Excerpt from Novella: "The Saltness of Time"

I've always liked this part from The Saltness of Time:

"The quiet was remarkable. I had never known quiet could have such intensity. The wind had stopped. No tree limbs creaked. The highway was shut down, so no rumble of distant semi-trucks existed. I started thinking how I had never heard such a silence before when I realized I was feeling vibrations. Sensory deprivation will cause hallucinations. Maybe it was the lack of sound that made me believe the acres of snow had become a vast sounding board stretching over the prairie and bringing to me the vibrations of its past. But there was no doubt to me then, nor is there now, that I heard Indian ponies passing in the night, and I could feel the heart throbs of a terror-struck pioneer family, huddled, praying for God to protect their lives in a dismal soddie. I heard, then, too, the shouts of children in an ancient Pawnee settlement, ignorant of what would follow a Spaniard's search for gold. I heard a shovel scoop out earth to make room for a tiny coffin, and sobs tore at my heart. My body was rocked by the thuds of buffalo bodies, one after another, hitting the prairie as a hunter decimated a herd. And then I actually felt the vibrations as the first plow ripped the sod and make the entire prairie sigh. It sighed the word 'land.' Land, it's a word as magic as the sea, isn't it? There even reached to me the sounds of monster fish from when Kansas was, for thousands of years, a great inland sea, only to dry up, like dreams, and leave beds of salt and shark's teeth for a Kansas boy to wonder at."

And look at that. A sentence ending with a no-no: "at."

Hey, It's Okay to Admire What You've Written

Well, sometimes you reread something you've written and say, "Damn, that's good:" From One More Victim

Her face at that moment is still the sweetest vision I have ever seen. It was full of yearning, yet already satisfied. Her complexion mirrored the innocence of her heart, untouched yet by the cruelty of the world and the far greater cruelty of our expectations for ourselves in that world. She opened her eyes and leaned her forehead to rest against my lips. I whispered her name as though it were magic. We were in another world.

Thanks to a Hutchinson Photographer I Have a New Image for Cover of "One More Victim"

I think one of my favorite things about the internet is Facebook. Yes, I spend too much time on it. I got on because it seemed an avenue to promote books. It became a lot more. It became a place to meet really neat and nice and interesting people, so many of them with different talents.

One of those persons is a photographer from Hutchinson, Kansas, where I started my adult career as reporter and later an editor at The Hutchinson News.

I don't remember how I first met Kristen Garlow Piper on FB, but meet her I did and enjoyed her photos of the remodeling of a Hutch downtown building into apartments. Appreciated, too, her many other photos. She seems to specialize in weather shots. I got her permission to use one of her rural photos for the cover of the short story Innocent Passage.

The other day she posted an image that just blew me away. I have fun taking a photo to see how it might work as a book cover. Here's the original image.

Here's the fun cover I did for a non-existent book.

Then I thought: hey, I do have a story that would be perfect for this cover. So I changed the cover for One More Victim to use this cover.

Curious why the story One More Victim works for this image? You're just going to have to get that ebook.

Photo details: Kristen used a standard night shot/tripod with cable release - ISO 100 - Shutter open 30 sec - 1/100 shutter speed. She said storms had been building all evening with the lightning starting around 10 p.m. She shot it with a Nikon D7000 and a Nikon 24-70 lens.

Are You a Kindle Unlimited Subscriber?

Kindle offers for $9.99 free access to hundreds of thousands of books. Thought I would list the works I have enrolled in that program:

Novel: Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All Set in Lawrence, KS and The University of Kansas during that turbulent spring of 1970

Novel: The 41st Sermon Episcopal priest at mid-life and mid-faith crisis gets involved with beautiful blonde parishioner and her phony kidnap plot

Sci-fi short story By Pain Possessed Can the weakest human save us all?

Short story about a solo round of golf: Downswing



Sci fi novella: A Match Made in Heaven The Mormons leave Earth to populate the Planet Moroni and discover their destiny among the stars and themselves

Literary novella: One More Victim Because the Holocaust is a critical element in this three-part story, it has broken through the top 100 in world literature>Jewish

Collection of shorts: Hospital Days 14-year-old boy learns some life lessons working as a candy striper in a small town hospital

Short story. The Richard Dary Weight Loss Institute The best weight loss program is the one you can't remember

Golf, the Supreme Sport

This is the newspaper column I wrote that led me to compose the fiction short story Downswing.

Golf, of course, is the supreme sport. I use sport here in the truest sense of the word. More people may watch baseball or football. Youth baseball and beer-belly, adult softball may its legions. More sweat may be produced on the tennis courts. Golf shines as the pinnacle of sports and self-involvement.

In the first place, a normal physique is more than adequate for the game. To play football, you have to be bear. To mash home runs you need forearms the size of Easter hams. But, even the most svelte of forms can learn to knock the golf ball a respectable distance. The over-muscled and large-sized man who tries to use his force alone to crush the golf ball will find it dribbling off the tee in mockery or whizzing in a slice lost amongst the trees.

Timing, rhythm, grace, and balance are the qualities to make a golf ball sit up and take notice. Grip the golf club too hard and you destroy the muscular fluidity golf requires. Bad shots bring tension; tension leads to more bad shots. Golf teaches the blend of mental balance and muscular control.

No other sport requires the full range of using one's muscles: from crushing a drive to tickling a delicate putt ,the small "plunk" in the hole the required sound so the previous satisfyingly crack of the drive has real meaning.

Baseball players who can knock the ball over the fence tell me that feeling is nothing compared to the glory of a long drive. "It makes you shiver all over."

Other sports require umpires and referees. The dishonest golfer suffers in his own hell: taking gimmes on putts he's not sure could make, not counting strokes he ought, playing Mulligans. There are hundreds of ways to cheat at golf, but the one who is cheated is the golfer himself. Most learn this soon. Most beginners soon find satisfaction in honestly breaking 100 on a decent course, breaking 100 with no gimmes, no Mulligans and all the penalty strokes counted.

You've seen baseball, basketball, and football players whine, cry, shout, argue with officials about penalties called. The real golfer, with only God as his witness, calls penalty strokes on himself.

In what other sport does the key point of action before a crowd bring that crowd to absolute silenced? It exemplifies that key element in golf that makes it supreme – courtesy.

Talk about your game of inches! After traversing 440 yards on a long par four, the game, the tournament, one's wits may come down to the small white ball taking one more roll to plop victoriously into the hole – or sit in abject misery at its edge.

In golf, you can play along or with friends, with strangers, or with enemies. And you learn something new about yourself – and them – every time.

Golf is a sport that will last your lifetime. You can begin it young and finish your life with it as an old man. What other sport, besides fishing, can be your lifetime companion?

Golf is a harsh but lovely mistress: lulling you, exciting you, embarrassing you.

Ben Hogan once noted that it should be perfectly possible for someone to birdie every hole, yet no pro has ever shot 18 under in a PGA tournament. Golf has no master. The best you can hope for, dream for, dedicate your life to, are those precious moments of sacred bliss when individual shots work and you are left alone in the universe with your humble glory.

Short Story "Confidence" Published by New Digital Publication "Eleven to Seven"

Thanks to an alphabetical listing, my short story "Confidence" is the first story listed in a new digital publication "Eleven to Seven." I think we're going to see more and more of these sorts of creative outlets open up. I hadn't published "Confidence" myself, so I am glad it has now found a home. The author who gives away his fiction for these sorts of endeavors hopes exposure to the published piece prompts a reader to search for more of his or her work.

I wrote "Confidence" when I was in my twenties. I was exploring the short story environment. I thought the piece of fiction at less than 500 words worked well, but it was never accepted to the literary journals where I submitted it. And so it sat in the file cabinet for, well, decades now.

I think it shows what can be accomplished in the short format. A character is established and something life-changing occurs to him. The challenge is to make it occur for the reader in a convincing and connecting sort of way. Hope you'll check it out.