Fredrick Hudgin

This is my first young adult book. My grandkids kept asking me for one of my books and they were all full of adult words, thoughts, and actions-clearly not appropriate for young readers. So I wrote this one.I'm sure you've heard the clich about the grass always being greener. Sometimes it's true-sometimes it's not. It's usually a little more complicated than that. There are no adult words beyond what I hear tweens use every day. And no sex beyond holding hands, giving hugs, and kissing. While the book contains some violence and death, it is not graphic and I feel it is presented in a way that most young readers would understand without getting disturbed. However, being a young reader book doesn't mean that the plots and subplots are not interesting. Susannah and her friends are dropped into the middle of a civil war. There are good people and bad people on both sides of the portal. Deciding who is whom becomes a pretty important question to figure out. After the Earthlings get cloned, things really get complicated. Imagine saying "Hi " to yourself So pull up a chair and enter a world of Magic with dragons, mages, and swords. It is called Gleepth. You can only get there once a year, and only for a few minutes. But no one told Susannah that when she stepped into the portal and into a life beyond anything she had ever dreamed. And there was no way back beyond waiting a year for the next window.

The little girl who greets Frank on A Rainy Night told him about her father and uncle who had not come home from Afghanistan. But there was more to the story than she said ... a lot more. Frank had already lost his wife and family. The girl's loss reached out to him until the men appeared.In Ashes on the Ocean, her husband of forty-three years has died. Suddenly she was free of his strict ways. She rebuilds her life, filling the void he left with bright happy things. But she still had one remaining obligation-to get his ashes to the ocean. The temptation was to repay his years of intolerance in kind, but a promise is a promise.Being Dad is about healing. How do you bury the memories along with your son when he comes home from the war with an honor guard instead of a bear hug?Susannah finds out that parallel universes really do exist and that the Green Grass isn't always quite so green on the other side of the fence.This collection of short stories are my favorite of the stories I have I written. Some are twisted. Some are fun. Some are sad and some are happy. Kind of like life. I hope you enjoy them.

There are two sections in this collection. The first I created rambling around the world as a computer programmer. I studied the people around me. Most people have a story. Most are very interesting. Sometimes the stories were about themselves. Sometimes they were about things. Sometimes it made up stories about events I witnessed or introspections I discovered in a moment of clarity.The second section is about the people I loved during my wanderings.I hope you enjoy these selections.

The governments of Canada and the United States begin to slowly reinstate themselves and attempt to suppress the anarchy that has swept their countries after the Three-Hour War. Once governmental control and peace are reestablished, the bigger problem of asking the Galactic government for a second chance is revisited. But before we can get humanity's death sentence reversed, we have to make the Galactic government listen to us. The problem is, no matter how hard we wave our hands and shout, all we get back is silence.As a last resort, a young woman volunteers to be sent on a suicide mission in a capsule that will pass the alien moonbase and exit the solar system. She has ten days of food and no way to return to Earth. She will die unless the aliens intervene. Her name is Leann Jenkins. It is her job to show the galaxy that humanity has something good and beautiful to offer and is worthy of a second chance.But the galactic government is busy with another threat-the Yunia. The Yunia are a species from another galaxy who are attacking and conquering the Ur-controlled galaxy. The Ur has been peaceful so long they have forgotten how to fight.Suddenly humanity's aggression and war-like ways aren't quite such a negative. We have to join forces with the Ur to combat a common enemy.

A novel about how ghosts share our lives and interact with us dailyDavid is a Green Beret medic. At least he was for thirty years until he retired and returned to his parents' home without a clue what to do with the rest of his life. While he is trying to figure out how to recover from the violence he'd faced in Afghanistan and Iraq, he meets a woman who shows him the way then disappears. As David rebuilds his parents' home and attempts to start an emergency care clinic in his rural town, he meets the woman's granddaughter. Together they figure out how to bring down the meth lab that has poisoned their rural town, overcome state licensing regulations preventing the clinic from opening, help their friend attempt to beat his cancer, and discover David's roots buried in an Indian sweat lodge. Ghosts abound in this story of love, betrayal, supernatural guides, and unfaithful parents. The good guys aren't entirely good. The bad guys aren't entirely bad. Nothing is what it seems at first glance in Chambersville as the book leads the reader on a merry Ghost Ride.

The aliens who gave humanity its death sentence are still not responding to our overtures for a negotiation. We keep trying to open communications with them but all we get back is silence. Russia tried to nuke them but all that happened was Moscow was sent into the sun. Even with the invention of an artificial uterus, the so-called Baby Machine, the Earth's population of humans has begun a steady decline that, unless something changes, will end in ninety-some years with the death of the last human being.The three graduate students who discovered wormholes, Lily Yuan, Kevin Langly, and Douglas Medder, have created successful lives for themselves. In the two years that have passed since Book One ended, all three of them finished their PhDs. Lily and Kevin began working on new, peaceful uses for wormhole technology. They exchange emails with Doug at least once a week.Doug is working at the Canadian Aerospace Research Centre as chief architect of a Rosy transportation infrastructure that, within Canada, will replace long-haul trucking, train cargo, and air cargo transportation with wormhole portals. Countries all over the world have begun asking Canada for help with setting up their own systems. A major new industry was created in Canada overnight: manufacturing the freight portal system and selling it to the world. Phase two will be to replace human long-distance transportation (airplanes, cars, buses, railroads) with wormhole portals.But wormholes and their close cousin, dark energy portals, have continued to be weaponized by the countries and terrorists of the world. Because wormhole attacks are so deadly and can happen with a five second warning, many countries have built huge automatic retaliation mechanisms that can respond to a wormhole attack instantly, without requiring permission from a head-of-state or even a general to begin the counterattack.And without children or a future, civilization begins to erode across the world. Violence and crime escalate. Law enforcement seems unable to stop its growth.This is how the story of The End of Children continues to unfold.

Some graduate students discover how to open a wormhole. A wormhole is a hole in our universe that goes from one place to another, bypassing everything, including the distance. When the students open their first wormhole, an alert is sounded by the wormhole detectors that were planted on the moon fifty thousand years ago.The alert causes humanity to be evaluated by the Ur, the Confederation of Sentient Species in our galaxy. Wormholes would allow humanity to begin spreading and exploring the rest of the galaxy. We are evaluated to see if we have progressed enough to begin trading and interacting with the other peaceful species who already inhabit much of the galaxy. We fail to pass their evaluation primarily because we keep killing each other. Because there is no way to stop us from developing starships using the wormhole technology and spreading our war and greed throughout the galaxy, humanity is selected for elimination. This is done by simply turning off our ability to have children. Without the need to preserve our world for our children, civilization begins to unravel. We plead with the Ur to give us a second chance, but no one answers our calls. Our government weaponizes wormholes to use them as a bomb delivery system. The technology escapes our country, giving every despot and terrorist the ability to deliver bombs anywhere in the world without warning. This leads to World War III which destroys the infrastructure, the governments, and the military worldwide. Only two governments manage to escape the holocaust-Canada and the US. Canada because they refused to use wormholes as a weapon and the US because the president was flying to California on Air Force One for a goodwill visit when the war started. After the war and the anarchy that follows, the governments of Canada and the US slowly rebuild their countries, reaching a new level of cooperation and partnership.As the governments of Earth are blowing each other up, our galaxy is being invaded by a force from another galaxy. The Ur are losing planet after planet without a clue what to do about it. After so many millennia of peaceful coexistence, the generals of the Ur have forgotten how to fight. Suddenly humanity's killer ape is not such a liability.This is the story of how it all unfolds. Book 1 - The Beginning of the EndBook 2 - The Three-Hour WarBook 3 - The Emissary