Good Morning - Steven E. Wedel

One October night in downtown Oklahoma City, a novelist is robbed and beaten on a sidewalk three blocks from his hotel.

Donnie Nelson - bookseller, father, grandfather, boyfriend, the writer of fantasy novels that have unexpectedly found an audience late in his career - has spent the evening at a writers' conference, telling polite stories about world-building. By midnight he is bleeding on the concrete with his phone and wallet gone, rescued by a bearded stranger named Andrew, and led to a soup kitchen run by a thin, bald man named Milton.

Across the long hours until dawn, the three men sit at a table and argue about the questions that don't have clean answers. What does mercy actually cost? What does accountability accomplish? What do you want for the people who have hurt you, when you stop pretending the system will answer for you?

Andrew, a fired teacher living in a broken-down van behind the chapel, has stopped believing in anything but showing up.

Milton, a former minister who survived a fire in Brazil that changed his understanding of God forever, has found a quieter conviction.

Donnie has only the night, his bandaged hands, and a question he doesn't yet know how to answer.

By morning, he will have to.

Good Morning: A Convergence is a novella for readers of Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, Kent Haruf's Plainsong, and the quiet philosophical fiction of the American interior. It brings together three characters from three Steven E. Wedel novels - Donnie Nelson from The Lost Pages Bookstore, Andrew Clausing from The Teacher, and Milton Agnew from Amara's Prayer - for one long Oklahoma night that asks each of them what their lives have actually been preparing them to do.