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HELP THE VICTIMS
CFA of Victoria (firefighters with specific bushfire appeal in link)
HELP AFFECTED WILDLIFE
WWF, specifically targeting koalas and future plans for replanting eucalyptus
RESOURCES
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And in Melbourne / surroundings
The anthology, NOISE, began with a question, “Does this thing always sound like this?”
The answers are “No” and “Yes,” served up with a rousing “Maybe!”
Ten authors took on the challenge, gifting us with twelve brilliant stories, poems, and novellas, moments in fictional lives, all sharing the human experience of sound
At times we hear the voices of the enemy.
Other times the silence is broken by the rattle and groan of a last hope falling apart.
It could be a person’s world crashing around their ears.
An ear-worm or an airhorn.
Crushing guilt and broken hearts.
We rarely pay attention to the ambient noise of the cafeteria. But it is there and for some, it is a cacophony.
What is the sound of justice being rendered?
It could be that buzzing sound…follow it…it may lead us to mushrooms and Mars.
Noise—it’s all around us, a sensory thing. It can be beautiful or terrifying, and but it most often goes almost unnoticed.
The anthology, NOISE, explores the human experience of sound and details the turning points that changed lives.
NOISE, an Anthology of Speculative Fiction is available at Amazon http://getbook.at/Noise
12 stories, novellas, and poems of sound, silence, and the Human experience.
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Lee French is a USA Today bestselling author living in Olympia, WA with two kids, two bicycles, and too much stuff. She’s a frequent visitor to Myth-Weavers, an online RPG site, and also trains in taekwondo. Best known for her young adult urban fantasy series Spirit Knights, she is an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison. Discover her many books and stories on her website at www.authorleefrench.com.
Shaun Allan is a Wattpad Star, featured author and Wattys winner. He has appeared on Sky TV to debate traditional vs electronic publishing against a major literary agent. He write multiple genres, including young adult and children’s, along with psychological horror. Shaun has been commissioned to write for Universal, Warner Bros, Blumhouse, STX and Paramount for such movies as The Purge: Anarchy, Sinister II, The Boy, Incarnate, IT and A Quiet Place. He regularly holds writing workshops at local schools and lives with his wife, daughters and a manic dog called Ripley. He works full time, co-owns a barber’s salon, and writes in that breath between his heartbeats.
Connie J. Jasperson lives and writes in Olympia, Washington. A vegan, she and her husband share five children, an ever-growing number of grandchildren, and a love of good food and great music. The author of nine fantasy novels, she is a member of SFWA and is active in local writing groups. She participates annually in NaNoWriMo. Music and food dominate her waking moments and when not writing or blogging she can be found reading avidly. You can find her blogging at
https://www.conniejjasperson.com
Ross M. Kitson is a published author in the fantasy genre, with an ongoing series (The Prism Series), a number of short stories on Quantum Muse web-zine and several stories in Steampunk and fantasy anthologies. Ross works as a doctor in the UK specializing in critical care and anaesthesia. His love of speculative fiction and comics began at a young age and shows no signs of fading.
Victoria Azores spends all day in pajamas and drinking coffee. She isn’t wealthy but has mastered the art of being a perpetual houseguest. The secret is to always make pancakes for one’s hosts on Sunday. She has written five thin volumes of verse, most of which are hidden in dusty crannies about her attic room. She has never watched Game of Thrones.
Marilyn Rucker is a songwriter who dabbles in novel and short story writing. Her books, the cozy mystery Sax and the Suburb and the historical fantasy The Cat, the Crow and the Grimoire have both won Indiebrag awards. The Cat, the Crow, and the Grimoire also won The Woman’s Write Best Novel award of 2017 award. She is currently working on a book about the end of the world. Her books and links to her songs are at www.marilynrucker.com.
Stephen Swartz up in Kansas City where he was an avid reader of science fiction/fantasy and quickly began emulating his favorite authors. Eventually studying music in college, he composed a symphony. Like many writers, Swartz also worked at a variety of jobs: from French fry guy to soldier, IRS clerk, TV station writer, before heading to Japan to teach English for several years. Returning to the US, Swartz became a professor of English and now teaches at a university in Oklahoma. He can be found writing his latest manuscript usually late at night and blogs weekly.
http://stephenswartz.blogspot.com/
Lisa Zhang Wharton Born and raised in Beijing, China, Lisa Zhang Wharton is graduate of Peking University and University of Minnesota. She is an engineer by education and an author by avocation. She has previously published several short stories about life in China in various literary magazines. Her short story “My Uncle” has won a second prize in a WICE sponsored Paris Writer’s Workshop. “Last Kiss in Tiananmen Square” is her first full-length novel. Recently its paperback has been republished by Myrddin Publishing and sold in Amazon.
She strives to enlighten her readers about the cultural differences between the West and China, showing not only the differences but also the similarities, to foster global thinking and hopefully create a path to a more peaceful world.
She works at Medtronic Inc. and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband. You can read her blog at www.lisazhangwharton.blogspot.com or follow her on twitter at @zhangwhart
David P. Cantrell, a retired CPA, lives with his wife of four decades in the beautiful coastal community of Arroyo Grande in central California. An accident late in life left him paralyzed from the neck down, though he’s regained significant faculty. After a chance encounter with Jasper T. Scott, he turned to writing as an outlet for his creative energy. His debut novel, Gates of Fire and Ash, is a YA fantasy showcasing his love for dogs. Find out more about his work at www.davidpcantrell.com.
Maria V.A. Johnson is a published poet, a voracious reader, professional editor, and published author with a BA Hons Degree in English and Creative Writing. She first started writing seriously, when at sixteen she wrote a poem for her grandmother’s funeral and she grew to love poetry and writing from there. She has collaborated in a book entitled The Other Way is Essex, which raises money for Farleigh Hospice in Chelmsford, Essex not far from her home.
You can find Maria at https://www.myrddinpublishing.com/authors/maria-v-a-johnson/
Alison DeLuca is the author of several steampunk and urban fantasy books. She was born in Arizona and has also lived in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Mexico, Ireland, and Spain. Currently she wrestles words and laundry in New Jersey.
A summer evening spent fishing
On black waters beneath a sunset sky.
Forested hills climbed high in the west,
As dark as shadows and just as safe.
Bears and their young came to fish the creek
That runs past the woods next door.
Deer swam across the lake to eat
Grape leaves and my mother’s roses.
Sunsets seen from my father’s boat
While fishing for perch or crappie.
And morning came, bright and young,
Filled with the scents of home.
Of potatoes and onions, crisp and brown,
And fish frying for breakfast,
And cinnamon rolls just out of the oven,
And coffee perking on the stove.
Smells that signified Sunday morning.
And when the washing up was done
I took my book to the alder grove
And drowsed the day away.
_____________________________________________________________
A Summer Evening Spent Fishing, by Connie J. Jasperson © 2018 All Rights Reserved, reprinted by permission (First appeared on Life in the Realm of Fantasy http://conniejjasperson.com/2018/02/23/flashfictionfriday-a-summer-evening-spent-fishing/ 23 Feb 2018)
Indian Sunset: Deer by a Lake, painted by Albert Bierstadt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons ca. 1880 – 1890
Connie J. Jasperson is a published poet and the author of nine fantasy novels. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. A founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group, she can be found blogging regularly on both the craft of writing and art history at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.
You’ve always got to be careful writing a blog post with the words ‘fantasy’ and ‘women’ in the title lest you melt the server with the wrong sort of web traffic. What got me thinking about this was the current barrage of fanboy vitriol about the new Captain Marvel film.
To recap, Brie Larson plays Captain Marvel, the superhero hinted at in the conclusion of Infinity War last year on a 90’s style pager. In the comics Captain Marvel (in the non-Shazam Marvel iteration) has undergone a number of changes over the years. He started as a male hero called Mar-Vell who was an alien superhero from the Kree world who links with Rick Jones of Hulk/ Captain America fame so that Rick ‘summons’ Captain Marvel when he knocks his wristlets together. Captain Marvel became a popular character fighting against Thanos, and ultimately died of cancer in the comics. That fina storyline was an especially poignant and mature story that resonated with fans. After that Captain Marvel had a new incarnation as a superhero in the Avengers, an African-american female cop called Monica Rambeau. After her we had another three or four versions of Captain Marvel (one a child of Mar-Vel) until Carol Danvers took on the name as a change from her pre-existing identity as Miss Marvel. Danvers had been in the comics since the 60s, and gained her powers merging DNA with Captain Marvel in an explosion, and emerged in the late 70s as a hero, lost her powers to Rogue from the X-men, and then regained them to join the Avengers. So a well-established character, and not exactly one that’s been gender-switched as part of some illuminati plot to de-masculinise the Marvel male fan-base.
So with the first Marvel film to have a female lead you’d expect the wide Marvel/ comics fan-base to embrace this seminal moment after a decade of films with muscle-men focal characters. Ummm, not exactly. A core of ‘fans’ clearly felt that the idea Captain Marvel might be pulling Thor/Hulk/Cap/Iron Man’s butts out of the Thanos fire didn’t seem to appeal. I’d imagine it was the same group that grumbled about Black Panther being too political about racial issues…
So naturally when Brie Larson (who, after all is an Oscar winning actress who gained her accolade in a film about a rape-victim locked in a shed) stoked the dissatisfaction by making a comment about the lack of diversity amongst film critics, both in terms of race and gender: ‘Am I saying that I hate white dudes? No, I’m not. What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to a woman of color, there is an insanely low chance that a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie and review your movie.” She references the Annenburg study which analysed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and found 76% were written by males, and 82% by white critics. That a female actress known for her advocacy work should make the comments isn’t really surprising but it clearly got social media fired up, and the whole thing erupted into some quite vile rhetoric. Negative ‘reviews’ had been posted before the film was actually released.
Oddly it brought to mind the vitriol that was created when the latest Star Wars trilogy dated to have a female lead in the form of Rey. Now the Star Wars fan-base is famous for having extremely passionate fans who lament anything that falls short of the original trilogy, and I’d agree the Last Jedi didn’t really hit the spot, but back when Force Awakens casting was announced the grumbles about both Rey and Finn grew beyond any form of objectivity and descended into straight up offensive rants on social media and blog posts. This repeated concept that the world has been hijacked by social justice warriors and females is perpetuated both in the media and in the surreal world of politics, presenting the average white male as some kind of bullied and endangered species.
(And don’t even get me started about the response to a FEMALE Dr Who….)
As a fantasy reader (and writer) I’ve been interested to look at whether fantasy fiction falls foul of the same prejudices that are plaguing films. Fantasy literature evolved through the last century from the pulp fantasy fiction of Robert E Howard, and Fritz Lieber, the epic fantasy of Tolkien and Terry Brooks, and the darker work of Moorcock. The stereotype fantasy hero of a muscle bound warrior with a chainmail-bikini wearing female hanging off his pectorals was perpetuated by artwork of the period (classic Boris Vallejo).
Ove the last twenty years the stereotypes in fantasy have been eroded. In anticipation of the TV series being released I’ve finally commenced on reading the Wheel of Time series, and whereas the trio of Rand, Mat, and Perrin are the focal characters (at least initially) the female cast command equal dominance, not least due to the focus of magical power being amongst women (Nynaeve, Egwene, Moiraine, and Elayne). Jordan’s characterisation of them is enjoyable and well-rounded, if at times he falls down in their joint desires for the troubled Rand.
Arguably the most influential series of the last twenty years is George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, filmed for TV as the phenomenally successful Game of Thrones. Martin’s evident affection for his female characters in the books is greatly developed by the HBO writers of Game of Thrones. In fact the surviving male characters are often portrayed as both flawed and foolish, such as Jon Snow or Tyrion Lannister. In contrast the dominant characters now are Daenarys, Sansa, Arya, and Cersei, and all are excellently written and superbly acted. It’s encouraging when you realise the influence GOT is likely to have on commissioned fantasy pieces for the TV, which with the boom in Amazon Prime and Netflix is truly the future of the fantasy adaptation.
When Robert Jordan predeceased the conclusion of his epic series, the writer Brandon Sanderson took over the reins. Sanderson isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, some finding his style a bit light for the current vogue of dark fantasy, but I rate him highly. His first work Elantris was superb, and his Mistborn series is excellent. Sanderson writes female protagonists well: Sarene in Elantris, and Vin in Mistborn are realistic and strong female characters, and arguably the key characters in both works.
Of the other works that spring to mind, Robin Hobb is probably my favoured author for female characterisation in fantasy. Her works are superb, a succession of trilogies that advance a storyline about the return of dragons and their elderling servants to a troubled world. Her most famous books focus on the relationship between a royal bastard Fitz and the androgynous Fool, but her other works based around the use of living ships enjoy several strong key female characters (Althea in Liveship Traders, and Thymara and Alise in The Rainwild Chronicles). Perhaps unsurprisingly Hobb writes them extremely well, making them fallible and flawed, yet ultimately strong women in the plots.
From my own work, I based my female characters on much of what I liked from Hobb, Martin, and Sanderson. Emelia, the key character of Darkness Rising, struggles with mental illness as a consequence of her Wild-magic, makes poor choices for good reasons, is passionate, heroic, rash, and volatile, yet ultimately wins the day. Orla the Knight of the Air, and Marthir the Druid bot start the series as strong dominant characters who go on journeys of self-discovery, again not always making sensible and altruistic decisions on the way. I felt that they reflect the evolution of fantasy fiction to provide realistic and interesting female characters as a counterpoint to the well-established male tropes in fantasy (loveable rogue, stoical warrior).
In fairness to Marvel and Star Wars their female lead characters haven’t always been met with resistance. Rogue One’s Jyn was a great lead character, but I suspect she was received well more from her presence in a fan favourite film—Rogue One is a real nod to the Star Wars fans, a grimy view of the Empire and the Star Wars mythos. Similarly Jessica Jones, in the Marvel-Netflix series, is a grittier heroine with a drink problem, arrogance, and demons aplenty. Despite the critical acclaim of the character and series the show has fallen by the wayside with the current plans for Disney’s streaming service leading to the end of all the (excellent) Netflix Marvel shows.
So my prediction for the next series with strong female lead? The adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the awesome Lyra. It’s being done by the BBC this year, and I’m hoping for an improvement on the Golden Compass film (which I enjoyed, but didn’t really capture the books’ magic).
And I’m hoping with Star Wars 9 on the horizon, and Marvel’s Phase 4 to feature Black Widow’s solo outing, that the respective fan-bases can take a leaf from DC (and the great response to Wonder Woman) and fantasy fiction and embrace great, well-written female leads.
Not everyone lives in a house that looks straight out of Pottery Barn. There are people who do, but they often pay people to clean for them. You can’t afford that, and you don’t have time or energy to do it either. You might apply to be one of the families that are tidied up in that new Netflix series, but chances are you’re not telegenic enough.
There are two extremes of anality. One is anal retentive. This is the preferred end of the continuum in modern society. Keep everything in. Keep it all tucked away. Be constipated. Do not park your car on your street, but in your neatly organized garage.
The opposite extreme is anal expulsive. Artists tend to lie closer to this end of the spectrum, though not always. We throw our garbage around and splash paint and glitter glue on it. We give it to our relatives for holidays. Sometimes this work turns into something so beautiful we don’t want to waste it on our relatives. Then we can sell it, and then we can afford to hire someone to clean our house.
We may not need all types of people in the world, but we have all types, including the messy. Accept them. If you are one, accept yourself. Don’t ever invite people over. Wallow in your filth. Own it. Who are you trying to impress anyway?
Messy people are often the kindest. Also, overweight people tend to be nice as well. Not spending all their energy on cleaning or dieting frees them up to be kinder and more interested in other people. They also have better pastries.
Of course, there is a point of no return, where your messiness can become so out of control that it drives everyone in your life away. If you hate people, this is not a problem. If you care what others think, cultivate relationships with other messy folks.
If you are embracing your mess, do not live in a neighborhood with an HOA. You cannot have a bowling ball garden in a neighborhood with an HOA. You also can’t grow food or raise chickens or create glitter-glued garbage sculpture in your front yard with an HOA.
Try to simplify your life so you don’t always have to sort through things. Maybe just move into a refrigerator box on the side of the road. You can visit your junk occasionally, if you still pay your rent or mortgage. Likely you can’t, if you’ve done this. Sometimes simpler just isn’t better. You’ll have to be the judge.
Don’t be so judgy. Everyone has quirks. Some are worse than others.
Have patience with the obsessively neat and controlling. Especially if you marry one. In fact, if you’re messy, you probably have done this. Try to remember that they married you because you put them in touch with a side of themselves they can’t access. They are messy inside, and you are messy outside. Wear them down. They will crack one day. Then they will kill you and dispose of your body in neatly tied plastic bags with the pine scent that you aren’t ever able to find at the grocery store because you’re just too disorganized.
Even if you’re hopelessly messy, you may eventually negotiate your way through the stacks of stuff piled in your home over to where you left your cellphone. You might even find your charger and call a therapist who specializes in hoarding disease and its accompanying compulsions.
Good news for writers! There is a huge market for children’s books. Famous comedian Stephen Colbert and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor both have published new children’s books lately.
The children are reading either voluntarily or involuntarily, reading or being read. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that they have to buy books, or their parents have to buy books which is good for the writers. Children are the ones who must learn how to read and have reading assignments.
Reading and writing are apparently still required skills in our modern society. But who know how long it will last. Our lives are increasingly taken over by TV images or video images on our TVs or smart phones. I find myself so much free time on watching YouTube videos that I hardly have time to read anymore. The only reading I do is to listen to audio books or read the Facebook or Twitter messages.
Yes, we have to write in our social medias like Facebook or Twitter. But our writing is easy, and it is limited to 280 characters on Twitter. It is less than 280 on Facebook because nobody will read a message that are longer. As for Instagram, the preferred method to share is photograph or video. On Snapchat, they even put on funny glasses or dog ears on the picture of your face or your friend’s face. It is getting so popular that Snapchat thinks they can sell you cameras that do that. Inventor Elon Musk even thinks we should communicate via brain waves in the future, so we can exchange data in a speed that rivals Robots. It might sound advanced and may be necessary for the survival of mankind. But language is such a great invention and has been around for thousands of years. Books play such an important role in the advancement of our culture and society, and in the preservation of our history. Now they are calling it a bottle-neck of human communication.
Writing for me has been like a friend since I was very young and suffering from unusual cruelty in China due to my parent’s disagreement with the government and political background. Without writing, I wouldn’t have been able to survive. So please support reading and writing and let this great invention last for another thousand years.
Lisa Wharton
For much of my childhood, my grandmother, Ethel, lived with us. She had the biggest influence on how I view my life as a woman.
Born in 1909, she had always been a staid, working-class housewife who “knew her place,” which was not what most people would have considered it.
Convinced that men couldn’t think their way of a room with doors nailed open, she expected they would keep their noses out of “women’s business.” That left her free to get on with the real work that kept her world running smoothly.
For more than ninety years, Grandma Ethel was an intrepid cleaner of all things soiled. Woe to the child who brought mud in on their shoes, or the man who thought he could sit down to dinner unwashed and wearing dirty work-clothes. Woe to anyone who sassed grandma—she had an Edwardian view of discipline.
Mothers and daughters don’t always get along. Grandma Ethel and my mother had a rocky relationship, rife with resentment (some justifiable) on my mother’s part and confused indignation on my grandmother’s.
I was often at odds with my mother, who until she defied Dad and went back to work in 1973, was the quintessential post WWII angry housewife. I embodied everything she despised about my generation, and she was articulate in expressing herself.
My grandmother, on the other hand, quietly despaired of my ever finding a dependable man, but believed I did my best and that was all that mattered.
The core of the strife between my mother and me boiled down to our radically different values and domestic styles. I grew up in the 1960s and had made a number of poorly planned relationship decisions that hadn’t worked out as well as I thought they would.
In the 1980s, I was the sole provider for my family, with three part-time jobs to hold down and no child support. Sunday was the only day I had for housekeeping. While the house looked great on Sunday night, by Friday it had become a disaster. I was married, but my ex-spouse’s role as stepdad and husband was like that of an ugly art piece given to you by a good friend. It takes up space on the shelf, and you keep it because you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But it contributes nothing to the ambiance of the room, and you cringe whenever you dust it.
Surprisingly, despite the domestic free-for-all in my home, my staunchest supporter and greatest ally in the struggle with my mother was Grandma Ethel.
She was always there for me, a quiet force of nature. I could count on her to pick a spot and just begin tidying. She made it a game the kids enjoyed.
As she got older, Grandma lost her ability to taste food, and she stopped cooking, relying mostly on frozen TV dinners. She took the bus to Woolworth’s every morning, ordering toast and coffee in the coffee shop for her breakfast, and then treating herself by purchasing a small bag of menthol cough drops, thinking they were candy. She had a peculiar habit of sitting beside the fountain in the mall after she left the store, peeling the wrappers off each cough drop, leaving the wrappers in the Mall trash can. Once peeled, she put the drops back in their bag and put them in her purse.
She did this because “it saves time later.” Every afternoon, she sat in her chair reading a Louis L’Amour novel, listening to the radio and enjoying her “candy.”
Whenever we visited Grandma Ethel, my kids dreaded being offered a piece of “candy,” but they accepted it politely and thanked her. Once we were in the car and on the way home, the truth would spill out in that frank way children have, but I was proud of them—they loved her enough to be kind.
On Fridays, my mother bowled with a woman who worked at Woolworth’s. She told Mama that Grandma was known at Woolworth’s as “the cough drop lady” and mentioned Grandma’s habit of wrapper-peeling, saying it was “sweet.” Mama, of course, was horrified and embarrassed, and not very kind about it.
In her golden years, Grandma developed another fun habit. She listened to the local radio station all day, getting the news and singing along with every oldie or Top 40 hit of the 1980s. She knew all the words.
“Like a Virgin.”
“Billie Jean.”
“I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
Grandma knew and sang along with them all, but she adored Bobby McFerrin. In her last years, when she couldn’t remember anything else, she still sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and danced in the kitchen with my ex-husband’s red long-johns.
When she hit the age of about eighty-five, she lost that fire, that thinly veiled resentment of all things male that had kept her going for so many years.
By then I was a single mother again and determined to remain that way. During her final year, Grandma was my closest friend and companion.
She had become vague and was often unsure what day it was or where we were going. She’d always had a sneaky sense of humor, but she became both shocking and hilarious, saying what she really thought without thinking first, quite loudly. She did whatever she felt like on the spur of the moment.
I lost a dear friend when Grandma passed away. But by then, my mother and I had come to an uneasy truce and were actually forging a friendship of sorts.
Did I mention my mother was extremely competitive? “Competitive” is a weak word when describing how my mother viewed any game or contest. She outlived both Grandma and my dad, which meant she had won, and which was all that mattered.
She “loosened up a bit” too, as she approached sixty-five. Mama began having an occasional cocktail at lunch.
Occasionally, every day.
Margaritas.
By 1990 Mama thought Cheech and Chong were a riot and loved the Rolling Stones, Mick the Stick in particular. 1989’s Steel Wheels was her favorite Stones album, and there was a time right after my dad died that if you went anywhere with her, you listened to Mick and the boys… over… and over.
The 1990s were her decade, musically. She loved U2, and Hootie and the Blowfish.
Music blasting, Mama drove her Aerostar like every road was a racetrack, and she was determined to win at any cost. Pedal to the metal, yellow lights mean “step on it and hang on to your hat.”
Mama loved jewelry, nice clothes, Mexico, and going on Caribbean cruises. She played cards twice a week with her girlfriends. She and my Aunt Lillian went to the casino once a week and played the slots like pros. At seventy-two, Mama found an awesome boyfriend and was in love for the first time in her life.
Once she turned eighty, she really began to have fun. When it came to restaurants and hotels, Mama expected a lot and usually got it. Waiters and cabana boys adored Mama because she looked far younger than her age, was an outrageous flirt, and tipped extremely well.
So now I’m the senior grandma–a responsibility I’m determined to fill well. With five adult children in our blended family to appall, I’m really looking forward to my golden years—I’ve earned them.
I’m not sure I can live up to the glorious examples set by my grandmother and my mother, but I’m an author so I should be able to come up with something suitably fun. I figure I have about fifteen years to work up an awesome shtick to trot out in my dotage.
In the meantime, I never forget the two women whose unique personalities and work ethics made me who I am. My motto is Don’t Worry, Be Happy and always tip well.
_____________________________________________________________
Credits and Attributions:
Three Women on board a Ship, ca. 1930 by Australian National Maritime Museum on The Commons, Samuel J. Hood Studio collection. Sam Hood, photographer (1872-1953) [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
Don’t Worry, Be Happy ©2018 by Connie J. Jasperson, All Rights Reserved, was first published on Life in the Realm of Fantasy on March 23, 2018. Second publication, ©2018 Myrddin Publishing Group, used by permission.
So now there appears to be no health benefit to drinking moderately and regularly, which means I’ve had to chuck my gin and tonic habit into the same trash heap as sniffing glue, methamphetamines and goat yoga. (No, I haven’t tried all of these, but I’m sad they’re off the table. Goat yoga is off because I’m allergic. To yoga.) 
Social drinking used to be a thing. My parents’ generation proudly collected fine liquors to stock their home bars, and proudly collected home bars in the shape of globes and umbrella stands to hide the liquor when not in use. The globe bars looked educational and stately on the outside, hiding the jollity within. 
Much like Queen Victoria, who started them. (Don’t quote me on that.) 
My family home did not have a globe bar. We had a wet bar, which was a tiny room with a little sink and some shelves in it where my parents kept the booze. They only opened it when we had parties, and then they pulled out the dusty old whiskey and vodka bottles Dad had bought on sale and made manhattans and whiskey sours and hot toddies and other exotic sounding beverages that made the grownups laugh way too loudly and play unusual party games. 
The rest of the time the wet bar was a kind of hide out for my brother and me. Sometimes we used the sink for scientific experiments, but mostly it just took up its tiny space in the house and was opened irregularly.
In my dotage, I’ve not had a globe bar or a wet bar. My husband travels a lot, and collects tiny bottles of all kinds of alcoholic goodies, so that we have a little something of everything in about two hundred tiny, bubbly bottles. We keep all of it on a pantry shelf in the kitchen. We can proudly serve exactly one full drink of almost any top shelf liquor to at least one guest.
But now, even this infrequent and parsimonious celebrating has been curtailed by the Global Burden of Diseases study. This study has conclusively found from data collected over 16 years and from 195 countries that alcohol just isn’t the gentle panacea we had hoped it would be.
You may read the dire news, if you haven’t already heard it, here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext
All I have left are books and music, which have so far not been determined to be harmful in moderate quantities. Also I have coffee and chocolate, which are not harmful in minuscule quantities. I am trying to embrace the minuscule without resentment. I have only been moderately successful at this.
And well yes, I have only been moderately successful at cutting down on my moderate gin and tonic habit. But as my husband likes to say, “Spread the poisons around so that it’s less likely anyone of them will kill you.”
As a music student in college, I was not averse to attending an opera or two. Some were more interesting than others. My mother, who always promoted my musical interests, took me to my first opera when I was a boy: Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, about a ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever. (Why is there no movie version today? It would make a great paranormal film.) But it was Madama Butterfly that became my favorite, and the only opera I can enjoy just listening to without having to see the stage production.
In the opera, an American naval officer visits Japan and because he is staying there a while on business, he arranges to have a “temporary” wife. The inevitable happens: his business is concluded and he leaves, promising to return, and later she discovers a child will be born. He does eventually return, but with his American wife in tow. He is surprised to find his Japanese lover has a child but he is determined to bring the child home to America. The Japanese woman is so distraught over that verdict that she commits suicide in one of opera’s most tragic scenes.
While I was living in Japan in the late 1980s and early 90s, teaching English to the students of a small city, I wrote the story of an American man who meets a Japanese woman. They have a relationship then must inevitably part. A child is born. Eventually the man learns of the child’s existence and wants to do the right thing. Despite his American wife’s objection, he goes to Japan to check things out. I’m skipping over a lot of details, of course, but you see how the plot is similar to the Madama Butterfly story. That was purely unintentional.
So there you have it: Art imitating a life which imitates art.
Being a guy, of course I wanted my male protagonist to not be a jerk, to do the right thing. But he is human and thus has flaws. He also faces the clash of customs, lost among people who think differently, where the acts that make no sense to him seem perfectly logical to the local folk. Japan in the 1990s is a modern place, but in inaka (the rural, “backwoods” regions), the old, traditional ways still hold sway. So our hero, Benjamin Pinkerton (yes, I borrowed the name from the character in the opera, just to make the connection more obvious), tries to do the right thing: save a child he never knew he had while risking everything in his life back home. It is another stranger in a strange land scenario I like to write.
John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821) was an English writer and physician. He was best known for his involvement in the Romantic movement, an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. He is considered by many as the originator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story “The Vampyre“ (1819), which was the first published, modern vampire story.
Perhaps because John Polidori was a physician, he was able to bring all the disparate elements of 19th-century vampirism mythology into a coherent, compelling short story. With just that one short story, he spawned an entire literary genre.
How did this come about? The story had its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer when Europe and parts of North America underwent a severe climate abnormality.
Lord Byron and his young, twenty-year-old physician, John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva.
On the run from creditors and Shelley’s ailing, understandably jealous wife, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (who later became Mary Shelley) and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, visited them.
The group was kept indoors by the incessant rain of that cold, wet, unpleasant summer during a three-day stretch in June. Bored at being cooped up, the five turned to telling fantastic tales, and which inspired them to write their own.
Reportedly, they were fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford’s Vathek, and laudanum, to which Byron was addicted. Mary Shelley, in collaboration with Percy Bysshe Shelley, produced what would become Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.
Polidori was the outsider, the man who was only included as he was in the employ of Byron. Lord Byron made him the butt of many jokes at dinner parties, taking great pleasure in humiliating him. This cruel treatment of anyone in his power was well documented by his contemporaries.
Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron’s, Fragment of a Novel (1816), which is also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment.” Over the course of several mornings, he wrote “The Vampyre.” The manuscript was overlooked for three years when it was discovered by a disreputable publisher, Henry Colburn. He published it in his New Monthly Magazine under the title “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.” It was received with acclaim, much to Polidori’s surprise and chagrin.
Polidori struggled to assert his rights to the work, and Lord Byron did have the grace to declare promptly the work was Polidori’s and not his. Despite that assertion, proper credit for authorship of the story was muddy for many years.
Polidori’s work had an immense impact on his contemporary readers. Numerous editions and translations of the tale were published. The influence of The Vampyre as described by Polidori has continued into the twenty-first century, as until recently, his work was frequently considered the primary source of what is accepted as “canon” when writing about vampirism.
What are the traditional tropes of vampire fantasy? First of all, we must think Lord Byron. He was an arrogant, self-centered, charismatic sociopath with a gift for writing brilliant poetry. From birth, Byron suffered from a deformity of his right foot, and by the time he hired Polidori, he was addicted to laudanum which had been prescribed for the pain. He treated the young Polidori atrociously, engendering deep antipathy for his patient in the young doctor.
Within the pages of Polidori’s diary, I see “The Vampyre” as an allegory of Byron’s abuse of John Polidori himself. It is easy to visualize Byron as a man possessed of the power to drain one of their soul when seen through the eyes of the man he had in his power, and whom he treated abominably as an employer.
Byron was described as the devourer of souls in the book, Glenarvon, by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron’s former lovers. “Ruthven” is the name Lady Caroline Lamb referred to Byron as in her novel. Polidori had read Glenarvon that summer, and blatantly used Lamb’s protagonist’s name for his vampire, and Byron proudly admitted he was the role model.
The Public Domain Review article, The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire, says this about the rocky relationship between Polidori and Byron:
“It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities. Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having “such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,” a mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas Jones de Powis, “the facility of…bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.”
So we know vampires are charismatic and seductive. Their bite would enslave their victims. Folktales from hundreds of years ago tell us they can take the form of bats and fly through the windows of even the tallest buildings. Historically, vampires are powerful, but unable to withstand the light of day, which would burn them, and destroy them forever.
However, that which was once canon regarding vampires is no longer set in stone.
Modern vampires are often able to stay outside during the day, and some even sparkle. Many are model citizens who get their blood from robbing blood banks.
But underneath it all, I still have a fondness for the mad, bad, dangerous-to- know Lord Byron style of vampire.
~~~|~~~
Myrddin offers several varieties of Vampire for your reading pleasure:
Carlie M. A. Cullen’s Heart Search Trilogy
Stephen Swartz’s dark Stefan Szekely Trilogy
Nicole Antonia Carros’s hysterically funny Brawn Stroker’s Dragula
Polidori’s Vampyre by Connie J. Jasperson was first published on her blog, Life in the Realm of Fantasy, on 20July, 2016, under the title Physician to the Vampyre. Reprinted by permission.
Cockygate takes over Twitter!
This weekend, Twitter blew up with the #cockygate or #cocky scandal, where a romance author trademarked the common English word cocky. Normally, these kerfuffles are way over my head and I don’t pay attention but I used to work in a patent agency and I have a little, read very little, knowledge of intellectual property and what I read filled me with horror.
Quick disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are the author’s personal opinion alone and do not reflect Myrddin’s.
I worked in the search department. It was my job to check the validity of patents and report to clients on them as well as other duties. Because of this I had to attend ‘lessons’ with the ‘baby’ agents (affectionate term for trainees) on patent law. I know this isn’t trademark law and that they are very different but it did kind of crop up in conversations now and again. It was drummed into us that patents had to be unique. Part of my job was to find other patents or find inventions in use before an application was filed to ‘blow it out of the water’. I thought of myself as a bit of a pirate. Arrr!
Trademarks were supposed to follow a similar vein. Trademarks were supposed to incur protection for novel and unique marks. I may have not paid the proper amount of attention when they were talking about it, the smoked salmon bagels were particularly delicious in those lessons, so I admit I may have got the wrong end of the stick. I’m always willing to be wrong.
This brings me back to cockygate. An author filed and was granted a trademark for the word ‘Cocky’ as well as another for the stylized word to do with her book series.
The USPTO is notoriously busy and things can slip through which probably shouldn’t. Saying this, it does only take a few seconds to determine on Amazon that there were pre-existing books on there with the word Cocky in the title and even (so I’ve heard) there was a series with that word in the series title.
The danger of letting this trademark happen is that authors could trademark other common English words. This could be ‘the’ or ‘billionaire’, how about ‘star’? The last one could be great. You could retroactively sue the Star Wars or Star Trek franchises as well as untold books. This lady is a genius. Edit: I’m pretty sure you can’t do this. I thought you could only threaten people who use your trademarked mark AFTER you’ve got it. Prior use and all that. It doesn’t stop people from trying though and sometimes just the threat is enough to scare someone to do what you want. End of edit.
I’m not saying trademarking words is stupid. Apple for example is a trademark of the computer company. An ordinary every day apple of the fruit variety cannot be confused with the maker of computers and iPhones etc. I’ve always believed that was why some are allowed and others not. Cocky on the other hand is a descriptive word which is used on a daily basis in the field the author inhabits. It has been used before and it makes it difficult to remove that word from that field without affecting others. You do not need to refer to apples in any way when talking about computers, I suppose you could give away a bag of apples with every purchase, but that is stretching it!
There may be a happy ending with this. An attorney with knowledge in the field has filed a petition to get rid of the offending trademark. I believe with my little and limited understanding that he has a real chance of this working. Also, allegedly, one of the trademarks granted was using a font that was not permitted to be trademarked. Unfortunately, I think this trademark has a genuine basis. It was the word cocky but only written in a certain way. This meant that an author could use cocky in their title but they would have to use a different font, no biggy. Except she was given the word cocky as well which meant cease and desist letters went out when maybe they shouldn’t have.
The attorney is also an author and so has a stake in this debacle as all authors do if this precedent stands. He has my undying admiration for undertaking this, not just for filing the petition but also for not seeking damages or any financial penalties. After all, the trademark happy author may have just received bad advice and is acting on that advice. I do like to think the best of people.
However this pans out, there will still be fallout even if this trademark is annihilated. Authors will be out of pocket and let’s be frank, authors don’t make a ton of money unless you are one of our heroes like Stephen King, James Patterson, JK Rowling or the other heavyweights.
I really hope this can be resolved soon and no one suffers too much from what could be traced back to a simple mistake of not enough staff at the USPTO to assess the viability of a trademark.
Like John Snow and Sergeant Schultz before him, I know nothing about marketing a book. Anticipating the release of my first book, Gates of Fire and Ash, I developed a woefully inept marketing plan and forged ahead like Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of the elusive Road Runner. I’m here to share my experience.
Remember I know nothing, so I read what other writers had done and what the gurubloggers had to say. Pronounced Goo-Rub-Loggers, a gurublogger is an internet blogger that claims to know the answer. The answer to what you ask? Oh, I’m glad you asked. The answer to anything that gets you to generate revenue on their site. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to bloggers making money from their sites. I’m opposed to bloggers using teasers and snake-oil techniques to sell high dollar items or provide useless information in order to collect impressions and clicks for advertising fees. At any rate, I came up with the “plan.”
My plan was pretty basic:
I can confidently state that Step 7 was accomplished. I’m less sure of the others.
Good Cover
I’m not a graphic designer, and Step 7 precluded hiring one. I cobbled together a cover with a good deal of help from my Myrddin Publishing friends. I spent $29.00 for a couple of photos and at least two dozen hours working with an old copy of Photoshop Elements that had come bundled with a long gone printer.
Did I get a good cover? I don’t know, but it was good enough.
Catchy Description
It is harder than you might think to write a book description. It’s supposed to encourage people to click Add-to-Cart using just a sentence or two. Lines that capture one person’s fancy may be a complete turn-off to another. The truth of this became clear when I asked for feedback from writers and non-writers. In the end, I went with the majority vote because I agreed with it.
Social Media
Social media will make your book the key that unlocks the door to success. I’m not so sure about that, but many gurubloggers seem to believe it and are willing to share their hard-won knowledge for a free pamphlet and a paid subscription. My social media effort was limited to making a few posts on Facebook letting folks know that the book was coming and announcing its launch on Amazon. What about Twitter and the other sites, you might ask. I don’t know a Twit from a Ter and even less about the others. I didn’t have the energy to find out. Oh, I unintentionally “boosted” one of my launch adverts on Facebook. It cost me $7.00. I probably could have gotten a refund but decided it was a cheap lesson look before I click.
Reviews
Reviews are the lifeblood of successful independent authors. Get as many reviews as possible and as quickly as possible is the mantra. If you succeed, the magicians at Amazon will brew a potion in their algorithmic cauldron that brings readers to the altar of your product page. So, I solicited people to read an advance review copy (ARC) of the book hoping to get reviews. I sent out emails to my friends (some are now former friends) offering a free copy in return for an honest review. I also made the offer on Facebook as part of my clever social media marketing plan. I received ten acceptances to be an ARC reader. Five of them posted a review on Amazon. They averaged 4.5 stars, though. Oh, well. I tried.
Amazon Categories & Keywords
Categories and keywords are supposed to make it easier for readers to find my book by browsing. Think of it like the sections of a physical bookstore says Amazon. Excuse me, a monitor and mouse have nothing in common with a physical bookstore. I don’t believe readers browse in the physical sense. They can’t, there are too many books, 1.8 million titles by one account. Still, I played the game.
Amazon’s help screen: Selecting Browse Categories, includes this quote, “During title setup, you’ll select a BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) code. The codes you choose, along with your selected keywords, are used to place your book into certain categories, or browse paths, on Amazon.” I didn’t actually select a code number. Instead, I picked from an outline of options. For example 1. Juvenile Fiction > Action & Adventure > General, or 2. Fiction > Science Fiction > Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic. I need to mention that none of my options seemed to fit my book.
Keywords are different. I created them thinking they’d be a good way to help readers find my book. I’m not so sure now. They may be more import as a way to narrow the books I’ll be compared against for sale rank purposes. My story intentionally excludes magic as a plot element, but it involves a quest to find a cure for a disease. I used quest as one of my seven keywords. Amazon included my book in a Sword & Sorcery subcategory as shown here, (2241 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Sword & Sorcery). It turns out that using the keyword quest triggered the classification. I’ll be changing that soon.
Amazon Marketing Services
Amazon receives a piece of the action from the sale of each book. I have no problem with it because I can publish a book on Amazon without spending one dollar. Zon even offers me free tools to help.
Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) is one of the few ways it can get extra moola from me. Remember I know nothing, but I wanted to try AMS to boost the visibility of my book. AMS offers two types of advertising: Product Display and Sponsored Products. In a nutshell, Display ads appear on a competitors Amazon sale page.
<< Display ad
Sponsored ads appear in search results.
I tried Product Display first. The $100 minimum budget scared the hell out of me, but I was feeling confident and went for it. Twelve days later, I terminated the ad. The AMS report showed that my ad had been displayed 17 times. Each display being an “Impression” on the Big A reports. Sadly, no one checked-out my book by clicking or tapping on my ad. Clicking or tapping is reported as a “Click”—clever. The cost to me was $0.00 because I only had to pay for clicks, not for impressions.
Unimpressed with Product Displays, I tried Sponsored Products next. Sponsored ads let me pick search words that AMS calls keywords. Why did Amazon choose to use keyword for two distinct purposes? Seriously, if you know, please tell me. But, I digress.
If a reader used one of my AMS keywords to search for a book, my ad might appear to them (an impression), and if they clicked on my ad I’d be billed for it; a daily budget limited my risk.
I played with the system because I know nothing. Initially (2/26/18), I let Amazon pick my search terms. It chose 35 terms and over 12 days generated 792 impressions and 24 clicks. Amazon’s report (see below) implies that the ad generated $8.99 in sales at the cost of $3.89 for a healthy 43% cost of sale percentage.
In truth, the $8.99 was for the purchase of a paperback by a personal friend and had nothing to do with my ad. I made three more attempts using search words generated by KDPRocket. KDPRocket analyzes Amazon data to find terms that buyers have used in the past. In theory, I could do it myself, but it would take many hours, if not days, to find as many terms as KDPRocket can in minutes. At $97.00 it’s not a cheap program, but it saved me many hours.
Each of my attempts used at least 250 search terms but was generated with different beginning criteria. As I hope you can tell from the table, I didn’t sell enough books to pay for KDPRocket. However, about 200,000 prospects saw my ad. Marketing is about building brand awareness more than generating current sales according to my Marketing Professor who is probably dead by now.
Spend as little as possible
Excluding KDPRoceket, I’ve spent less than $50.00 so far to create and market my book. Am I happy? No. But, I’m not unhappy either. I’m experimenting and haven’t finished yet. I see KDPRocket as an investment more than an expense and can use it for future projects that may be more profitable. Actually, profit isn’t my motive. I hope readers will enjoy my writing, but they must find it to do that, which is why I’m making an effort to advertise.
Do you have comments? Please share them.
Copyright by David P. Cantrell 2018
For Stefan Székely it is a fate worse than death: To be a vampire yet stuck with his vampire parents. After 13 years Stefan can endure it no more. He wants a castle of his own. But first he must visit his family’s bank in Budapest.
With endless strife rumbling across Europe, Stefan hardly recognizes Budapest, now capital of the Hungarian Federation. The world has changed. Nevertheless, he embarks on the reign of terror he always denied himself, living the vampire playboy lifestyle. Until he gets a stern warning from the local vampire gang. He is not welcome – unless he plays by their rules.
Should Stefan fight for his right to party like it’s 2027? Or will an unexpected encounter with a stranger change everything? As clashes between vampire gangs and State Security escalate, Stefan realizes he just might be the key to changing the fate of Europe forever! . . . If he can survive three bloody nights in Budapest.
In 2014 my medically accurate vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN came out to a couple rave reviews. My main purpose then was to counter the hysteria of the Twilight experience with some medical research crossed with an understanding of established legends. I wanted to tell a realistic vampire tale. I even set the story in my own city and the action in the story followed the actual days and months I was writing the story. The story and my writing of the story ended the same week. Of course, I revised and edited after that.
Then I thought . . . what might possibly happen next? So I chose a gap of, say, 13 years (the number seems significant in horror stories). Now, where did I leave my protagonist? How is he doing? What could have happened since the end of the first book? What has changed in the world during these 13 years? How would what’s different in the world affect his own corner of the world? How would he cope with these changes?
As I started on another vampire story I quickly realized that I had to also write essentially a science-fiction story. A futuristic story. If I were setting the story 13 years after the end of the previous novel, then this sequel would be set in 2027. And it would be somewhere in Europe, which is where our hero was at the end of the first book.
What do I know of 2027? Not much. Like many science fictioneers writing about the future, I took the present circumstances, the way things are now (good and bad), and extrapolated how they might progress. Remember that novel by George Orwell, 1984? It was published in 1948 just as fears of a Communist takeover gripped Europe. It was supposed to be a warning. Orwell imagined how the concerns of his present might play out in the future.
With the current strife in Europe, mass immigration, refugees coming to Europe from the Middle East and Africa, the increase in crime, warfare between left and right political groups, I could see all these happenings extending, continuing and growing through the following decade. The moral question that arises is whether an author should follow his/her own beliefs; that is, how the world should be, a Utopian view – or choose a path of development which would be the best setting for the story, however the society might become – or try to take an honest look at current events and let things fall where they might, for good or ill.
I chose both. If I have to make a choice, I will lean toward what makes a good story over what my own beliefs might be. For the sake of this story and for the way I think society will continue to progress/digress or develop or evolve over the next 10 years, I’m letting the European conflicts play out in the sequel: my now less-medically accurate vampire novel, titled SUNRISE.
In this sequel, the new Hungarian Federation is a strictly run Euro-centrist society. The State Security apparatus runs a tidy ship and getting in is very problematic. Staying in if you are a “diseased” resident such as a vampire is dangerous. However, our hero, Stefan Székely, is already within the boundaries of the Hungarian Federation at his family’s estate in the former Croatia; therefore, I, the author, must deal with the vagaries of that location. It was not an unpleasant effort. I love to travel vicariously.
Easter is coming, and while I have no small children at home, my husband and I still celebrate the advent of spring on that day. I will make a special holiday dinner and invite our friends, all of us retired. This year the menu will include a coconut cream pie, which I can hardly wait to try out. I found the recipe on the Minimalist Baker website, and have included the link to it here: Vegan Coconut Cream Pie.
When I first began eating a plant-based diet, I started slowly, with truly meatless Fridays. My first forays into vegan cooking were not good. I had no idea what ingredients to buy and no idea how to make the food taste good. I had the mistaken notion that vegetables were bland.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I realized that I needed to learn how to cook all over again. The first thing I did was to go to the internet. There I found the wonderful website, The Minimalist Baker. There I found an endless source of amazing, plant-based recipes, all requiring 10 ingredients or less. Even better, they could be made with one bowl, and usually took thirty minutes or less to prepare.
I believe that food should be clean, that is, raised without chemical sprays and fertilizers. To that end, I only buy non-GMO (genetically modified organism) food. Why am I so strict about this? Soybeans and wheat and other grains that are commercially farmed in large factory farms are genetically modified so the fields sown with those seeds can be sprayed with ‘Roundup,’ which is a chemical herbicide manufactured by the Monsanto company. Monsanto also manufactures the seeds that can withstand their chemical.
At first glance, this seems like no big deal. But Roundup is glyphosate, a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide, and crop desiccant. It is used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with crops. Glyphosate is absorbed through foliage, and minimally, through roots and transported to the growing points within the plant. In March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
This chemical is used in many aspects of large factory farming, including desiccating grains for harvest.
The principal of eating organically grown foods is the same as not eating too much fish because of high levels of mercury—the small quantities ingested in each individual plant may not be harmful but the accumulation over time is bad. Because glyphosate is so pervasive in the standard foods available at the grocery store, I am strict about only buying organically grown produce, sugars, beans, and grains, as they are ‘clean,’ that is, grown and harvested without the use of pesticides and herbicides.
Organic food is more expensive than chemically raised food but eating a plant-based diet is far cheaper overall. And, the costs of organic foods are going down as small farmers increasingly embrace the craft. In the Pacific Northwest, where I am from, the small family farm is making a comeback, driven by the demand for clean food. The pressure against the small farmer from “Big Ag,” as the factory farming corporations are known collectively, is great.
But despite the lack of tax incentives and federal subsidies that the largest corporations receive, small organic farms are not only taking root, they are also thriving. A great article on the rise of “Food Forests” can be found here: These Oregon organic farmers figured out how to have nature do all the work.
My new favorite cookbook is “Field Roast: 101 Artisan Vegan Meat Recipes to Cook, Share, and Savor” by Seattle chef, Tommy McDonald. This book now resides on my kitchen counter alongside the cornerstone of my personal cuisine, “The Homemade Vegan Pantry: The Art of Making Your Own Staples” by Miyoko Schinner.
With just these two books and my favorite vegan websites, I have developed a style of cooking that makes each meal a small celebration of the food we are so fortunate to enjoy.
Whether you are vegan, a carnivore, or somewhere in between, food is more than just something we eat to stay alive—food and how we prepare it is a central facet of our lives. I’m so fortunate to live in the Pacific Northwest, where the food culture is leading the way to a healthier lifestyle, and where small farmers are able to do what they do best: grow amazing food for me to prepare for my family.
Here at Myrddin Publishing, we cover a lot of genres and romance is no exception. Whether you like contemporary, historical, or paranormal romance, there is something for everyone on your list. Below is just a sample of where you might find your next Valentine’s day treat! you can find the full list of Myrddin romance here.
A Beautiful Chill by Stephen Swartz
Life is impossible when every moment of the present is haunted by the past.
Íris is a refugee from an abusive youth in Iceland, further abused on the streets of Toronto – until she sees Art as an escape. With a scholarship, she drifts from depression to nightmare to Wiccan rituals to the next exhibit. There’s a lot she must forget to succeed in a life she refuses to take responsibility for.
Eric is settling in at Fairmont College, starting a new life after betrayal and heartbreak. Divorced and hitting forty, he has a lot to prove – to his father, his colleagues, and mostly to himself. The last thing he needs is a distraction – and there’s nothing more distracting than Iris.
A Beautiful Chill is a contemporary romance set in the duplicitous world of academic rules and artistic license.
Ednor Scardens (The Charm City Chronicles Book #1) by Kathleen Barker
Growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Baltimore in the 1960’s was hard enough when everything went right. Kate Fitzgerald wasn’t that lucky.
Struggling to cope with unwanted attention from older boys and men, Kate’s childhood friendship with shy classmate Gabe Kelsey begins to blossom, but quickly becomes tangled when she falls hard for his darkly handsome older brother, Michael.
As the brothers vie for Kate’s affections, she doesn’t know how to choose between them without tearing their family apart. She looks to her girlfriends for advice, but the tragic death of a classmate brings them face-to-face with mortality, shattering their facade of invincibility.
Her dilemma deepens when a predatory priest with a hidden past arrives at Holy Sacrament School. And when she silently witnesses a frightening scene between Gabe and Fr. O’Conner, Kate unknowingly becomes O’Conner’s intended next victim.
Viking: The Truth about Lagertha and Ragnar by Rachel Tsoumbakos
Lagertha was known to be one of the wives of the famous Viking, Ragnar Lodbrok. But did you know they first met each other at a brothel? And just how long did their marriage last? Was Lagertha really the revered shield maiden we see her as today? ‘Vikings: The Truth About Lagertha And Ragnar’ aims to unravel all these secrets.
‘Vikings: The Truth About Lagertha And Ragnar’ is so much more than a history book though.
In Part One their story is brought to life with a historically accurate retelling. Part Two then explores the historical facts surrounding this story.
Heart Search (Book #1) by Carlie M.A. Cullen
One bite starts it all . . .
When Joshua Grant vanishes days before his wedding his fiancée Remy is left with only bruises, scratch marks and a hastily written note. Heartbroken, she sets off alone to find him and begins a long journey where strange things begin to happen.
As Joshua descends into his new immortal life he indulges his thirst for blood and explores his superhuman strength and amazing new talents while becoming embroiled in coven politics which threaten to destroy him. But Remy discovers a strength of her own on her quest to bring Joshua home.
Fate toys with mortals and immortals alike, as two hearts torn apart by darkness face ordeals which test them to their limits.
Recently, I had the opportunity to see the movie “The Post,“ with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. I was intrigued not particularly by the central theme of the Pentagon Papers, but more by the life and personality of Katherine Graham, the daughter of the founder of The Washington Post and the person who took over the helm at the paper after her husband committed suicide.
After the movie, my friends and I discussed some of the more poignant aspects of the movie for us, including the whole idea of a woman being in charge of a major company back in that era. One woman in our group talked about how she had read the autobiography of Katherine Graham and how interesting it was looking at her entire life and seeing how Hollywood portrayed the snippet of her life that involved the Pentagon papers. My curiosity was piqued by what she said and I seemed to remember that my father-in-law had given me a book from his collection a few years back that was about her. I resolved to go home and look for it, and if I didn’t have it, I’d find it at the library. Sure enough, the book was on my shelf, neatly placed in between Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty and The Real George Washington.
These three books have been displayed in the bookcase in our family room for who knows how many years now without being read. So, as a belated New Year’s resolution, I decided to read these three books by the end of the year, starting with a Personal History: Katherine Graham. After pulling the book off the shelf, I remembered why my father-in-law had given it to me in the first place: it was because I was a journalist in my pre-married, pre-kid life and he thought I would find it interesting.
I’ll admit, the read is a bit daunting. The book is about two inches thick and tops out at 625 pages, but so far it has kept me captivated. I look forward to learning more about Katherine Graham and maybe in the near future having a fun discussion with my father-in-law, who has incidentally read ALL of the books in his bookcase.
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Author Bio-
K. K. Hatch is the author of “Silent No More,” a work of historical fiction set in the world of Nazi Germany during the waning years of World War Two. She is a busy wife and mother of three teenage girls and little bunny boy named Coco. Up until recently, she and her family called Colorado home, but now she lives in Northern Virginia, opening a new chapter of their lives.
With the passing of fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, it seems a good time to reflect on the women authors of my life, especially in science-fiction and fantasy where the percentage has been more skewed.
When I was a young reader, science-fiction got my attention. Imagining other worlds, traveling in space, or dealing with futuristic possibilities was my thing. I started at a young age reading such sci-fi authors as Ben Bova and Robert Silverberg. Also an author named Andre Norton. Mostly these were short stories, often in an anthology edited by Silverberg. One day, though, I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite authors was a woman. I thought Andre was a boy’s name! It made me think.
Boys tend to want to read stories of other boys or men doing things, heroic things. At that age I honestly didn’t care what the girls did in stories. It was just that male authors tended to write about men doing manly things (I’m generalizing, of course), so I had no reason to try female authors. I also did not have much knowledge then of how difficult it was for female authors especially in the genre of science fiction and fantasy; I just wanted a good story. My mother pushed A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle on me, telling me it was a good story, but as a young boy I was not so interested in reading a story about a girl!
Gradually, I grew up. Focusing deliberately on a wider range of fiction, literary and decidedly non-SF works, many of them were written by women. I enjoyed them: I got to experience life as a female character, got to understand the issues they dealt with, and perhaps gained from perspective I did not previously know. It was educational. Whether or not the authors were women still did not matter to me as a reader more than what the story itself was. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books about Authorian legend interested me, not because of the author but because of the Arthur. Nancy Kress and her sci-fi and books on writing mentored me for a time, as well.
Classic women authors starting with Mary Shelley and continuing through the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen entered my experience in college by making me play along as the man in the pages of their books. I could empathize, to a point, with the women in the novels. That experience helped develop the Romantic qualities which have eventually ruined me. I can’t confidently say, just from reading, that I now “get it” or that I understand all the characters endured and could cheer as they rose up and took whatever position they deemed in the story to be a success. Yet my empathy continued to grow.
In grad school, read Francine Prose and Annie Proulx, partly to see a view of life which I could not see without the lens of a woman author writing about a woman protagonist. A couple years ago I read a teenage romance series by Stephanie Perkins, not for the thrills of young love and relationship conundrums but to understand how a young girl thinks and acts. I used what I learned from those books for my own novel which featured a young girl. More than research, I deliberately tried to learn to see what I could not with my own experiential eyes. And then a film on cable TV one night prompted me to check out Margaret Atwood’s novels, starting with The Handmaid’s Tale. Now, of course, it has returned in a new series.
Having a daughter further instilled in me the urge to seek women authors for her to read. The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer became a milestone in my daughter’s life. Inspired, she even wrote fan fiction herself. No matter what word or label you may apply to me and my experience with women authors, I want the best for my daughter, and for her to understand other women’s lives and times, struggles and triumphs.
More recently, as I worked on my own epic fantasy involving dragons, I returned to the novels of Anne McCaffrey. While her dragons and their world are remarkably different from the ones I was writing about, I very much appreciated the craft, the imagination, the pure exhilaration of the world she invented in Pern. Then the sci-fi/dystopian trilogy by Marie Lu caught my attention as something my daughter might like to read…but I read it first. Before reading these authors, Marian Perera, a fellow newbie, came out with Before the Storm, which wonderfully taught me how women think and act in sci-fi romance. It was liberating as I was composing my own sci-fi trilogy.
Now Ursula has passed on, never to write another novel. Yet we remain blessed to always have the products of her mind, the outpouring of words that frame and construct and fulfill our own hopes and aspirations for years past and years to come…for the world of make-believe is our world, today’s world, in disguise.
October had arrived in the Pacific Northwest, chill and damp as always. Our friends, Jonna and Jake, lived on Black Lake, on the north end of the lake where my sister and I had spent our childhood.
A true Northwesterner, Jonna had planned a day on the lake despite the weather. A women’s day out with my sister, Sherrie, our old school friend, Evonne, and our dear friend from Texas, Irene. We planned to cruise the lake and show Jonna and Irene where we had lived from 1963 through the 1990s.
Jake was worried we would wreck the boat, calling instructions as we pulled away from the dock. “Don’t worry,” we called back to him. “Jonna knows how to drive.” Nevertheless, he stood in the rain, fretting at sending his beloved boat out under his wife’s control, loaded with sparkling cider and a group of women he knew all too well. This despite the fact Jonna would drink no wine until after we returned.
Despite Jake’s misgivings, Jonna neatly negotiated the deeper channel between the half-sunk, rotting posts of the old Black Lake Mill, which had burned in 1918, and was never rebuilt. Like many parts of my childhood, the old posts had simply been left where they were, rotting corpses of a time when Timber was King, and money grew in the forest surrounding Black Lake.
Our boatload of women and laughter slowly passed the new summer homes and palaces of the nouveau riche jammed onto narrow lots, professionally landscaped and manicured. Crammed between the mansions were the familiar, now-ancient mobile homes and the older, rundown shanties. Our childhood friends, “Black-Lakers” all, had lived year-round in these flimsy, drafty homes. Oil was expensive, so feeding the fireplace or woodstove was how we stayed warm back then.
In the 1930s, when my father grew up in the hills above the other side of the lake, the area had been exceedingly rural, a poor place teetering on the edge of poverty. In the 1960s, when I was growing up, it was working-class but still small and insular. Many of the people around the lake had gone to school with my father, and he knew them well.
Jonna slowly followed the shore past those homes, old and new. It was surprising which tattered old cabins stubbornly held on, clinging to their places despite being elbowed aside by the beautiful new homes of the well-heeled few.
Hugging the shoreline, we went south, passing down the eastern side of the lake toward the house that had been my family home for thirty-five years. I was curious, wondering what it looked like. As we idled along, I thought about those years that we had spent there, the good and bad.
How many evenings had I sat beside my grandmother at the picnic table, gazing out across the water to the Black Hills rising above the lake and dominating the view? How many campfires in the fire-pit on the beach, and barbecues? How many summers were spent swimming from morning to evening? I couldn’t wait to see it again.
The old landmarks had changed radically–we only recognized where we were because the contours of the shoreline was still the same. Having fished those waters for so many years, Sherrie and I knew which half-sunken log meant we were nearing the neighbor’s house. Ours had been beyond the woods next door.
The neighbor’s house had seemed large and modern when I was young and had been referred to as “the airplane hangar” by the locals when Ken Nolan built it. I was surprised to see how small it really was. It was greatly changed, but I recognized the mid-century wall of glass facing the lake. The new owners had abandoned the small lawn and gone to simply having a large deck, surrounded by tall salal and Oregon grape. They had sacrificed much of the view from inside in the interests of privacy, I suspect.
Even though the neighboring house was so changed, I was filled with anticipation for the first sight of our childhood home, with me going on and on, telling our friends how beautiful the property was.
We never saw that house, despite my eager searching.
Just beyond the now-ancient grove of alders that had separated our property from the neighbors was a rundown building. It did resemble my parents’ house but was definitely not the home I had grown up in.
It had been made into a duplex and was clearly a rental unit for the large house that now sat behind in what had once been the swamp. The acre of lawn and gardens that had been my parents’ pride and joy was lost to the wilderness, with a dilapidated fence cutting the yard in two. On either side of the fence, narrow paths snaked through the weeds, muddy trails to the beach. Grass and weeds stood waist-high, obscuring the once-beautiful home.
The beach and swimming area were gone. A marina dominated the waterfront, with five dilapidated power boats moored at several docks. Thinking back on that sight, I suspect that summers there see few children playing in the shallows, as the formerly sandy beach is now a swampy morass.
I confess I was devastated to see the old family home in such disrepair.
The last time I had approached the house from the lake had been in 1995 after my grandmother passed away, while my mother still lived there. That day, as we returned to the shore, I had viewed the modest home in its park-like setting, with a broad lawn that took an hour to mow even with the riding mower. Cherry trees, alders, and maples had shaded the yard, with roses, camellias, rhododendrons, and other heirloom shrubs framing the house. Blueberries, cascade blackberries, and loganberries had pride of place in the immense vegetable garden that was to the right of the house when viewed from the lake.
When we were growing up there, the inside of our home was cold and damp and frequently in disrepair. There were no carpets because Mama said they would be ruined, and certainly the linoleum hadn’t stood the test of time. Our furniture had been worn out, and Mama wasn’t really into interior decorating.
Besides, as she was always reminding us, there was no money to fix things up. Dad had a good job, but money was tight. Nevertheless, however shabby it had been compared to the homes of our wealthier classmates who lived in town, it was immaculately clean inside and out. Nothing was ever out of place, because what would people think? Mama had strong opinions about people with poor housekeeping habits and was rather vocal about it.
As I said, the house itself had been nothing special, but the yard… 350 feet of waterfront and five acres going back toward the road. The yard and the view were what my parents had made themselves house-poor for.
When I was a child, the yard had been a magical place of refuge from disapproving adults, with many places to hide and read and to be important to someone, even if it was only the cat.
I didn’t know what to think when we saw the rundown hovel with a flock of boats parked in front. I was glad to be in the company of my friends and my sister, as I fought the sting and burn of tears. I think because I’m four years older than Sherrie, her memories were of happier times than mine, when Mama rebelled against Dad’s wishes and got a job outside the home so she could have some extra money.
Our friends in the boat, Irene, Evonne, and Jonna – they knew. These women could tell what had occurred, how it had set me back. They were united, a wall of strength, silently commiserating and allowing us to just take it all in, yet there for us if we needed to talk about it.
I didn’t. I couldn’t.
At last, Jonna turned the boat, and we idled along the shore, cruising south around the swampy end where the Black River begins its journey to the Chehalis River, and then to the “new” development of Evergreen Shores, built in the 1970s. Then we went north along the west shore, passing the strange dichotomy of shanties mingled between high-end vacation manors. Having circled the lake, we finally negotiated our way back through the rotting pilings at the north end and approached Jonna’s dock.
Jake had been standing there the whole time, likely expecting we would sink his boat. But we hadn’t, and bless him, he was happy to help Jonna park it.
I’m an author now, middle-aged. I’ve lived a long and interesting life, and still I find I have lessons to learn. A place is a place, and a building is only a home when someone lives there. I think that what I really discovered by going back to the lake house is that you don’t go home by returning to the scene of your childhood.
My childhood home still shines in my memories, but nowadays home means comfort and cozy evenings on the back porch with my husband. Home is a wall with photographs of our children and grandchildren.
I carry home within my heart and memories, and wherever I am, that is home.
Connie J. Jasperson is an author and blogger and can be found blogging regularly at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.
Black Lake Sunset, by Florence Lemke, 1973. Painted by the author’s aunt, image reproduced from the private collection of Connie J. Jasperson. © 2018 All Rights Reserved. Printed by permission.
This week has been filled with parties, dinners, breakfasts, lunches – all hosted by Moi. And, as in other years, my kitchen has decided to celebrate by breaking down.
Wonderful, isn’t it? Two years ago my kitchen faucet handle snapped off the night before we had a group of friends coming to dinner. We replaced the handle with a deck screw (really) and used it throughout the season. I made huge vats of pasta, trays of cookies, washed loads of dishes – all with the deck screw.
My husband made it festive by covering the screw with red duct tape. Testosterone for the win.
This year it was something simpler that broke down: an entire REFRIGERATOR. Not like I need a fridge as I whisk and cook and serve up loads of food for the four separate sets of company we had planned.
Luckily, this happened a bit earlier on. I convinced Mr. Man that we really couldn’t make it through December without a fridge. Hanging sacks of food from the trees to keep them from bears just wouldn’t cut it.
We ordered a new fridge (painful right before gift-giving season, but there was no other choice) and waited for arrival. It was scheduled to land on our doorstep a week before Christmas. The local recycling was called in to pick up the old one.
All was well in Whoville.
Until, that is, some Vice-President or middle manager decided to revamp the delivery process. I’ll never know what this Grinch did to our purchase entry, but Delivery Night came and went, sans fridge.
I spent the next day on the phone with the large store chain that handled the sale. Imagine my joy as I eyed piles of unwrapped gifts, unsent cards, unbaked cookie dough. This all happened to the background of On Hold music. In a burst of irony, I heard I’ll Be Home for Christmas several times.
This tune could only make me think sadly of my fridge, lost in depot hell.
I have a beautiful family, wonderful friends, and my health. I publish with an amazing group of authors. There’s really no reason to complain – other than the patched-up fridge that is limping its way through the last of our social whirlwind.
2018 will arrive, bringing resolutions and joy. It will deliver new babies, new loves, new jobs.
In my case, I really hope the new year also delivers … you-know-what.
‘Twas the night before Xmas, when all through the base
Only robots were stirring, but none with much haste.
The backpacks were taped to the air vents with care,
In hopes that old Santa would find his way there;
The kiddos were tucked in their coffin-shaped beds,
As a Twix induced sugar-rush played with their heads;
Mom in her flannel and I in tighty-whites
Had just settled in after saying good nights.
When suddenly our module shook to and fro,
I leapt from my bed and was soon ready to go.
Away to the view screen I flew like the Flash,
And focused the monitor in a hurried dash.
The blue Earth above gave an eerie luster
To the dwellings that formed our lunar cluster.
Then, a vision beyond belief did appear,
A tiny red shuttle, manned by tiny reindeer.
Anon, a weird looking pilot escorted them out.
“I am Captain Saint Nick,” he said with a shout.
His four-legged crew must surely be tame,
Because clearly I heard him call them by name;
“Now, Crasher. now, Lancer. Now, Rancher and Buttless.
On, Gromit. On, Wallace. On, Dander and Gutless.
Gather your pouches, gifts stuffed to the top,
We must hurry and scurry there’s no time to stop.
And then in a jiffy, I heard from the ceiling
The clatter and chatter of eight little beings.
I stood from my perch and then turned around,
To see the pilot materialize with nary a sound.
Unsure of his purpose, my phaser at ready,
I stunned the old guy, my aim was quite steady.
His bundle of toys were thrown to the floor
“Oh no, this must be Santa,” I had to implore.
His eyes – how they twinkled, from the stun no doubt.
His cheeks soon grew as red as if they had gout.
His mouth formed a circle like a black hole,
His chest expelled the growl of an evil troll.
The sound of his anguish filled me with grief;
I feared for my life when he gritted his teeth.
He had a narrow face and surprising round belly.
Plus a wicked smile; I thought of Machiavelli.
With the wink of his eye he turned his head;
The look on his face filled me with dread.
But soon I realized I feared without reason
When he chuckled and said, “I love this season.”
He looked to the floor and gathered the toys,
Several were for girls and others for boys,
He filled all of the packs hung by the vents
Then touched his comm-unit and off he went.
From my viewer I saw him gather his troops,
The eight little reindeer were a strange group.
He walked up the ramp, his team close behind.
When the shuttle rumbled, it began to climb.
The craft hovered high over our airless dorm;
Through some unknown magic a dome did form.
These words were written on the white hemisphere,
Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
By David P. Cantrell (c) 2017 with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore
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