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