Craig Domme

Like Jackson Browne says in his masterpiece, ‘Running on Empty,’ Craig Domme turned twenty-one in 1969, a worn-out hippie, and volunteered for the draft as a last resort. Twenty months later he was a card-carrying member of the US Army’s First Special Forces Group and had learned Morse code, among other things. In hindsight, nothing in life would ever be as difficult or compete with the rigors of ‘The Training Group,’ and end up being as rewarding as his association with that band of brothers.

Susie Lee came into his life ten years later, and she taught him the finer points of parenting as they raised four beautiful children in Farmington, a small town in northern New Mexico. She earned her Masters in Special Ed and finally the ‘Pink Ribbon’ in 2011 after spending thirty-one years raising her husband and family. They succeeded most nobly in that pursuit, and she left him an aspiring author with all the free time in the world.

After three years, The Diamond Teardrop Illusion became a reality and is the pre-cursor to The Bell on the Bow, forcing a trilogy. These books answer a question as to why those Russian forefathers came to America, fictional stories that tell about human destinies, an old church bell that ends up in Kansas, magic, a message about doomsday, and a one in a billion miracle man named Jude. Together, they explain some of the finer points about history and the reasons things happened the way they did, thus the books' genre: historical fiction. They were written purely and merely to entertain. You can cry, laugh out loud, close the book and contemplate what is out there in the world and what could have been, had it not been for the story of Jude. Vincent Van Vedic is the giant gunslinger captain of the Vanessa, and he takes Jude and the church bell out of Russia in 1942 and brings it to America to a sister church in Kansas, saving the Macedonia along the way.

Comments and critiques are most welcome, at craigdomme@gmail.com