Writing Memorable Characters, Part 2

Part 2: Bad Guys

Readers love to hate a character. This chapter deals with a bad guy, but not bad like Findlay in The Navigators, who tried to make everyone’s life miserable like a deranged Bond villain.

Mrs. Billen is a more haunted figure.

But what makes a character BAD?

They do all the stuff you hate. Findlay taunts and teases and tortures Peeky.

Mrs. Billen is a different kind of bad.

In this chapter you’ll meet a new character.

Read on, and see why you hate reading her story.

 

Using my unreleased manuscript An Angel On Her Shoulder, I am showing you my techniques for reworking a story into a more readable, more enjoyable piece. It’s 45+ lessons in about 45 days. (To start at Chapter 1, click HERE.)

To view it best, bring up the two versions in different windows and view them side by side to see what was changed.

Then give me your thoughts in the comment section.

 

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Chapter 13 “FINAL”

She didn’t hear the train coming. It was an accident.

Driving home from my meeting with Father Frank, I got stuck by a train. That didn’t happen much in Tampa, but it used to happen all the time when I was a kid.

I guess the conversation with Father Frank had gotten me to thinking. He seemed to know it would.

Anybody could have read my face and known that I was in need of answers that weren’t going to be easy to come by. Father Frank’s conversation put the wheels in motion.

I sat in my car and watched the long train roll by, each set of steel wheels making a clack-clack as it went over the crossing. That’s a noise I knew well. The rhythm lulled me into a kind of daydream, bringing back memories of Millersburg.

When I was a kid, a classmate’s mom had died over the summer in a terrible accident. When people first heard about it, we were all really surprised. My parents were shocked. But I was young. Kids didn’t process things the way we later would as adults.

Jenny Billen’s mom had been hit by a train, along with their little baby. We knew the Billens because Jenny was in the same grade as me. Our families went to the same church, and my older brother was on the basketball team with Jenny’s older brother. Our families were kind of close. When my dad felt inclined to buy an antique car, the Billens stored it at their ranch for us in an unused barn stall. I visited there once in a while. One time, Mrs. Billen gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from their cows. I almost didn’t want to drink it. Milk came from a bottle in the refrigerator, not from a bucket under a cow. I was certain it had missed some very important decontamination process that was supposed to occur before you could drink it.

When I first heard about her accident, I assumed that Mrs. Billen had probably been driving in their station wagon, and when the crossing lights began to flash, she tried to beat the striped guard pole as it came down over the road. Somehow the train must have caught her as she drove across the tracks. As kids we had heard stories like that before. On the way to soccer practice, if some teenager drove around the crossing gates to beat the oncoming train, Mom would point it out. Look how crazy that person is! That’s very dangerous. You should never do that!

This was different.

Mrs. Billen wasn’t driving anywhere; she was walking. Somehow, she had managed to be walking alongside the train tracks with her little baby, and gotten hit by the train.

In our small Indiana town, train tracks were everywhere. They fed the big industries that helped our town grow and thrive for decades: Richmond Chemicals, Metcalf Machinery and Mining, Atlas Engineering, among others. Most of them are gone now, but once upon a time, big thundering trains rolled through our city with the sound of progress and prosperity. When a kid got old enough to ride a bike, train tracks became a real pain in the butt. A tire might go sidelong into the two-inch dugout on each side of the steel rails at a crossing, and it would send him flying. Driving a car, a long train would ruin your mad dash to school or work.

Teenagers can’t budget for traffic or train delays. It’s not in their DNA until sometime after age thirty or so.

As kids, we tried to flatten coins by placing them on the train tracks. Jimmy tried it a few times down near the park. You had to put a penny on the big steel rail, and when the train went by it, would smash it flat. A penny would become as thin as paper, and as wide as a half dollar. Or so we had heard, anyway. We only knew about flattening coins the same way all kids learn things like that—from some other kid whose older brother had done it.

The train conductors knew kids liked to do that stuff, too, and they must have hated it. One wrong move by some dumb kid, and splat, the kid would get flattened along with the coins. The train’s engineers always were on the lookout as they passed through towns.

Smashing coins was more difficult than you’d think. The oncoming train vibrated the tracks with such great intensity the coins moved around and fell off the rail. That meant you had to jump up at the last minute and replace your coins or they wouldn’t get flattened.

Time it wrong, and you’d get flattened.

Even the rush of wind from the passing train was strong and violent. It was scary the first time I felt it, because I wasn’t expecting it. From our hiding spot in the trees twenty feet away, the wind from the train was still massive and powerful. The vibrations came through the ground and into your Keds, and the suction created by the enormous train engine could pull you under its huge steel wheels.

Adventurous kids would sometimes hop aboard slow moving trains as they came to the crossings or needed to switch tracks. That often met in disaster, too, just like the kids who insisted in swimming in the Indiana rock quarries every summer. You could read about some kid drowning from the shifting sands in the quarry every year, and you could find a story about some kid getting his leg cut off—or worse—trying to jump onto a moving train. They were like annual stories in the paper, just with different names each time. But I guess the draw of the cool water or the thrill of a free train ride was enough to make dumb kids take unknowing risks. Kids don’t read newspapers.

As I sat in my car watching the train roll by, I thought about the game my dad would play when we were stuck by a train. He would try to get us kids to wait out the delay by counting the cars of the train. It was an old trick, and it usually met with mediocre success. It gets boring counting train cars unless there are a lot of them, and then that gets boring for a different reason.

This time, I was first in line, a front row seat.  The only thing between me and the rolling thunder of the giant train was a small striped pole from the roadside train guard.

From there, even in the car, I could feel the vibrations of the massive locomotive. It made me think.

How the heck did my classmate’s mom not hear that thing coming? I had always wondered, as a kid, and now I was wondering again.

The trains were so big and so noisy, now just like then. It just seemed inconceivable that somebody couldn’t hear them coming. Mrs. Billen hadn’t been placing pennies on the rail to flatten them, either.

My stomach lurched. I shouldn’t have skipped lunch.

Then I had an awful queasy deep inside me. Maybe she did hear the train.

A cold sweat broke out on my forehead as I envisioned what happened. She heard it coming. You can’t not hear a train coming. And you can’t be taking a walk by the tracks and not notice it from a long way off.

Gripping the steering wheel, I tried to not see, to not know. The images came at me fast, blinding me to all but the horror they displayed.

I swallowed hard, shaking my head, fighting it, but it overwhelmed me. I had to look. I couldn’t not look.

The very thought of not seeing made my insides churn. I thought I’d throw up in my car. I was gasping, sweating, hot and stuffy—but unable to look away.

She would pretty much know the train schedules just like everybody else in town. There were the morning ones that made me late for class in high school, and the afternoon ones that made me late for my job after school. I can’t tell you now what times they ran, but I could have told you then.

The scene played out inside my car like a movie projector was showing it on my windshield and all around me. I was there.

She put away the breakfast dishes just like she did every morning, and walked over to the high chair. Glassy eyed, she picked the baby up. I felt him squirming in my arms when she did. He was getting heavier now that he was a few months old.

The day before, she had seen her older kids off to summer camp. It was a much quieter house without them. This morning, she kissed her husband goodbye as he went off to work the cattle auction. For one week a month he would spent the morning in town and the afternoon at the stockyards getting everything counted and ready.

She had the big ranch house to herself, just her and the baby.

She opened the window over the sink while she washed the dishes, gazing absently out over the green pasture. Afterward, she dried her hands on a dish towel and slid the station wagon keys off the hook on the wall.

She drove past the small grocery stores that were closer to the farm, going all the way down to Robertson’s. She found a spot at in the middle of the lot and lifted the gear shift on the steering column into park. She got the baby and walked to the front door, but instead of going inside the store, she walked on down the covered sidewalk to the side of the building and went around the corner.

Here, the train tracks were closest to the store. There was the asphalt driveway that the delivery trucks used, then a short span of woods, and then the train tracks—a distance of maybe seventy-five feet, in all.

Waited near the store, she heard the distant howl of the train horn as it passed the crossing two miles away at Sunset Street. The noise carried in the wind. That was her cue.

I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath coming in short gasps as I watched her step onto the asphalt driveway.

A delivery truck slammed on its brakes to avoid her. The driver honked. Mrs. Billen should have been startled, but she wasn’t. Holding her baby in her arms, she looked up at the driver, paused, and then moved on.

The truck driver shook his head and took a deep breath.

Close one, he thought. That lady was lost in a fog.

When she reached the trees, she paused again. The closest tree that would hide her was very close to the clearing for the drainage ditch. She wrapped her body around her sleeping child as best she could, to prevent the branches from scratching him as she pushed her way through the underbrush. Then she waited.

She could not yet hear the train but she could hear its next horn blast as it passed through each intersection, a friendly honk to drivers as the train made its way through town.

Her breathing calm and slow, she gazed at the tracks. Just down a small hill and up a small hill. Her pulse quickened. My heart pounded with adrenaline as sweat streamed down my cheeks.

Another blast from the train horn as it crossed the intersection at Morris Road. It was getting closer. I groaned, my stomach clenched in fear as I watched.

She observed the distance to the tracks with the next horn blast. She turned to look. In the distance, the massive engine pushed its way out of the morning mist: a small white headlight surrounded by the painted yellow cat of the Chessie system train.

Right on time, she thought. Her heart was pounding now. My feet were pressed to the floor slamming invisible brakes.

The train’s speed was deceptive. Objects that big don’t appear to be going fast. Slowing down to pass through town, the train still moved at a brisk 50 miles per hour. As the giant steel engine rounded a small curve a mile away, Mrs. Billen stared at the tracks close by. A short run down the hill and a short run up the other side to the tracks.

Now she could start to feel the rumble of the big train. It started as a methodic clacking with a low hum underneath. The closer it came, the louder the clacking grew. The thunderous engine vibrated the ground. Its trademark yellow cat image became clear in the sunlight.

Another blast from its loud horn as it crossed Hanna Avenue a few hundred yards away. That one woke the baby. He began to cry.

I couldn’t breathe. I clenched my teeth as I continued to watch.

The rumbling grew louder. Her feet began to shake. Mrs. Billen put a hand on the tree to steady herself. Her baby crying, she took a deep breath.

She pushed off from the tree and sprinted down the short hill. Running with her child in her arms, each stride landed hard on the ground. She rushed across the flat span to the short hill, being careful not to fall.

The train engineer saw something move out from the trees on the left. Maybe a deer, he thought, and moved over to the left window to check.

Mrs. Billen looked up at the coming train, less than a hundred feet from where she stood. Its terrible noise deafened her and drowned out the cries of her infant son. She paused, only for a moment, as a hand frantically waved at her from the engine window.

The blaring horn was overwhelmed by the piercing screech of the metal brakes. She stepped up the short hill to the tracks, clutching her son.

She looked down at the gravel dancing under her feet from the rumbling of the massive locomotive. Then the ground was covered in a huge shadow.

She lifted her head to see the large painted cat as it leaped at her.

Closing her eyes, she braced to receive it.

I sat in my car, shaking as I cried, my shirt drenched in sweat. The churning in my stomach caused me to gag and spit. I slapped at the armrest buttons to put down a window, gulping the fresh air.

It took the train over a mile to come to a complete stop. By then, there was not much left to identify Mrs. Billen or her son. Hours later, the police to figure out that the car in the Robertson’s parking lot belonged to the bodies on the tracks. The car keys at the accident site fit the station wagon door. Mrs. Millen’s purse rested under the front seat.

Then a phone call was made to the stockyards, to locate her husband and give him the terrible news.

I wiped my eyes. Whatever her personal pain, her world of depression, Mrs. Millen heard the train call to her—and she went to answer it.

That’s what I knew now. I knew it. I saw it.

She crossed over into the realm of the dark angels, the ones that push us to do the unthinkable.

She did it on purpose, and took her baby with her. It was as simple as that. And as evil as that, to take the life of an innocent baby.

What other possible explanation could there be?

One, perhaps. The one they made up and gave to us kids. I remembered that.

A lie told to young classmates by their parents to protect them from the horrors of the world for a little while longer.

A lie told to the Billen kids to ease their pain and keep the good memories of their mother intact.

A method to prevent a well meaning friend who came over to see the new calf, from asking innocent questions that would keep the torture alive.

A gift of love, really. Everyone would look the other way. What benefit was there to dwell on the truth of such a tragedy?

And what is the truth, anyway? They said she didn’t hear it coming. That it was an accident. Who was I to argue? Still . . . With my bloodshot eyes and wet shirt, I now knew there were other explanations.

Darker ones. Ugly ones.

In all the years since, I never spoke about what happened to Mrs. Billen. Not my wife, nobody. I never mentioned it a living soul since the summer it happened, and I couldn’t believe I thought of it now.

Father Frank was working on me.

The driver behind me laid on his car horn, yanking me out of my fog. The train had passed.

Sitting up, I put my car into drive and headed for home. My queasiness had vanished.

But I think I understood what Father Frank was getting at—or starting to. I think I may have started to grasp it. The aberrations, these dark angels or whatever they are. Maybe they do exist. I may have met one.

Once upon a time, she gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from her cow.

My queasiness came rushing back as I realized something much worse. I may have been best friends with one.

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Original Chapter 13, An Angel On Her Shoulder

 

She didn’t hear the train coming. It was an accident.

 

I was driving home from my meeting with Father Frank, and I got stuck by a train. That didn’t happen much in Tampa, but it used to happen all the time when I lived in Ohio. I guess the conversation with Father Frank had gotten me to thinking.

 

He seemed to know it would.

 

Anybody could have read my face and known that I was in need of answers that weren’t going to be easy to come by. Father Frank’s conversation put the wheels in motion.

 

I sat in my car and watched the long train roll by. Each set of steel wheels on each train car went clack-clack as it went over the crossing. That’s a noise I knew well. The rhythm of the rain lulled me into a kind of daydream, bringing back memories of trains in Millersburg, Ohio.

 

When I was a kid, a classmate’s mom had died over the summer in a terrible accident. When people first heard about it, we were all really surprised. My parents were shocked. But I was young. Kids didn’t process things the way we later would as adults.

 

Jenny Billen’s mom had been hit by a train, along with their little baby. We knew the Billens because Jenny was in the same grade as me. Our families went to the same church, and my older brother was on the basketball team with Jenny’s older brother. Our families were kind of close. When my dad felt inclined to buy an antique car, the Billens stored it at their ranch for us, in an unused barn stall. I visited there once in a while. One time, Mrs Billen gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from their cows. I almost didn’t want to drink it. Milk came from a bottle in the refrigerator, not from a bucket under a cow. Wasn’t there some sort of decontamination process that was supposed to occur before you could drink it…?

 

When I first heard about the terrible accident, I assumed that Mrs Billen had probably been driving in their station wagon, and when the roadside “train crossing” lights began to flash, she just tried to beat the striped guard pole as it came down over the road. Somehow the train must have caught her as she drove across the tracks. As kids we had heard stories like that before. On the way to soccer practice, if some teenager drove around the crossing gates to beat the oncoming train, mom would point it out – look how crazy that person is! That’s very dangerous. You should never do that!

 

This was different.

 

Mrs Billen wasn’t driving anywhere; she was walking. Somehow, she had managed to be walking alongside the train tracks with her little baby, and gotten hit by the train.

 

In our small Ohio town, train tracks were everywhere. They fed the big industries that helped our town grow and thrive for decades: Richmond Chemicals, Mercury Machinery and Mining, Atlas Engineering, among others. Most of them are gone now, but once upon a time, big thundering trains rolled through our city with the sound of progress and prosperity. When you got old enough to ride a bike, the train tracks became a real pain in the butt. Your tire might go sidelong into the 2” dugout on each side of the steel rails, and it would send you flying. When you could drive a car, waiting for a train to finish passing would ruin your mad dash to school or work.

 

Teenagers can’t budget for traffic or train delays. It’s not in their DNA until sometime after age 20 or so.

 

As kids, we tried to flatten coins by placing them on the train tracks. Jimmy from next door tried it a few times down near the park. You had to put a penny on the big steel rail, and when the train went by it, would smash it flat. A penny would become as thin as paper, and as wide as a half dollar. Or so we had heard, anyway. We heard about flattening coins the same way all kids heard things – from some other kid whose older brother had done it.

 

The train conductors knew kids liked to do that stuff, too, and they must have hated it. One wrong move by some dumb kid, and splat! The kid would get flattened along with the coins. The train’s engineers always were on the lookout as they passed through towns.

 

Smashing coins was more difficult than you’d think. The oncoming train vibrated the tracks with great intensity, and the coins moved around and fell off. That meant you had to jump up at the last minute and replace your coins or they wouldn’t get flattened.

 

Time it wrong, and you’d get flattened.

 

In fact, even the rush of wind from the passing train was strong and violent. It was scary the first time I felt it, because I wasn’t expecting it. From our hiding spot in the trees 20 feet away, it still felt like its massive power and vibrations and noise could pull you out and suck you under its huge steel wheels. Adventurous kids would sometimes hop aboard slow moving trains as they came to the crossings or needed to switch tracks. That often met in disaster, too, just like the kids who insisted in swimming in the quarries every summer. You could read about some kid drowning from the shifting sands in the quarry every year, and you could find a story about some kid getting his leg cut off – or worse – trying to jump onto a moving train. They were like annual stories in the paper, just with different names each time. But I guess the draw of the cool water or the thrill of a free train ride was enough to make dumb kids take unknowing risks. Kids don’t read papers.

 

As I sat in my car watching the train roll by, I thought about the game my dad would play when we were stuck by a train. He would try to get us kids to wait out the delay by counting the cars of the train. It was an old trick, and it usually met with mediocre success. It gets boring counting train cars unless there are a lot of them, and then that gets boring for a different reason.

 

This time, I was first in line, a front row seat.  The only thing between me and the rolling thunder of the giant train was a small striped pole from the roadside train guard.

 

From there, even in the car, I could feel the vibrations of the massive locomotive. It made me think.

 

How the heck did my classmate’s mom not hear that thing coming? I had always wondered, as a kid, and now I was wondering again.

 

The trains were so big and so noisy, now just like then. It just seemed inconceivable that somebody couldn’t hear them coming. Mrs Billen hadn’t been placing pennies on the rail to flatten them, either.

 

Inconceivable.

 

Then it came to me: She did hear the train.

 

She heard it coming. You can’t not hear a train coming. And you can’t be taking a walk by the tracks and not notice it from a long way off.

 

I can see the whole thing now. She would pretty much know the train schedules just like everybody else in town. There were the ones that made me late for class in the morning, and the ones that made me late for work in the afternoon. I can’t tell you now what times they ran, but I could have told you then.

 

She put away the breakfast dishes just like she did every morning, and walked over to the high chair to lift her sleeping baby out. Emotionless, like she was in a daze, she picked the baby up. He was getting heavier now that he was a few months old.

 

The day before, she had seen her older kids off to summer camp. It was a much quieter house without them. This morning, she kissed her husband goodbye as he went off to work the monthly cattle auction. He would spend the morning in town and the afternoon at the stockyards getting everything counted and ready.

 

She had the house to herself. Just her and the baby. Nothing out of the ordinary.

 

When the dishes were done, she walked over and got the station wagon keys. A trip to the store would usually follow breakfast.

 

She drove past the small grocery store that was closer to their farm, and down to Robertson’s, which was closer to the train tracks. She parked, got the baby and walked to the door. But instead of going inside, she walked on down the covered sidewalk to the side of the building, and went around the corner.

 

Here, the train tracks were closest to the store. There was the asphalt driveway that the delivery trucks used, then a short span of woods, and then the tracks. Maybe 75 feet in all.

 

She waited near the store until she heard the train horn blow as it passed the crossing two miles away at Sunset Street. The noise carried in the wind. That was her cue.

 

She stepped onto the asphalt driveway. A delivery truck slammed on its brakes to avoid her. The driver honked. Mrs Billen should have been startled, but she wasn’t. She looked up at the driver, paused, and then moved on. The truck driver shook his head and took a deep breath.

 

Close one, he thought. That lady was lost in a fog.

 

When she reached the trees, she paused again. The closest tree that would hide her was very close to the clearing for the drainage ditch. She wrapped her body around her sleeping baby as best she could, to prevent the branches from scratching him as she pushed her way through.

 

Then she waited. She could not yet hear the train but she could hear its horn blast as it passed the intersections. A friendly honk to drivers as the train made its way through town.

 

She looked over at the tracks, just down a small hill and up a small hill. Her pulse quickened.

 

Another blast from the train horn as it crossed the intersection at Morris Road. It was getting closer.

 

She thought about the distance to the tracks as she heard the next horn blast. She turned to look. In the distance, it pushed its way out of the morning mist: a small white headlight surrounded by the painted yellow cat of the Chessie system train engine.

 

Right on time, she thought. Her heart was pounding now.

 

The train’s speed was deceptive. It always slowed down to pass through town, but it still moved at a brisk 50 miles per hour. Objects that big don’t look like they’re going fast. As the train rounded a small curve a mile away, she looked back to the tracks in front of her. A short run down the hill and a short run up the other side to the tracks.

 

Now she could start to hear the rumble of the big train. It started as a methodic clacking with a low rumble underneath. The closer it came, the louder the clacking grew. The thunderous engine vibrated the ground. Its trademark yellow cat image became clear in the sunlight.

 

Another blast from its loud horn as it passed Hanna Avenue just a few hundred yards away. That one woke the baby. He began to cry.

 

The rumbling grew louder. Her feet began to shake. Mrs Billen put a hand on the tree to steady herself. Her baby crying, she took a deep breath.

 

She pushed off from the tree and sprinted down the short hill. Being careful not to fall, she rushed across the flat span to the short hill.

 

The train engineer saw something move out from the trees on the left. Maybe a deer, he thought, and moved over to the left window to check.

 

Mrs Billen looked up at the coming train, less than a hundred feet from where she stood. Its terrible noise deafened her and drowned out the cries of her infant son. She paused, only for a moment, as a hand frantically waved at her from the engine window.

 

Then, the deafening blast of the horn and the squeal of the brakes. She stepped up the short hill to the tracks, clutching her son.

 

She looked down. The gravel under her feet danced from the rumbling of the massive locomotive. Suddenly the gravel was cast in a shadow.

 

She looked up to see the large painted cat as it leaped at her.

 

She closed her eyes tightly and braced to receive it.

 

It took the train over a mile to come to a complete stop. By then, there was not much left to identify Mrs Billen or her son. It took hours for the police to figure out that the car in the Robertson’s parking lot belonged to the bodies that were found on the tracks. The keys they found at the site fit the station wagon door. Her purse was under the front seat.

 

Then a phone call was made to the stockyards, to locate her husband and give him the terrible news.

 

Mrs Billen had waited for the train, ran in front of it, and committed suicide. Whatever her personal pain, her world of depression, she heard the train call and went to answer it. She crossed over into the realm of the dark angels; the ones that push us to do the unthinkable.

 

She did it on purpose, and took her baby with her. It was as simple as that. And as evil as that, to take the life of an innocent baby.

 

What other possible explanation could there be?

 

One, perhaps. The one they made up and gave to us kids.

 

A lie told to young classmates by their parents to protect them from the horrors of the world for a little while longer.

 

A lie told to the Billen kids to ease their pain and keep the memories of their mother intact.

 

A method to prevent a well meaning friend who came over to visit a pony, from asking innocent questions that would keep the torture alive.

 

A gift of love. Everyone would look the other way. What benefit is there to dwell on the truth of such a tragedy?

 

And what is the truth, anyway? They said she didn’t hear it coming. That it was an accident. Who am I to argue? Still… there are other explanations. Darker ones. Ugly ones.

 

I never spoke about what happened to Mrs Billen to another living soul my entire life. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone since it happened, when I was a kid. I can’t believe I even thought of it just now. Father Frank, working on me…

 

A horn honked. The car behind me yanked me out of my fog. The train had passed.

 

I sat up and put my car into drive.

 

But now I think I get it, what Father Frank was getting at. I think I may be starting to understand. The aberrations, these dark angels or whatever they’re called, they just might be real. Maybe they do exist. I may have met one. Once upon a time, she gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from their cows.

 

Then I realized something much worse. I may have even been best friends with one.

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ANALYSIS

Awful, right? You could probably do without ever reading Mrs. Billen’s story again – as opposed to Father Frank, who you liked.

That said, she’s not as memorable as Father Frank, either, but she’s not supposed to be. She’s another log on the fire that is Doug’s journey.

Think about the feelings you had when you were reading this, and since it’s not really the final draft, feel free to tell me ways it could’ve gotten deeper under your skin.

And if you write dark stuff, post a section that shows somebody becoming unlikable.

Now:

Let me have your comments. The next chapter will post tomorrow but they will ALL come down shortly after February 15, so don’t dawdle!

You are readers, too. Your input will shape the final product. Be honest.

Share and reblog these! Your friends need to know this stuff, too.

Dan Alatorre is the author of several bestsellers and the amazingly great sci fi action thriller “The Navigators.” Click HERE to get your copy of The Navigators – $2.99 or FREE on Kindle Unlimited!

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