Selected and Collected

This is a collection of 27 short pieces, written over the past half dozen years. Many of them are from the booklets I had printed locally to use as Christmas presents. (Writing, for me, is more fun than shopping.) Several of the selections are new and have not appeared anywhere yet. One of them is technically an essay, rather than fiction, and another shades into a kind of loose memoir. Most are short stories of one sort or another, weird, crazy, demented, philosophical, softly romantic, brutally realistic, grim, touchingly upbeat, and are populated by characters who strive, despair, fear, exult, manipulate, develop, reminisce, wonder, and otherwise experience life.

Ralph Bowden has entertained himself by writing mostly fiction for 25 years, through and following careers as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, a history professor, a home builder, an alternative energy consultant, an instructional designer, and a technical writer. Twenty-one novels, four story collections, and a three-act play hide, mostly unread, on his hard drive. He likes all of his word offspring. Realistically, some of them are probably terrible. Others might entertain readers besides himself, but Ralph hasn’t the time or ego drive to promote and sell, nor the stomach for collecting rejection letters. Self-publishing avoids all that and is quick. If somebody finds and likes what he has written, fine. If not, the world will go on (or not) just the same.