Cover art by Mary Lou Timpko, with some help from Claude and Ideogram.
SIXTEEN CONNECTED STORIES
Tales From the Lines
You don’t remember how you got here.
You awaken standing among countless others. Swept up in the crowd, you move slowly toward a glorious light just over the far horizon, and as you do, you begin to recognize those around you. People from your life reach out, some you welcome, some you would rather have forgotten, recognition and confusion on their faces mirroring yours. Each is a chapter of your own story. Some are right beside you, others within sight, and others across a small gap, in the other line.
Here are their stories. A man forgiven for everything but his silence. A woman who finally meets the daughter she never held. A famous skeptic who planned to say the right words on his deathbed. A young woman who walks into a prison to sit across from the man who killed her father. Others winning and losing the battle of their deepest desires.
Tales From the Lines is sixteen connected stories: the wrongs and wonders people did and received, and the forgiveness they gave, refused, or never thought to ask for.
One line moves casually forward, the other slower, as if weighed down by the burdens of their past life. But both march toward the light.
A note before you read
This book is not for children. Just because it is a Christian book does not mean it is meant for kids. These stories deal with sin and forgiveness, and blessedly, our children are usually spared from that kind of depravity during their youth.
About the author
R. Norb Timpko has spent his career building worlds out of code. He earned an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where a back injury on the football field changed his course, and he finished his BS in Computer Science at The Pennsylvania State University.
A game programmer for more than two decades, he started at BreakAway Games, coding Napoleonic battle games and working on Civilization III: Conquests. He then set out on his own to code a game himself and designed the Take Command Civil War series, which made PC Gamer’s list of the 100 greatest games of all time and has been used by the U.S. Army in training. Through his company NorbSoftDev he went on to build the Scourge of War historical battle simulations, where thousands of soldiers march across the field at once. Later he spent time on the multiplayer team for Amazon’s New World.
He is a husband, dad, son, brother, Christian, friend, and writer. He and his wife, Mary Lou, were both adopted at birth. He was the only one of his high school friends who didn’t go to Live Aid in Philadelphia, because he hated crowds, which is funny for a man who would one day write a book about the biggest crowd in history. A lifelong reader of just about any fiction, he felt the weight of a call to write for most of his life before he finally sat down and stopped ignoring it. Tales From the Lines is what came of it.
At home with Mary Lou: three kids, five dogs, one cat, and a colony of bees.