Boca Author Takes Second in National Contest

Author Keith Darrell was recently honored for his work.

His speculative fiction anthology Randoms was a finalist in the Short Story Fiction category of the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award. His work took second place, with the winner Todd Walton for Buddha in a Teacup: Tales of Enlightenment.

"The National Indie Excellence Awards are designed to bring recognition to titles from independent publishers," Darrell said.

The competition is judged by an independent panel of experts from all aspects — editing, marketing, publicity and design — of the publishing industry.

In Randoms, published in February, Darrell compiled tales filled "with memorable characters, engaging dialogue, a sense of wonder and O.Henry-style ironic twist endings."

"Loneliness and unrequited love are central themes in several pieces, as are prejudice, abuse, the nature of good and evil, free will versus destiny, the dehumanization of a bureaucratized society and how it treats its most helpless members, and how the greed inherent in modern society leads individuals to seek wealth while ignoring the riches they already possess," he said.

Randoms has been compared to The Twilight Zone because most of the scripts were based on the premise of ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations, with the stories grounded in reality except for one element that would tilt the tale into speculative fiction, Darrell said.

"In Randoms, that might take the form of a boy struggling to fit into a new school and falling in love with a ghost of a colonial girl, or a drunken Irishman whose life changes when he stumbles upon a leprechaun on his way home from the pub," Darrell said.

"The advantage of writing an anthology rather than a novel is that if the reader doesn't care for the story, he can flip forward to discover another story more enjoyable," he said.

"Since I wrote all of the stories in this collection, I decided to make it a showcase of random works. I treated each story as a challenge," Darrell said.

Darrell's professional career also has included jobs as an attorney, reporter, Web designer, entrepreneur, stockbroker and real estate agent.

His other published works include Issues In Internet Law: Society, Technology, and the Law (now in its fourth edition), and The Web Designer's Client Handbook, Putting Your Business on the Internet.