The Vicar of Church Hill is a collection of thirteen Young Adult history mysteries, designed for close reading and analysis, and they help develop long form reading skills.
Thirteen mysteries for young readers, set in and around Richmond, Virginia. The "detective" is a newspaper reporter who borrows a police horse to ride undercover disguised as an eighteenth century circuit rider. Each story teaches a lesson suitable for classroom discussion. This second edition is expanded to include more than twice the stories of the first edition.
"An edge-of-your-seat mystery, a suspense thriller with real life places and happenings you may recognize…" Nikki Edwards, Patrick Henry High School newspaper.
"The reader can definitely include Richmond as a primary character." Elizabeth King Humphrey, Southern Scribe
"Very Richmond."
"…filled with adventure, excitement, and mystery. I looked forward to reading each story knowing that I would learn something new. The characters were real and some I hope to meet someday - particularly the Vicar. I really like the Vicar and his horse. Also, I really liked the fact that all the stories were set in and around Richmond. There is so much about Richmond I have yet to discover. Thank you again for these wonderful stories. Please keep writing." Vanessa Remmers (high school reader)
"I had trouble putting this down, which was a bad thing in Physics class. Oh well. The Vicar of Church Hill was a wonderful read. The plots were funny and varied; you never knew what Joe was going to face next … best part, however, was reading about places, like Broad Street and Monument Avenue I know like the back of my hand. It made the story so much more real. Should the Vicar ever feel the need to ride down to Farmville, tell him to look me up." Cat Schlitz (high school reader)
The original print edition (2002) held up pretty well for a dozen years. There are still print copies available, but we highly recommend this expanded new print edition and the e-book. Collectors buy the print edition because it is unusual: published by a television production company, manufactured by a Richmond printer.
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Rapunzel in Control is a collection of five stories, that teach aviation, history, and geography. "Teleflight" - piloting giant scale radio control airplanes from fully immersive cockpits on the ground - is carried to high art in these adventure stories. Classic World War II Warbirds, space age jets, ornithopters, and micro helicopters are all here for flying and aviation enthusiasts.
The title novella, Rapunzel in Control, is the novelized version of the movie Scramble! in which students at Central High School in the Blue Ridge mountains fly large scale models of World War II airplanes in competition against other school teams. Rapunzel leads Central to victory from inside her Air Traffic Control Tower. In Sabre Dance, Chaparral High School in New Mexico builds and flies the "century series" jets from the 1950s and battle Russian planes from a rival school. The lead character is a boy named Eusibio who pilots an F-100 Super Sabre. Eusibio and the Chaparral team reunite in the third adventure, Airplane Down, which takes them over the border into Mexico. The featured airplanes are two of the rarest ever flown, the XB-70 and the XF-90. Aerospace editor, Diego Rhodes edited this book on his ranch in Copper Canyon, Mexico where the story is set. While the first three stories in this collection are set in high schools, Tropic Teleflight pits adult hobbyists in city versus city competition. The action covers the entire state of Florida. Some of the airplanes in the story are fanciful, unique, yet plausible. This story offers a glimpse at what radio control aerial combat might look like at the NASCAR professional sport level. The fifth and final book of the collection is The Caves of the Crystal Eyes. Three friends, two girls and a boy in Charleston, South Carolina, fly helicopters and an airplane by remote control through a cavern, an unexplored cave system under a mountain in Amazonia. They are in a race against time to return a biological sample and help battle a tropical retrovirus.
Ornithopters feature prominently in the story, and leading ornithopter inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur, Nathan Chronister wrote to say: "I just finished reading your story, Tropic Teleflight. Loved it! It is definitely packed full of action. Your vision of what ornithopters can become (much like real birds, and maybe even exceeding their performance) is very much in line with my own vision and efforts. I have also dabbled in putting cameras on them and flying by looking at a video monitor. Reading your story has rekindled my interest in maybe setting up an ornithopter competition of some sort in the future." To delve deeper into the wonderful world of ornithopters, visit The Ornithopter Zone.
Longtime multi-rated pilot Ken B. read the title story Rapunzel in Control and the story Sabre Dance and spoke with the author about some of the planes mentioned in the stories. Click below for those interviews:
Audio Video mp4: Bamford Rapunzel
Audio Video mp4: Bamford Sabre Dance
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Shackleton Crater teaches astronautics and history.
A down and out space futurist finds himself leading ten astronauts on a secret mission to the Moon. He and three crewmen crash in Shackleton Crater in the Moon’s South Pole while the others establish a base near the equator in Central Bay. Political intrigue, world war, Apollo relics, a Japanese robot dog, and a race with the Chinese, round out this story of endurance. It concludes with a twist so unpredictable it is appropriately set near the lunar North Pole.
Originally written as a screenplay, the planned movie poster describes it best: In the fourteenth year of a new century, the fate on an embattled earth is in the hands of men marooned in Shackleton Crater. If you think this is a one hundredth anniversary retelling of the 1914 British expedition to Antarctica you are correct. If you think you already know how this story ends, you are off by a quarter of a million miles.
Shackleton Crater is a space survival story, a struggle with the elements (the lack thereof), and like the movies, “Gravity” and “Apollo 13,” the author has taken great care to portray the scenarios, science, and equipment accurately. The one leap of artistic license in the story has characters able to live in the cold trap on the floor of the crater, which with current space suits would be impossible. Personal and psychological histories are also true to the historic record.
The author was, for two decades, a freelance space journalist who diligently prepared for a career in the major news field that the Space Shuttle program promised to deliver. His knowledge of some of the content in this story (politics, some machinery and a few personalities) was gathered first hand.
Clever parallels keep the story close to Ernest Shackleton’s, SOUTH, his detailed account of the Endurance expedition. Though set in the future, the novella teaches about twentieth century exploration, in Antarctica, outer space, and on the Moon, and in a way, about exploration in general. Determined to make sure his readers remember the name of Ernest Shackleton’s life boat (and the Scottish benefactor, James Caird, who helped back the Endurance expedition), the author names his main character, “Timothy” James Caird.
Shackleton Crater was originally published along with four other stories in a collection entitled, A Slaughter of Ornithes. Almost immediately advisors in the publishing business counseled an independent release. This stand-alone edition is the result and uses the same cover art. The technically minded may object to the illustration (with light in the crater), but the author wanted a moonscape showing “a” crater, an astronaut, and some wreckage.
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Yucatan teaches ecology, geology, and paleontology.
Yucatan is a science fiction theological contemplation of sin and consequence, a primordial eco-epic that mixes Genesis 1:1-3 with elements inspired by The Wizard of Oz.
An idealistic ecologist is thrown 65 million years into the past on a mission to save the Earth from a cosmic collision. With the best intentions, however, he ends up inadvertently destroying two, maybe three worlds. “Traveler” must also battle a horde of iconic evil creatures, in an epic struggle, providing pages and pages of suspense and fiery combat.
Written with the most up-to-date dinosaur news in 2025, this fun novella is educational and enlightening. Hypsolophodonts, Sinothisosaurs, and a colorful Leallynasaur, who shows up in the cold North Sea coast, are just some of the discoveries that will delight dinosaur fans. It will appeal to anyone interested in paleontology, the time travel dilemma, or camping in the tropics.
Yucatan is certainly a book for young teenage boys, but it works for all ages, filled with clever allusions, and teaching a clear lesson.
Print, e-book, and now audiobook! Here are two samples:
Yucatan audio Sample 1
Yucatan audio Sample 2
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A Slaughter of Ornithes is a collection of five unforgettable science fiction, horror stories, and includes the novella Shackleton Crater. The title story is set in Venezuela. Christian missionaries are rarely portrayed accurately in popular fiction but they are in this neat read. It is a survival story about politics, religion, nature, and human nature. The Last Place On Earth is structured rather like a poem, and with many hidden references it is a story enjoyed more each time it is read. Sirens of Celebes is a disturbing story that haunts readers, who usually figure it out later. The Green Hell is a black humor cautionary tale about yard work in the sunshine state. Shackleton Crater - the past is prologue on the Moon's South pole. Written in 2009 and set in 2014, this is hard science fiction at its best, and definitely not, as one reviewer classified it, "alternative history."
Jody Rawley is adapting his Sci-Fi B-movie screenplay backlog into short stories for Kindle. Here are five new winners in the science fiction horror genre.
The title story of this book is a "monster in the house" and “final girl” horror story set in Venezuela’s unexplored Amazon tepui region. It’s a classic jungle survival creature-feature with Phorusrhacidae (popularly known as Terror Birds). Rawley, who is no fan of horror films, does occasionally enjoy an old fashioned monster-on-the-loose tale. He designed this prehistoric predator story to be educational, teaching politics and science, survival and even theology. The main characters are a missionary couple. It includes rainforest facts, Indians, and romance. It is likely the only story in which you will find a tetrachromat.
The fifth and last story in the book is a spaceship crash and lunar survival adventure that mirrors the 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton Antarctic expedition. It teaches space history, space science, and current geopolitics. The historic chronicle (the South Pole) and this science fiction adaptation (on the South Pole of the Moon), each follow a crew of men marooned in a dark freezing wilderness during a global conflagration. The personalities of explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott (and Apollo 15’s Dave Scott), are the keys to the mystery.
Three literary short works separate these two novellas. In the first of these three, a seven page story (with a two page discussion guide), titled, “Last Place On Earth,” Pliestocene wolves attack a Soviet gulag on Halloween (and yes, the prisoners are revolting). In the time it takes to drink a cup of hot chocolate you can thrill to blizzards, the glow of snow filtered aurora borealis, a frozen ocean, and a pitched battle against weird ancient mega fauna. It is a Cold War drama written in stanzas like a poem, where “A” is for Arctic, “B” is for Bear and also Badger, and “H” is for bomb.
“The Sirens of Celebes” is an eerie SCUBA dive into psychodrama, a study of descent into mental illness. A millionaire yachtsman amateur scientist visits a Southeast Asian reef famous for its aquatic biodiversity and has a disturbing encounter with the locals. This little six pager “totally creeped out” the book’s editors and test readers.
In “Green Hell,” tropical landscaping a home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida overwhelms a Yankee couple. It’s an emerald shaded black comedy full of mosquitoes and fire ants, and it will likely be the first story you read that includes a Tegu.
So all together (the collection), this is a jungle and space travel, underwater, Ice Age, primitive-setting survival adventure book about married couples, explorers, prisoners, soldiers, a physicist on a plane, a sailor (biologist) on a boat, wolves, birds, lobsters, and Florida. It challenges, inspires, upsets, delights, and teaches readers, and it makes them laugh.
Five beautiful and compelling original works of cover art illustrate this collection.
These horror stories are appropriate for teens and homeschoolers. Each story is an awesome vocabulary builder. They are outstanding for book club and classroom discussion. They are also appropriate reading for teens in that there are no bad words and no salacious content.
A Slaughter of Ornithes was "a strong contender for title of the month honors" from The Book Designer.
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A dark, delicious comedy, Burger Clown is about corporate identity crisis. "A very quick, deep, and droll twenty-two pages." Two restaurant chain clowns accidentally arrive at the same grand opening and with corporate insuperable anonymity, decide to rob a bank. It is also the story of a struggle for the soul of the company owner's son. "Fast food black humor for those who can stomach it." A bad clown adventure that dishes out revenge, horror, and a demand for change. Corporate and government bureaucracies meet at the table and the result is self-serving farce followed by just desserts. "It's a little bit . . . uh, mixed with . . . Well, no, it's not like anything else. Except, maybe Bullwinkle." An industry professional who read the screenplay version of Burger Clown said, "It's the second funniest script I ever read. The first went on to become the movie What About Bob?" The author says, "This story was inspired by a real event. Lost in the legal annals of a South Western state's traffic court records is the case of two hamburger restaurant clowns (you would know the clown's name) who crashed into each other. The police could not identify either clown as an individual and corporate lawyers defended the drivers as 'logos' not men. As I recall, all charges were dropped."
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CURA is a screenplay for a short, avant-garde, contemplative, Christian film. It is a contrast-as-conflict story told with much symbolism, set in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Mexico's Copper Canyon.
Cinema is the art-form of the director. A screenplay, it is understood, is nothing until the director envisions it and shares his vision with an audience. There are a few of us, however, just a few, who like to read screenplays. The audience for "art film" screenplays is even smaller. Offered here is the script for a Christian short film, heavy on symbolism, drawing upon the rhetorical notion that contrast can serve as conflict.
Inspiration for this dreamlike work was the author's 1980s encounter with a Western wanderer who mentioned the legend of Copper Canyon's Lost Cathedral. It was supposed at that time to be a myth, an occasional apparition, or at best a mysterious 18th century ruin. Catholic records held no evidence of a church in the canyon. Today, the cathedral, lost for so long but never completely forgotten, is a popular tourist attraction near Batopilas, Mexico.
Synopsis: a young man leaves Las Vegas, drifts in grief to Los Angeles, then into the Mexican wilderness. He stumbles upon the derelict chapel, cleans and restores, ministers to an anchorite in a cell, studies, comes to an epiphany, and in time assumes the role of pastor.
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