Water Fire Steam

The year is 1884. Rolla Alan Jones, an ambitious dreamer fresh out of an East Coast engineering school, is commissioned to design and build the first water system in Spokane Falls, Washington, a booming town of twenty-thousand. He is everyone's golden boy for five years until the city burns down on August 4, 1889. The once-celebrated engineer is scapegoated for the catastrophe alleging his system yielded inadequate water pressure. Asked to resign, betrayed by his friends, shunned by the community, and abandoned by his pregnant wife and three-year-old son, Rolla must find the strength to reinvent himself or return to New York as an abject failure. Based on a true story, Water Fire Steam is a story of forgiveness and redemption for anyone who has ever had to claw their way back from an unwarranted accusation.

Available in eBook, Kindle Unlimited and paperback.

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Coming Soon: Young Heroes

A gripping story about four fourteen-year olds facing significant circumstances that will recompose their lives forever.

If you drove by any American high school where boys dressed in football uniforms were on their mark as a whistle blew across its grassland, and the air smelled darn right wholesome, you'd likely smile. Suppose the lawn on either side of the dark red brick two-story school was covered in dew from last night's rain, and cheerleaders with pony tails practiced gleeful cheers? This site might lull you into believing normalcy resides here in spades. That everything was as it should be. It might persuade you to think that the crazy violent world displayed in the media every day exists everywhere but here. But it's doubtful you would fall for that unless you were naive. For every city shoulders gloom, and people's private lives contain secrets that disguise truths.

Portland, Oregon, is one such city, and within the confines of this metropolis live Millar Carmichael, Robin Lamb, Jermo Salvador, and Felix Matteson-Truax, four fourteen-year-olds. A tricky age, for sure. Being neither adolescent nor bona fide teenager can’t compare to their boisterous and bold 16- and 17-year-old counterparts. Yet their hunger for independence, the right to be taken seriously and adequately recognized, is beyond question.

Young Heroes—encompassing a rich tapestry of diverse fourteen-year-old students from Wy’east High School in Portland, Oregon—challenges conventional notions of heroism and explores the profound idea that heroes emerge from the ordinary individuals among us.

Read the first chapter with the link below.

Water Fire Steam won First Place for Post 1750's Fiction, Goethe Awards April 20th 2024. The Goethe Books Awards is a Division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBA)