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 58
The murder of Sandra Donaldson was the most exhilarating moment in Freddie’s life as a 63-year-old bachelor. It was the first time he had ever acted independently of his twin brother Frankie, other than in the privacy of his home, and those times were just in his mind. ‘The Olinger brothers can’t be blood brothers.’ That was what Freddie had heard all his life. Frankie, according to a close circle of friends since high school, a group of fawning idiots as bright as a shot bulb, was always considered ‘the hog.’ By this, they meant he was smart. One thing these imbeciles got right was hogs are smart, but they were seriously wrong to believe Frankie had real intelligence. On the other hand, Freddie was known as ‘the sheep,’ dumb as a bah bah.
No one, not even Frankie, the man and brother Freddie worked beside every day at Sand Mountain Tire & Muffler for going on half a century, knew the real Freddie. It was what he wanted. He lived alone, in the same little house on Fern Dale Drive that his long-deceased parents had left him in their joint will. Secretly, Freddie was a reader and a thinker—not that the two activities could be separated. Unlike what he always told his brother, Freddie spent almost every waking moment outside his day job in a book instead of watching television. Frankie would be amazed to see nearly twenty thousand books standing alphabetically erect along book shelfs lining every wall in the house.
Other than reading, there was one other activity that Freddie loved. And hated. It too, according to Freddie, was a book of another sort. The public knew it as Facebook. To Freddie, it was Heartbook because through this internet social media phenomenon, one can learn the inner most character of a person. It was not until Barack Obama was elected President that Freddie got really interested in Facebook. During the campaign, he had read everything published on the bright young man from the windy city of Chicago. Freddie, if he had believed in God, would have ascribed Obama’s coming as the most cherished gift God could have bestowed on America since Thomas Jefferson. Obama was intelligent, compassionate, articulate, and possessed the type of strength that wasn’t on display, but humble and controlled. His coming was the best thing that could happen to America, especially after eight years of idiot George.
But Facebook changed Freddie’s mind. Not at all concerning President Obama. He was everything and more a United States President should be. What changed for Freddie was his belief that Southern Baptists were as dumb and harmless as sheep. During the eight years Obama was in the White House, Freddie became infected with a rage he had never known. It was a rage against racism. As a rule, Southern Baptists hated Obama. This flew in the face of Freddie. Although he hadn’t been to church in four decades, he knew this was pure hypocrisy. Freddie’s library had been the protective wall that held his rage at bay. As the days of Obama’s administration ended, Freddie became hopeful that things would change when Hillary was elected. Surely, since she was white, Americans would receive and welcome her as President with open arms. When Andrew Kane came on the scene, Freddie’s knowledge made another leap of progress. He learned Southern Baptists just loved to hate. They had become so political that anyone who didn’t subscribe to loathing the homosexual was a liberal akin to a Hitler. Perfect timing is rare in life, especially in American political life. But it happens. And, it happened with President Andrew Kane. According to all of Freddie’s reading, it was impossible.
Impossible for a man so poorly qualified in every way to be elected as President of the United States. But, it happened. And, only because evangelicals decided it was better to get in bed with the devil himself than to try to understand and support a woman who was open to gays and lesbians.
If the Facebook praising of President Kane was sickening enough, what bothered Freddie the most, what got his rage bubbling over the wisdom of his library, was the unwillingness to leave Barack Obama alone. Freddie learned through his Facebook reading that there was an entire clan of local folks, all faithful, diehard, Southern Baptists, whose hatred for the black man, the man they referred to as a buffoon, was relentless. This was the clearest evidence Freddie needed to start ridding the neighborhood of a few of these walking and talking idiots. Did they not know that a buffoon is a ‘a ludicrous figure, a clown, a gross and usually ill-educated or stupid person’? Someone who was so retarded he couldn’t come within a million light-years of associating Barack Obama with a buffoon. Then, a week before Freddie murdered Sandra Donaldson, he realized it wasn’t that these Southern Baptists were retards, it was because they were racists. Deep in their hearts they housed the worst type of hatred. This blinded them to the truth. This was dangerous, especially with a man like Andrew Kane as President. Freddie, feeling an exhilaration, one he had never felt, knew, finally knew, his life purpose. It was to protect America from those like his brother Frankie, those who are hellbent on destroying the decency and respect embodied in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ Freddie knew he couldn’t change the mind of every idiot in America who still hated Barack Obama, but he could be a shepherd to lead a few local haters over the edge and into the abyss.
The Pencil-Driven Life 