ARRAKIS PUBLISHING
NEW RELEASE
A Novel
Caleb Doyle lands at seventeen in John Hancock's warehouse and spends the next half-century inside the founding of the United States. Fifty years later, on the morning Jefferson and Adams both die on the Fourth of July, he sits his grandson down and tells him the version the schoolbooks left out. The smugglers, the grabbers, the slave holders. The one he was inside of.
Read NowYou've copied that same paragraph forty times. Stop.
What most people would call a career, Joe Zeigler calls an interest. He has had about a dozen of them, and none of them went the way anyone would have planned.
He left home at sixteen. He moved into a fire station in Williamsburg, Virginia, and caught the school bus out front. Before he was anything else, he was a firefighter. It was an education no engineering school was going to match.
He put himself through Oklahoma State studying engineering and economics by selling his car, tending bar, and driving a taxi. While there, he became an honorary member of the Black Panthers.
He took a job as a fire protection engineer at Kemper Insurance and then spent ten years racing motorcycles professionally. He raced Yamaha TZ250 two-strokes under the guidance of Dr. Bob Pepper, president of the AAMRR road racing organization. He crashed at 150 miles per hour at Bridgehampton, healed, and got back on the bike.
During his recovery, he designed what became known as the “magic hub,” a rear-wheel device that keeps a seized engine from locking the wheel. Joe Bolger manufactured and marketed it.
In 1973 he founded the Penguin Roadracing School, the oldest motorcycle road racing school in the United States. It is still running. He wrote its text in 1981, then left it alone for forty-five years.
Then came the computers. He opened six stores, including the first computer discount warehouse in the country. It burned. Arson. He built software companies after that, FirePrograms among them, written for the men he had stood watch with, and consulted for Digital Equipment Corporation. Ken Olsen ignored every word of it. He was still a good man.
He started writing in 1980 and got distracted by computers for thirty years.
He publishes now under Arrakis Publishing: novels, Bible retellings, political nonfiction, and the essays at Burnt Ground, where he writes about money, politics, and a country coming apart on schedule. There are more than two hundred and sixty of those and he has not run out of material.
He is eighty. He and his wife Lanying split the year between Crystal River, Florida and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and drive the distance in an RV. Lanying drives. Joe writes. Cat sleeps.
