Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan embarked on a program of aggressive military overseas adventures in Asia and the Pacific. From 1904 to 1941, Japan''s desire for resource independence had driven them to conquer Korea, Manchuria, large parts of China, and French Indochina, and to occupy large swaths of Pacific islands. These conquests provided tremendous resources, but still, they needed more.

All these conquests were driven by the Samurai: the ancient warriors of Japan, answerable only to the needs for resources, an ill-defined bushido code, and their Emperor.

They led Japan into a horrible war stretching across a third of the Earth''s surface, knowing full well they could not defeat their enemies. Their plan was the uncertain hope that the West would falter and offer an olive branch, accepting Japanese hegemony in the Pacific and East Asia and granting them the resources they needed.

This was a miscalculation driven by a folly of epic proportions. Four months of early and easy victories in 1941 convinced them of their invincibility. They refused to believe that their fighting spirit could be defeated by superior firepower and the sheer numbers of opponents. And the samurai had no Plan B.

Young Romance in the style of Fern Michaels; Adventure in the tradition of JA Vance; Thrills like John Grisham...Stella''s Game has it all!

The Cold War; friends moving away; assassinations; deaths in the family; the Race to the Moon; draft and race riots; Vietnam; 

marches for peace and freedom; overdoses; the Sexual Revolution; graduations; puberty...

What could go wrong?

Before there were cell phones; before the internet, before anyone even thought of Google, there was Stella''s Game.

When Stella sat at her big round table and quietly shuffled her cards, the world took a seat and all arguments ended.  Stella''s Game was home; a safe port in a roiling sea.

See the world in the eyes of two boys and two girls in an affluent Detroit suburb from 1963 to 1974. Watch as their world is transformed, as they grow, laugh, love, and learn in Stella''s Game: A Story of Friendships.

Where Stella''s Game ends, Tideline: Friendship Abides begins.

Life has its limitations, natural and artificial.  Natural limits are nature''s doing; the others are ours.

Where John Grisham meets Fern Michaels...there''s Tideline...

Natural limits are imposed by nature--like the ocean tides. The rest are imposed-often reluctantly, sometimes of necessity-by how we live our lives. We set limits on what we hope to achieve, the challenges we''re willing to face, or what we''re willing to tolerate, or to settle for. Those decisions come easier when we don''t have to make them alone; when we have the love and patience of true friends.

But those limits are to be tested. The friends have goals to achieve; milestones to reach. They were eighteen when they joined the Army and Navy in 1973. But what do they do, these new Cold Warriors, without a war to fight? They work while they live: they write letters while they learn, love, laugh and cry...and wait for that next war. America''s war in Vietnam is ended, but the after-effects are still felt. Watergate is in the news; so is Cambodia. The world is still a dangerous place, and even "cold wars" have casualties.

A tideline on a beach marks the sea''s normal limits, where the sea in a normal tide will stop. The tideline for these friends....well, we did say a normal tide...

Where there''s adventure, romance, and mystery, there''s...Tideline: Friendship Abides---Part Two of the Stella''s Game Trilogy--that follows our cast of characters out of the ''70s and into the ''80s.

Four friends...two gun battles...two weddings...a fire...family lost and found...what more could you ask for?

How about...what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

Join JJ and Ann, Mike and Leigh in the thrilling conclusion to the story that began with Stella''s Game: A Story of Friendships, and continued with Tideline: Friendship Abides.

From the creator of The Stella''s Game Trilogy, The Safe Tree: Friendship Triumphs finishes the saga that started in 1963. 

This Redhead consists only of external dialogues between two characters, Blondie and Red. There are no non-verbal narratives nor any internal dialogues. There are no quotation marks for what they say; just those in their dialogs, nor "he said" nor "she sighed" nor "they cried" tags. You will read of no facial expressions that they don''t talk about, no un-noticed reactions or un-vocalized thoughts. Further, you won''t see proper names; nothing but nicknames and the odd title. The italics are for emphasis. Conversations are naturally paced; some spoken phrases or sentences invite response, and are marked by (...). I generously use these ellipsis for this pacing.

Most of the story takes place in either a two-bedroom, two-story, bath-and-a-half townhouse on a quiet rural/suburban street, or in a small neighborhood tavern not far away. The buildings in the neighborhood are close enough together that the comings-and-goings of neighbors are not a mystery, nor are some of their other activities.

There are no scenes set; no transitional segues described other than in their dialogues. Story breaks and chapters may move from one location to another-and you''ll know when they are important-but just as often, they merely mark the passing of time.

This Redhead will require more of your imagination than any other story you have ever read. You should provide missing elements out of your experience. The interior layout of rooms, how crowded the bar is, or any other visual elements you can make up as you see fit. As their dialogs are very personal to them, so too will the scene settings become personal to you. You might place Red and Blondie in your kitchen, in your neighborhood watering hole, or in the living room where you had a memorable romantic encounter.

It may surprise you how absorbing a reading experience This Redhead will be.

In the frozen skies of World War Two Europe, two mighty air forces fought in a deadly ballet of sudden death. The Americans attacked with their bombers again and again, dropping their deadly cargoes on factories, cities, homes. The Germans defended with their fighters day after day, charging the deadly guns of the bombers, defending their factories, cities, homes...

A Wisconsin farm boy with a flying father learned to pilot airplanes before he could drive a car. Answering the call after Pearl Harbor, John Miller learns to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress, with its ten heavy machine guns. In the massive formations over Europe, the interlocking fields of fire were devastating to any attackers. The son of a butcher, Otto Thielmann is a boxer who learned to fly gliders as a teenager. When Germany called, he answered...and became a fighter pilot.

Miller''s and Thielmann''s lives were so different, but so similar, they had to try to kill each other.

From the author of the Stella''s Game Trilogy, Crop Duster: A Novel of World War Two brings you visions of air combat, of the devastation of air bombardment to the targets, the attackers, the defenders, and the survivors.

In the spring of 1862, three green armies clashed in the Tennessee pine barrens near an obscure flatboat landing on the Tennessee River. 

Desperate to stop two Union armies from joining forces-and by so doing, to prove his worth to the Confederacy, Albert S. Johnston, with Pierre G. T. Beauregard, led the 40,000 man Army of Mississippi north from Corinth, Mississippi. It didn''t help that Johnston and Beauregard didn''t trust each other, nor that their army, collected from all over the South, had never fought-let alone marched-together...

Planning an advance on Corinth, Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of West Tennessee waited near the trading hamlet of Pittsburg Landing on the west side of the Tennessee River, near a small church called Shiloh, anticipating the arrival of Don C. Buell and the Army of the Ohio. It didn''t help that Buell hated Grant, thought they barely knew each other...

On 6 April 1862, the Confederates, most of whom hadn''t eaten in days, stumbled into the Federal camps in the dark of night. By sunrise, a fifth of Grant''s army had become casualties, but Grant himself wasn''t there...yet...

By sunset, the die was cast for a different future for America...

This encounter-two days of fighting that produced over twenty-thousand casualties-was the first major battle of a war that was projected to last only six months. Instead, it dragged on for three more years, and changed the American way of war forever.

The Devil''s Own Day: Shiloh and The American Civil War is a careful examination of this pivotal battle, from the co-author of Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly, and the creator of The Stella''s Game Trilogy.

February 1945. 

World War Two is entering its sixth year. In Europe, Germany is on its knees, its shattered cities in ruins, battered by clouds of bombers attacking day and night. In the Pacific, the war has been raging for just over three years-the island battles producing rivers of blood-but only a handful of bombs have fallen on Japan.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the most sophisticated airplane in the world, was the only airplane that could persuade Japan that resistance is futile. But in the six months since the Superfortress''s combat debut, Japan remains undaunted and unharmed by the bombers.

Why? Logistics, weather and urban layout.

The logistics are a matter of distance. The distance between the Pacific airfields and Japan is four times greater than that between English airbases and Germany.

The weather over Japan, unlike the relatively calm European skies, has an almost constant cloud cover ... plus the jetstream, a howling zephyr that blows bombs off course from the B-29''s bombing altitude.

Japan itself, unlike Germany, has much of its weapons production scattered throughout the civilian urban landscape; concentrating on Japan''s large factories isn''t nearly enough to stop production.

Hap Arnold, the Army Air Force''s boss, has staked everything, including his reputation, on proving that a land invasion of Japan can be avoided using the Superforts, a weapons program more costly than the atomic bombs. But they and their unimaginative martinet of a commander aren''t getting it done.

So Arnold brings in Curtis LeMay, a general known as a real operator. Sharing Arnold''s belief that a slogging land war can be avoided, LeMay looks at the problems and devises a solution with tactics that throw away all the books, even some he helped write.

To win, the B-29s would conduct a Fire Blitz, and burn down Japan.

9 March 1945

Mere seconds after the sirens started, searchlights lanced the dark night with their probing, piercing fingers of light, and the antiaircraft guns began firing...

And the Fire Blitz began...

Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan embarked on a program of aggressive military overseas adventures in Asia and the Pacific. From 1904 to 1941, Japan''s desire for resource independence had driven them to conquer Korea, Manchuria, large parts of China, and French Indochina, and to occupy large swaths of Pacific islands. These conquests provided tremendous resources, but still, they needed more.

All these conquests were driven by the Samurai: the ancient warriors of Japan, answerable only to the needs for resources, an ill-defined bushido code, and their Emperor.

They led Japan into a horrible war stretching across a third of the Earth''s surface, knowing full well they could not defeat their enemies. Their plan was the uncertain hope that the West would falter and offer an olive branch, accepting Japanese hegemony in the Pacific and East Asia and granting them the resources they needed.

This was a miscalculation driven by a folly of epic proportions. Four months of early and easy victories in 1941 convinced them of their invincibility. They refused to believe that their fighting spirit could be defeated by superior firepower and the sheer numbers of opponents. And the samurai had no Plan B.

Young Romance in the style of Fern Michaels; Adventure in the tradition of JA Vance; Thrills like John Grisham...Stella''s Game has it all!

The Cold War; friends moving away; assassinations; deaths in the family; the Race to the Moon; draft and race riots; Vietnam; 

marches for peace and freedom; overdoses; the Sexual Revolution; graduations; puberty...

What could go wrong?

Before there were cell phones; before the internet, before anyone even thought of Google, there was Stella''s Game.

When Stella sat at her big round table and quietly shuffled her cards, the world took a seat and all arguments ended.  Stella''s Game was home; a safe port in a roiling sea.

See the world in the eyes of two boys and two girls in an affluent Detroit suburb from 1963 to 1974. Watch as their world is transformed, as they grow, laugh, love, and learn in Stella''s Game: A Story of Friendships.

Where Stella''s Game ends, Tideline: Friendship Abides begins.

Life has its limitations, natural and artificial.  Natural limits are nature''s doing; the others are ours.

Where John Grisham meets Fern Michaels...there''s Tideline...

Natural limits are imposed by nature--like the ocean tides. The rest are imposed-often reluctantly, sometimes of necessity-by how we live our lives. We set limits on what we hope to achieve, the challenges we''re willing to face, or what we''re willing to tolerate, or to settle for. Those decisions come easier when we don''t have to make them alone; when we have the love and patience of true friends.

But those limits are to be tested. The friends have goals to achieve; milestones to reach. They were eighteen when they joined the Army and Navy in 1973. But what do they do, these new Cold Warriors, without a war to fight? They work while they live: they write letters while they learn, love, laugh and cry...and wait for that next war. America''s war in Vietnam is ended, but the after-effects are still felt. Watergate is in the news; so is Cambodia. The world is still a dangerous place, and even "cold wars" have casualties.

A tideline on a beach marks the sea''s normal limits, where the sea in a normal tide will stop. The tideline for these friends....well, we did say a normal tide...

Where there''s adventure, romance, and mystery, there''s...Tideline: Friendship Abides---Part Two of the Stella''s Game Trilogy--that follows our cast of characters out of the ''70s and into the ''80s.

Four friends...two gun battles...two weddings...a fire...family lost and found...what more could you ask for?

How about...what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

Join JJ and Ann, Mike and Leigh in the thrilling conclusion to the story that began with Stella''s Game: A Story of Friendships, and continued with Tideline: Friendship Abides.

From the creator of The Stella''s Game Trilogy, The Safe Tree: Friendship Triumphs finishes the saga that started in 1963. 

This Redhead consists only of external dialogues between two characters, Blondie and Red. There are no non-verbal narratives nor any internal dialogues. There are no quotation marks for what they say; just those in their dialogs, nor "he said" nor "she sighed" nor "they cried" tags. You will read of no facial expressions that they don''t talk about, no un-noticed reactions or un-vocalized thoughts. Further, you won''t see proper names; nothing but nicknames and the odd title. The italics are for emphasis. Conversations are naturally paced; some spoken phrases or sentences invite response, and are marked by (...). I generously use these ellipsis for this pacing.

Most of the story takes place in either a two-bedroom, two-story, bath-and-a-half townhouse on a quiet rural/suburban street, or in a small neighborhood tavern not far away. The buildings in the neighborhood are close enough together that the comings-and-goings of neighbors are not a mystery, nor are some of their other activities.

There are no scenes set; no transitional segues described other than in their dialogues. Story breaks and chapters may move from one location to another-and you''ll know when they are important-but just as often, they merely mark the passing of time.

This Redhead will require more of your imagination than any other story you have ever read. You should provide missing elements out of your experience. The interior layout of rooms, how crowded the bar is, or any other visual elements you can make up as you see fit. As their dialogs are very personal to them, so too will the scene settings become personal to you. You might place Red and Blondie in your kitchen, in your neighborhood watering hole, or in the living room where you had a memorable romantic encounter.

It may surprise you how absorbing a reading experience This Redhead will be.

In the frozen skies of World War Two Europe, two mighty air forces fought in a deadly ballet of sudden death. The Americans attacked with their bombers again and again, dropping their deadly cargoes on factories, cities, homes. The Germans defended with their fighters day after day, charging the deadly guns of the bombers, defending their factories, cities, homes...

A Wisconsin farm boy with a flying father learned to pilot airplanes before he could drive a car. Answering the call after Pearl Harbor, John Miller learns to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress, with its ten heavy machine guns. In the massive formations over Europe, the interlocking fields of fire were devastating to any attackers. The son of a butcher, Otto Thielmann is a boxer who learned to fly gliders as a teenager. When Germany called, he answered...and became a fighter pilot.

Miller''s and Thielmann''s lives were so different, but so similar, they had to try to kill each other.

From the author of the Stella''s Game Trilogy, Crop Duster: A Novel of World War Two brings you visions of air combat, of the devastation of air bombardment to the targets, the attackers, the defenders, and the survivors.

In the spring of 1862, three green armies clashed in the Tennessee pine barrens near an obscure flatboat landing on the Tennessee River. 

Desperate to stop two Union armies from joining forces-and by so doing, to prove his worth to the Confederacy, Albert S. Johnston, with Pierre G. T. Beauregard, led the 40,000 man Army of Mississippi north from Corinth, Mississippi. It didn''t help that Johnston and Beauregard didn''t trust each other, nor that their army, collected from all over the South, had never fought-let alone marched-together...

Planning an advance on Corinth, Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of West Tennessee waited near the trading hamlet of Pittsburg Landing on the west side of the Tennessee River, near a small church called Shiloh, anticipating the arrival of Don C. Buell and the Army of the Ohio. It didn''t help that Buell hated Grant, thought they barely knew each other...

On 6 April 1862, the Confederates, most of whom hadn''t eaten in days, stumbled into the Federal camps in the dark of night. By sunrise, a fifth of Grant''s army had become casualties, but Grant himself wasn''t there...yet...

By sunset, the die was cast for a different future for America...

This encounter-two days of fighting that produced over twenty-thousand casualties-was the first major battle of a war that was projected to last only six months. Instead, it dragged on for three more years, and changed the American way of war forever.

The Devil''s Own Day: Shiloh and The American Civil War is a careful examination of this pivotal battle, from the co-author of Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly, and the creator of The Stella''s Game Trilogy.

February 1945. 

World War Two is entering its sixth year. In Europe, Germany is on its knees, its shattered cities in ruins, battered by clouds of bombers attacking day and night. In the Pacific, the war has been raging for just over three years-the island battles producing rivers of blood-but only a handful of bombs have fallen on Japan.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the most sophisticated airplane in the world, was the only airplane that could persuade Japan that resistance is futile. But in the six months since the Superfortress''s combat debut, Japan remains undaunted and unharmed by the bombers.

Why? Logistics, weather and urban layout.

The logistics are a matter of distance. The distance between the Pacific airfields and Japan is four times greater than that between English airbases and Germany.

The weather over Japan, unlike the relatively calm European skies, has an almost constant cloud cover ... plus the jetstream, a howling zephyr that blows bombs off course from the B-29''s bombing altitude.

Japan itself, unlike Germany, has much of its weapons production scattered throughout the civilian urban landscape; concentrating on Japan''s large factories isn''t nearly enough to stop production.

Hap Arnold, the Army Air Force''s boss, has staked everything, including his reputation, on proving that a land invasion of Japan can be avoided using the Superforts, a weapons program more costly than the atomic bombs. But they and their unimaginative martinet of a commander aren''t getting it done.

So Arnold brings in Curtis LeMay, a general known as a real operator. Sharing Arnold''s belief that a slogging land war can be avoided, LeMay looks at the problems and devises a solution with tactics that throw away all the books, even some he helped write.

To win, the B-29s would conduct a Fire Blitz, and burn down Japan.

9 March 1945

Mere seconds after the sirens started, searchlights lanced the dark night with their probing, piercing fingers of light, and the antiaircraft guns began firing...

And the Fire Blitz began...