If you want to find out who I really am, read this collection of essays.

Many readers of the Common Threads in the Life series by Ronald L. Donaghe have often assumed that the seven novels in the series closely reflect the author's life. They do not. The author of Slices of Real Life (Autobiographical Essays) has written a series of essays that tell the author's real story, and it is far different from his novels. Perhaps what is reflected in the many works of fiction the author has written are what he values most—family life, being part of the LGBT community, and the will to fight for equality. In these essays, the author presents slices of his real life from the time he first became conscious of self (around age four) until the present. This collection is open-ended, because life is open-ended and will only end when his life comes to a close.

An allegory for our troubled times: Beware of authoritarians and despots.

Twilight of the Gods, Book I, Cinátis is an allegory for our troubled times, where one country, Ch'turc, is controlled by priests whose dictates are enforced by an army dedicated to doing their bidding, where laws are only for those who live under the rule of the priests, not the priests and government leaders themselves. It is a country of the big lie, of complete and utter madness, where even the rulers live in fear of their own people, where newborns are put to death if the sci-priests attending them detect the ancient "stain" of a legendary race of beings who have mated with the ordinary population, which has resulted in those who are "earth gifted", those who are witches and completely evil. Ch'turc is at perpetual war against another country, called Omoham, where the very thing that is feared in Ch'turc is celebrated in Omaham.

This world only has the two countries of Ch'turc and Omaham; the rest of the world is filled with great forests, ice mountains, lands of toxic swamps, and enchanted seas that will reject anyone who attempts to sail them or swim in their waters. Omoham is the land of the "gifted" who live in harmony with nature; Ch'turc is the land of industrialization, where natural resources are becoming depleted, of factories that pollute the atmosphere, of the untold wealth for the few and grinding poverty for the many.

In this first book in the "Twilight of the Gods" series, Ch'turc makes its move to finally enslave Omoham. Some said it was a real plague, a pandemic, sweeping across the land; others said it was a great lie, perpetrated by secretive priests, and spread by the Ch'turc armed forces who would enslave a country for their own gain. But one thing is real—the FEAR that drove thousands from their homes in the dead of winter. They headed north from the cities of the plain, toward the ice mountains of a country ruled by the priests and false patriots,

The takeover of the country of Omoham seems inevitable, and yet, when all seems lost, when an entire country is in danger of giving rise to a dictator, a savior appears with unstoppable power, able to either save the world, or...destroy it.

Book I
A Book Brought to Light is an interactive workbook that guides users in writing, which will build a novel from beginning to end. By writing a powerful attention-grabbing opening and clearly indicating potential conflict, the writer will then move step by step toward creating all the parts of a novel, including plot, character development, concrete setting description, powerful dialog, etc. This workbook encourages the writer to think organically about what makes an effective and interesting story. The workbook is designed to allow ample room for the writer to practice each activity. The second half of the workbook is the writer's journal with over a hundred line pages—enough room to write a rough draft of the novel. Throughout the workbook, are other lined pages for the writer to practice the exercises in each chapter of the book, self-assess his or her progress, and to take notes about each of the writing steps. Ronald L. Donaghe is a 40-year writing veteran, as well as an editor with over 30 years experience in both technical and creative writing. He has been a writing teacher, and is an award winning author. The approach to helping writers grow their ideas from start to finish is free of "prescriptive writing rules"; instead, he helps writers access their inner creativity, bring their story ideas into the light and onto paper. This workbook also helps the writer discover his or her own voice, and how to decide if a story should be told by a character or a third person, omniscient narrator (the author). The writer is introduced to concepts of concrete words vs. abstract words, showing rather than telling a story, By the time writers get to the end of the activity section of the workbook, they will be well armed to start that novel they have carried around with them for many years—and they will understand how beginning any story with a powerful idea can lead to the creation of yet more stories. Best of all is the idea that the interactive workbook will become filled with the writer's own work, until it is a companion resource to be kept on hand whenever the writer is creating a novel.

Book II
This workbook is the second book in the series, Creative Writing, Interactive Workbooks - from Draft to Done. It is for writers who have completed a first draft of a novel and now want to evaluate its content, to test its storytelling quality, including the unfolding story, character development, effective dialog, writing style, and to help writers discover places that need to be revised in their novels. The workbook provides numerous examples of content elements, samples from published books, and leading questions the author can answer about every aspect of evaluation and editing. This workbook contains ample lined pages throughout, and the second half is a writing journal. As with the first interactive workbook, titled A Book Brought to Light: How to Grow Opening Lines into a Novel, the information, exercises, and precepts about writing in this second book comes from almost 40 years experience Ronald L. Donaghe has working for two major book editing companies, and he brings away from that experience the tools and techniques of story evaluation and development. Donaghe is the author of more than a dozen novels, as well as the author of several high-tech equipment manuals for the aerospace industry, communications, and engineering. The workbook is written in clear and conversational language and isn't prescriptive about "rules."

Book III

Finding Your Writing Voice: an Interactive Workbook is meant for serious writers who want their writing to be distinguishable from all other writers—by having a strong Writer's Voice. This workbook is designed to help writers discover their voice, as well as to develop it as they write.

A writer’s voice is something unique to each writer, but we rarely start writing in our own voice until we have become proficient in writing in ways that are conventionally “correct” and that make sense, and uses our language with some skill. Our voice, or the color we bring to our writing, develops along the way. We might come out of writing courses in college, writing like our professors, but if we write enough and develop a sense of how we want to say something, then we’re developing our own voice. How we want to tell a story, what we concentrate on in the story, discovering what we’re really good at, like dialog or description, the syntax that sounds good to our ears, and when our own writing pleases us—all this is how we develop our own voice. Put another way, when what we’ve written evokes our own emotions like laughter and tears, then we probably have felt the inner truth of our own voice.

The next four journals are themed for each season of the year.

Lined pages, blank pages, and dot-graph pages

And so it is with Spring, itself. It is a quickening, a time for restoration, for the earth to show signs of life, for living things to bud.

You can almost feel it coming on suddenly toward the end of winter, a day breaks and the temperature rises slightly, and frozen ponds slowly begin to thaw, and you can hear water running up in the mountains as snow melts. The sun rises in a clear blue sky, and it’s almost time to put away the coats and wear lighter jackets, then sweaters, and then shirt sleeves.

All that. Birds build nests, cats nap in the sun, we suddenly feel like taking a walk into downtown, rather than driving, we turn our clock ahead an hour and the sun sets later.

And of course, writers write, artists draw, and others doodle—at least in blank books like this one.

Is Spring a glad time of year for you? Is it a time of year when you want to start a new project?

And of course, there’s Spring Cleaning when we throw open the doors and open the windows, and shake out the rugs, and gather up things to wash that we’ve been letting go, bringing freshness back into our homes, in a quickening of renewal.

Lined pages, blank pages, and dot-graph pages

Roughly speaking 60 percent of the world’s population is under 40 years old, and around half of this group is under 18 years old.

So let’s face it, you’re most likely in the younger category, and let’s also admit that it’s summer and you’re not likely to write a single word in a journal like this; you’re more likely to write words in the sand on some beach somewhere.

You’re going to take selfies and some of you will keep walking backwards holding your camera on a selfie stick trying to get the best shot of yourself against the background, farther...farther...farther...

Until you fall off the cliff at the Grand Canyon, run smack dab into the rotating blades of an Indiana Jones-type plane, back into a crocodile infested swamp (or is it alligator?). The possibilities are endless for your demise as a result of taking nothing but selfies on your summer vacation, but hey! That’s what Summer vacation is all about.

So, this glossy-cover hardcover (or paperback) journal is meant to be durable and way more useful than something to write in...geez! You can put it over your face when you’re lying on the beach and you don’t want to sunburn your nose. You can pretend you’re reading and hide behind its open covers and keep your eye on that hunk or hottie, and he or she will never know the difference, but beware of others holding up this same journal over their faces and looking at you!

Now, if you do intend to actually write in this journal (I would) during your travels, you can write on the lined pages, draw on the blank art pages, or doodle on the graph dot pages—and paste prints of your selfie pictures in here, too.

A Working Journal

The inspiration for this writer’s journal came to me when sleep wouldn’t. I’ve been interested in Whitman since I was a teenager, when I had only read a few well-seasoned morsels provided here and there from high school English teachers. And without knowing how devoted Whitman was to this singular life’s work of his Leaves of Grass, which he typeset and published himself in several editions, the years have passed and again and again, I return to his work, with constantly growing understanding of just what he might have wanted to accomplish. And this long cataloguery poem, “Song of Myself” seems to me to be the distilled, tinctured key to the rest of his work.

So, in the first part of this writer’s journal I have broken this long poem into segments, which occur on the left side of the open journal. You get a chance to munch on Whitman’s words and contemplate what he means, what he seems to intend, what each successive stanza (?) says. He is extremely clear and concrete (I believe), but he also creates metaphors for something far more universal...cosmic almost.

The right-hand page provides blank lines for you to write what you want. You can ignore Whitman altogether, but I have assumed an audience for such a journal as this would be writers, perhaps poets, perhaps those who have a strong background in literature, perhaps not. Maybe some among those who use this journal will be teenagers.

The language can at times be confusing, referring to archaic things or expressions, since it was written by a 19th Century American, and a good dictionary or literary guide to Whitman might be helpful. I also suspect that the older and experienced the reader of this journal, the less confusing the language might be.

But certainly, for his time and for any time, really, he is a clear writer. Or he writes clearly. I’ve left Whitman’s spelling, grammar, and punctuation alone. And for that matter, you will be left alone, as well; no one will be looking over your shoulder as you work your way through this major poem and journal.

Part Four

My independent editing, prepress, and publishing “company” is called Two Brothers Press. During this past year, I have worked on my skillsets as an editor (40 years), content evaluation (fiction, including plot, character development, conflict and resolution), not just rules and regs of the technical aspects of a manuscript. And finally, this year, Two Brothers Press is bringing out new editions of the classics and popular fiction whose copyrights have ended and their works languish in the public domain.  No, I wouldn’t/couldn’t possibly consider a new and different Complete Works of Shakespeare. So I have picked up works by 19th century American writers as well as slowly getting into foreign writers, as you will see in the following pages.

The Idiot is at the same time Dostoyevsky’s favorite book and one that he considers one of his most problematic. And critics, as well, have said that it is chaotic in its plot lines (there really aren’t any), unlike his focus on the murder and its consequences on Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. But The Idiot is most representative, perhaps, of much of Dostoyevsky’s own life, including his illnesses, frailty, and his own epilepsy. The title of “idiot” is a reference to his central character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin. Dostoyevsky wanted to portray this character as a beautiful person, without guile, an abundance of goodness, and open-hearted simplicity. 

The portrayal of epilepsy is given realism by the fact that the author, himself, was epileptic and could bring authenticity from his personal experience. It has been described as the most personal of all of Dostoyevsky’s major works. In it he also embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions.

Perhaps that is why The Idiot is his favorite, a work that allows him to express his most primary motivation and subject it to his highest ideal of true Christian love to the fiery crucible of contemporary, Russian society. Cruelty is a harsh mistress and causes great pain and suffering in Prince Myshkin.

The Nineteenth Century Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is thought to be one of the greatest novelists of any age, and among his most electrifying and psychologically terrifying books is Crime and Punishment, which takes place in mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg Russia. It is the twisted story of a young university student who has hit on hard times and who believes that he can commit a crime that proves he is a superman, above ordinary humans and the law. But he immediately begins to spiral into the self-inflicted torture of recrimination, paranoia, and mental illness, in a deadly conflict between morality and a baser primal urge.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."—Ernest Hemingway

In 1885 when The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, a note from the author says the scene is the Mississippi Valley and the time is 40 or 50 years ago. Mark Twain is deliberately not specific on the time setting, but it’s easy to determine that this story takes place before the American Civil War by about fifteen to twenty-five years. Missouri was a slave-owning state before the Civil War, and the slave Jim owned by Miss Watson runs away after he hears her tell someone that she could get $800.00 for him.

When Huck Finn and Jim get together, it is after Huck has staged his own death, and they meet on an island. Part of the significance of this work is the slave question and how they are viewed by themselves and by the society in which they live; by this time, 1845 and earlier, slave ownership and the enslavement of humans by White Americans had become an increasingly important issue. While 1845 might be a little early for the Southern, slave-owning states to be talking about secession from the Union, the slave issue was prominent and had been for quite some time.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been thought of for over a hundred years as another children’s book like that of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and indeed, Tom Sawyer makes his appearance in Huck Finn, as well. And even though Huck Finn is a boy of thirteen and he is a child in many ways, he possesses a maturity and way of taking care of himself (and others) that is more like an adult. He takes on adult issues and problems and he takes on adults. At times he is as vulnerable and unrestrained as a kid is, as a child of thirteen would be; but more often as he and the slave Jim head south on the Mississippi River, Huck tackles every problem that comes his way, like an adult, with the determination of an adult but perhaps the calamity of a child. And yet, when he hurts Jim’s feelings on a very deep level after they get back together on the raft and Jim fears that Huck is dead or lost, Huck learns an adult lesson and makes an adult decision, and more importantly he sees through the dark veil of whites vs. slaves and sees Jim’s humanity, perhaps for the first time, but certainly for the first time that he is actively aware of the effect of such racism. So, only in some ways is this a children’s book. It is in fact, an adult book. It is America’s book about America. It is about “realism” rather than idealism, and even though it is realistic and down to earth and musty with physicality, it might also be considered as an allegory about America’s deep seated racial, religious, and political divides. It is more than a child’s book. It is a book that urgently needs to be read generation after generation.

This is the iconic novel of the American Civil War as experienced by a young man, Henry Fleming, who joins the Union Army to go off and find glory fighting for the United States against the Confederate Rebels. But once he is in the army and has to move from place to place, the glory goes out quickly and before he has even experienced a single battle, he regrets not being back home on the farm doing his chores and otherwise being free. And then on the verge of battle, Henry wonders if any of the other young men are worried about their mettle as soldiers, and he wonders if, like him, they are scared and perhaps even afraid of running given the chance. Henry finds out what he is made of and is quickly ashamed as he drifts away from his regiment. Later, when he is accosted by a soldier on the march and is hit in the head with the butt of the soldier’s rifle, Henry gets a wound, but it is not from battle, and he slinks off, later to be “rescued” by a friendly soldier who seeks to take care of him. From there, Henry learns valuable lessons about fear and redemption and courage and what he is really made of.

Stephen Crane was born several years after the Civil War had begun and ended, and this novel is remarkable because Crane was able to capture the essence of complex emotions that tested men in wartime, but having never served in the army himself, and it was only his sensitive imagination that led him to write what feels like an authentic retelling of a tried and true soldier.

Gunman’s Reckoning was published in 1921 when Frederick Schiller Faust (Max Brand) was only 29 years old. It is an Old West story set in a mining town “west of the Rockies” called The Corner. A claim jumper by the name of Jack Landis is sent by an invalid in a wheel chair, Colonel Macon, to claim a gold stake out from under the true claimant, which he does. But then in one of the very first double-crosses in the story, Jack stakes the claim in his name, not the colonel’s and joins forces with a man only called Lord Nick, who veritably controls the entire town of Corner. His men kill those who get in the way, and Lord Nick manages to get them off without consequences, time and again. A stranger named Donnegan, however, is recently sent by colonel Macon along with his daughter to look up Jack Landis and determine if he has betrayed the colonel, and Donnegan confirms that he has, but in a clever plot twist, which readers won’t see coming, we learn that the man who Jack Landis throws in with claims a man who was killed had the real claim to the mine and not the colonel. Donnegan has to decide what the truth is. He also has to determine if Jack Landis has forsaken the colonel’s daughter, whom Landis was pledged to marry in favor of a woman in the town of Corner. When Donnegan realizes that Jack Landis has indeed betrayed the colonel and his daughter, Donnegan seeks to destroy Jack, as the colonel has bid. From this point on the story unfolds in one plot twist after another, one betrayal of love after another until readers can only continue to discover what will become of everyone in the story. This is, as critics have said, as complex as a Greek Classic, with Heroes bigger than life, even in diminutive men who reach large and bold.

 

Entertaining, stunning, and immensely clever to the very end, Gunman’s Reckoning is a well planned and executed novel with all the excitement of the Western genre and yet with the grace of a literary novel.

This edition of Zane Gray’s The Man of the Forest, is illustrated and historically annotated to provide context for this work as a classic in the genre of “The Western,” a genre that Zane Gray also helped to develop into it long lasting form. Milt Dale is the reluctant hero who had rather live alone in the forest than have anything to do with all but a few friends in the local community. But along comes Helen Rayner and her sister Bo who have arrived to help take care of their ailing Uncle Al and to eventually become heirs to his ranch. The is the kind of adventure and activities that seems to Helen to be made for her, and she is eager to get on with her life. However, she has been followed from Missouri by her life-long nemesis, Harve Riggs, who has been insistent that Helen will one day marry him. When they step off the train at their destination, Harve attempts to pull Helen along with him by grabbing her suitcase and reveals his complete lack of respect for the woman he is obsessed with. Milt Dale, however, disabuses Harve of the notion that he can treat Helen like that and informs Helen that he has come to take her to her Uncle Al, and he mysteriously asserts that she should not get on the morning stage, because her life would be in danger is she does....

Should she trust this tall, good-looking, and strong stranger who has just dispatched Harve Riggs so easily? Under the circumstances, she decides that is her best option, as she is glad to be shut of Riggs—at least for the time being. And so Helen, her sister Bo, and Milt Dale board the stage that will now travel the 40 miles to the ranch. And so the adventure begins, fraught with more unexpected twists and turns than Helen could ever have dreamed. The Man of the Forest was the fifth best-selling novels of his 55-book career.

To many readers, the Old West calls to mind a place and time, and even a way of life that somehow involves cowboys, horse thieves, Indians, railroads, stage coaches, ranches, small towns built of raw lumber, and saloons, gun-fights, boarding houses, bordellos, gold rushes, outlaws—a whole cultural milieu that may or may not have been exactly factual, but in the hands of one of the Old West’s greatest chroniclers, Zane Grey, all of that comes to life in his books.

Readers might also know that the Old West days encompassed some period after the American Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. But in The Light of Western Starswe see that the Old West way of life continued right into the early twentieth century.

This book is about a young woman’s pursuit for meaning in a world full of danger and love in unexpected places. She is also searching for a kind of redemption at some future time. This book shows how compelling and rough cowboy life was in New Mexico in 1912. The story opens in Chapter 1 replete with tension and threats of danger.

When Madeline Hammond stepped from the train at El Cajon, New Mexico, it was nearly midnight, and her first impression was of a huge dark space of cool, windy emptiness, strange and silent, stretching away under great blinking white stars.
“Miss, there’s no one to meet you,” said the conductor, rather anxiously.

“I wired my brother,” she replied. “The train being so late—perhaps he grew tired of waiting. He will be here presently. But, if he should not come—surely I can find a hotel?”

“There’s lodgings to be had. Get the station agent to show you. If you’ll excuse me—this is no place for a lady like you to be alone at night. It’s a rough little town—mostly Mexicans, miners, cowboys. And they carouse a lot. Besides, the revolution across the border has stirred up some excitement along the line.

This edition of Riders of the Purple Sage was created by Two Brothers Press as one of its “Classics Editions” for a series of books that commemorates and gives a historical accounting with illustrations of its influence on literature, and in the case of Riders... 

It shows how Zane Grey’s master works helped to develop a new genre—that of the Western, that is the American Western following the American Civil War and the continued push westward by settlers.

 

Riders of the Purple Sage is a story about three main characters, Bern Venters, Jane Withersteen, and Jim Lassiter, who in various ways struggle with persecution from the local Mormon community led by Bishop Dyer and Elder Tull in the fictional town of Cottonwoods, Utah.

Jane Withersteen, a born-and-raised Mormon, provokes Elder Tull because she is attractive, wealthy, and befriends “Gentiles” (non-Mormons), namely, a little girl named Fay Larkin, a man she has hired named Bern Venters, and another hired man named Lassiter. Elder Tull, a polygamist[3] with two wives already, wishes to have Jane for a third wife, along with her estate.

The story involves cattle-rustling, horse-theft, kidnapping, and gunfights.