowless of Glascow developed a surgical attack on what was then called masturbatory insanity, which alienists believed was at epidemic proportions. Dr. Yellowless inserted a silver wire in the foreskin, making erections so painful it would eliminate the crazy-causing things. Other methods called for safety pins to be used on uncircumcised men so that their foreskins were pierced by the silver-coated (to reduce infection) pins through the glans of the penis, also causing pain during erections, another method for eliminating the damnable things.

The Rush Building, where Suzanne was housed, was named after Benjamin Rush, honored as the father of American psychiatry, who firmly held to the belief that masturbation caused insanity. Oh, and he was the fellow who invented that gyrator. And he also believed that blacks were black not because God created them that way but because they suffered from a congenital form of leprosy, mild, to be sure, but enough so it resulted in excess pigmentation.

Rush wrote in his Medical Inquiries upon Diseases of the Mind that masturbation produced seminal weakness, impotence, painful urination, emaciation, pulmonary consumption, indigestion, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, idiocy, and death. A French physician, Pouillet, concurred. Masturbation posed a grave threat. Pouillet wrote: “Of all the vices and of all the misdeeds which may properly be called crimes against nature, which devour humanity, menace its physical vitality and tend to destroy its intellectual and moral faculties, one of the greatest and most widespread -- no one denies it -- is masturbation.”

Freud, too, regarded adult masturbation as a pathologic practice and part of the cause of neuroses.

But, in one of the great turnabouts in the history of psychiatry, therapists later would prescribe masturbation as healthy to the mind and body.

For women, it was once believed that mental disorders were caused by pelvic excitations and clitoridectomies were tried, especially in cases of epilepsy.

Later, sex therapists would recommend masturbation for women, too, as a way to healthy sex.

In the Soviet Union they tried prolonged sleep therapy on the insane. America used hydrotherapy, placing agitated patients in hot water for days so that blood flow increased to the body’s largest organ, its skin, thus lowering respiration and blood pressure and creating a state of relaxation.

In the 1930s the increase of admissions of patients diagnosed as schizophrenic was so high it was theorized there must be a schizococcus germ that could pass on schizophrenia to an offspring. In 1936 a committee of the American Neurological Association hoped that American physicians could someday emulate the clinical efficiency of the Germans in their treatment of eugenics. Germany had over 200 courts to determine which psychiatric and neurological patients should be sterilized. During Hitler’s Reich more than 400,000 sterilizations were counted.

The most effective sterilization is death and the Nazis tested methods of mass murder first on mental patients before they applied them to other undesirable populations. At the start of the Third Reich there were 200,000 patients in mental hospitals. At the end of the Third Reich there were 20,000. An interesting twist in early Nazi civilization is that it was deemed humanitarian to euthanize incurable mental patients, but not Jews. Jews were considered subhuman and so not worthy of euthanization.

From 1909 to 1934 in the civilization called America, California sterilized 15,000 psychiatric patients. Twenty-seven states adopted sterilization laws. They were used often against the retarded.

One attempted treatment for schizophrenia, as well as depression and psychosis, was -- what many people regarded as a kind of euthanasia -- the lobotomy. Its main American proponent, Dr. Walter Freeman, would make driving trips across America to stop at state hospitals and perform the procedure he had simplified to the point he felt that a sterile field wasn’t even necessary. First you anesthetized the patient with electro-shock, rolled back his eyelid, place the tip of instrument, a leucotome, which was a modified ice pick, against his tear duct (which is 98 percent sterile) and drove it through his eye socket with a hammer whack, shoved it into the brain and wiggled it around. Forty-thousand people were lobotomized between 1945 and 1955 in America. In 1949, the Portuguese doctor who first did lobotomies was the co-winner of the Nobel prize for medicine and was cited for discovering the value of freeing the brain from the disturbing effects of its pre-frontal lobes.

Larned State Hospital came from a time when a concern grew that the rate of insanity in America was way too high: one out of 262 persons compared to a rate of one out of 1,000 in Europe. Blamed then was the rapid acquisition of wealth in America, that with luxury, insanity kept pace. It was the price of civilization, some reasoned. The quicker you go rich, the more likely you were to get nutty, too.

So what those patients needed was order and discipline restored to their lives. Asylum superintendents spent much of their time planning, and writing detailed papers on, how a hospital and its buildings and grounds should be laid out. How high the ceilings should be, how boring its wards. How a patient’s day should be structured. Then they rivaled each other by announcing cure rates. A person was cured if he was released back into society. Sometimes a person would be cured five times because they would have to be re-admitted, cured, released and have to be re-admitted. But it upped the cure rate.

Shortly after World War II, when we had learned of the horrors the Nazi’s afflicted on the Jews in the concentration camps, “The Baltimore Sun,” in 1949, printed a series of articles called Maryland’s Shame, which detailed how that state treated its mentally ill. More than 9,000 inmates were crammed in fire-trap institutions designed for 6,000 patients. Few received any treatment. Thousands lived like animals. Many rolled in their own excrement. Others slept nude in the winter because there were no blankets. Attendants, paid less than prison guards, stole patients’ money, got drunk on duty and raped female patients. Sex offenders and small children were housed together.

Oh, and while man was making his great scientific and engineering achievement of walking on the moon in 1969, lobotomies were still being performed.

In 1976, “The Philadelphia Inquirer” would win a Pulitzer prize for a series of articles it ran about the conditions of Farview State Hospital, the institution of last resort for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania. Here, too, hundreds of patients who had no work to do did nothing but sit in ward chairs all day long. Only three percent received any real psychiatric care. Men died after beatings by guards or by other patients, egged on by guards. Such deaths were certified as being caused by heart attacks. There was an unwritten code among guards that all guards present had to hit a patient if one guard hit him. Commitments to Farview were so easy that cases were recorded of a 30-day disorderly conduct sentence turning into a 30-year sentence.

The history of commitment procedures makes for interesting reading, too. For example, in France, in 1737, a father had his son committed because the son was heavily in debt and had been dismissed from the army and so had disgraced himself and his family. In 1697, a French woman was committed because she was the mistress of a nobleman who had practically abandoned his wife, family, and duty because he was so nuts over the skirt. In other words, people were committed as insane who disturbed the social order. When society didn’t have the basis to bring criminal legal proceedings against those who offended it, they found ways to get rid of them by using nut houses to throw them in, nut houses that were such hell holes that, as the old saying goes, if you weren’t crazy when you got there, you would be after you stayed.

Back in the Farview case, all it took was the signature of two physicians, and they didn’t need to be psychiatrists, to certify to a court that the subject was mentally ill and in need of treatment to get him committed. That didn’t secure treatment, but it did secure incarceration, sometimes until the patient died of old age. Finally, a court case was successful that freed the patients based on the cruel and unusual punishment clause in the Constitution. Patients were transferred to civil hospitals or back into the community. A follow-up study showed only a fourteen percent recidivism rate among these 500 patients previously designated by Farview as criminally dangerous.

In 1964, the year I was a junior in Larned High School and living on the grounds of Larned State Hospital, we were living in what one author called the “enlightened fourth phase” of dealing with the insane. Society had moved from 1) being afraid of the mentally ill because they were possessed of evil spirits to 2) simply protecting itself from the insane by chaining them or locking them up to 3) treating them in a humanitarian way by placing them in asylums where they were harbored but not really treated and so suffered chronic anonymity to 4) now seeing mental illness as an illness to be treated and cured.

It’s just we still didn’t really have a clue how the hell to do it.

Later, we’d just give up and send them back into the streets to roam at will, beg for food, be beaten by police, and again be housed with criminals.

Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America

This work continues to be popular:

Reviewer: "Not since George Orwell's 1984 have we had such a chilling look at what the future could be." Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America.

Way back in 1988 Pat Robertson ran for president and it scared the bejesus out of me. The whole religious right still terrifies me. I've always said that if fascism comes to America it will be through the pulpit. The year 1984 had passed with all its references to George Orwell's book and it got me wondering if in the future the religious right won the day what would America look like in 2084? Abortion would not only be a capital offense, pregnancy would be mandatory for married women of child-bearing age. I started the story from the viewpoint of a mason working on the cathedral project for the Pastor Governor of the Great Christian State of Kansas. The book came into shape creating a boy with a remarkable memory for Bible verses.

Summer Sales Special

Summer Sales
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Smashwords was an early entry into the ebook business and early on I used their platform to get into publishing my fiction before using Amazon's service. Smashword's month-long Summer Sales Special starts July 1 and runs to the end of the month. I've put eight of my works at 50 percent off, which means one of them, Downswing, is free! Details of the fiction available for this discount below. Remember, promo code PP725.

Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America

Reviewer
I expected a few things when I started reading this book. I expected to maybe be amused by a satirical take on the Fundamentalists that are doing their utmost to take over this country - sadly, the concept is difficult to make amusing, because the idea of Fundamentalists taking over this country and turning it into an Evangelical theocracy is absolutely terrifying to anyone who wants to live in love and Light. I expected to be outraged by the excesses of Fundamentalist leaders who grow fat and rich off the tithing of their flock, while the common people live in poverty and squalor. I expected to be terrified by the idea of an Evangelical theocracy in general. What I did not expect was to be profoundly moved. I did not expect the overwhelming desire to make this book required reading for everyone. I did not expect goose bumps or a profound feeling of "rightness" to come over me while I read this book.

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SPILL

Here are some fun lines:

“Bartending has given me a wonderful perspective on the needs of the common man.” (The poor saps, she thought to herself.)

The fact that he had passed security checks to become a bonded delivery agent—given the many on-record facts of his own unreliability matched only by the disreputability of his truck—still amazed Fred. No wonder terrorists could fly planes into buildings.

Zoe was neither ugly nor fat, but at 38 she was feeling old and a little bloated.

Something always took whatever savings she was able to amass, which really was a euphemism for quarters in an empty two-gallon goldfish bowl.

But he wasn’t bad looking for a morose, failed-English-teacher, older guy.

“Why, yes, my dear. It is.” Reginald knew she hated to be called “my dear.” “Honey” was an eye-gouging offense.

Blue Kansas Sky

Synopsis: A tale of snooker on the Kansas Prairie, set in Larned, KS. Circa 1965. Larned State Hospital is but a few miles outside Larned,Kansas. Jim, who lives on the grounds where he father, the dentist of the mental hospital, has housing. He rides the bus with the few patients who are granted permission to visit Larned on Saturday mornings. Jim goes to meet a friend to play snooker and learns some valuable lessons about race and also about himself.


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The Saltness of Time

Reviewer: When four young college students get snowed in with a stranger in a small Kansas town, they hear from him a story about an event in his youth that has forever altered his life and his perceptions of the world. Like all of Attwood's stories, The Saltness of Time provides just enough information to give the idea behind the story structure, and to allow the reader to fill in the rest. Beautifully evocative, this is a story that you'll want to savor and re-read. Check it out!

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By Pain Possessed

Can the weakest human save us all?

Reviewer: Like all of Randy's stuff, this is a great piece. Fans of his work won't want to miss it. Those who enjoy thought-provoking ideas and don't mind working a bit to find all the layers should enjoy this also. Definitely check it out - like all of his stuff, I recommend it.

Downswing

Reviewer
Voluptuous, gorgeous - who thought a golf game could be so beautiful?

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The 41st Sermon

This was a strange story - Randy asked if I could assign a genre to it, but honestly, I can't think of any genre it fits into neatly. There is a bit of mild erotica, there are definitely lots of different themes - finding yourself, redemption, finding faith, learning what life is all about - but none that relates itself to a specific genre other than general fiction. I really liked the book, though - it had a lot of good things to say, and I thought the story was one in which many people could find enjoyment, once they get past feeling shocked about some of the issues that come up. I warn that you need to be open-minded about the story, but if you are willing to do so, you should find something in here to love. Check it out!

Remembering Reviewer Katy Sozaeva

Randy's style is intense, his plotting brilliant...terrific writing style. Each of his stories a gem - and each was very different. -- Katy Sozaeva

It’s hard (and sad) to realize that three years have passed since I was among the recipients of a group email that Katy Sazaeva sent informing us that her prognosis was for weeks or months left in her fight with cancer.

Katy was an ardent supporter of my fiction and also edited several pieces.

She reviewed almost all of my works and I thought I’d reprint those reviews here.

Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America

Life-changing, profound, MUST READ, highly recommended

September 2, 2011

I expected a few things when I started reading this book. I expected to maybe be amused by a satirical take on the Fundamentalists that are doing their utmost to take over this country - sadly, the concept is difficult to make amusing, because the idea of Fundamentalists taking over this country and turning it into an Evangelical theocracy is absolutely terrifying to anyone who wants to live in love and Light. I expected to be outraged by the excesses of Fundamentalist leaders who grow fat and rich off the tithing of their flock, while the common people live in poverty and squalor. I expected to be terrified by the idea of an Evangelical theocracy in general. What I did not expect was to be profoundly moved. I did not expect the overwhelming desire to make this book required reading for everyone. I did not expect goose bumps or a profound feeling of "rightness" to come over me while I read this book. I did not expect to want to take to the streets to preach the word of Bobby - to propose that the world would be a better place if we all became ... Bobbites.

You see, 12-year-old Bobby Crowley - the son of stone-mason Bob Crowley, who is working to build a cathedral in Topeka, KS that will be larger and more glorious than any other cathedral in the world - is special. He has an amazing memory for Bible verses, and a strangely wise way of saying just the right thing at just the right time. And he has been carefully watching the formation of a significant alignment of stars in the sky, including a new star that just appeared three months ago, which are coming into a cross-like shape. And on a Friday like any other Friday - a Stoning Friday that would see the stoning to death of a "heathen, a whore, a pair of adulterers and a pair of faggots" - Bobby takes his place among the great religious leaders of the world when he steps forward and speaks the words "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and in the process saves the life of a beatific young woman: he gains a following and begins performing miracles, and providing proverbs of hope, peace and love. Many people believe he is the second coming of Christ.

Caught in his wake are a prostitute, his teacher (himself gay and who has been forcing himself up the weaker boys in his classes), the young woman who had been accused of being a whore and set to be stoned, a seller of banned books, a Catholic friar and many more; they go into Rabbletown, the slums of Topeka, where Bobby spreads the true way - the way of peace, love, acceptance and kindness, rather than the hate and manipulations used by those in power. And in a world where the leaders all revere and emulate the practices and beliefs of that disgusting scumbag Fred Phelps, those sorts of teachings are threatening to the power structure. Bobby and all who believe in him and his miracles are declared anathema and the Inquisition is sent after them.

This book does two things: it exposes the horror of a theocratic, fascist Evangelical Fundamentalist power structure, and it provides hope for redemption for anyone who chooses to live a truly good life, and follow the basic teachings that so many modern-day dogmatics seem to forget are the only two rules laid down by Christ - you know, the one Christians are supposed to emulate? Yeshua Christos told his followers to follow two simple rules: 1) love each other and treat others like you would like them to treat you; 2) love the Higher Power of Creation, in whatever form you choose to comprehend It. It doesn't matter what religion, creed, belief structure or lack thereof you choose to affiliate yourself with, these simple rules are common across almost every single one, and are the only rules that are really necessary to create a world in which everyone would like to live. This book - reading this book - will cause a profound shift in perception and I believe, honestly, that the world would be a better place if everyone followed the example set by Bobby. We all need to become Bobbites. Read this book and see if you don't find these truths to be as profound as I did.

Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All

Randy asked me to read "Then & Now" and give him some ideas of the genre. Like all of Randy's wonderful stories, this one is hard to quantify. It tells the story of Stan Nelson and his time at KU in Lawrence, KS during the events of winter and spring 1969 - 1970, including the riots sparked off when a police officer shot a young, black man. Stan was a sort of hub - center of a group of people who were all involved in the scene in different ways. While there are a number of romance elements in the story, I think it is even more a coming-of-age story - showing how the events and repercussions of the events changed Stan's life and how he dealt with those changes.

Anyone interested in aspects of the 60s' culture and events, and/or interested in how people relate to each other and learn about themselves should find something to love in this story. I was engrossed in it throughout and read it straight through, stopping only when absolutely necessary, and then for as short a time as possible. Like all of Randy's works, I can highly recommend this book to just about anyone.

SPILL

Comic tour de farce, HIGHLY recommended!

October 7, 2011

Fred Underwood, a former English teacher and current delivery carrier, is fed up with the high price of gas. He believes the oil companies are price gouging and decides to take a stand. Together with his friend Zoe X. Quinn (that X is important - read the book and you'll understand), he hatches a plot to not only get some attention to the problem with the oil companies, but to make a bit of money in the process. What he doesn't expect is for the Big Oil companies to sit up and take notice.

Filled with intriguing characters, and an amusing subplot involving skateboarding gamers, "Spill" is a comic tour de farce that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys political satire, generally humorous story-lines, and great writing. Randy has outdone himself on this one - give it a read as soon as possible!

The Strange Case of JamesKirkland Pilley

Chilling and beautifully written - highly recommended

September 3, 2011

Randy Attwood said that he used the Cthulu Mythos as an inspiration for this chilling story; I can definitely see the influence. As the story progresses, and people grow mad and/or kill themselves and others, we learn more about the reason, and the sense of dread grows, as does the sense of unreality. It all starts when a man who has a home at the edge of a park decides that the old, swampy pond needs to be cleaned out and a new, more pristine lily pond made in its place. But as the water is removed from the area, strange happens commence. What is the source of the strangeness, the sense of unease, and the odd behavior of those who live in the area?

While this is short - a novella at most - a lot of story is crammed into it. I highly recommend it for those who are fans of the eerie and strange.

The Saltness of Time

When four young college students get snowed in with a stranger in a small Kansas town, they hear from him a story about an event in his youth that has forever altered his life and his perceptions of the world.

Randy Attwood says this is a story he first started working on in his 20s. Like all of his stories, "The Saltness of Time" provides just enough information to give the idea behind the story structure, and to allow the reader to fill in the rest. Beautifully evocative, this is a story that you'll want to savor and re-read. Check it out!

Crazy About You

Crazy about this book! Crazy about this writer! You should be, too!

September 2, 2012

Brad's father is a dentist at Larned State Hospital - the hospital for the insane - and they live on the grounds of the hospital. Brad also works in the hospital cafeteria, and feels a deep compassion for many of the inpatients. "Crazy About You" details a week in Brad's life - a crazy week that teaches Brad more about life than he really wanted to know. He learns the mysteries of love, learns the true meaning of fear, and is involved in several murder investigations. Just a typical week in the life of a teenage boy? Hardly. But Attwood's involving style and wealth of information make this a highly engaging and interesting read, especially for those who, like me, have always had a fascination with insanity.

One of the many things that I found fascinating about this story was how the early 1960s are portrayed - and how very much like the mid 1980s it was; I think being a teenager, exploring life and learning these things, tends to make every generation think they are unique - but what they don't realize is, that they're really very much the same.

A coming-of-age novel in the hands of a master storyteller, "Crazy About You" is a book in which anyone should be able to find something to enjoy.

One More Victim

One More Victim" is an amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful story (says so right on the cover) - but then, those are my words, the words I said right after I finished editing it - I cried while I was editing it, and I'm not the sort to easily become overly sentimental about a story. It is a coming-of-age story, a story of realizations, a story about beginnings and endings - it is a story I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys a well-spun tale.

Randy Attwood's short stories are also always a treat. Highly evocative, helping the reader connect in even the strangest ways - you can find my individual reviews on most of these stories. As I've said, Mr. Attwood even makes snooker and golf interesting!

I'm so excited to see these two stories paired into a single book, and I think most readers will find something to love here. Check it out - you'll love them!

The 41^st Sermon

For the open-minded, this story of sin and redemption should be as enjoyable as it was for me

October 7, 2011

Father Christopher Talley, an Episcopalian priest, spends a week each year at a resort in the Ozarks. This gives him a chance to escape the constraints of his life as a minister - to fish, to drink, and to spend some time with a woman other than his wife. He also writes his sermons for the coming year. This year, while at the resort, he runs across one of his parishioners, the lovely Molly, who says she is thinking of divorcing her husband and has come to the resort to think about things. That isn't why she is there, of course - but she's bored and decides to seduce her handsome pastor.

This was a strange story - Randy asked if I could assign a genre to it, but honestly, I can't think of any genre it fits into neatly. There is a bit of mild erotica, there are definitely lots of different themes - finding yourself, redemption, finding faith, learning what life is all about - but none that relates itself to a specific genre other than general fiction. I really liked the book, though - it had a lot of good things to say, and I thought the story was one in which many people could find enjoyment, once they get past feeling shocked about some of the issues that come up. I warn that you need to be open-minded about the story, but if you are willing to do so, you should find something in here to love. Check it out!

Heart Chants

Really excellent story

January 1, 2014

This book provides a peek into the legends and lore of the Diné, or as they are commonly known, the Navajo. Their creation story is beautiful.

“In the beginning was the wind. And when the earth came, the wind cared for it. And when the darkness came, the wind breezed across it beautifully. And when the dawn came and laid its lightness over the darkness, We, the People, were created. And the wind kissed our faces.”

Phil McGuire's portion of the story focuses on two young women—Hsu Chi and Zonnie—whom he takes in to try to protect, Hsu Chi from anti-democratic Chinese gangs, and Zonnie from whoever or whatever has taken away two of her friends, also Navajo, from their college. Attwood has obviously done a great deal of research into the Diné culture, legends and lore and shows the reader exactly how beautiful that culture was, and how much the European settlers destroyed in their hubris. I do not know if there are any reparations to be made for the damage we did to the native cultures here, but I find it been heartbreaking how much knowledge has been lost. It would behoove us to find those who have kept this knowledge and preserve it before it is gone forever.

I found the talk Ko-yo-teh had with the old man at the filling station very funny, especially when the old man repeated the message he had sent to the moon in Navajo: “Watch out for these guys; they come to take your land.” Sad, of course, but also very funny. It fits in with the overall theme of the book, which is well represented by this quote: “I'm convinced the deepest passion mankind has is the need to inflict belief on another person. Belief in God, belief in these words as God's words, belief in this interpretation of these words, belief in these acts in the name of God. If it's not religion, it's politics.”

Overall this is a fairly clean book, but I did note some editing errors, mostly extra, missing, or repeated words, awkward commas, and misused words, such as “rationale” for “rational” and “statute” for “statue”. Not enough to lower my rating or lessen my enjoyment, obviously.

Like all of Randy Attwood's stories, this one is absolutely amazing. I kept having goose bumps from reading it. Highly recommended for those who enjoy a good story, especially if you are interested in Native American stories and culture.

Downswing

Voluptuous, gorgeous - who thought a golf game could be so beautiful?

May 3, 2012

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this short story from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis: A lone golfer discovers the fusion between the mechanical physics of golf and the feeling of the soul.

My Thoughts: This is the latest short story from Randy Attwood and will bring me up-to-date again with his works. I like to stay abreast of Randy's writings, because he has such a terrific and interesting style, each book unique but containing a familiar voice. Now, I had to wonder exactly how he would make golf interesting, especially in just eight pages, but I shouldn't have worried. Listen to this description of placing a ball on a tee: And eighteen times this easy gesture, this stooping over with the tee between the fingers, the ball hidden, protected in the perspiring palm, the insertion into ground the wooden link to earth the ball would soon be contacting - all this, for me, had given the gesture a quality of sacredness. Isn't that gorgeous? The story is full of beautiful prose like that.

Blue Kansas Sky

Excellent, multi-faceted

May 2, 2012

Synopsis: A tale of snooker on the Kansas Prairie, set in Larned, KS. Circa 1965. Larned State Hospital is but a few miles outside Larned, Kansas. Jim, who lives on the grounds where he father, the dentist of the mental hospital, has housing. He rides the bus with the few patients who are granted permission to visit Larned on Saturday mornings. Jim goes to meet a friend to play snooker and learns some valuable lessons about race and also about himself.

My Thoughts: Told from the point of view of a person who lives the same life as Brad in Crazy About You, but has a very different attitude toward the inmates of the Larned Asylum, the main gist of the story is about playing snooker. But, like all of Randy's works, that is not all there is to it. I'll say this much - I don't know squat about snooker, but he made the game - which is, I think, a metaphor for other things - very exciting. I won't tell you what I think it is a metaphor for; I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Check it out.

A Match Made in Heaven

Perfect!

April 12, 2012

Synopsis: The Mormons have left the Earth to populate the planet Moroni, finding their destiny among the stars and themselves.

My Thoughts: I have never met a Randy Attwood book that I haven't loved; he has a real talent for bringing his characters to life and creating an environment that is realistic and detailed without going overboard. This is the first science-fiction story he has published, so I was quite interested to see how he did in this story environment. And it was... brilliant!

This is a short story, maybe it could be considered a novella - it took me about an hour to read it through. I am not sure where, exactly, Randy came up with some of the ideas he used in this story (I'll have to ask), but I found the ideas presented evocative and thought-provoking. There are questions of consciousness, how to truly access God (in whatever form that power takes for you), the humane treatment of others, etc. Like all of his books, I highly recommend this terrific story from Randy Attwood.

By Pain Possessed

Synopsis: Can the weakest human save us all?

My Thoughts: I was actually on my way to go to sleep (I have a lot of manuscripts to get through this week, so it's going to be a busy one), I learned that not only did Randy Attwood have a couple new short stories up, but that this one, By Pain Possessed, was currently free! Well, I figured I could fit in a short story; after all, I did have to wait to fall asleep until after 8 a.m. so I could take my medication, right? So, I grabbed the story and opened up in my Amazon Cloud reader and started to reading!

Because this is a short story, it is hard to provide a synopsis that describes the idea behind the story without spoilers - that is, I think, why Randy Attwood went with such a short and succinct synopsis (provided above). This story is about pain - those who enjoy dealing it, those who enjoy feeling it, those who would rather avoid the whole thing... Deeper, there is an undercurrent of facing up to your fears and becoming a stronger person for it, but also a warning about becoming that which you hate and therefore losing sight of yourself. So, there are a lot of ideas put into this short story.

Like all of Randy's stuff, this is a great piece. Fans of his work won't want to miss it. Those who enjoy thought-provoking ideas and don't mind working a bit to find all the layers should enjoy this also. Definitely check it out - like all of his stuff, I recommend it.

3 Quirky Tales

Quirky, and highly readable

September 3, 2011

"Tell Us Everything" - a girl's piercings create a connection that allows her to see truths and broadcast them over the air in a limited area. That doesn't do the story justice - it's a wonderful piece

"It Was Me" - while driving home one night, the narrator looks in the next car ... and sees himself from 30 years ago. Is it really him, or just a crazy coincidence? Then other coincidences start to show.

"The Notebook" - Two people connect over their losses, brought together by an unbelievable confession and a mysterious notebook hidden in an attic. Impossible to describe this story without spoiling it, but it is very powerful. The ending has a twist you'll never see coming.