Flashbacks Revisited

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.

 

FLASHBACKS

Hey, wasn’t Flashback a movie in the 80s?

Okay, to understand this post/chapter as a flashback, you have to have read some of the previous ones, but not all of them. We won’t hold it against you if you didn’t follow all the way from chapter one. probably. But you’ll need to go back and read a few chapters to really get this.

I’ll see you at the bottom.

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Chapter 14 “FINAL”

“What?” The cars were whizzing by my green Schwinn as Jimmy and I rode our bikes to Woolco. I couldn’t hear his question over the noise. There were too many cars, driving way too close to us.

As adults we tend to forget these things, but being a 10-year-old kid on a bike, riding down a busy road with cars going by just two feet away—it can feel pretty ominous.

Construction in several places along Washburn Boulevard, our chosen route to Woolco to procure more model boats, created the hazard that forced us into the street. Apartments were being built, so whole sections along the busy road didn’t have sidewalks. That wasn’t a big deal on our own street—the only cars that drove down Reigert Drive belonged to people who lived there. But going out to the bigger, busier roads was a different story.

A scrawny little kid on a bike feels it when a car goes past at 40 miles an hour. You wouldn’t think 40 mph was very fast riding in a car as a passenger, but a car that goes by you at that speed when you’re on a kid on a bike, it’s a whole different ball game. Squeezed onto the side of a bustling main road with car after car whizzing by, it’s amazingly fast. And loud. The hum of the tires make a lot of noise, especially if the cars already have snow tires on them. Trucks make the most noise. When one of the big concrete trucks rolled by, it was like a jet liner was getting ready to land on your head. The freaking ground shook. But the biggest part was the wind.

Even the smallest sedan that goes by you on your bike, the wind in its wake tugs at you and pulls you toward the road. It would grab at you and knock you off balance. A big car going by felt like it could throw you to the ground. Asphalt roads do horrible things to hands when you fall off your bike. Not only did it sting like hell, you had to sit there and pick the little rocks out of your wounded knees and palms. Then you had to climb back on your bike, bleeding, and keep riding. It didn’t matter whether you gave up and went home, or whether you toughed it out and rode on to the store, a bike was usually a kid’s fastest way to get to someplace. And riding with a skinned knee or buckshot hands was the worst.

Usually, we encouraged each other to keep going and get to the store. The thinking was, as long as you already went through all that trouble, you might as well get your model boat. I bet Woolco saw more than one bleeding kid pull up on his bike on any given summer day.

So our little excursion to acquire additional warships to destroy down in the creek was made a little more adventurous—and a lot longer—by the lack of sidewalks. At least it seemed longer to us.

Amidst this chaos, Jimmy had said something to me, but I missed it. He shouted it again.

“Would you kill Hitler?”

“What, here? Now?”

Another car roared by, its driver voicing disapproval by laying on the horn as it passed.

“You wanna play now?”

He was crazy. This road was too busy to talk back and forth to another kid on a bike behind me. I hated this part of the ride. We needed to get to the section of the road up ahead that had the sidewalk, where we could ride safely. That’s what was on my mind.

Not Jimmy. “C’mon! Would you kill Hitler?”

“Get off the road!” A motorist shouted as they sped by. We had to go on and off the street when there wasn’t a sidewalk, but we obviously weren’t doing it very well. This particular spot was a short section that was lasting forever.

“Come on!” Jimmy shouted. “Let’s play!”

It was a stupid name for a stupid game. Irreverent, really. I’m not sure we even called it by that name. Killing Hitler. I’m not sure I remember what the actual name of that game was.

Oh, I knew alright. I remember playing that game like we had just played it yesterday.

It was just a dumb game that we played as young pre-teenagers. We didn’t have wives or children or girlfriends back then, to civilize us, so we played dumb games to trick each other into saying something stupid. It was just a harmless game to pass the time for a couple of kids who weren’t old enough to pass it in other ways.

“Would you ever steal a corvette?”

“What? Heck, no!” I gripped the handle bars and winced as my bike shuddered with each vehicle that passed.

“What if bank robbers put a gun to your mom’s head, and you had to steal the car or they would kill her. You have to steal the car to help them escape, or they will kill you mom.”

“Then, yes, I’d steal the car. Now shut up, you’re going to get us killed.”

Jimmy howled in laughter at my distress.

Our game was as complicated as Tic Tac Toe, and almost as pointless. Back when we were young enough to walk into the trap of questions set by the other, the opposing player wasn’t usually strategic enough to ask methodical questions. We’d just try to win in three moves. We had no plan. When we grew old enough to be patient, we couldn’t lure the other one in. Tic Tac Toe.

The game was premised on knowing what the other person considered important, or knowing what they valued. But it also depended on them having similar judgment as you.

What if you stole a car and didn’t get caught? That changes things. When people don’t get punished the first time they try something bad, they may become emboldened to try it again. Maybe shoplifting had lost its thrill so you try jacking a car—anything to see where the limits were. We knew kids who had done it. Older kids we’d see at the park. They smoked pot or went joyriding, things like that. They were tough kids who got in fights at school but didn’t get beat up.

In the real world, would I ever steal a car? No, never. Hoo, boy, would I get in trouble for that! Because of course, I’d for sure get caught. My dad would kill me. I’d be grounded forever.

The other kids, the tough kids, they were learning that rules were for suckers. When you don’t get caught, the rules don’t apply.

Now I was starting to understand. I didn’t get it back then. And if the tough kids had any clue, they ignored it. At their school, they didn’t have nuns lecturing them about being good, and parents lecturing them about how they represented the family in the community.

So we never tried anything. We played our game.

“So you wouldn’t steal a car?” After we’d safely made it to the sidewalk, I could hear Jimmy better. “Okay, your mom has to go to the grocery store. She wants you to go with her, so you go.” Then he thought for a moment. “You want to stay home and play. You want to ride your bike.”

“Okay.”

Patches of shade from Elm trees passed over us as we glided down the far side of the boulevard. It was a little too fast to ride with no hands, but I knew Jimmy was back there trying it.

“She wants you to help her buy things. You wanna play with your friends. It’s summertime, but you go you have to go. She needs your help.”

He seemed to be attempting a stealthy angle this time. Rolling along the sidewalk, we dodged the occasional low hanging tree branch.

I listened as he went on.

“After the store she wants to stop by the bank.”

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, where is this going?”

“Hang on. You read your new comic book and you’re just miserable. You should be home. You should be down at the park, jumping ramps on the bike trails with your friends.”

Jimmy liked the jerry-rigged bike ramps we made at the park. We would push our bikes to the top of one of the big hills, the same ones we would ride our sleds down in winter when they were covered with snow. At the bottom of the hill, we rigged up some plywood and old boards that we fished out of the creek. The idea was to be like Evel Knievel, racing down the hill on your bike and hitting the ramp at top speed, and then seeing how far you could fly.

The problem was, it was pretty scary coming down the hill. You picked up a lot of speed. If you hit the brakes, you might go over the handle bars and land face first in the dirt. Or your tire might skid and send you into the trees. If you made it to the bottom, you would almost certainly miss the ramp—an eight inch wide board at best—and if managed to hit it, you’d probably wreck after you got airborne. Landings were such a small part of the equation, we never planned on them. We had no place to slow down, no safety gear, and no way of getting medical attention if you got hurt.

We were typical ten year old boys.

Jimmy was still laying out his elaborate scenario while I had drifted off.

“She parks the car and goes into the bank…”

I shook my head. “I guess I do this before the grocery store, or the ice cream is gonna melt and the milk will spoil.”

“You are in the bank, standing there,” he continued, ignoring me. “All of a sudden, there’s a bank robbery. They take your mom hostage. You’re sitting there, so they give you the car keys and tell you that they need you to steal that car out front or they will shoot your mom. The robbers need this to make their escape.”

The scene set, he asked the capper: “Would you steal it?”

“Of course,” I said. “No hesitation.”

“You’d get caught.”

“So?”

“So you’d go to jail.”

“I don’t think they’d send a kid to jail in a situation like that.”

“But what if they did?”

This round of the game seemed a little tortured. What was he getting at? Either he had forgotten that he had asked me nearly the same question before, or he was looking for a different answer.

I considered it, too, as I pedaled along Rummings Road. This one had a sidewalk, so we were safe.

But I was tired of the game, and frustrated from all the speeding cars conspiring to scare us. I jumped to where I thought his questions were headed. “We would all kill Hitler if we could kill Hitler, okay? But it isn’t that easy.”

I glanced over my shoulder, seeing a shocked expression on his face. “Even if you could really kill him, not just theoretically?”

“Of course. No hesitation,” I said, still theorizing. “To sacrifice your life for the lives of millions would buy you a seat in heaven. It’s an easy choice.”

“What would make it harder choice?”

I rode in silence for a moment. It was a good question.

My family had been to my uncle’s house for a birthday party for their two year old son. They fawned over that cute little kid, walking around in his overalls and t-shirt. He was their world, and it showed. To trade him away? Inconceivable. Probably for any parents, with a kid of any age, but a little kid? A helpless child? No way.

“Say you have the parents of a little kid,” I started. “Their only child, on the kid’s second birthday.” I paused for effect, like I was making it up. “In front of all their friends and family, everybody at the kid’s birthday party, you ask if they would trade their child’s life to kill Hitler—before he came to power, but you explain what he’s going to become, and they understand it like you showed them a page of a certain future. They could even get away with it, Scott free. Now it’s a whole different proposition.”

I was proud of myself. I had created a scene where there would be a real challenge to do the right thing. Young parents are hard wired not to put their child at risk. Even as a kid, I knew that. Certainly none would volunteer to lose their child for a stranger who had done nothing wrong yet, even with the promise that he would eventually come to power and be responsible for the deaths of millions of people—including millions of children. It was a beautiful dilemma.

Would you kill Hitler? Yes. What if it would cost you the life of your child in exchange? Then, no.

It changes that quickly.

No mother could ever make that choice. And she wouldn’t let her husband choose it, either.

I could see the smiling look of satisfaction on Jimmy’s face. In fact, I think that was his point, to get me to come up with some really challenging situations. I wondered why.

As a game, two stupid pre-teens might very well banter about this. You can still say yes. It’s just math at that point. Lose this one, keep millions of others. Easy. As a math problem, it’s just a figurative child you don’t know. A kid on paper.

But in reality, it’s crazy. Nobody would do it. So it’s not an automatic choice. The math still works, but somehow you can’t do it.

I figured that was Jimmy’s point. To get me to open myself to that.

Why?

I looked back at him again. He was still smiling. “Those poor parents.”

He didn’t mean it. He was mocking me, letting his sympathetic brain disengage from his theoretical one.

Whatever. It’s just a game. Why not? It doesn’t matter.

We had reached Woolco. I rolled my green Schwinn into the bike rack. “You have a dark streak, man,” I said, shaking my head.

Jimmy brushed past me. “Hey, you came up with all that baby killing stuff, not me.”

I was about to say something back to him when I stopped. He was right.

I was even a little embarrassed for having done so, thinking about the look on my uncle’s face when I told him we traded his child to kill a really bad guy. Mom always said I had a vivid imagination, but to be honest, it made me a little sick to my stomach to know that I could think stuff like that up.

I locked up my bike and went into the store, and forced those thoughts out of my head.

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Original Chapter 14, An Angel On Her Shoulder

 “What?” I asked frantically. The cars were whizzing by us as we rode our bikes to Woolco. I couldn’t hear the question over the noise. There were too many cars, driving way too close to us.

As adults we tend to forget these things, but being a 10-year-old kid on a bike, riding down a busy road with cars going by just two feet away from you – it can be a little hazardous.

There were several areas under construction on Washington Boulevard, our chosen route to Woolco to buy more model boats. Apartments were being built, so whole sections along the busy road didn’t have sidewalks. It forced us to ride our bikes in the street. That wasn’t a big deal on our own street; the only cars who drove down our street were people who lived there. But going out to the bigger streets was a different story.

When you’re a scrawny little kid on a bike, and a car goes by at 40 miles an hour, right next to you, you feel it. You wouldn’t think 40 mph was very fast riding in a car as a passenger, but a car that goes by you at that speed when you’re on your bike, it’s a whole different ball game. Squeezed onto the side of a busy main road, at 10 years old, on a bike, with car after car whizzing by, it’s amazingly fast. And loud. The tires make a lot of noise, especially if the cars already have snow tires on them. Trucks make the most noise. When one of the big concrete trucks rolled by, it was like a jet liner was getting ready to land on your head. The freaking ground shook. But the biggest part was the wind.

Even the smallest sedan that goes by you on your bike, the wind in its wake tugs at you and pulls you out toward the road. It would grab at you and knock you off balance. A big car going by felt like it could throw you to the ground. Asphalt roads do horrible things to hands when you fall off your bike. Not only did it sting like hell, you had to sit there and pick the little rocks out of your wounds. Then you had to climb back on your bike, bleeding, and keep riding. It didn’t matter whether you gave up and went home, or whether you toughed it out and rode on to the store; the bike was the fastest way to get to either place. And riding with a skinned knee or buckshot hands was the worst.

Usually, we encouraged each other to keep going and get to the store. The thinking was, as long as you already went through all that trouble, you might as well get your model boat. I bet Woolco saw more than one bleeding kid pulled up on his bike on any given summer day.

So our little excursion to acquire additional warships to destroy down in the creek was made a little more adventurous – and a lot longer – by the lack of sidewalks. At least it seemed longer to us.

Amidst this chaos, Jimmy had said something to me, but I missed it. He shouted it again.

“Would you kill Hitler?”

“What, here? Now?”

Another car roared by, voicing its disapproval by laying on the horn as it passed.

“You wanna play now?”

He was crazy. This road was too busy to talk back and forth to another kid on a bike behind me. I hated this part of the ride. We needed to get to the section of the road up ahead that had the sidewalk, where we could ride safely. That’s what was on my mind.

Not Jimmy. “C’mon! Would you kill Hitler?”

“Get off the road!” a motorist shouted as they sped by. We had to go on and off the street when there wasn’t a sidewalk, but we obviously weren’t doing it very well. This particular spot was a short section that was lasting forever.

“Come on! Let’s play!” Jimmy shouted.

It was a stupid name for a stupid game. Irreverent, really. I’m not sure we even called it by that name. Killing Hitler. I’m not sure I remember what the actual name of that game was.

Oh, I knew alright. I remember playing that game like we had just played it yesterday.

 

It was just a dumb game that we played as young pre-teenagers. We didn’t have wives or children or girlfriends back then, to civilize us. So we played dumb games to trick each other into saying something stupid. It was just a harmless game to pass the time for a couple of kids who weren’t old enough to pass it in other ways.

“Would you ever steal a corvette?” might be the opening question.

“What? Heck, no!” would be a typical opening reply.

Then: “What if bank robbers put a gun to your mom’s head, and you had to steal the car or they would kill her. You have to steal the car to help them escape, or they will kill you mom.”

“Then, yes, I’d steal the car.”

And so on. Silly.

It was as complicated as Tic Tac Toe, and almost as pointless. The goal was to get the other person to start out at a position that was completely reasonable, and get them to move to a position that was completely the opposite. The trick of the game was to do it in slow enough steps that they can’t see where you are heading with your questions, baiting them into the trap.

It rarely worked. When we were young enough to walk into the trap, we weren’t smart enough to ask methodical questions. We’d just try to win in three moves. We had no strategy, no plan. When we grew old enough to be patient, we couldn’t lure the other one in. Tic Tac Toe.

The game was premised on knowing what the other person considered important, or knowing what they valued. But it also depended on them having similar judgment as you.

What if you stole a car and didn’t get caught? That changes things. When you don’t get punished the first time you try something bad, you might be emboldened to try again. Maybe you’d steal another car, or try shoplifting, anything to see where the limits were. We knew kids who had done it. Older kids that we’d see at the park. They smoked pot, or went joyriding; things like that. They were tough kids who got in fights at school but didn’t get beat up.

In the real world, would I ever steal a car? No, never. Hoo, boy, would I get in trouble for that! Because of course, I’d for sure get caught. My dad would kill me. I’d be grounded forever.

The other kids, the “tough kids” as we called them, they were learning that when you don’t get caught, you start to think that the rules are for suckers, that the rules don’t apply…

Now I was starting to understand. I didn’t get it back then. And if the tough kids had any clue, they ignored it. At their school, they didn’t have nuns lecturing them all day about being good.

Your family’s interest steers you back into the clear; your upbringing. Peer pressure. Social standing. Among other things.

That’s not to say only poor kids steal cars, or that rich people have better morals than poor people. Rich people maybe just have different opportunities.

We played the killing Hitler game when we were kids because when you’re 15 and 16 and start have girlfriends, you don’t play games like that anymore. But at the time, we were ten. We didn’t have girlfriends, and wouldn’t have any for some time. So we played our game.

Would you steal a car? No, of course not. No hesitation. My dad would kill me. I’d get caught, of course. I’d get caught if I lived in a big town like New York City, but in our small town where everybody knew everybody, they all sure seemed to know me. When I turned sixteen, everybody knew what my car looked like. At ten, they knew which bike was mine. I would get completely caught if I ever tried anything.

So we never tried anything. We played our game.

“So you wouldn’t steal a car?” Jimmy asked after we’d safely made it to the sidewalk and I could hear him better.

“Okay, your mom has to go to the grocery store” Jimmy said. “She wants you to go with her, so you go.” Then he thought for a moment. “You want to stay home and play; you want to ride your bike.”
Of course. I want to ride bikes with you, right Jim?

 

“She wants you to help her buy things. You wanna play with your friends. It’s summertime, but you go you have to go. She needs your help.”

Jimmy was attempting to be stealthy this time out. Rolling along the sidewalk, we picked up some speed as the road turned down hill. Dodging the occasional tree branch, I listened as he went on.

“After the store she wants to stop by the bank.” I rolled my eyes and he must have known it. “You read your new comic book and you’re just miserable about this. You should be home. You should be down at the park, jumping ramps on the bike trails with your friends.”

Jimmy liked the jerry-rigged bike ramps we made at the park. We would push our bikes to the top of one of the big hills, the same ones we would ride our sleds down in winter when they were covered with snow. At the bottom of the hill, we rigged up some plywood and old boards that we fished out of the creek. The idea was to be like Evel Knievel, racing down the hill on your bike and hitting the ramp at top speed, and then seeing how far you could fly.

The problem was, it was pretty scary coming down the hill. You picked up a lot of speed. But if you hit the brakes, you might, go over the handle bars and land face first in the dirt. Or your tire might skid and send you into the trees. If you made it to the bottom, you would almost certainly miss the ramp – an 8” wide board, usually – and if you did manage to hit it, you’d probably wreck after you got airborne. Landings were such a small part of the equation, we never planned on them. We had no place to slow down, no safety gear, and no way of getting medical attention if you got hurt.

Typical ten year old boys.

Jimmy was still laying out his elaborate scenario while I had drifted off.

“She parks the car and goes into the bank…”

I chimed in. “I guess I do this before the grocery store, or the ice cream is gonna melt and the milk will spoil.”

“You are in the bank, standing there,” he continued, ignoring me. “All of a sudden, there’s a bank robbery. They take your mom hostage. You’re sitting there, so they give you the car keys and tell you that they need you to steal that car out front or they will shoot your mom. The robbers need this to make their escape.”

The scene set, he asked the capper: “Would you steal it?”

“Of course,” I said. “No hesitation.”

“You’d get caught.”

“So?”

“So you’d go to jail!”

“I don’t think they’d send a kid to jail in a situation like that.”

“But what if they did?” he asked. This round of the game seemed a little tortured. What was he getting at? Either he had forgotten that he had asked me nearly the same question before, or he was looking for a different answer.

I considered it, too, as I pedaled along the busier road. This one had a sidewalk, so we were safe.

From there, you boil it down. Would you steal a car? Would you still try to save your mom or your brother or your dog from a burning building? What if they threatened to shoot your mom over a loaf of bread?

Jimmy wasn’t asking good questions anymore. Would you steal a loaf of bread? No. If you family would starve if you didn’t? Yes. Does that make it right?

It’s ridiculous because they would never have you shoot your mom over a loaf of bread. But the idea is, what starts out as absolutely “No” can usually be twisted, in this game, to something where you would say absolutely “Yes.”

I cut him off. “We would all kill Hitler if we could kill Hitler. But it isn’t that easy.”

I don’t think Jimmy understood that aspect of the game questions. “You’d have to kill Hitler before he came to power,” I explained, “before he caused the war and murdered everybody. We would do it in a second if we could know all that, if we could see all the bad things he was going to do. Of course, no hesitation. Shoot him in the head and leave him in a ditch, no problem. Theoretically, it’s easy.”

“Even if you could really kill him, not just theoretically?”

“Of course. No hesitation,” I said, still theorizing. “To sacrifice your life for the lives of millions, it’s worthwhile. That would buy you a seat in heaven, if you believe in that sort of thing.” Killing someone in a game is easy, just like GI Joes in the creek. Murder is an easy thing to discuss when it isn’t a real possibility.

 

“But even if you’d be killed in the process?” Jimmy asked. I couldn’t tell if he was sincere or if he was pulling me in. But I went on.

“Yes,” I replied. “No question. No hesitation.”

“That’s not the problem,” I continued. “It’s still easy to say ‘yes’ if you were sitting here as a grown man that already did all the things he wanted to do in life, or if you were talking to a man who was old enough to feel like he lived his life, that’s an easy choice.”

“What would make it harder choice?”

Good question.

I had recently been to my uncle’s house for a birthday party for their two year old son. They fawned over that kid. He was their world, and it showed. To trade him away? Inconceivable. Probably for any parents, with a kid of any age, but a little kid? A helpless child? No way.

“To talk to a parent of a little kid,” I started. “Their only child, on the kid’s birthday. Let’s say two; the kid is turning two years old.” I thought for a moment, working up some real drama for the scene. “In front of all their friends and family, everybody at the kid’s birthday party, you ask if they would trade their child’s life to kill Hitler. Before he came to power, and even if you could get away with it. Now it’s a different proposition.”

I was proud of myself. I had created a scene where there would be a real challenge to do the right thing. It was mystifying. Young parents are hard wired not to put their child at risk. Even as a kid, I knew that. Certainly none would volunteer to lose their child for a stranger who had done nothing wrong yet, even with the promise that he would eventually come to power and be responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Millions of children. It was a beautiful dilemma.

Would you kill Hitler? Yes. What if it would cost you the life of your child in exchange? Then, no. It changes that quickly.

No mother could ever make that choice. And she wouldn’t let her husband choose it, either.

Jimmy was satisfied at my question. I could see it in his face. In fact, I think that was the point. To get me to come up with some really challenging situations. I wonder why.

As a game, two stupid pre-teens might very well banter about this. You can still say yes. It’s just math at that point. Lose this one, keep millions of others. Easy. As a math problem, it’s just a figurative child you don’t know. A kid on paper.

But in reality, if somebody ever came up to you and said, “We’re taking your child, and in return for your child this person who will eventually do some bad things will be killed, and all the bad things won’t happen.” It’s crazy. Nobody would do it. So it’s not an automatic choice. It’s still the right thing to do, the math still works, but somehow you can’t do it.”

That was Jimmy’s point. To get me to open myself to that. Why?

I looked back at him. He was smiling.

“Those poor parents,” he said. He didn’t mean it. He was mocking me, letting his sympathetic brain disengage from his theoretical one. It’s just a game. Why not? It doesn’t matter.

We had reached Woolco. I rolled my green Schwinn into the bike rack.

“You have a dark streak, man,” I said, shaking my head.

“Hey, you came up with all that, not me!”

I was about to say something back to him when I stopped. He was right. I came up with it.

I was even a little embarrassed for having done so, thinking about the look on my uncle’s face when I told him we traded his child to kill a really bad guy. Mom always said I had a vivid imagination, but to be honest, it made me a little sick to my stomach to know that I could think stuff like that up.

I locked up my bike and went into the store, and forced those thoughts out of my head.

---

ANALYSIS

Yes, Virginia, you can use a flashback just like you can use an occasional adverb. Even the -ly kind. Just, you know, don’t overdo it.

So this chapter got trimmed a little and really sounded a lot like the first time Jimmy and Doug play the Killing Hitler game, but that’s intentional. It was a loooooong time ago when you read that, even if you were reading it in a book, and sometimes a passage is supposed to have that deja vu feel, so replaying sections can give you that.

But be careful, a little goes a long way. I may have overdone it, and I’ve trimmed this chapter twice. Trust your instincts, but listen to your critique partners and  beta readers.

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.

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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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