Late July with excerpts

It’s no ordinary Friday, as the late July sun shines on my new book Shifting Sands Short Stories. The paperback came out at the beginning of July.

Writing, collecting and publishing the stories that I have gathered for over more that two decades wasn’t a walk through the strawberry fields by any means.

On the contrary, the stories and their characters are not Shallow.

Check out one of the major characters, professor Martin Duggan who struggles with his own perfection.

Excerpt from the Temptation of Martin Duggan short story:

“He walked to his gray Chevrolet, the only brand he trusted over the years. Just like everything else Martin had ever owned, it was perfectly clean. He didn’t forget to grab a bottle of cold diet Coke from the machine.

Driving through Rocky Rapids was a balsam on his nerves. The town was neat and clean too with a few banks, a video store, a car dealership and a long gone Spartan grocery store.

Rose used to shop there, when they still loaded groceries into cars back in the 1980s. As a remnant of the past, there was a Bear furniture store, a drive up restaurant and a Dairy Queen by the city park and creek.

It could have been a perfect day, in a perfect life in a perfect town of one perfect professor and a perfect couple.”

At one of my newspaper jobs, the publisher called me shallow for not following up on a major story about a Belding boy who delivered his sister in the bathroom of the family home. After being syndicated by the Associated Press, the story made it to the Dave Letterman Show.

Dave held up the front page of the Ionia Sentinel-Standard with the story.

However, I did not know about that, another paper reported on that.

“You are shallow and selfish,” said the publisher.

I remembered that. I will always remember that.