BED BUG STEW, Tales and Poems on Roots, Revenge, Redemption, and Baseball is now on Pre-sale. All royalties, 100%, during the presale period go to veteran support groups. The books will be delivered starting November 18, 2023.
Go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Xulon Bookstore websites to get your pre-order in, now! Don’t forget to read an excerpt below!
From the back page:
BED BUG STEW Is two books in one volume!
First is a compilation of short story fiction and poetry on a wide range of subject matter: science fiction, messages from the heart, and a little terror thrown in. You will laugh out loud and shed a tear, and you will remember all the characters and their flaws, strengths, motivations, and sometimes the depths of their souls.
You will meet a senior citizen who hears other people’s thoughts through his hearing aids, a football coach who shuns interviews, a widow who changes her life for one that she loathed, a mason whose soul has been crushed, a man who claims to have been in thousands of movies, and a ballplayer whose best moments were off the field. And many many more…
The second book is the author’s first-person account of his attendance at the New York Yankee Men’s Fantasy Camp in January 2023. Yes, it is hilarious.
Get a copy for yourself, your favorite reader, and that particular Baseball fanatic in your life (or all of them! There is something for everyone!).
BED BUG STEW is an adult collection, not to be compared with my other venture in illustrated children’s books… which are available on Amazon, exclusively.
Excerpt from the introduction:
“Bed Bug Stew” comes from a ditty my father had us four kids sing on car trips in the 1960’s. It is sung to the melody of The Star-Spangled Banner:
“Oh, say can you see? Any bed bugs on me?
If you do, pick a few; and we’ll have Bed Bug Stew!”
I have sung this inside my head and out loud every day, since forever, and I will continue to do so. It can’t be helped. If there are other verses, I have never heard them.
Everything in Book One is fiction, a product of my dreams.
Sometimes we have a thought that compels us to get up and write it down. Not all of them are productive or funny or moral. In the darkness and quiet of early morning we hear a whisper to get up and do, to write. Many words and pages are stricken, many others are developed, and a precious few are like locomotives, impossible to stop.
This whisper is not a distraction for us. It’s the best friend we have. Henry Miller said, “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” I am the contradiction of that advice. Would that I may just write one thing at a time.
Novels can be read in one sitting, like eating a meal, light or heavy, and can fill us or bloat us or satisfy a hunger or satiate a craving or cut to a buried memory. Sometimes we can’t finish at one time and come back to it later, and sometimes we just push it aside and say, “enough.”
The reader is making an investment in his or her time and brain function and I hope I have respected that. Reading is not a passive activity. In this book, I believe that you may want to read only one or two submissions here at a time, over time; a well-worn book that is kept on the nightstand can be another friend that helps us sleep… or keeps us awake.