The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Stenographer, written in 2018, is my fourth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Walt Shepherd, a 35 year veteran of the White House’s stenographic team, is fired by President Andrew Kane for refusing to lie.
Walt returns to his hometown of Boaz, Alabama and renews his relationship with Regina Gillan, his high school sweetheart, who he had ditched right before graduation to marry the daughter of a prominent local businessman. Regina has recently moved back to Boaz after forty years in Chicago working at the Tribune. She is now editor of the Sand Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper.
Walt and Regina’s relationship transforms into a once in life love at the same time they are being immersed in a growing local and national divide between Democrats and traditional Republicans, and extremist Republicans (known as Kanites) who are becoming more dogmatic about the revolution that began during President Kanes campaign.
Walt accepts two part-time jobs. One as a stenography instructor at Snead State Community College in Boaz, and one as an itinerant stenographer with Rains & Associates out of Birmingham.
Walt later learns the owner of Rains & Associates is also one of five men who created the Constitution Foundation and is involved in a sinister plot to destroy President Kane, but is using an unorthodox method to achieve its objective. The Foundation is doing everything it can to prevent President Kane from being reelected in 2020, and is scheming to initiate a civil war that will hopefully restore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.
While Walt is writing a book, The Coming Civil War, he is, unwittingly, gathering key information for the Constitution Foundation.
Will Walt discover a connection between the Foundation and the deaths of three U.S. Congressmen in time to save his relationship with Regina, prevent President Kane from being reelected as the defacto head of a Christian theocracy, and the eruption of a civil war that could destroy the Nation ?
Chapter 4
My meeting with Dean Naylor was cut short by a ‘human issue’ as he called it. Seems like an assistant coach and the new head basketball coach hired during the Christmas holidays were having difficulty expressing brotherly love. During the twenty minutes we had before Naylor was called to the gymnasium, we discussed the second semester stenographic course I was to teach on Monday and Thursday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., including lab time. From his bragging about Snead State winning last year’s Tri-State Regional Stenographic Tournament, I could tell he had high expectations. He also was supportive of my decision to stand up against the President. As Naylor was rushing out of his office he said, “Thanks for being a man of principle when you chose truth over job security. Let’s have lunch one day soon and I’ll introduce you to a couple of other supporters.” With that, he was gone leaving me sitting in his office.
For five minutes or so I continued to sit and reminisce. After graduating from Boaz High School in 1972, I couldn’t make my mind up about what profession I wanted to pursue. So, I spent the next year here, what was then called Snead State Junior College, taking general curriculum courses. The Dean’s secretary came in and said she had to run an errand and needed to lock-up his office. I walked out and instead of descending the nearby stairs to the first floor I walked down the long hallway towards the classroom Jennifer and I had taken a Speech class together. The room was the old auditorium. I sat down in a seat closest to the area I remembered sitting every day during that semester. I imagined Jennifer right beside me, her blowing that crazy, unruly black curl out of her right eye. That was January 1973. Where in hell had forty-five years gone? “You got to leave, I’m locking up.” A short, older man holding a key ring with a hundred keys shouted from the double doors by the hallway.
The Pencil Driven Life 