Writing Update – February 2024

Hello ladies and gentlemen, how’s everyone’s Saturday going? I am currently working on my debut novel, Resistance Rising, while jamming out to SiriusXM Octane on my Alexa device.

Here, though, is a bit a sneak peek into what I’ve been working on. This is a peek into Chapter 5. The hope is to finish up writing this chapter and maybe the next few over the weekend in between working on college coursework.

Here’s also to hoping you will enjoy this snippet into Chapter 5.

And I always like to say Peace, Love, and Rock&Roll

Tragedy Struck 7 years ago

Morning and Happy Halloween ladies and gents. Be safe out there today and DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE!! 7 years ago today I lost this little man, Kayden Michael, my 1st born son, to a drunk driver. Think of him and the countless others who have lost their lives to tragedy #Halloween

Murder @ Central City Teaser

Hello All and Welcome to my story time. I just wanted to stop by real quick and share with y’all a quick teaser of this horror/serial thriller that I am currently working on outside of my Military fiction. I hope y’all will enjoy this little sneak peak and leave some comments below and share with your friends and family so they can see a sneak peak as well.

The running title at the moment as you can see above for this story is, Murder at Central City but that could always change before the ending is written. But alas, I hope you enjoy this sneak into what I’m working on and I hope to post again very soon with other story ideas and just random thoughts on my mind.

So, enjoy 😁

It was a full moon tonight. When you looked up at the moon, it was shining a nice bright orange hue of a harvest moon. You could see the indentations of the craters that litter the light side of the moon. But the tide was high tonight, so it made for the perfect time to send a body off into the ocean piece by piece for the sharks and fish to munch down on. It turned out to be a near perfect way to rid yourself of the evidence when you have murdered someone. I say near perfect because there have been instances in the past where a body had come to shore after part of it wasn’t destroyed by marine life. That was where others made mistakes. You needed to make the body parts as small as possible and spread them out over a longer distance so as to not make it obvious of a particular dumping spot along the coast for the authorities.
Tonight though, was the night I would be ridding myself of one of several victims I had laid claim to over the years. Thankfully though, I have yet to have been caught on to by the local authorities or the feds. But with the number of women I now had under my belt that have disappeared, it was sure to be sooner rather than later that they would catch onto the disappearances of these women.
Although, I always think, maybe it’s because of the type of women that I have been selecting from the crowds. They were women who really didn’t get on the chat rooms or have many friends or family around them. They were mostly runaways that nobody cared for or would really pay much attention to if they did disappear for a long time without a word. This was the 90’s when the internet was barely a thing. AOL was just making its initial up and coming. We had yet to start truly discussing the possibility of Y2K as it was still a few years off. Cell phones weren’t much of a thing unless you had money. And the technology wasn’t extremely easy to track and trace where someone had been the night they disappeared.
It really made for the perfect time for serial killers and other crimes of passion to occur without the risk of getting caught. It was definitely the perfect moment for someone like myself to snatch a woman in a bigger city where they’d barely be noticed to have disappeared because of the way they lived their lives. The young lady could be highly attractive but because she was so addicted to the drugs and/or alcohol, nobody would think that these young ladies had been murdered or they wouldn’t be surprised by it, to say the least.
The young lady I had taken tonight was one of those I mentioned before. She was a very attractive young woman who happened to fall on a hard drug known as cocaine. An ex-boyfriend of hers had gotten her highly and quickly addicted to it when she was just 17 years old and she had a falling out with her family. They wanted nothing to do with her or the boyfriend. She would steal money and other valuables from her family and use it to get the next fix.
This led to her getting into trouble with the law but due to a large overcrowding in the prisons, she was released early from her sentence due to “good behavior” and because she didn’t have a home to go to, she was sent to a halfway house for recovering addicts when they were released from prison. This led her back to her ex faster than a bullet travels out the barrel of a gun though. The first night she was out of the prison, she snuck out of the building where her sleeping quarters were and ran back to her ex to get some more cocaine to get high.

Life in Pain

Hey guys, it’s Gary. Just coming to you from the lobby of my counseling office I go to. I wanted to write this post to say how much I appreciate each and every one of you who come here and interact with my stories. I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your day to read what I write here. I will be trying my best to keep up with posts at least once a week or more for y’all. I am hoping to be able to build this page I’ve created up to a standard that everyone is welcome here and that we all have a good time reading the stories and story ideas I write down for ya.

But to get to the point of the title of this particular blog I’m writing here for you to read, we have to go way back to the year of our Lord, 2015 and to the date of Halloween that year.

It was a fateful day to start. My fiancée (now wife) was roughly 7 and a half months pregnant with our first child, a boy we had decided to name Kayden Michael. We were out having dinner and watching a movie with my baby brother, who just happened to have turned 18 years old the day before. We had taken him out to the local Hometown Buffet in a small town named Visalia, where I had grown up in. We were traveling home after having gone and watched Jurrasic World at the local theater. We were headed back to my mother’s house in Tulare, where I was born and raised most of my young life.

It was roughly 12:08am on Halloween morning, though, when our lives would be changed forever on that fateful night. We were traveling down the rural highway, known to the locals as Mooney Boulevard, when we drive past the sign that lets you know you’ve entered my hometown. Nearby were some stores that were closed for the night. The only store opened was the gas station at the corner of Prosperity and Mooney that night.

What we did not know at that time as we passed the intersection to continue on our journey was a vehicle that wouldn’t move out of our lane just ahead. About 500 feet from the intersection was a left turn lane to allow vehicles to pull into the Target shopping center or make a U-turn to continue going south on Mooney and further into the eastern side of town.

As we approached the fateful area, I was driving on this road at about 60 mph, which happened to be the posted speed limit for this very edge part of town. When I looked at my clock, it had read 12:08am. When I woke up from being knocked out by the collision, it was roughly 12:28am. At least, that was what the police report says when it was called in. There’s about a 20-minute gap that I am missing from my memory of that night. It definitely tells me that I was unconscious from the impact of my vehicle against the passenger side of the other vehicle.

Later the day, at roughly 11am, I was approached by a psychologist of the hospital to tell me the fateful news. When the accident happened earlier that morning or night since it was barely after midnight, was that when we all came to, my wife could not feel our son moving around inside her womb. She would start to scream that she couldn’t feel the baby moving at all. With all of the adrenaline that I could muster at the time, I pushed open my door, which had a very heavy piece of the vehicle we had collided with, pinned against it.

I rushed to the other side of the vehicle to my wife to check up on her. That night, I would lay my head down on the belly of my wife and never feel or hear my sons heartbeat ever again. Because of the collision with the other vehicle, my son was killed in the impact and dangerously rough movements inside my wife’s womb. The doctor later that day would tell me, that if it was not for the length of my wife’s pregnancy and the severity of the car accident, I could have possibly lost her that night as well.

So, for me, I live with and constantly remember the events of that night every day. The pain I feel in my back is a constant reminder of that fateful night. Has it been rough for me and my wife? Yes, it has. It has impacted our relationship and our marriage more than anything. But we have stuck together besides losing our son, and we have fought for each other every day.

To end this off, I just want to say, never miss the opportunity to say you love your family. Because you never know when anything could happen, that could dramatically change your life and your relationships with everyone around you. Please always be safe and do not drink and drive. I don’t like seeing or hearing about people dying because they decided to drink and then drive home.

God Bless you and your families.

Murder Mystery Story Idea

“Hey kid, where are your parents at?” As I walked towards this young child who looked to be about 8 years old standing out on the street corner in the pouring rain.

It was a dreary late afternoon, and I was out on my routine patrol of this particular neighborhood. A mostly quiet part of town, where I always planned out every day I was on shift, to take my lunch break while on duty. Just so I could see this young, beautiful waitress that looked like she could pass for a young Amanda Bynes twin from the early 2000’s before she fell into the deep end of mental health distress.

“Hey, kid!” I shouted as the young boy ran off in the opposite direction like I was about to arrest him, and he didn’t want to be caught. I had just finished eating my burger inside and really wasn’t in the mood to run anyway.

But as the kid ran off, I noticed what appeared to be a trail of a red liquidity substance dripping from the kids backpack he had around his shoulders. The trail led back into the building and through the residential office entrance. Intrigued by the look of it and the way it looked like blood, I quickly rushed inside the lobby of the condos and noticed the trail of red led straight to the staircase off to the back of the lobby.

I reached up to the shoulder strapped mic of my patrol radio to call it in when I heard a screaming sound echo from the back of the lobby. I rushed towards the sound to find a second trail of red substance that appeared to be blood streaming from behind a closet door that was supposed to be locked.

When I rounded the corner, I saw a young, possibly 4 year old, child and her mother standing in the hallway looking down on what was left of a man who appeared to be in his late 50’s on the floor with his head missing just outside of the closet door.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Looking down at the body assessing the area for any hint of what might have happened, I motioned to the little girl and her mother to clear the area so that I could cordon it off while the detectives did their jobs once they arrived.

I reached for my radio and heard the distinct chirp of the radio sound as I pushed the call button upon the mic to call it in, “Central, this is Adam9Charlie. Reporting a murder scene at the corners of Bradshaw and Fuller.”

Serial Murder Mystery

As I turned the corner, I was this beautiful young woman wearing the bluest blouse with the tightest black pants imaginable. She was standing at the bus stop waiting for a ride when I walked up and said to her, “Hey hun, you looking for a ride tonight or do you need to be somewhere?”

She looked up at my towering frame standing next to her and whispered to me so that no one at the bus stop could hear, “Only if you’re willing to make my night Sugar.”

As I heard her voice echo through my mind, all I could think of was I must have found an angel because that’s what it sounded like to me. So I motioned for her to follow me to my vehicle which was parked around the corner and let her see my 1969 Shelby GT 500 parked at the curb.

She looked at me and with a look of pleasure in her eyes she climbed in after I politely opened the door for her.

What she didn’t know was that she was not going to make it home tonight or any other night for that night I had chosen my first victim to be sacrificed to the gods of old. She would never get to see her family or friends and the authorities would never find the body.

It would be about 45 years before a piece of her would be found after I was done with her.

Even then, the authorities would have nothing to else to find and no suspect to arrest. It would go down as one of the longest cold cases in the small towns history….

Iberian Tales Volume 1 – Excerpt

Aquati, one of the most beautiful cities in Portumangul outside of Lisbone, Tiranic, and Ceará, was bustling with the activity of soldiers and citizens both preparing for the long and inevitable night ahead. Five hundred thousand soldiers were preparing for attack while some three million citizens knew that Michael had answered their summons and had brought more soldiers with him.

The Lord and Mayor of the city, Roger Marchez II, had sent summons to Lisbone, requesting reinforcements, when a scout reported troop movement at the border northwest of Tiranic and just east of Aquati before he died of an injury he had sustained from Mangul scouts in the forest while scouting the border.

Lord Roger, who has been mayor of Aquati for less than a decade, never expected to have to call upon Lisbone for assistance because all of his reports from scouts never reported any troop movement up until about three weeks ago. And those reports had been movement up by the border of Alicante with Norten’s Land. He never expected that those same troops were only three leagues north of the city and preparing to attack.

About a week before, Michael had come to Aquati in request of Lord Roger with two hundred and fifty thousand more troops from Labrec. He had told Roger that the rest of the army would be here in a few days. They had been held up in Labrec due to a large storm that had hit the area the night before and there was some damage that needed to be fixed to some of the supply wagons.

A few days later, as Michael had said, some seven hundred thousand Iberian soldiers and magicians arrived at Aquati ready to fight. Later that same day, some seven hundred and fifty thousand troops from their brothers to the south, Donachuvort, arrived with Jason leading the way.

Lord Roger had not expected it but Prince Michael informed him that he had called upon their brothers to the south. Lord Roger was relieved to hear it. He knew that any time either Iberian kingdom was under attack, the other always responded with help. He knew that because of the treaty between the two Iberian kingdoms. He also knew that Prince Michael and Lord Jason were cousins and that they both trained together and fought together in many a battle before.

A Prince in Portumangul, when he turned fifteen, went to Donachuvort’s city of Madey where for three years, trained at the cities prestigious military school. It was considered one of the best training schools in Donachuvort. That was where Michael had met and become friends with Jason, who was also there for the training. From then on, it was hard to separate the two of them. And when Jason had become commander of Donachuvort’s army when he was just twenty-five, Michael was there to congratulate Jason. Later that same year, when Michael took over the army from his father, King Emmanuel, Lord Jason was at the ceremony.

When it came to Michael and Jason, Lord Roger thought, there was no friendship that compared to it.

“Lord Roger, sir, General Tribec reports that the cities defenses are in place and that Michael has sent some three hundred thousand more troops to the north of the city to strengthen the defenses to the north.”

“Thank you, Joseph. Send a message of appreciation to Michael and Jason for me with a gratitude of thanks.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Espionage: The Beginning – Excerpt from Ch. 1

The thing about living life in the fast lane is that you never have time for peace and quiet with your children at home. This is the life that I lived. My name is Richard. I am a 15-year veteran in the United States Army. I lived my life every day trying to stay alive while being deployed overseas away from my wife and three kids. It sucks that I am missing so many birthdays but even while I am deployed I am always finding ways to keep in touch with my children and my wife and I make sure that they know I am always thinking about them. I am actually not far from being able to retire from the Army and become a father to my children.

My oldest is going to be fifteen soon. She is an athletic young woman who has so much potential and has already received scholarships to some prestigious schools to play hoops. She is my pride and joy. My two younger boys, twins and very smart at the age of twelve, look up to their big sister. She is always there for them just as I was for my siblings growing up.

As I look around the cave at my fellow soldiers, we gather for the early morning briefing. All the men in this encampment I would gladly give my life for if their lives or the lives of their families were threatened. However, the first thing that comes to my mind every morning is my wife and kids back home.

As I adjusted the collar of my body armor, the heat inside the cave made wearing the armor tough. The sweat poured down our bodies in drenches. Some of us carried quite a bit of equipment that made the heat even more torturous.

We were currently on a mission in the middle of the hot desert mountains of Afghanistan looking for several high-ranking Taliban members that our Intel unit thought to be situated up in some caves nearby.

“What is Intel saying about the location of these insurgents, Josh?” I asked Lieutenant Sutton, who was my right hand man and my intelligence officer while out on mission.

 “Intel informs me that we’re about 5 clicks south of the target,” says Josh, pointing to his map and adjusting his body armor. Jeez, it’s hot stuff to wear in this climate. You sweat like a pig in it. “They say they caught something moving near these caves less than a day ago. We are to go in. If we meet resistance, we fight back. We’ll know more after the mission is completed.”

“Thank you,” I say readjusting my armor for the millionth time. “Gentlemen, you heard the man. Let’s move out while it’s still dark, before it gets too hot, and before they spot us.”

As the men started heading over to the Humvee we had parked and hidden out of sight, I thought I caught a shimmering glimpse out of the corner of my left eye that would give any soldier the suspicion that they had been detected by a sniper.

I signal to my men to hold positions and take refuge. Just as the men are moving into better firing positions, gunfire starts roaring off around us from multiple directions.

Where in the flying fuck did these assholes come from and how in the hell did they know where we would be? Intel had informed us that the insurgents we were to track down weren’t this far south. But obviously they must have missed them.

We begin to take evasive actions and return fire but we cannot manage to figure out where the bullets are flying in from since all we seem to pick up is that the bullets are coming from several directions.

Movement off in the distance caught my eye. Using the scope on my military issued rifle, I can clearly make out what appeared to be an unmarked car and moving fast enough towards us, that it kicked up a huge cloud of dust behind it. There was no doubt in my mind that it was a suicide vehicle full of explosives. It was now a life or death moment for us.

I signaled to my buddy on my right to cover me and without waiting for a reply, scrambled for a better firing position. The noise of the firefight around me faded as I concentrated on my breathing and sighted on my target, the wheels. My finger caressed the trigger. My mind and body relaxed as I waited for the moment that felt right. I squeezed off three consecutive short bursts at the speeding vehicle, hitting the right back tire, making it spin out of control and slam hard into the side of the valley wall.

Another movement caught my eye through the sight of my rifle that looked to be one of the insurgents moving away from the group firing at us. From what I could ascertain, he was trying to get his compadres to cease fire and retreat.

My finger caressed the trigger again and squeezed off another burst of rounds towards where he was positioned hitting his friend to his right just left of the man’s heart. The rebels face was covered in blood as another round of bullets hit him in the leg, shattering his femur.
   
As soon as he drops to the ground, the rest of the insurgents seized fire and ran away from us. The men nearest me let off a few more bursts out of their rifles hitting several of the radicals as they are scampering away. Their leader was dead or dying from his wound. What these insurgents did not know was that my communications sergeant had just called in an air strike on their position.

A Night of Darkness

The pain. It’s all I can feel. The dark excruciating pain of someone tearing my heart from my chest and squeezing till it crumbles to dust. 

That’s the pain I felt the moment I was told my son didn’t make it. It was the darkest my heart had ever felt. The deepest my life had ever been. I felt like I was at the bottom of an ocean with no air to breathe and only what I had held in in my last breath. Living my life without my son felt like it was going to end. 

Contemplating suicide to join my son in Heaven crossed my mind several times but it was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. It wasn’t the first time I had thought about offing myself either. Many times throughout my life have I had thoughts of ending it all. 

I think the only reason I have yet to do it was because the thought of my family knowing I ended my life without talking to them about it scares me. Another reason I haven’t ended my life is because of the music that I would listen to when I was having those dark thoughts about suicide. Listening to heavy metal music and just sitting or lying quietly as I let the lyrics run through my brain, my mind would look deeper into the meaning of the lyrics and allowed them to talk me off the ledge. That’s how I was able to step off the edge and back to reality even if it sucked. 

Love and Protection

Here is a story that I quickly wrote for a friend of mine on his weekly flash fiction blog a while back that I thought I’d share with y’all. So let me know in the comments section what y’all think about it and if I should take it further and turn this into a short story (or more)…

The tides rolled in as we walked along the beach, hand in hand, talking about life. As I looked upon her sunbathed face, I could tell she was holding something back. She had a look of terror in her eyes I’ve only seen once before. The night she found out her parents were murdered by thugs who worked for a former client of her father’s. 

I kept looking at her as I asked, “They’ve found us haven’t they?”

She looked at me and nodded slightly as she lowered her head down. I knew we had been on the run for almost six years now from these men who took her parents. And now they were after her and her child. I was her assigned agent to protect her but we had fallen in love with each other a few years back and we had a child of our own together. My job was to protect her from these thugs but they had somehow found out where we were hiding out at…