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 83
For the past several weeks I had guided my Boaz Stenographic column far away from religious and political subjects. My favorite had been writing in response to Darlene Hawkins statement, “dogs are more human and humane than humans.” I used this time and space to include a ton of examples from my experience with Golden Retrievers to agree with Darlene’s statement.
This week, by default, would be a return to the most dangerous subjects in the world, especially given it was only three days until, possibly, the most important presidential election in the history of the United States. My choice of subject was limited because there was no submission other than those that addressed religion and politics.
The Sand Mountain Reporter’s selection committee chose James Blevin’s statement, “Salers is an atheist, Kane is a Christian, enough said.” The buzz caused by this post had dominated the Reporter’s online community. At first, I thought the committee surely could have selected something more specific, like a statement dealing with the possibility that the next president could select three Supreme Court justices, or the insanity of President Kane taunting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un into a nuclear war. However, over the week I had to write my column, I became thankful for Blevin’s statement. It said a lot more than I initially thought.
Since November 8, 2016, when eighty-one percent of white evangelical Americans cast a vote for Republican presidential candidate Andrew Kane, much had been written about their reasons. One thing seemed clear. It was in no way because his life exemplified the Biblical Jesus. Kane was, as one national reporter put it, “an unrepentant, thrice-divorced, self-professed sexual predator with a penchant for pathological lying who ran a campaign of unbridled hate, fear mongering, bigotry, racism … and more lying.” Then, and now on the eve of determining whether this man would continue to possess the most power endowed upon any man in the world, I had remained confused over why Christians had so wholeheartedly abandoned their 2 Corinthians 6:14 mantra, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” But, as I thought and wrote I concluded that American Christianity was undergoing a monumental shift. It was no longer so important what a man did, but simply what he said. Kane, had always said he was a Christian. A few articles I had read had said that since faith alone is what determines a man’s salvation, placing too much emphasis on a man’s works cheapens Christianity. To me, this sounded as rationalizing to achieve a goal, an attempt to scoot around charges of hypocrisy.
Eric Salers said he did not believe in God. He said this, like all atheists, because he had not been presented with sufficient evidence to believe there is a God. Salers, a Democrat, was as good a man as one could find in America. He was a successful businessman with an impeccable reputation. He had been married for thirty years to the same woman and they had four children. Salers had always donated large sums of money and time to charity. He had spent the past ten years as a Senator and focused heavily on creating jobs and health-care for the poor and needy. Salers had declared in 2016 that he was an atheist and had barely won reelection as a U.S. Senator. It seemed it was based on who he was as a human, on what he had done. It hadn’t hurt that he was a Senator from California. If he had been from Alabama, he would have been tarred and feathered. Now, running for President, he had done surprisingly well to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.
Every week in dealing with my column when the subject is either religion or politics, I continued to be amazed and appalled at the broad-based ignorance of the Reporter’s readers. Do they believe that atheists are evil? Why do they have more respect for a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Buddhist than an atheist? Aren’t all non-believer’s atheists? Why do evangelical Christians hate the lost they say they are evangelizing? Is it simply because the atheist is courageous enough to say, ‘I’ve considered your position and I’m not persuaded?’
It sure seems to me that, just as I was taught to do as a kid, growing up in a Southern Baptist Church, you can’t think about these things. You must take it on faith. You must believe the Bible is true. God created the universe less than 10,000 years ago and but for the fall by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, there would be no evil today. Some way as a teenager I had seen through the lies, the attempt at brainwashing. I had been lucky or something, but millions of people, dozens of people I knew and cared about, hadn’t been able to escape.
The fact is, once a group of people, like evangelical Christians, have a cause, let’s say abortion, they will hitch their wagon to the Devil himself to win a battle or a war. I truly don’t believe the real issue is abortion, but simply the thirst for power, the pride of being in control, no matter reasoning and argument to the contrary. Otherwise, evangelical Christians’ supposed love of life would extend onwards as the unaborted child grows up. They would fight for gun control and oppose the death penalty. But, that’s not what happens.
After wallowing in the mud of Christian hypocrisy, I finally realized that evidence didn’t matter. What truly mattered to these folks was what they believed the Bible said. They truly were willing to trust in a 2,000-year-old book that, without a doubt, had clearly been proved false on many issues. They were fine with no evidence for Moses or for the Israelite’s escape from Egypt, no evidence for the Resurrection. Most of them completely ignored the enormous body of evidence that the universe is billions of years old.
Clearly, what mattered was that a person said he had faith in the Christian story. Nothing else mattered. When I finished my column, I knew that all my efforts to prevent President Kane from being elected were in vain. There was nothing that could stop him. He was a Christian and Salers was an atheist. Enough said.
The Pencil Driven Life 