Scott Eubanks

The aging process is a sneaky son-of-a-gun. It begins by lurking around the edges of one’s life and occasionally darting into your person to take a bite out of your well-being. It then zips back into the shadows and waits for the next opportunity to reappear and take another bite out of your youth, your appearance, your confidence, and/or your already fragile self-concept. You’d like to grab it and strangle it, but it’s always out of sight and out of reach. Each bite it takes out of one’s existence leaves the victim a little less capable of ignoring the damage done by the attacks and a little less able to ignore their cumulative effects. Fighting against aging is a losing battle, but we do have a good shot at enjoying the many good parts of it. I was Born on Third Base is a humorous look at aging and the notion that “seventy is the new fifty.”

Homer: A Tornado Wrapped in Barbed Wire chronicles the hardships Homer Eubanks and many others faced during the first half of the 20th Century, poverty, World War I, the Spanish Flu that killed more than fifty million people worldwide, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time that ran over the weak and produced a generation of strong, tough, battle-scarred folks who dealt with more adversity than anyone deserved in one lifetime. Born in 1908 in Hamilton, Texas, Homer was a sharecropper’s son whose journey started with no money, an eighth-grade education, eight siblings who loved him, and an inner strength that served him well in the face of huge challenges and moments of danger. As much history as biography, HOMER A Tornado Wrapped in Barbed Wire, reveals a time when families pooled their meager assets, blood, sweat, and tears to help each other cope with economic stress and other angry circumstances that fought to hold them in the darkness as they strained to reach the light. People relied on the kindnesses and help of others as they clawed their ways in the direction of respectability and a modicum of success.

Long time grifters Sam and Rachel love two things: each other and the grift. On the run from the mob, the two lovers move from one con to the next, winning some and losing others, but always finding a way to survive. Episodes 10-12 of Season Two begins with The Sound of Breaking Bones by Eric Beetner. In Mississippi, Sam and Rachel pose as a godly couple running an adoption service, but they quickly run afoul of a local deacon whose tendencies run more to the Old Testament than the New. Scott Eubanks penned Episode 11, Still Life with Suitcase. This debut author's work finds Sam and Rachel in Florida, working a variation of the fiddle scheme. Their targets are new money but the art involved is from an old master. The danger itself, however, is elemental. Episode 12, Down Comes the Night, officially closes out season two. Series creator and editor Frank Zafiro picks up with Sam and Rachel right where they left off in Episode 11. Deciding to face the threat of pursuing mobsters head on, the couple devises a plan to finally be free and safe. The life of a grifter, however, holds little hope of either.

Puberty Drove the Car: I was just along for the ride takes readers on a nostalgic, coming of age ride about life in Marshall, Texas, during the 50s and 60s. Told through the eyes of a narrator who has now reached his 70s, Puberty Drove the Car relates the sometimes clumsy and often funny march toward adulthood in humorous selections sure to please readers who long to retreat from the frantic pace of today's lifestyle and seek a refuge the past has to offer through stories full of East Texas laughter. This collection celebrates a down-home good time with people of solid character, reflecting on the syrupy slow 1950s and 1960s when gentility and simplicity were conducive to storing away good memories and enjoying friends.