…can be yours at one click. One of those ebooks is my Edge of the Shadow, Book One of the Wisdom Court series. Here comes the link… http://bit.ly/2jWEIGJ Click away! Enjoy an abundance of FREE ebooks. But the deal ends October 2.
Happy reading.
30 Saturday Sep 2017
Posted e-books, Reading, Wisdom Court
in…can be yours at one click. One of those ebooks is my Edge of the Shadow, Book One of the Wisdom Court series. Here comes the link… http://bit.ly/2jWEIGJ Click away! Enjoy an abundance of FREE ebooks. But the deal ends October 2.
Happy reading.
05 Wednesday Oct 2016
Posted Reading, Stephen King
inI have had ongoing, low-level respiratory crap (medical term) for at least a month and today the bug responsible is staging a resurgence, rolling out more coughing and wobbly-headed paranoia. It’s time to revisit The Stand.
In case you’ve never read it, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic America after a majority of the world’s citizens have succumbed to a weaponized superflu virus known as “Captain Trips.” When the dust settles, groups of survivors begin to journey west, compelled to gather in…Boulder, Colorado, my home town! Those are the good-guy survivors, of course. The bad-guy survivors make a bee-line for Las Vegas. Wouldn’t you know.
I’m not going to recount the entire plot–read the damned book. It’s a terrific story of good versus evil with some of the juicy pulp details Stephen King loves to sprinkle in. It’s probably my favorite of his novels, although I vacillate back and forth between The Stand and It as numero uno. I have a deep appreciation for King, who is able to evoke my nineteen-fifties childhood more sharply than any other author I’ve read.
Until recent years, it’s been my annual tradition to reread The Stand at Christmas to balance out the more egregious aspects of the holiday, and to take advantage of the ever active flu season. But this year, the time is now. It’s hard to continue feeling sorry for myself and my puny little germ while reading about the wholesale destruction of the world’s population.
And I’ll be damned if I give into the oh-God-it’s-probably-terminal thinking that villainous bastard Randall Flagg uses to spread terror across the land.
Cough-cough.
Enter your name in the Wisdom Court drawing on Halloween by commenting on this post. The prize is your own copy of each book in the Wisdom Court Trilogy: Edge of the Shadow, A Signal Shown, and All In Bad Time. All signed by me.
01 Thursday Oct 2015
When I envision autumn, the smell of wood smoke is in the air and I’m walking through orange and red, yellow and magenta leaves piled on forest ground. Overhead mottled green leaves wave at me. Squirrels scurry among scattered acorns, carrying them up tree trunks for storage in their picturesque holes. Inside each one, I’m sure, is a living room suite designed by Arnold Lobel where the squirrel families spend evenings in overstuffed chairs, drinking hazelnut tea and eating walnut bread. (Look inside Lobel’s Owl at Home http://amzn.to/1M3XIoh if you want to see the squirrels’ decor. They’re always after the owls for decorating tips.)
Those visions of my favorite season were formed by books, from Little Women to A Separate Peace to Winnie the Pooh, and augmented by two years spent living near the Hudson River. The images have little to do with what autumn is like in Colorado. Our high temperature yesterday was eighty-two degrees. Residents are making pilgrimages up the Front Range of the Rockies to see the yellows of the aspen trees, bright against the backdrop of evergreens, but the scenic palette can’t compare with the explosion of colors on the East coast.
While rain is forecast for the weekend, we’re more likely to have sunny days, and here is where Colorado achieves glory. We have the sky. The sheer sweep of crystalline blue, set off by the quaking aspen leaves, fills the soul and dazzles the eye. Every October the Rocky Mountains bare their shoulders of leaves and bask under a blue that extends forever. I’ve searched the Thesaurus, trying to find the perfect word to describe that shade, but none will do. The closest, lord help us? Skyey. Every place has a sky, but in the West, it is more than scenery. It is a character affecting the story, setting the scene, flavoring the air.
And yet I rhapsodize each year over the colors of the leaves in my mind’s eye even as I revel in the vast sea of sky overhead. In the way we see and respond to such things as autumn, how much is owed to the power of words and the impressions they make on our memories? How much has to do with the immediate sensory appreciation we have of our surroundings? Is it fiction versus reality? Perhaps it is the best of both.