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From JoeMyGod: Tonight In San Diego: Vigil For Murdered Gay Sailor August Provost.

The Acorn Stories: The Individual Stories

"Acorn": When we arrive at the fictional West Texas town of Acorn, the narrative keeps shifting between Regina and Dirk, who both seek control over their relationship.

"Flip, Turn": A different scene from the narrator's amusing but unproductive life comes to him every time he turns to swim in the opposite direction.

"Keeping A Secret": A little boy wants to shield his mother and his little brother from a dangerous situation.

"Survival": A young teacher (both deaf and gay) clashes with his school's emphasis of uniformity over diversity and sports over academics.

"Paying The Rent": In this politically incorrect tale, an inarticulate young man hopes to marry a rich woman so he can pay the rent, but he finds her repulsive.

"Morgana Le Fay": A widow finds her new romance disrupted by her Siamese cat's strange behavior.

"Your Daughter": Gretchen's approach to raising a daughter and maintaining a marriage requires ignoring problems and carefully orchestrating conversations.

"Knock": A father sees his daughter abandon her Mexican heritage, and he now fears other types of abandonment.

"Come With Me": The conflictive influence of her overbearing sister and her supportive husband forces Becky to re-evaluate her ambitions.

"Dead Enough": Farcical look at English departments, tabloid TV, the publishing industry, and America's superstar culture.

"Mae": Standing by her husband's grave, an elderly woman looks back at the joys and challenges of marriage and motherhood.

"Timothy Fast": In this satirical retelling of the Faustian myth, a Jewish businessman finds himself pulled into small-town politics.

"Mirrors: A Blackmail Letter": The owner of an art gallery becomes the target of a "family values" witch-hunt, spear-headed by Acorn's closeted (“ex-gay”) mayor.

"Echoes": A time of unexpected changes for Becky and her husband.

"Oak": Julie Briggs can only talk to her mother by leaving messages on her answering machine, but she refuses to give up her voice.

"Acorn Pie": An unusual weekend in the life of an unusual town.



Read the reviews at Kirkus, Amazon.Com, Amazon.Com (1st edition), bn.com (2nd edition), and bn.com (1st edition).

Kindle Edition.

Find or promote author events with BookTour. Please visit my BookTour page.

I’m happy to see my video channel receiving an increasing surge in traffic. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to watch, forward, embed, and/or favorite my videos!

Of course, many of the most popular online videos right now involve the protests over Iran’s election. See farzinfakhraei’s channel for some of those videos.

The Acorn Stories.
By Duane Simolke.
Pride in the Arts Award.

Visit the West Texas town of Acorn! Enjoy the German festival, a high school football game, homemade apple pie from the Turner Street Cafe, and the cool shade of a hundred-year-old oak tree. Meet dedicated teachers, unusual artists, shrewd business owners, closeted gays, and concerned neighbors. See how lives become intertwined in moments of humor or tragedy. Just be careful, because in Acorn, the sky is always falling!

From romantic comedy to razor-sharp satire to moments of quiet reflection, these award-winning tales transform a fictional West Texas town into a tapestry of human experiences.

• “A lush tangle of small-town life branches out in this engrossing collection of short stories.” –Kirkus Discoveries
  
• “A talented, insightful author.” –E. Conley, Betty's Books
  
• “If you liked WINESBURG, OHIO . . . rejoice.” –Watchword
  
• “By the time you have finished reading these tales of the people who inhabit the fictitious town of Acorn, Texas, population 21,001, you will have met some endearing as well as irritating characters, from the Mayor to the local would-be gigolo; from the busy-bodies to the business owners; from those who grew up in Acorn and have tried to escape the small town to those who have moved to Acorn to escape from the real world.” –Ronald L. Donaghe, author of Uncle Sean
  
• “A well-crafted collection of short stories.” –L. L. Lee, author of Taxing Tallula
  
• “It was a real pleasure to read about the fictional town of Acorn, Texas.” –Mark Kendrick, author of Desert Sons
  
• “Simolke makes good use of his vivid imagination in creating credible dialogue and satirical images.” –Huda Orfali, author of Blue Fire
  
• “There are people that you like, some that you can't wait to see if they get theirs.” –Joe Wright, StoneWall Society
  
• “Each of Simolke's stories lets us look into the lives of some of the most interesting characters I have ever read about.” –Amos Lassen, Literary Pride
  
• “When you finish, when you put the book aside, Acorn will still be with you.” –E. Carter Jones, author of Absence of Faith
  
• “I highly recommend this book!” –Richard Carlson, author of Jeremy Grabowski's Crazy Summer in Stormville!

Read the reviews at Kirkus, Amazon.Com, Amazon.Com (1st edition), bn.com (2nd edition), and bn.com (1st edition).

Kindle Edition.

Degranon: A Science Fiction Adventure
By Duane Simolke
Winner, Pride in the Arts Award

On the planet Valchondria, no illness exists, gay marriage is legal, and everyone is a person of color. However, a group called “the Maintainers” carefully monitors everyone’s speech, actions, and weight; the Maintainers also force so-called “colorsighted” people to hide their ability to see in color.

The brilliant scientist Taldra loves her twin gay sons and thinks of them as the hope for Valchondria’s future, but one of them becomes entangled in the cult of Degranon, and the other becomes stranded on the other side of a doorway through time. Can they find their way home and help Taldra save their world?

• “This is an incredible book about the human condition and how one person striving for the good can, in the end, be a source of change.” –Rainbow Reviews
  
• “In Degranon, author Duane Simolke establishes his voice in gay genre writing by combining current concerns revolving around queer culture with a world of dimensional doorways, advanced technology, and distant planets.” –X-Factor, October 1, 2004 issue
• “It's a very good story.” –HomoMojo.Com
  
• “A must read.” – Joe Wright, for StoneWall Society
  
• “A reminder of the danger of fanaticism.” –Mark Kendrick, author of Stealing Some Time
  
• “Duane Simolke's latest offering is a fascinating scifi excursion into a world as unique as his singular vision.” –Ronald L. Donaghe, author of Cinátis
  
• “I recommend DEGRANON for its exciting, well-constructed narrative, its often intriguing characters, and its wealth of ideas both political and philosophical.” –J. Clark
  
• “DEGRANON is sci-fi that warrants the attention of any serious aficionado, gay or straight, fascinated by alien worlds that mirror our own world.” –William Maltese, author of Beyond Machu

Though it takes place on other worlds, all the characters in this book are people we might call Native American, African American, Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern. Some of them are also gay. In fact, you could call it a gay science fiction novel, though it can also appeal to a wider scifi audience. For the revised, second edition, I rewrote three of the main characters as gay men, gave a larger role to a lesbian police officer (known as a “Maintainer”), and further explored the “closet” metaphor that appeared in the first edition. Degranon deals with themes of diversity, censorship, and religious violence. It takes place in an alternate dimension, with some of our prejudices and other problems looked at from unusual angles. More importantly for most scifi fans, though, it delivers fast-paced adventure and constant twists.

The opening paragraphs of The Return of Innocence: A Fantasy Adventure

The relentless wind whipped the sails as the shroud of darkness that sometimes entombed them began to return. Darkness had descended and slowly disappeared in the same fashion, and at the same time, on each of their previous three days at sea, always around noon. As she gazed at the warship anchored beside theirs, Sasha absently toyed with one of the long, meticulously plaited braids of deep chestnut-colored hair that usually flowed down her back. She often pulled a braid over her shoulder when lost in thought.

Her attention became riveted on the massive claw marks on the ship’s hull. Deep gouges ran at some points from stem to stern, indicating that the ship and her undoubtedly unlucky crew had come across a dragon or sea serpent. By the looks of the nearly shredded topsail and hole-riddled mainsail, the crew barely survived; the tales they shared quickly spread unease among the men who rode with Sasha toward the kingdom of Jaan.

Usually, she didn’t pay much attention to the random vessels that came and went during her journey away from the islands. However, her curiosity rose after she heard some of the sailors talking about it with hushed voices in the galley during breakfast. Now she idly fingered the ornate dirk that was belted at her side along with the scarred broadsword that her father presented to her after she managed to best one of Jaan’s better, younger apprentice swordsmen in a practice session at her father’s small, makeshift soldiers-at-arms school.

Dressed in stout brown leather breeches, cropped black leather traveling boots, a tight-fitting cloth vest, and a short traveling cloak to ward off the sudden, chill sea breezes, Sasha decided she looked rather boyish this morning. Normally, she would prefer the free-flowing clothing she wore on her family’s homestead. However, this mode of dress allowed her more freedom for defending herself, if needed.

Her eyes narrowed as she surveyed the ailing vessel more carefully, and as the sky grew darker. Thoughts of what awaited her in Jaan flitted through her mind. Only yesterday, she had reached seventeen, but she had already experienced more adventure than most noble-born women could ever hope to see. Not that she had wanted any more high drama or swashbuckling mayhem. Truthfully, she really just wanted the peace and contentment that her family once knew in Jaan, the kingdom of her birth. Sasha sighed as a pang of loneliness and not a little bit of resentment at her circumstances stabbed at her insides. She shook her head, as if to dispel the cobwebs of longing that clung to her mind, and her braids fell back into place.

She looked up from her musings at the sound of the light, rolling gait that marks a man who has spent most of his life at sea. She smiled slyly as the young captain approached her and bowed. He was fairly good looking, with light tan-colored skin and almond-shaped, brown eyes that looked rather worldly for his apparent age. He smiled back at her, briefly revealing a perfect set of almost impossibly white teeth. His face was thankfully bereft of the coarse, bristly hair that attached to the faces of the other sailors like an affliction.

Now he’d be an interesting candidate for a spouse, if I were looking for one, thought Sasha, though she’d never heard of a Westerner marrying an Easterner. But she then told herself it must violate one of the cosmic laws, like the one that magic users can’t occupy the same territory as each other, or the one that no one should ever eat meat in a horse’s presence. She asked herself, Who could keep up with all those rules, and what bothersome idiot made them all up in the first place?

“Falon Shin, Captain Ferik,” she said, greeting him in the local Kael dialect. She knew very little Old Thelni, but people of all dialects knew the basic greetings and courtesies from the ancient tongue. Though they all shared the same written version of Thelni, their dialects often made it difficult for them to understand each other. Still, starting with Old Thelni, in a person’s dialect, showed respect for that person’s heritage, and a noble-born like Sasha paid attention to such matters. “Are you feeling as restless as everyone else?” She gestured about herself in reference to the swift yet silent motion of people going about their tasks around her.

Captain Ferik raised an eyebrow in silent observation. “Perhaps it would be better if you were below decks,” he said. “It’s getting too dark to see, and we don’t know what attacked that ship.” His eyes scanned the horizon and the ship sailing away from them.

Sasha chuckled lightly. “Are you worried about me? How touching! However, there’s nothing out here but them.” She pointed to the battle-scarred ship that disappeared into the approaching darkness.

“There’s more than wind at work here,” the captain remarked. “One eclipse is a bad omen, but four within a month can only mean one thing…sorcery.”

Preface to The Return of Innocence: A Fantasy Adventure

During my teen years, I wrote several science fiction and fantasy stories. Most of those got lost during moves, but one of them eventually grew into the novel Degranon: A Science Fiction Adventure, and I occasionally tried to develop a novel from one of the fantasy stories, “The Return of Innocence.” I wrote that story in 1983.

The novel, however, remained unfinished for two decades, still a sketchy jumble of drafts and notes with enormous potential. I eventually considered the possibility of cowriting it with a fantasy author. When I mentioned the idea to my friend Toni Davis, she decided to read through some of the chapters and quickly fell in love with my fantasy world of Theln. Toni mostly wrote poetry and fan fiction back then, but wanted to explore new characters.

Toni brought fresh perspectives to a long-neglected project by interjecting ideas, fleshing out characters, and exposing flaws. Unfortunately, work and her own projects would keep her away from working much more on the project. Eventually, I combined our ideas to write a complete draft. Though the finished book only includes a little of her writing, it contains a great deal of her inspiration, and I appreciate her efforts in making sure I could one day finish this light-hearted epic.

Setting aside the manuscript for most of 2005, I would occasionally come back to it with a fresh perspective to polish it on the sentence level. When I read back through it in early 2006, I found the funny and exciting novel I always imagined it would become. Aside from changing a word or two here and there, I finally managed to let it go, so my readers can enjoy it.