Freebies!

This is a special section for friends, fans and readers. You can visit this page to read some samples of my writing. Feel free to copy or download anything you like at no cost. However, this is ONLY for personal use, not reposting, please! All material is copyrighted.

We will be changing the contents every 4-6 weeks and normally there will be a story, an article about writing, and a poem or two posted here. Check back often to see the latest offerings. And feel free to comment on them in the guest book or by email!

Enjoy!

Gwynn

A Child's Garden

Poems

Writing True-to-Life

Riding Wildfire

A Child's Garden
By Gwynn Morgan

Juanito was thin, an almost fragile-looking child, face and body sharpened by bones close to the surface. He would have resented being called a child, for he was almost twelve years old and thought himself nearly grown. He'd smoked stolen cigarettes, emptied the final drops of a good many discarded bottles and held his own in more than one neighborhood rumble for all his delicate appearance.

But he was a child, and looked it, especially this evening. A ragged shirt hung loosely on his bony frame and a pair of oversized Levis was gathered clumsily at his waist. Dirty toes peaked through holes in his ragged canvas shoes as he knelt in the back yard of one of the little stucco houses exactly like the others that bordered the steep and ill-paved street in Copper Glance, Arizona.

He was very absorbed in whatever he was doing. Conchita, full of big-sisterly disgust at his grubby appearance, stepped off the rickety back porch for a closer view. A crumpled tablespoon for a trowel, he carefully dug shallow furrows in the burnt earth, rows made crooked by rocks too big to move. He tried to soften the packed ground with water poured from an old wine bottle. Finally satisfied with his handiwork, he took a handful of wrinkled peas and corn grains out of his pocket and tucked them tenderly into the straggling rows. He poured the rest of the water along them before he stood, moving slowly, a bit stiffly from the long crouch.

"Santa Madre, Juanito," Conchita said, her cross tone echoing that of their mother, "What loco thing are you doing now?

He jumped at the sound of her voice, spun around to face her. For an instant, she saw the gentle pride in his eyes before it faded.

"I made a garden." He folded thin arms defensively across his chest, stood with his feet apart, braced as if awaiting a blow. "Mr. Barkley gave me the seeds. We didn't use them all in school. He's going to give me some more tomorrow, different ones." He must have seen the skepticism in her face. "Really, sis, I didn't swipe them. He gave them to me and I'm going to make them grow."

Although her short laugh expressed her cynicism, she didn't say all the sarcastic things she could have said. It might be silly, but making a garden was better than hanging around the pool hall and tavern down the street or roaming with the gangs. It was never easy, but she tried to remember and be like the gentle side of the mother whose death had left her surrogate mother to her younger brothers and sisters, all six of them.

"Okay," she said. "Now fill the wood box before Papa gets home." The pungent scent of burning beans recalled her to the kitchen just as a familiar old pickup came rattling down the alley.

Strangely, the little garden grew. The fierce sun of the high desert beat down every day and drank up the water he poured over his plants every evening, but the garden grew. The corn sprouted, pea vines spread, radishes and carrots burst out of their adobe beds in fluffs of green. He whittled stakes for them from boards salvaged from the woodpile and proudly lifted the vines out of the dirt. The dog made a bed in the middle one hot day. When he surveyed the damage that evening, he almost cried but instead swore poisonously in both English and Spanish as he vowed to build a fence. He salvaged most of the plants and built a rough fence out of more firewood scraps and some rusty chicken wire. Conchita did not dare ask where the wire came from.

Finally just after school was out, his proud moment came. He brought in a handful of little pea pods and she cooked them for dinner. There were only a few peas for each of them and they were bitter. Papa ate his in one bite, drowned in hot sauce. Conchita nibbled a few and then offered Juanito the rest because he was always hungry. She caught six year old Pancho with his mouth open to complain and silenced him with a look. She pretended not to notice when Pancho slipped his peas to the dog.

June grew hot, heavily and hurtingly hot. Tempers grew short and people got careless. By day Copper Glance lay eerily quiet under the heat but by night it buzzed with a hectic empty gaiety. Everyone tried to ignore the overhanging sense of dread, the pall that settled over town like a heavy woolen blanket. The shrill scream of the accident siren at the mine and the wailing ambulances accented both the noise and the quiet.

Although the Company began to ration water, Juanito always managed to scrounge a bottle or two forhis garden. The carrots and lettuce were growing and tiny ears had appeared on the corn.

Papa worked graveyard shift now, midnight to eight, and tried to sleep mornings before it got too hot. Conchita struggled to keep the kids quiet, but it was futile, almost impossible. Rosa, the baby, was cutting teeth, whiny and cross. The twins fought constantly and Juanito disappeared as soon as he had breakfast. Papa never complained, but his face grew sharp and sagging with weariness. Conchita packed him a good lunch every night, not knowing what else to do. Each night when she got ready for bed, she prayed the summer rains would soon come to ease the drought and everyone's suffering.

It seemed the boys could think of nothing but baseball. Ten year old Manny and Juanito both played in Little League. Manny was shortstop for his team and while Juanito was a pitcher. Pancho was a catcher in his T-ball team. That meant a game for one or more of them almost every night. Conchita always went, usually with Rosa on her hip.

At least it was somewhere to go and gave her a chance to see some of the crowd she'd known in high school before Mama died and she dropped out. It always seemed harder when she got back home, though. Her old friends were giggling about boys and the weekend dances at CatholicYouth Fellowship while she at fifteen was saddled with a woman's responsibilities.

The late June night was still, hot, without even the usual breeze drifting down the canyon to cool the leaden air. Even the weight of a single sheet was too stickily oppressive to bear. Conchita lay on her cot, one of Papa's old undershirts as a nightgown, staring out the window at the black sky, dotted with a few stars. The younger children slept restlessly, muttering and tossing in their beds.

When the siren came, it cut through the children's restless slumber with merciless clarity, somehow personal and demanding. She lay taut, scarcely breathing. Juanito padded noiselessly to her bedside. Together they counted the bursts of sound.

"It's on the five hundred foot level," he whispered. She didn't need to answer. They both know Papa was working there. It was almost dawn when the men finally came to tell them what they already knew.

Afterwards, it was all a blur of flowers, tears and black, of hastily packing possessions that didn't even fill the pickup. The sudden shock of belonging to Aunt Lola's household was the hardest part. A big busy woman, Tia Lolita seemed cold, and they hardly knew her. She and her husband Diego lived in another camp, on the other side of the mountains.

Reality did not come fully to Conchita until thefinal morning. As if in a daze, she watched Juanito pour a final bottle of water down the parched furrows of the neglected garden. When the jug was empty, he dashed it against a rock. The shards glittered like tears in the harsh sunlight. Then it was he who took her hand and without looking back led her out of the yard to Tia Lolita's car where the younger children already waited. Later, thinking back on that day, she realized that was the moment Juanito stopped being a child.

Poems

It must have been fated that I would write romance! I've been preoccupied with "love" for most of my life! Before any novels were more than a vague dream in my mind, I was writing poetry, mostly dedicated to whoever was the Day Star in my current sky. I've pulled all of them together with the intent to produce a self-published book titled Walking Down My Shadows. It will include roughly a half century of love poems that I have written. Unfortunately, real life is not a fairy tale so words about love are not always happy ones. Here are just a few samples. Enjoy!

Gwynn

Our First Kiss (6-3-65)
I couldn't bear to leave you
You had been so long away.
In your voice I heard the anguish
And knew no words to say.
I turned to you for comfort
And to comfort you in turn,
To forget for just a moment
How hot my tears would burn.
You gathered me against you,
Your face pressed in my hair.
I felt a melting sweetness
And a wish to linger there.
Turning my head, I kissed your cheek,
Then you were kissing me.
Your lips were cool and tender
In that sweet eternity.
Before you broke the kiss
That lives in my memory,
The kiss that branded me your own
Now I never will be free.
How could one kiss mean so much?
It was my first from you
And Dear One, not only that-
It was a dream come true.

Every Time… 10/66
Every time for a minute we're strangers
Just for a heartbeat we're nervous and shy
Then you order "Come here," in soft husky whisper
And my hesitance fades as I haste to comply.
In the next instant your arms wrap around me,
Crush me against you; it's anguish so sweet.
That deep broken sigh warns you will kiss me-
I melt limp against you, surrender complete.
The strangeness has faded; I know no other
Love in the world when you hold me so tight.
All I could ask is to stay there forever
A part of you, Darling, because we're just right.

The Call (71)
Through sitar haze the ring of phone came clear.
To anxious feet I leaped, and stumbling, ran.
By some strange sense I knew the voice I'd hear;
My heart told me before the sound began.
With insatiable thirst I drank the tone
Beloved, warmly spanning days and miles
The words that told me I was not alone,
Painting for me remembered eyes and smiles.
The ache of missing afterwards came, renewed;
Pain, bittersweet, that only is subdued
Anesthetized by memories and dreams.
Now waiting for a meeting date that seems
Light years, infinity away-away,
To one who lives by minutes until that day.

From the Library (C: 70)
Myriad twinkles of an inverted sky--
Tangled in the darkness, round my feet they lie.
Seen from such a distance as a spirit gazing down,
Removed from life, reality, and from the town…
Heavy-eyed and weary from the long hours spent
Drifting through printed eons, yet somehow content.
Feeling strangely near you, floating spirit-free
Is knowledge then the link of supreme unity?

Parting is a shadow, a cloud across the sun,
The darkness after twilight, when day is done.
Parting is a raindrop, cold upon my face;
A chill wind blowing from an unknown place.
But also the memory of a crisp new dawn
A rose-sweet fresh May morning, of life going on.
A soft-spoken reminder of sunlight after rain
Looking to that lovely hour of meeting, once again.

Speechfailed (C: 81)
All that have served me faithfully
Do fail me now and I am mute.
Locked in the heart's silence
Unexpressed, the pain and joy
so inseparably mingled as to be
One, sit in heavy stillness.
Try though I must, my words
Are hollow, powerless and dead.
Their voicelessness mocks.
What could I say that you would hear?
What would you hear that I could say?
In one thousand years, who will care. . .
Or even tomorrow?
Only I, of the long memory,
Having been this way before, and more.
I ask it only once:
Will you not set me free
To drift, burning, out to sea?*

*Among the ancient Celts, dead heroes and nobles were placed on barges which were set afire and loosed on the tide.

Reflections on Life (82)
Life is so precious, so fragile;
We never value our own enough
Unless by accident we see reflected
In someone else's eyes the unguessed
Measure of our worth.
Take care, we say, oh please, take care.
The 'for me' is not spoken, but maybe
Sometimes, someone does hear it.
Take care of that which I value so greatly,
Yourself. And then you have an idea, a scale
for measuring your life's value.
Life is so precious, so fragile.
So easily and suddenly and irretrievably gone-
in the wink of an eye, the missed beat of
a very dear heart. Where and how and why?
Why do lovely and wonderful things
Hurt so much? Like a silver bullet,
A silver knife, a silver look can pierce
And transfix, leaving the poor soul paralyzed
And wounded. Perhaps the eyes aren't really silver,
But the look is the same, the shining metallic
Warm-cool fierceness, full of pride and pain,
Possession and parting.

Of death and A Silver Metal Lover By Tanith Lee. May 1982

The Clock's Voice (C: 80)
Relaxed to weary stillness,
Adrift twixt wake and sleeping.
Though wandering in dreams
These images still keeping:
Your voice, your face, your touch
In fantasy I'm seeking
While the ticking of the clock
Your name keeps speaking.
Then in my dream we walk,
Shoulder to shoulder
(Constrained in the real world
In dreams I can be bolder.)
I reach to take your hand,
Fingers entwining;
From the speech of eye to eye
The future divining.
From sidewalk into dunes
Together we go walking
To sit upon white sands
Just quietly talking,
The clock chimes and I wake,
My dreams still weighing
While the ticking of the clock
Your name keeps saying.

Faded Rose
So tightly folded is a rose
When first it starts to bloom.
So tightly locked was once my heart
Before you pierced the gloom.
The bud that opened to a rose
In time must wilt and fade
And crumble to become as dust
On the grave where it was laid.

Union (82)
To almost all, love comes, in time.
We stumble on to those who rhyme
With us and make our fragments whole.
It seems that one has no control
Over this most vital, desperate quest.
We blindly wander and at best
Search down so many dead-end ways
Until it seems that all our days
Destined are we to be alone.
But all the while, someone unknown
Is searching too, the same as we,
Is lost in the same misery.
Then, with a bit of luck, we meet.
And sometimes doubting, must retreat
A little bit before we're sure
This is the match that will endure.
Now we begin the courtship dance,
The timeless rituals of romance,
The journey of discovery to
Explore this wonder, ever new.
Step by step we closer draw
To reach the ecstasy and awe
As melding, blending, joined, sublime,
We find that love found us in time.

Writing True-to-Life
Realism versus Reality

"How-to" Article by Gwynn Morgan

Life if often boring, tedious, dull, uninspiring and prosaic, isn't it? We all know readers of fiction generally read to escape the mundane details of their lives. So the question is, how do you write a story that does not do violence to the average person's vision of what really exists without boring her or him to tears? How can you keep an exciting pace and still not stretch your reader's believability index to the breaking point?

To use an old saw, the devil is in the details--both those you put in and those you leave out. Take the actual life and work of a "cowboy"--long hours on horseback, or today perhaps in a pickup truck, looking for sick or injured cattle, broken fences, drying water holes, poisonous weeds, etc. Hardly the stuff of fantasy, so what's a poor author to do?

Well, you could resort to Hollywood hoakiness: put your cowpoke on a big Palomino (stallion, of course) with a silver-decked saddle, pearl-handled revolvers on both hips, and maybe a yodeling sidekick and leave a fair portion of your readers gagging in disgust. Or you can sketch out a few bare facts about this man's life and work in a paragraph or two before you go on to the conflict and the romance!

Or how about a cop? Those of you who have a law enforcement officer in the family probably know just how far from the facts most of the current movie and TV scripts go in portraying this line of work. Again, we have long, dull hours of patrolling, the traditional minor tasks of helping lost children, nabbing shoplifters or writing speeding tickets, and once in awhile a "sexy" crime like a major homicide, a big heist, or a drug bust. Again, b-o-r-i-n-g if you go into the day-to-day routine.

So you compromise. Set up with one short scene of your cop talking to an elderly lady who reported a prowler, or maybe taking a five-year-old into a store to return the candy bar he "borrowed." Then, move on to the meat of your story.

Please, if you don't want to turn the readers who know better, don't give us fifty-vehicle car chases across the entire state of Texas or too many Dirty Harry cold-blooded shoot-out scenes. That is not real, but then, don't spend half your manuscript-unless it's a screenplay about Mayberry--on the bumbling antics of a small town policeman and his boss: the nightly stroll along Main rattling shop front doors, the quiet hours cruising the streets at night, just looking for something that isn't quite right.

We all brush our teeth, shower daily (we hope), eat two or three meals, and do a zillion other routine but necessary little tasks. So, since readers already know everyone does these things, you don't have to tell them. Oh, in a short scene-Tom Hanks' character in Turner and Hooch comes to mind-you can give us a great insight into this person by showing him or her obsessing about some normal, minor bit of personal hygiene. That may work, but otherwise, those are details to leave out.

We don't have to follow the hero or heroine through their entire day, every day for the whole length of the story. Unless something happens that is highly significant in terms of the plot or perhaps a small detail that is key to characterization, simply provide the reader a line or two of transition from scene to scene and skip the dull stuff!

Let's try an example. "John stormed out of Becky's house. He chose to ignore the wind, and barely noticed the gritty little snowflakes stinging his face. All the things he wished he could think of quickly enough to say at the right time clanged together in his head. But it was too late now. He slumped into his car and drove home."

Stop right there. Don't tell us how John undressed, went to bed and tossed and turned all night. Instead, pick up the next day when he runs into Becky at the office or the drug store and the conflict goes on.

I have a real pet peeve about so-called historical novels that slaughter facts, disregard actual dates, ignore the documented life spans of known historical persons, and put 21st century thoughts, mores, customs and behavior into the minds and deeds of 13th or 18th century characters. All I can say to those authors is, if you really don't want to bother with research, write fantasy! That way you can make up a whole world and the rules for it and shape them any way you want. It won't matter then exactly when Queen Victoria assumed the English throne or Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I can think of only one narrow sub-genre of speculative fiction where one is allowed to play with history and make changes. That is alternative history, usually considered a sub-genre of science fiction, although I imagine you could weave a romance into such a milieu and maybe sell it, at least to a bold e-publisher.

There, you can have the South win the War Between the States, Spain becomes the dominant force in North American Colonization or Hitler and crew win World War II. But, you still have to be accurate up to the point at which your world diverges from reality.

The writer of fiction has to walk a thin line, balancing realism--the semblance of what is real--against reality--all the mundane, tedious aspects of "real life." You can make your world seem real to the reader by selecting the details you include and those you leave out and by taking pains to research those facts that are essential to your story so you know they are accurate. Fiction may be imaginative, but it still must be rooted in the real world in order to be believable to the readers.