Some stories don’t work out – at least, not in a satisfactory way.

No, I won’t talk about the Syrian disaster, neither here nor in fiction. I don’t have the chops to do justice to those caught up in those horrors. I live and work and the level of the battles between ordinary meanness and ordinary goodwill. Where facts get distorted, and public rumor transforms into a wild-eyed public menace one who is simply a hapless fellow attempting to keep his sick wife and two children afloat. Clumsy? That he is. And surrounded by people who manage to turn signs of clumsiness into a tale of extortion, profiteering and wild rumors of banditry.

Not to mention the other hapless family where the father carries the reputation of international criminal. Thus far, the only evidence against him points to severe inability in dealing with rules of common sense.

In other words: life in a very ordinary little town. My fiction happens at the same street level because that’s where I spend most of my time.

And thus, one more for the road.