Stories

Barnegat Bay is a romance, which starts on the Jersey shore in the summer of 1932. It focuses on its narrator, Doc, and his friends Mike, Larry, Al, and Spence, summer lifeguards soon headed into their senior year at CCNY -- the City College of New York. This is in the uncertain times and job market of the still early years of the Great Depression, just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. Joining the guys are Mary and Claire, local to the area but no less ambitious for their lives, and in fairly close by New York City, Doc's parents.

It may initially seem an odd book for this site, but, believe me, it's not.

The Waldron police -- Chief Owen Neland, Lt. Ike Omari, Detectives Elena Petrakis and Don Burris, and Sgts. Jae Ryu and Rob Perez -- are on another case. But this time, it's their own

These are the original, annual, New Year's letters that I sent to my friends from 1993 to 2001. That was from two years after I moved into the building to a year-and-a-half after I left.

As mentioned, the letters were the basis for the book, and they often overlap the same material. But they cover more time and more characters, and are sometimes funnier because they're more compressed and somewhat more rude.

The continued adventures in sex and friendship, online and off, of Alan Damschroeder, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, high school teacher.

Alan says, "Sometimes I think it takes a triumvirate of saints to keep me out of trouble."

These stories are written as exchanged e-mails and reading this way is an acquired taste. But the first book of this series, Web Guys, has a small, loyal following, so here's the second.

593 Riverside Drive is a kind of drawing room comedy about the difficulty a woman living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1925 has in getting a divorce and the narrow-mindedness of one of the male lawyers in the subsequent trial. Still, there's a lot of humor in the rudeness, especially when Uncle Herbert's around. The book will serialize on Fridays, probably through November -- WELL, THAT HIT A MAJOR SETBACK WHEN I HAD A TRULY UNEXPECTED STROKE ON OCTOBER 2ND. NOW, I'M HOPING TO FINISH EDITING AND POSTING BY THE END OF FEBRUARY 2024.

Billy wants a relationship. Badly. And that's just what he gets.

This is a darkly funny Roadrunner cartoon. No matter where it starts, the coyote gets it in the end.

Be careful when you rub part of your body thinking it's a genie lamp.

This was written for a friend of mine, who contributed the first three chapters.

Two guys and a dog load into a 10-year-old pickup truck and spend two months driving the perimeter of the United States. It doesn't directly show, but over the course of the two months, the narrator falls in love with the driver -- and with the dog.

Events on a small New England college campus, following an exceptional one. Gil Andrus and his husband, Pete Sordan, follow through the usual faculty politics and the unexpected mystery. And Don Burris, the detective from The Pendleton Omens, reappears.

Note: this book shares roots and occasionally overlaps with my other book, Quabbin, which is also set in Waldron, Massachusetts, though in a national clothing company. But they're different books with different sensibilities.

In a small Western Massachusetts former mill town, now part of a larger college circuit, a Chinese-American high school student is suspected of selling drugs simply because he's recently moved from New York City.

The students know about it. The principal knows. The teachers and staff members have heard about it, too.

When one of the school's security guards learns too much, she calls the Waldron police, and Detective Elena Petrakis leads the investigation.

Backing her -- as in Recycle -- are Chief Owen Neland, Senior Detective Don Burris, Lt. Ike Omari, and Sgts. Jae Ryu and Rob Perez, who offer advice and support.