1 - Stories

Being the oldest and growing up in a large family can be hard, especially when you are gay and the family is extremely homophobic. You are constantly being compared to your deceased father. A man whose stature and deeds are always increasing, as time goes by, and are held up as your goals. Anytime you reach those goals, your mother moves the goalpost further away.

You never seem to measure up. You are always being told that you are worthless and will never amount to anything since you cannot measure up to your father. It never mattered that you were a straight "A" student and that you were an athlete.

Sometimes the connection between two souls is so deep that it transcends time and gender. This is a story about two such souls who are joined and then torn apart—and go on to seek and find each other through time.

Two boys from totally different backgrounds. Two different and equally dramatic histories. Two testing struggles. A tempestuous love affair in a provincial German town. Narrow-minded middle-class attitudes, venomous and hypocritical Catholic morality, archaic, harsh foreign prejudices. Street Art rebellion and a society basking in a false sense of security, ignoring the largest future natural disaster and the threat of war.

The book opens with two introductions and continues through a tumultuous series of events to a not quite inevitable conclusion!

Life is full of random events; tragedy strikes where it will until random goodness displaces the ugliness. Neither event lasts, fades in our collective memories until the roulette wheel of life lands on the unlucky number of some town or city. We’ve become callused…numb…and disbelieving of events outside of our homes, neighborhood, and state. It simply happens somewhere else…until.

Stanley lives a life of quiet desperation with nothing in his life having gone as he'd have wished. After a tragedy, a device shows up that could make everything better than ever, or worse than he thought imaginable. What would you do?

Roan has a pretty normal life. He's managed to buy a house in a nice neighborhood overlooking a lake; he has a decent job, a few groups of friends, and even a god son. What he doesn't have is a lot of experience in romance and, even what he does have has been questionable at best. One night, when the wife of his friend comes to his house with his god son in tow...things start to change in ways he's just not equipped to handle.

A lot can occur in a single day, and this day starts with Virgil Pruitt riding into a sad, struggling Texas town seven years after the end of the Mexican-American War. Sometimes it's not easy to be a good man, one who calls out unfair hate when he sees it, but Virgil doesn't always look for easy. Will he pay the price for being such a man, or will he be rewarded for standing up for young Wyatt Burnham?

Twenty-nine-year-old Sam Miller owns a duplex on the beach and lives there with his fourteen-year-old son, Devon (Devie). He rents out the other half to thirty-five-year-old Taylor Winters and his fourteen-year-old son, Cillian (Cillie). The dads share an attraction to one another, and their kids have an attraction for each other. The two sets of couples decide to explore becoming a family while Taylor, and Sam date, and Cillian, and Devon date.

Best friends, Luke and Matt, have been inseparable since primary school and now, after twelve long years of schooling, the end of those school years are finally within sight. All that is left to do is make it through the night of the school formal, before starting their final exams.

So what will the night bring for the boys and their group of friends? What secrets are about to be exposed? How will they, their families and their friends all react to the events that are about to unfold? And what will they discover about themselves . . . about each other . . . and about life?

When a homophobic baker refuses them service, Sam and Robby's attempt to buy a wedding cake turns into a nightmare.