Memories of My Childhood

Have you ever wondered what a writer's childhood was like? Well, wonder no longer. These stories are about my childhood. I began writing when I was twenty-one in the year 1971 and have since seen not only the world change dramatically but the publishing world as well. When I published my first novel, a horror yarn titled Evil Stalks the Night in 1984 with Leisure mass market paperbacks, I was a loyal worker bee of the big publishing houses with a stingy boiler contract and a whopping 4 percent of the royalties...now thirty-two years later I am no longer bowing to them and am finally making a living at my craft for the first time in forty-five years of writing; have 24 books published. Three of the following four short stories were the very first stories I ever had published and they were published in my local newspaper between 1977 and 1979 after the one called Michael, a tale about my youngest brother who was murdered in 1971, won their short story contest over two hundred other submissions. The fourth short story was just recently written and is a composite of some of my childhood Christmases. All four are loosely based on my childhood in the 1950's and 1960's. After my musician/singer/songwriter brother Jim passed away last year from cancer I felt the intense need to revive these old stories and memories and put them out there for all to read as a tribute to him and my family. These are my stories, my childhood and some of my fondest memories.