THIS IS NOT OUR FUTURE.Welcome to The Dystopian States of America: a Charity Anthology Benefiting the ACLU Foundation.This anthology features dystopian views of the future, for America and/or the entire world, should the current regime remain in power. And we use the word "regime" very pointedly, because while the executive branch of our government certainly made for a ripe target, our authors were free to draw inspiration from the legislative branch, the judicial branch, loc...

Author Lawrence Reid Bechtel has captured the story of Isaac Granger, a slave from Thomas Jefferson's plantation as told through the eyes of amateur historian Reverend Charles Campbell.In 1852, after much searching through the Black districts of Petersburg, Virginia, the amateur historian Charles Campbell finally located Isaac Granger, a former slave of the late Thomas Jefferson. Though disinterested at first in sharing his memories, Isaac was at last persuaded by ...

Dusk, some believe, is a time when two worlds meet and are divided by the thinnest of veils. It is a time when that which is not meant to be seen can be. The walls are down, and the windows are open.If one finds themself alone in the woods at dusk, when the fog rolls across the ground and your sense of direction is lost, beware. There are those who say something may find you.You may come across a staircase. It may be of rusted iron, or collapsing, weathered wood. It is a sp...

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a thousand-ton flying lizard with serious indigestion and hoarding issues! This is a collection of writing prompts about dragons, in all their variations. Some serious, some silly, there should be enough dragonic variety to help any story break out of writer's block.This eBook contains 31 prose prompts, which are one or more sentences of story. This type of prompt is meant to invoke a setting, emotion, or plot idea. They can be used in multiple ways ...

Vacationing with an old High School flame on his charter boat in the Caribbean, Nolan sets his hook into something he wishes he hadn't.The floating bag of stink hauls him into deeper and deeper waters until there's nowhere to go but down.Drew gets dragged from his home port in Key Largo to up the Florida Coast and into a crummy marina, then out to a posh resort on the island of Bimini, then across the Caribbean to the south Texas coast, then to a Colombian resort island whe...

Lurking in the shadows of midnight crossroads and the glow of high-tech summoning circles, these demonic plotbunnies are ready to bargain! From more traditional fiends to space-faring imps, there are diabolical critters for almost any setting. So grab your chalk, brush up on your contract law, and head into a month-long adventure with Evil(ish)!This eBook contains 31 prose prompts, which are one or more sentences of story. This type of prompt is meant to invoke a setting, emotion, ...

As we walk through dark times in our lives, we all need a way of finding truth in the tempest. Whether we are asking "Why the Tempest?" or struggling when life doesn't make sense, God's Word is sufficient to answer all of our questions.Faythelma Bechtel knows the tempest, but she also knows the One Who calms the storm. After losing two daughters and her husband, Faythelma has clung tighter to her Savior and longs to help others who are struggling to find peace in their own storms.

A collection of short stories, essays, art and interviews in celebration of Candas Jane Dorsey.Contains work by Timothy J. Anderson, Greg Bechtel, Eileen Bell, Gregg Chamberlain, Alexandrea Flynn and Annalise Glinker, Barb Galler-Smith, Anita Jenkins, Laina Kelly, Derryl Murphy, John Park, Rhonda Parrish, Ursula Pflug, Robert Runté, Diane L. Walton, BD Wilson and S.G. Wong.

A little green tractor helps the farmer with his farm work. He discovers that he is to small to help the farmer with some of his chores. This makes him sad so he leaves the farm trying to prove that he is big enough to do everything. However he soon discovers that life outside of the farm isn't as friendly as he thought it would be. When he tries to return home he gets lost.

It begins: "Claude had a mother and two sisters, older, a grandmother — in his memories, a shadow — three angry aunts, (one married with children: a boy in diapers, another boy, and a girl who liked to tickle his testes on occasion) and, for a time, a father."And so it was... We live, we love, we marvel, we become the lost, we suffer loss, we seek our joys and reach for our potentials.Our lives, as was his, are made up of the people with whom — and because of whom — we grow...

Bechtel, a former newspaper publisher and weekly columnist, continued taking oblique looks at things most people took for granted or accepted at face value, and he came up with what he called the "unthoughted."In this book Bechtel explores topics ranging from the impact of a local soldier's death in Iraq on the town he lived in to the Occupy Wall Street fiasco, to the differences between "May" and "Can", and certainly to the comic behaviors of politicians trying to appeal to a publ...

In a dark hour after midnight in 1938 a volley of shots ring out and a number of Spanish men fall dead. For them, from then on, there are no consequences. But for the women left behind, wives, mothers, daughters and sons, the echo from those gun barrels repeat, repeat, and repeat.This is the story of the women in one of those affected families: Señora Dolores, a wife, a mother, and an untimely grandmother; her daughters, especially among them long-suffering Maria, ambitious and thw...