Messages

Spare time creates a precarious lull in the life of a compulsive writer. It usually means that something — anything — must be cranked out or else a spouse, friends, neighbors or kids will suffer from a deluge of unwanted attention. Ergo, books, letters, political op-eds, e-mails and short stories.

You get hooked after the first feel-good experience, then spend the rest of your life trying to duplicate the same feeling. However, by writing you can create a finished product, not get finished by a product you don’t create. Why else do successful authors, amid all their wealth and prosperity, continue to lock themselves in a room for months at a time to keep pumping out written words by the millions?

Having retired after thirty years in Miami as a patrol cop, homicide detective and then a few command positions, I left with a formidable reservoir of stories ready for the keyboard. One lifetime is not enough to capture them all in manuscripts. Add in, the trials and tribulations of multiple marriages, fathering four children, adopting three more and struggles through my own array of addictions and demons until, one day, the storm calmed and the opportunity for creation was at my doorstep. The volume of stories to tell is beyond infinite.

I turned to a life of writing, not only for enjoyment and perhaps a little income, but as a catharsis in which I could express and share the many aspects I’ve learned from living the good life, the bad life and the sad life. Now it is a blessing to be able to wake up every day with umpteen hours at my disposal, to do what I want to do, not what I have to do.

My first short fiction story emerged sometime in the late 1990s about the human and fragile side of the police profession, and was readily tucked away. It started as an idea for a book, but I saw that the message could be tightly bound in a far fewer word count. Since then, I’ve produced another seventeen stories and kept them in file for a rainy day. Many of them could have been the basis for a full blown novel.

The rainy day has arrived and it is time to unleash them from the hard drive and publish the collection as a book before the passage of time rendered half of them out-dated.

These are not traditional “war stories” about cops and robbers; rather they chronicle a myriad of emotions gleaned from life and human experience in its most vulnerable states. After all, police officers are humans too. They are about loss, tragedy, struggle, youth, old age, the gift of love, the denial of love and a sprinkle of humor thrown in. All of these eighteen stories — to a greater or lesser degree — are based on true happenings which I am intimately familiar with or have credible knowledge about. Naturally, I have taken literary license to skew, embellish, exaggerate and add a bit of drama to the text. Some readers may wonder which of them are closest to the truth, so I have provided a measuring device called: “Truth-o-meter.” On the title page of each story, readers will see a percentage rating which tells what degree of truth the tale was derived from. But have no doubt, these stories are all fiction with fictional characters, although I suspect some readers will think a particular character is him or her.

Stories should not only entertain, but stimulate thought. Some of the material is dark, some light, some ironic and some frivolous and silly. But there exists a message in each which I hope will be of value to some, or at least, a few. At age seventy-two, all I can offer my fellow human beings is the benefit of vast experience in dealing with emotional trauma and whatever wisdom was gleaned during the course of one man’s life.

The messages abound, depending on how one relates them to their own unique lives. Most are clear, some not so clear, but they are there. I hope readers will appreciate them all for their intended purpose: Understanding mankind.