Shameless Self-Promotion

I've been asked by a few folks who have enjoyed reading my novel why I haven't been promoting it more. Since I don't have any good answer to that question, here's a peek at the prologue to "The Junkyards of Memory." (The book is available at amazon.com. Or you can order a copy from lulu.com by clicking on the icon on the right side of this page... and even get a 15% discount!)


She could hear someone knocking, but she couldn’t tell whether it was nearby or far away. She turned her head, looking around. Doing so seemed to take hours of infinitely exhausting effort.

The door, she finally decided. Someone was knocking on the bathroom door. “Go away,” she tried to say, but the sounds that came from her mouth were nothing more than a garbled groan.

The knocking on the door became louder, more frantic, and was now accompanied by someone calling her name. “Go away,” she tried to say again, but the words were unintelligible even to her own ears.

If only she could get up, go to the door, and tell him that everything was all right. Then he would go back to watching TV or reading a magazine or whatever he should have been doing instead of bothering her. She wanted to get up and tell him to leave her alone, but she could not make her body obey.

She pushed down on the floor with her hands, hoping that this would somehow propel her to a standing position. Her hands -- or the floor -- were covered with something wet and sticky. She stared at her fingers, trying to decide what the red stuff all over them was.

The knocking on the door stopped. There was a brief rattling of the doorknob. Then there was no sound. She relaxed in her efforts to stand up. He had given up and gone away.

There was a loud “wham” and a jolt that she felt through her entire body. He must have slammed against the door, trying to force it open. Too bad for him, she thought. She was leaning against it.

She looked at her legs. They were pressed against the base of the toilet bowl. It would be almost impossible for him to get the door open while she was in this position on the floor.

She felt him hit the door again, not as hard this time, it seemed. He wasn’t going to get in, she thought. She stared at the mess on the floor around her, hoping somebody would eventually clean it up.

Suddenly, accompanying another loud “wham,” she felt herself falling sidewards away from the door as it was pushed open. Her face hit the sticky floor, her cheek right next to the magazine she’d scrawled on not so many minutes ago...