Showing results by narrator "J. L." in All Categories

Digging deep within ourselves can be daunting and divine. Some of us need to find ourselves again, and it doesn't happen by accident. Authentic existence requires vulnerability and accountability. It takes courage to reconnect with our innermost knowing.

"The Playground": Jack Francis has lost his zest for life. Retirement has left him feeling old, and divorce has left him feeling useless, until one day, he witnesses something extraordinary. "The Crack in the Wall": The old stone wall that runs the length of Hendersonville Road in Milner's Hollow has a strange crack in it. On a beautiful summer's day, two little girls discover the terrifying truth about that crack. "Bossman": Disenchanted with his dead-end job, Eric Pendergrass discovers a strange way to make his boss pay.

In his first book, J. L. Raynor talks about his early years growing up in New York City and his love for the World Trade Center as a child. After September 11 and the weeks that followed, he began watching news reports that identified those responsible for destroying his favorite buildings. He developed a substantial amount of hatred toward not only Muslims, but anyone who resembled Middle Eastern culture.

Someone asked me what the theme of my collection was. I hate those questions. I'm really bad at theme. I don't think about a theme when I'm writing the story. I'm just trying to tell a story that interests me (and hopefully someone else). Most of these stories are about people who have lost something and are trying to find a way to move on with their lives. I hope you enjoy them.

These 15 original stories, donated by authors to help keep local theater alive, are fun, quirky, imaginative, and bold - the perfect way to tide over audiences until local stage curtains can once again rise! Each tale turns the spotlight on some unusual snapshot of life or imagination. Sit back, let us entertain you, and know that your purchase has made a big difference for local artists...while we all wait in the wings.

The year is 1951, and Emily Nelson, a recent graduate of teaching school, has found a dream job in her home town. She has been hired to teach a single six-year-old girl. The girl's father has one steadfast and cruel directive that Emily cannot understand - until she breaks it. Luna is an eerie story that takes you deep inside a mysterious family secret, examining the horror of that secret as well as the innocent little girl at its center.

When his boyhood friend vanishes, a man who has coasted through life on the fading memory of high school heroics, risks everything to save him. Just as Darwin is getting back in the game, Billy vanishes, the FBI wants Darwin's help to find him, and Darwin learns his wife's secret past has put her life in jeopardy. Darwin know's Billy's guilty, but he can't betray his friend, and he's falling in love with Fariba, but can't abandon his wife. He has no good choice, no winning shot , and in this world heroes don't get parades.

Here’s the truth: Thousands of businesses are started every hour of every day of every year. Most die, few thrive, and the rest struggle to survive - mainly through enormous effort, force of will, and luck. There is a better way to take the guesswork out of growth: focus on the few areas that make all the difference. Bill Flynn’s keen insights drawn from his personal experience, 30 years of studying business success, and speaking and working with hundreds of CEOs are neatly captured in Further, Faster.

Morgin finds himself living two lives. When he goes to sleep at night he dreams of a life 1,200 years in the past. But it's not like a dream, it's more like another life, for when he goes to sleep in that other life, he awakes again in this one, still a hunted man. In the far past he's a mercenary Benesh'ere warrior hired out to one of the 12 Legions of Angels fighting in the Great Clan Wars. And there he fights alongside, and against, legendary figures from the far past of the Shahot.

Now a Benesh'ere slave, every whiteface in the tribe hungers for Morgin's death. But he is Harriok's property, and while Harriok remains in a coma, a victim of the venom of the sand cat's sixth claw, the warriors wait and bide their time. As Morgin accompanies them on the March, an affinity for steel is slowly awakening within him, and he truly fears the truths his growing knowledge may reveal.

Morgin is trapped in the Kingdom of Dreams, the realm of the Unnamed King. He knows he must somehow get back to the Mortal Plane to save France and Rhianne, and he's frustrated that he doesn't know the way. He decides to find the Unnamed King, for surely His Majesty could show him the way, and maybe even tell him his true name.

Rat is no ordinary thief. A feral, filthy, and malnourished child, he haunts the streets of the medieval city Anistigh and survives on what he can steal. When he tries to steal a purse and bungles it, a mob wants to cut off his hand as punishment, so to save himself, he slips into a convenient shadow to hide. Rat thinks it's just another warm and comfortable shadow cast by the sun, but a clan wizard sees him create the shadow with his magic, an instinctive act of which Rat is unaware.

Technology is created for the betterment of mankind, but at what point is it to far? While the Resuoh Family seem safe for the moment, things quickly change as ExTek releases an all new threat to recapture the device that is now fused into Elijah's arm. As the family are forced to confront this, they also come face to face with mysterious new allies, and uncover the dark plot behind ExTek once and for all.

Multimillion-dollar companies around the world are losing millions, and they don’t even know it. In the past, non-financial risk (safety) has been approached from a sociological and psychological perspective. Risk Dollarisation presents the financial approach to non-financial risk. This is a quantitative, factual,and measurable account of your business' damage costs.

It's the fall season and time for Ossie to make his annual southern migration from Portland, Maine to his winter nest down in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Ossie meets up with a variety of whimsical and zany friends, but needs to navigate around obstacles, foes, severe weather, poacher,s and pollution if he is to reach his southern home. At an air show, Ossie meets a female osprey named Onida....

The Resuoh family lived a calm and peaceful life in small-town Nebraska where nothing ever happened, or so they thought. When a top-secret experimental tech laboratory loses a precious new invention, disaster strikes the town. The Resuoh family is thrust in the middle of a massive scheme and must set out to make things right before the entire Earth suffers the consequences!

The tech boom of our time is changing San Francisco at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been transformed by Silicon Valley. But the richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and the cracks in the city's facade begin to show. Inspired by Studs Terkel's classic works of oral history, writer Cary McClelland has spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of the Bay Area's rapid change: tech innovators, venture capitalists, coders, homeless advocates, pawn brokers, prosecutors, public defenders....

An examination of the practical application of the cross in a believer's life. A call to selflessness and the true Christian life.

Neal Bascomb, a New York Times best-selling author, delivers the spellbinding story of the downed Allied airmen who masterminded the remarkably courageous - and ingenious - breakout from Germany's most devilish POW camp.

A question that will define the Biblical veracity of our Christian profession and our perception of God, His character and His immutability: Did Jesus correct Moses? Did Jesus come to alter the Scriptures as delivered to Moses and other Old Testament writers? Has the entire Old Testament been abrogated and done away? What is the New Testament and its relation to the Old? What is the distinction between the Ceremonial Law and the Moral Law?