At promptly ten-o'clock in the morning, on the final Friday of each month, every suburb in Los Angeles tested its warning system, just in case the Communists succeeded in sneaking a nuclear missile through Eisenhower's defenses. That you are able to visit this webpage today is testimony to Iron Ike's vigilance.

By the time the air-raid system deteriorated and was finally abandoned altogether in the mid-1960s, its personification of paranoia had been replaced by newscasts of Vietnam, of assassinations, of serial murderers in our very midst.

Then came The Beatles.

And Bob Dylan.

And Joseph Heller.

And Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

And Chaz learned to type, because it was faster than the pencil. And he learned to play the guitar, because songwriters got more girls than authors did. But high schools in 1969 cared little for The Beatles or Bob Dylan or Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, so Chaz quit attending, some six months before he would have graduated.

Between performances at local pubs, where he covered tunes by Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel, and Credence Clearwater, he cleaned up after the elephants at a parking-lot circus, and painted signs for burger stands on Lakewood Boulevard, and worked as a clerk typist for the County of Los Angeles in Long Beach.

When he migrated to Madison, Wisconson, with a musician friend in 1976, he soon discovered there was no glamour in lugging amplifiers and guitar cases through the snow every night, and so he secured a job with the state government, where he eventually became a graphic artist.
And every winter Madison set a new record: the coldest winter in the state's history; the longest winter in the state's history; the most snow in the state's history . . .

So he returned to Los Angeles, where he married and sired children.

And he learned how to write screenplays.
Most of them sit on a shelf to this day, but one of them caught the attention of a Hollywood agent, thus initiating a professional relationship of disagreement and frustration. Chaz allowed his contract to expire, and vowed to dedicate all subsequent literary energies to novels, where the final word was his, and his alone.

More or less.

Through an evolving landscape of divorce, a new marriage, a new child, and new jobs, Chaz produced a collection of stories and novels poised for publication.

Enter Kim Blagg and PageFree Publishing.

A well-received trilogy of erotica came first, followed by No One's Ever Sick in Springfield, a psychological action story set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, right where Chaz grew up. Next at the gate is Son of the Bogeyman, the memoir of a ghost trying to make sense of his 103-year-long life, and why anyone would have him assassinated on the sunniest day of the year.