Second volume of the Marc of Ashes series. Country sheriff is pressed into serving as leader of a relief column to Constantinople in 1453. Deeming it a lost cause, the European powers send only a secret payload: the first printed Bibles. Arriving at the besieged capital, Marc successfully delivers his meager reinforcements and completes his mission. Only now, he and his charges are locked in the city facing one of the mightest armies ever assembled.…
Poetry inspired by a study of the 1900 hurricane in Galveston , Texas. It is the worst natural disaster in US history. wiping out the island as a commercial capital, sailing port and railroad hub. It was an unnamed storm, having struck before the naming tradition began. Once renown as the Newport of the West, the island was devastated by a tidal surge and hurricane that cost the lives of 12,000 people. Survivors lifted the remaining city structures and poured sand beneath them to raise them 15 feet. The new seawall was 15 feet as well and built by General Roberts, of Roberts's Rules of Order.…
An odd-ball team of scientists from a think tank secretly discuss alarming events which seem disconnected at first, but come rapidly into focus as the Singularity. the moment that artificial intelligence steps past human IQ presents a threat to the world they feel called on to respond.meeting outside work at a local cantina, they form an alliance that shuns the military, big energy and even their own institute. Soon they forced to ally with the military that pursues them in order to stem the tie of collapsing systems and a rising army of robots. It may come down to eradication of the race, or some miracle against a superior new life form. As the world falls apart, the tight knit group pushes beyond the bounds of anything they have ever done, as it may be the last chance to do anything.…
Poems by Mark Kessinger…
Poetry from the eyes of an American soldier in Vietnam. Mark Kessinger gives voice to soldiers from various experiences of those who serves, suffered and survived.The Book of Joe is winner of the 1990 Poetry Contest from Cleveland State University.…
Marc of Ashes is a re imaging of history as told by a sheriff, drafted as knight, to deliver a secret payload to the besieged city of Constantinople. En route, he encounters Russian Calvary, brigands, Dervishes, giants, Janissaries, and more. In a time of superstition and ignorance, he encounters an accused witch, conflicting a man of science and demanding a heart ruled by law. She predicts his outcome with a single word as they bury the Captain he must replace: 'ashes.' He struggles to reach his destination, only to find one of the most famous sieges in history well underway.…
Ji is a young woman caught in the subterranean society of the Hermit Kingdom. When all out war erupts between the US and her homeland, she is determined not to be the victim her grandparents were so long ago. Fleeing from exploitation, forced labor and worse, she begins an odyssey which takes her over foreign landscapes and into dangerous seas. Ji braves imprisonment, marriage, capture, and more while seeking to elude this spilled Panndora's box of horrors.An American fiction writer, Ken Mock, is the victim of a soft kidnapping. He is tricked into serving in a small think tank about the war where his ideas are used by the other side. Once freed, his guilt drives him to redeem the terrible ideas he has 'fathered.' He finds a way to the front lines of the forbidden War.Their lives, and those of others, become inexplicably intertwined in the twisted fate of a war never meant to be won, only to be endured.…