TALES TIMES TEN

About the Book

Here is a new book of ten short stories from the author of ‘ALPHONSO GENTLE’! ‘TALES TIMES TEN’ will begin with the struggles of an up and coming young professional stage magician. We find him playing ‘finders – keepers’ as ‘MISTER MAGIC’ here in Detroit. Next, in a ‘TWINKLING OF AN EYE’, we are a witness to one of those old time negotiations for a better life. After that, we visit a library of the future as a student requests ‘THE DOCTOR CLARK FILES’ in order to study the taboo deviant sexual behavior of members of the Twentieth Century. Then we are invited into the thought process of an architect doing a little puzzle to kill time in ‘HOLY CROSSWORD DOROTHY’. This is followed by an examination of ‘TACTILE UNDERSTANDING’. Better than halfway through we are invited to the ‘TECHTOWN BOOK CLUB’. We barely close the book on this adventure when we are alerted to the din that comes from the ‘LAND OF A THOUSAND CRIES’. Back to the future we go now when the screams die down for a further learned examination of the state of ‘SEX EDUCATION’. Thoroughly briefed, after this, on study materials and classroom requirements, we then go ‘SOLVING FOR ‘X’ in the here and now. Finally, with all this said and done, we get out the handcuffs and go for our guns as we are very firmly affixing our ‘SPIRITUAL SIGNATURE’ to this ‘TALES TIMES TEN’.

About the Author

Eligah Boykin Jr. was born in Mobile, Alabama out of the storms and trials of his loving parents, Eligah and Mattye Boykin. He found himself surrounded by doting aunts and uncles. There was also a very colorful grandmother involved in the mix, and a kindly upright grandfather who served as something of a counselor and elder statesman to those in the surrounding community. Others have commented that he ran all over the place as a child. He enjoyed roller-skating out of the living room and off the front porch onto the sidewalk in his youth, and is known to have sprained his ankle twice jumping whole flights of stairs in high school. He also enjoyed walking the hallways in a circuit and philosophizing with friends. As he grew older, he found that the stories he told to his friends in the Elementary school he attended, were less well received when he wrote them down in book form. He began to sense how saturated the American Culture and Society was with racism and sexism and intuitively began to plot his escape. He would become a gentleman writer like Ian Fleming and live off his royalty checks while bedding down beautiful women. He knew nothing of the horrors that were awaiting him. He wrote novel and a three-act play by the time he was fifteen, to the guarded consternation of his teachers and the resentful, envious glares of his peers. He thought with a little more practice and a few more revised drafts he ought to be rolling in his life’s calling and chosen profession. How little did he know of what would to transpire in his life. When standard High School Academia precluded blue line editing and the critical evaluation he required to graduate into the ranks of all those professional writers he avidly read, he dropped out of High school in his senior year. He went into the factory and took courses at a Community College and hatched a plan to write a three-act play that would be turned into a movie. He found the monotony of assembly line production less stimulating that attending an elite High School, but continued to save his money for that day when he would make his living as a writer. He joined a couple of New Age religions and adopted their practices, but found himself drifting more and more away from the third pages a day that was his inner commandment to produce. Bouncing from being a cab driver to a teacher’s aide to a dishwasher, through the successive hard knocks of life he earned a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Full Sail University. Armed with more sophisticated knowledge, some of which validated his earlier assertions and conclusions about what it took to become a truly professional writer, and with other tools of the trade, he began to crank them out. There is evidence of this here.