Roger Doering

Many years ago, when I took my family to the shore, we would drive to Wildwood, New Jersey to get to the ocean. On one of the roads crossing the swamp between the mainland and the city proper was an old fish processing factory. The years and the salt atmosphere of the 'Jersey' shore turned the structure into a rusted skeleton of it's former self. I always thought that building would be a great setting for either a story or a movie.

But, that scene never made it into my book, "Broken Twins".

The kernel for "Broken Twins" was planted while I was driving on a Sunday late at night for a meeting with a customer early Monday morning in Washington, DC. Besides concentrating on the Jersey Turnpike, or I-95, I listened to radio talk shows. They were inane tools to pass the time, and besides, they were the only thing on. As I approached Baltimore, there was a talk show discussing flying saucers and aliens, but for some reason the discussion drifted into the government taking property from it's citizens.

What if they took more than real property?

It was thirteen years later that "Broken Twins" was finished and published. Hey, I had a job and worked almost 24/7. I was in the emergency power service industry. I retired and wrote stuff.

Not only did I research the story, but with an engineering background, I researched the writing process. I found all, or most, of my old English literature books from college. Apparently, I never opened them, they looked as new as when I bought them in the sixties. Who knew I would need them forty years later.

I bought books on the preparation of my writing for public consumption and on the publishing industry. Then Amazon came along and I could forget most of this information.

Very early in my life we lived with my maternal grandparents in the outskirts of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. My grandfather had a very large barn built for him. He brought in very long tables and spread photographs of art and statues from all over the world. He took most of the pictures himself. I watched as he would take a picture or a series of pictures to the bathroom and as he sat of the toilette, he would write about the pictures.

I didn't know it, I was just a tyke, but he was writing the encyclopedia on the "History of Art". Again, I didn't know it, but my humble grandfather, Josep Pijoan, was the foremost authority on the history of art.

I look at his books now and wonder at the precision of his descriptions and insight into the society that birthed those works of art.

I found that on occasion when I would be writing "Broken Twins" I would look up from the key board and notice that two or three pages had passed and I wasn't aware that the story took off on its own. I had to deep edit, because uncontrolled words on a page normally do not make any sense.

Check out "Broken Twins.com". I have attempted to blog on the "Broken Twins" web site.

Please enjoy the story.