Beginning to End

Publisher Marketing: The 5 stories in Beginning to End were written primarily in the summer of 2014 except for 1980 San Diego. End of the N Judah is about a very specific time in my youth and has been written mostly in my head for over 35 years but only just put it down to paper. The Cruel pool is liable to cause me some grief. Lobster Zombie is for Queeny who is a real person I've never met but am very fond of. I have borrowed a story with minor changes, borrowed from myself, Heaven has been revised because I thought it fit better here than in the previous work, Winter Book. This collection of stories should be read in order, and will perhaps be reworked more tightly one day into a novel. Or maybe it's a novel now, a new important telling american bonafide important thing. I have another hot mess that's been rattling for a few years about a man who builds a boat in his backyard and plans to sail to Ireland to visit a little girl who used to live next door It's called Shelby after a little girl I knew when I was a boy. I think that's next, dunno, probably not revising and polishing finished pieces though. I put down, give up on and lose plenty of the things I write. I try to obfuscate certain characters and situations from real life that I think might come back and bite me but if you think a section sounds like its about you, it is, weather your living or dead, and if you think I changed how something really happened or mis remembered something, well, you are just wrong, that's what it meant to me, sue me, I dare you. I continue to submit plays to contests and festivals. Thank you for opening my latest book. Reading the whole thing won't kill you. C. M. Brophy, Hyattsville, August 2014 Contributor Bio:  Brophy, C M About the Author About the author: Born in New York City in 1959, C. M. Brophy has written, directed and acted in plays and films in New York, San Francisco and Canada. Founding member and artistic director of Dude Theater Frisco, Bindlestiff theater of 6th st. and Splanchnic Theatricals international as well as many other Union and pirate theater houses and film production projects as collaborator, hired gun and featured solo artist. He was impresario at Random Ax guerrilla arts. He was songwriter and bass player in the Scropes, a 1980's S. F. musical ensemble. He built, operated and sold a little pizza parlor outside Washington D. C. He works as a plumber these days and has been a cab driver, short order cook, tradesman, clerk, miner, lookout, mover, driver and decoy. He's done some modeling. He ran for Mayor on the platform that if elected he would not serve. He's run a marathon. He paints and sculpts and can dance and sing and swim. His opus for solo piano, "Roommate Torture" is almost finished, so yes, he is also a composer. He is full of love- and hate. Adventures, which he believes are not meant to be fun while they're happening, have taken him in small boats down rivers and across vast bodies of water, in trains, old broke down cars and commercial jet airliners. Brophy has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Mexico, South America, the British isles, Ireland, Europe and the middle of the desert. He has walked upon a frozen sea. He has a home in the suburbs, sons and a spouse, 2 dogs and a mortgage, has rolled in the gutter, been bloodied and blotto, tattooed and transformed, redeemed, broken boned, stitched back together, honored and ignored. A college dropout, he writes in bed or standing up, most prolific away from home. C. M. Brophy is a boxer and a poet. He is destined to continue to write outside the confines of commerce, fully field testing the experimental theory, "Perfect is the enemy of done.." intending to complete volumes of plays, novels and stories before he dies, hoping one day an editor will come along to help make sense and dollars from the rough concentrates of raw material, refining and extracting punctuation, spelling, formatting and structural contradictions into a slim faultless volume. Posthumously would be fine with him. Christopher Michael Brophy is very busy living.