AUTHOR - Raymond Spence
AUTHOR'S CONFESSIONS
As the old saying goes, I been everywhere and seen everything. Not quite but I did my best to get around. Born in London England, brought up for a few boyishly bad years in Stonehouse Scotland by ever patient Grandparents, brought to Canada by even more patient parents and served my sentence in a small pleasant British Columbia town where even the dogs had a good time either chasing cars or sleeping in the middle of the road and making the muttering drivers steer around them.
Then I was dragged up and into the Northern BC forests where I tended chickens, dug dirt so the potatoes could grow, worked in sawmills and plywood plants before I was released and allowed to go south to Vancouver where I attempted to smarten myself up with a few years of university and undid that good work by enjoying even more years of beach and pool life guarding and making jazz, blues and rock music far into the night. Now I've settled down to the life of a solitary scribe. Wish me luck.
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We used to aim so high, never thought of giving up ground,
But as the days pass away, some say we can be found in them.
But there’s always tomorrow at the end of today,
So we pick up our wings once again and we fly away!
To Another Day!
ALWAYS TOMORROW
Because her self indulgent and about to be retired upscale parents are more interested in Palm Springs than sticking around and looking after LIZ, their feisty but failing 85 yr. old aunt, their daughter MIRIAM, a lovely, hard working and childless 36 year old nurse, has to do the caring job alone - just as she did with her dying grandmother years before.
Miriam is married to PAUL, an obsessively athletic stockbroker who is happily turning 40. He’s a competitive triathlete and being 40 starts him at the top of a new age division. He secretly becomes involved with JONI, an equally obsessed and beautiful 28 year old female Tri Head who trains with him.
Liz and her still young but biologically ticking great niece face their problems with courage and humor but without any family help.
And then one golden late summer afternoon AL, a tall easy going humorous 31 yr. old lifeguard rows into their lives, offering the possibility of romance to Miriam who still doesn't know anything about the potential threat to her marriage. She denies her attraction to Al even when the ever sassy and wanna be young Liz urges her to at least flirt with this muscular and tanned hottie.
The title is meant to convey both the problems and the bittersweet hopefulness of life that many of us feel as we live out our own existences and roles.
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AUTHOR'S MUSINGS
On my first year as a beach lifeguard for Vancouver City, I was assigned Sunset Beach, which is where I situated Al, the lifeguard protagonist in ALWAYS TOMORROW. And the inlet waterfront market where he first meets Liz and her (ahem) faux niece Miriam, used to be my favorite coffee and pastry hangout. It made writing the scene and many others in the story a lot easier.
For as the experts always say, 'write what you know'. So who am I to argue with them?
And not only that, like Al I kept the lifeguard gig going a lot longer than one would expect from a supposed high school job. But like I always say... “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”
Sad to say, I no longer lifeguard and instead daily sweat over this hot computer. Oh well. There’s always sweet memories of the Yesteryears.
IRISH SQUALLS
A widowed young North American woman, Peggy Moore, returns to Ireland to live in a farming cottage and a huge acreage left to her in her Great Aunt’s will. When she gets to the cottage, driven there by Sean Lafferty, a garrulous cabby who becomes her best and laziest friend, she discovers Desmond Grattan, a rough looking local going through her Great Aunt’s papers. She drives him off but later discovers that he had done work for the old lady, (who might have promised him something during a drunken party), but nothing that was written down, (or even remembered clearly by anyone who was there until the anticipation of large amounts of cash and good paying jobs promised by a cabal of unscrupulous land developers quickly revives their powers of recall).
Backed by these powerful grifters, the rough sues Peggy for land title, using the brilliant junior partner in the village’s only legal firm. She employs the older senior partner who quickly begins to lose the case for his own reasons.
Against her better judgment, she finds herself attracted to Liam Geoghegan, the younger partner who is waging the suit against her inheritance claims. He is unhappily married and a real hunk and according to the garrulous Sean, “Aye, Peg. He’s a deep and dark one, that lad. Went off to university. Brawny and brainy fellow. Almost too bright for life. Came back with a real beauty for a wife. Talked even less since.”
Peggy, being a feisty Irish colleen born and bred in the Auld Sod, has no intention of selling the property at any price. Things look particularly bleak as the powerful schemers use every dangerous and dirty trick in the book to boot her off the farm. But what none of them understand is that Peggy is a tough, quick witted and stubborn adversary. And not even her growing attraction to the striking and enigmatic lawyer will deter her from fighting him and everyone else for what her equally feisty Great Aunt Peg had left her as a woman to woman family legacy.
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THE LAZARUS GIRL
On a rainy, winter Seattle night, a young man and a little girl die at the exact same Nano second in different incidents. And what happens to them After That is anybody's guess.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I wrote this novel while living through a rainy grey North Seattle winter when the mind turns to quiet thoughts of the Everlasting and the Unknown and I found myself wrapped up in these Byzantine coils like a helpless prisoner writing down this story until the advent of Spring released me back into the Every Day World.
I hope your reading experience is as mystifying as my writer's journey into the Afterworld was.
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Hook: POLTERGEIST in DELIVERANCE country.
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Tagline: There is sex for the Damned & Hell Bound but there’s a price to be paid.
A street tough Indian shaman, after experiencing a vision, escapes from prison to help the Elder, a two hundred year old mummy lying on a raised burial platform high up on a sacred mountain. The ancient warrior is losing his battle for the mountain against the Celtic devil, Deofol who emerges nightly from a continually bubbling pond that acts as a Hell Spout.
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Deofol is consorting with a beautiful female ghoul who haunts her ex-husband’s abandoned alpine hunting lodge that is situated beside the pond.
For the nearly two years since she was ripped apart by rabid Devil Pigs, the sexually ecstatic ghoul has inhabited the lodge and has joyously experienced her 666 nights of ecstasy.
But now it is time to pay for the horrific S&M orgies with real eternal torment when she is doomed to be dragged down to Hell at dawn the next morning.
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The shaman arrives at the lodge at dusk, willing to fight Deofol and the ghoul to the Final End, only to discover that the owner’s college age nephew and his girlfriend, who much too closely resembles the dead woman, have driven up that afternoon for what they hope will be a fun weekend.
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All Hell breaks loose during the night of demonic struggle and in the morning a supreme sacrifice has to be made or all is lost.
MARTHA FANS
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They came in droves.
By the doggy dozens. Over the fence.
Under the gate. Through the hedge.
Across the lane. Along the streets.
Hammered the sidewalks. Scratched the door.
Jammed the windows and threw themselves in front of moving cars in canine suicide pacts.
There were big dogs. Little dogs. Skinny dogs.
And dogs so fat they were of suspicious virility.
Dogs with tails. Dogs without.
Furry dogs and balding dogs.
And dogs that looked like carpet remnants.
There were quiet dogs and howling dogs.
And fighting dogs and sneaky dogs.
And dogs that visibly suffered.
I didn't know their names and
I couldn't judge their number.
All I knew for sure was that they were boy dogs.
​THE BEST IS YET TO COME
Two men; a recently separated thrill seeker who has life threatening cancer and a neurotically careful, romantically dumped hypnotherapist, (who’s treating the thrill seeker for an accident-caused Near Death Straight Into Hell Experience), take an impromptu holiday in Antigua on the cancer victim’s golden parachute money to try and solve their problems.
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They do - but not in the way they had anticipated.
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An argumentative Odd Couple comedy ensues between the straight-laced, non believing psychologist and the risk-taking bon vivant who’s embarking on an enforced spiritual search to meet his upcoming demise by disease.
In Antigua, the thrill seeker visits with a Voodoo priest to get rid of his recurring visits to Hell, while the always self worried hypnotherapist is in a hell of his own. He is so water phobic he can barely stand showers so of course he falls in love with a beautiful scuba diving instructor who is almost always wet.
The two are followed by the cancer patient’s estranged wife who is pregnant, perhaps by her ex-business partner, but who still loves her husband in sickness and in health. And she brings a sealed manila envelope from his oncologist to prove it.
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But...where there's life there's hope...or so they say...
"Delight thyself in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of your heart. The Best Is Yet To Come.” Revelations 4:1 11.
And then there's Frank Sinatra’s version of Coleman/Leigh’s “THE BEST IS YET TO COME”
This story explores both versions...