Title: New to the Game
Author: Mark Schoedl
Publisher: Best Books Media
ISBN: 978-1956095203
Pages: 239
Genre: Short Story Collection
Synopsis
There appears to be a distance between the person one presents and the real person hidden beneath the veneer.
Many more people from all walks of life have surrendered to their image to achieve recognition, to make ends meet, or to live the quiet life away from all the hullabaloo.
One cannot escape one’s fate no matter how hard one tries. So perhaps the impossible is possible, “just be yourself.” Many laugh behind their breath at this supposition. However, does winning a game or holding onto fractured relationships make your world a flawed yet wholesome endeavor that you can rest your hat on?
These are questions we all ask ourselves in our own private lives away from the hardened world around us. Since we only have now, perhaps it is time to feel the desperate sorrows and pitfalls we have created and to walk out into the world anew without all those pent-up preconceived notions that we cannot seem to shed. After all, our egos are as fractured and sullen as everyone around us. It’s a new day. Who knows what today will bring?
I too fall within this conundrum. My stories reach into what I have survived like everybody else. It is hard for it is only a world that we have accepted as the best of all possible worlds (Voltaire). I refuse to accept this as my path. Path? Is not this world a pathless land?
My sixteen stories from my new book, New to the Game, run over the same conflicts and escapism that many have held onto over the generations, and yet some daring persons see their own masked reality, feel its searching anguish, and let if fall to touch and feel new worlds – worlds they had no idea existed until they have had enough of their own biased and contrived ideals.
About the Author
Mark Schoedl currently resides in sunny Southern California; however, he still harbors a fond affection for his formative and young adult years growing up in Southeastern Wisconsin. Suburban Menomonee Falls, a northwestern Milwaukee suburban village, provides him with fond memories of rolling hills and open stretches of land that rest on its outskirts,
The Kettle Moraine and marshy soil remain with him wherever he travels. He draws inspiration from the young Scot John Muir who grew up on a Wisconsin farm as he too would reflect back on the sprawling wooded copses that surrounded the family’s cultivated land. As a middle-aged man struggling to survive in metropolitan Los Angeles, Mark has learned to work and play heedless of the daily news reports and Hollywood crowd that clutters the evening airways.