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Excerpt from Carl Knauf's "A Spoiled Game"

8/7/2022

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

"Though it has been a tumultuous year, crime didn't take a break," Charles Fleming said to the Interpol staff. "With that being said, you all have done a fantastic job, but there's one detective who truly went above what was needed. ... Detective Iris Augusta ..."

Polly Severy -- Proofreader Extraordinaire!

7/12/2022

When you are reading a book, there is nothing worse than finding misspelled words and grammatical errors. That is where I come in. I have done proofreading for many years for businesses and authors.

Excerpt from the upcoming book by Michael R. French, "The Ghost with Two Hearts". My first week in Kyoto, walking into a Shinto shrine, I realized my cellphone was missing ... .I found it half an hour later, sitting on an empty table in a busy cafe.

6/22/2022

Excerpt from Michael R. French’s new book “Ghost with Two Hearts”.“My mind traveled to Emiko’s riddle, just after we were throwing stones into the canal. What could be worse, she asked me... When I finally figured it out, Emiko was nowhere... .

6/22/2022

Excerpt from the upcoming book by Michael R. French, "The Ghost with Two Hearts". My first week in Kyoto, walking into a Shinto shrine, I realized my cellphone was missing from my back pocket. I found it half an hour later, sitting on an empty table in

6/22/2022

Excerpt from Michael R. French’s new book “Ghost with Two Hearts”.“My mind traveled to Emiko’s riddle, just after we were throwing stones into the canal. What could be worse, she asked me... When I finally figured it out, Emiko was nowhere to b

6/22/2022

"The Writer's Quandary # 1" From Michael R. French

6/10/2022

Seeing yourself as a writer, objectively, can be tough. There are periods when everything flows and you experience euphoria. Other times, I get trapped in my memories, or on a spectrum of emotions ranging from positive to “is this really happening to me?” I always pray that on any given day I can find time to write, and that my imagination is working. A defiant, uncooperative, or half-aslep muse can take a week or two off your life, if not longer.

Before tackling these challenges, every so often I ask myself why I write. Over a fifty year career of publishing fiction and non-fiction, writing screenplays, and making films, the why can vary significantly. Creativity has many motivations. If you want to focus on one particular genre, or are fixated by characters that must appear in every book you write, great. If you want to explore multiple genres, terrific. When you are engrossed by different subjects as the world—and your world, too—changes, readers want to read what you have to say. If you chase fame and money and Instagram followers, you will likely comprise the integrity of the majority of novelists today.

I wrote my first short story at fifteen or sixteen, to escape the standard adolescent turmoil. Reading, music, and sports were helpful but only scratched the surface of discovery. Creating characters who could be my friends, who pulled me into their world to teach me things, brought me happiness that I found nowhere else. I had no ambition to show my writing to anyone. My work space in my bedroom was off limits. I taped a “no trespassing” sign to my typewriter.

In college, my why changed again. I wanted to read and learn from every great writer, including some peers in my creative writing classes. Arthur Miller, Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs were my favorites (a generational thing). When I compared my own writing with the super talented, I developed an anxiety that wouldn’t let me look in a mirror more than once a day.

Time passed. Married, with two wonderful kids, my wife and I took jobs as real estate agents, yet my muse was like a termite that kept burrowing deeper, looking for something. I wanted to give myself another chance at writing. By age 32, stealing time whenever possible, I managed to write and publish three novels. Two were reviewed in The New York Times, and one was made into a TV series. I thought of quitting my real estate job.
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"Lemons: In an Orchard" by David John Baer McNicholas (Author)

1/29/2022

Available on Amazon

Dear Reader,
I describe myself as a ghost hunting wizard who lives in a bus. I’m also a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts,
where I study creative writing. It’s an emotional education. When I say that I mean that it’s unnatural to try and separate ideas from
the feelings we have about them. I know that scientific/philosophical rigor claims to do just that, but positionality informs us that
this is impossible. Moreso, that claiming it diminishes the perspectives of the people we other. Enough didactic introductions, let’s
look at the book and the process of writing it.
Writing Lemons: In an Orchard was a deconstruction of my experience as a white man. It was a meditation on a person I
hated, his entire family seemed a train wreck I had to pour-over every scattered piece of bloody shrapnel. I had to feel his pain and
confusion, and get to the root of it. At its most personal this book is a story of an estranged father, himself a broken boy, whose
comforts of success and privilege dissolve in front of our eyes. How he is transformed by the things he thought he’d put to bed
informs the emotional story of the book. At the beginning of the book, the narrator is described as a pile of human remains torn to
pieces by wild animals. By the end of the book, one has to wonder if he isn’t more alive than that.
I wrote the novel in Santa Fe, NM, as my first fall here became my first winter. I was living in this Thor El Dorado shuttle
bus built on an E-350 cutaway. I woke up every day and wrote. These were the days of the dwindling public assistance money from
New Hampshire. Work was something in transition. I was writing, but not for an income. I was writing more for the outcome. Dr
Bronner washed me in the Santa Fe river everyday from July to December. That river, or an analog of it, made it into the novel. My
body was a mess when I got here. Years of chronic pain and parasomniac episodes, combined with mid-life collapse, unpacking
themselves. I walked everywhere with a gnarled, vine-twisted walking stick. Slowly. As one pedestrian in Arizona remarked to the
back of my head, “in the middle of the damn sidewalk.”
The inspiration for the novel came from a short drive I took out to San Diego and back. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do
with myself. I came out to Santa Fe to study at St. John’s College, but quickly disabused myself of that notion. I was thinking, ‘do I
go back or do I stay?’ I decided to visit the Pacific Ocean. On the way back to Santa Fe, I drove through massive citrus fields in
California. There were just lemons as far as I could see for miles. I thought, there’s a novel in there.
I ruminated on it for a month until I found my narrator. He’s a sick man, a jerk, although he doesn’t think so. He
monopolizes the text with his travails, lost on the lemon farm, peppering his narration with pseudo-intellectual right-wing bigotry
and personal recollections, the meanings of which he seems almost verging on apprehending. And then there are the dreams. The
fever dreams of a man left to exposure, infection, and starvation.
Of course, he meets some other characters, denizens of the lemon grove who guide him on his path to be re-united with his
soul, which has been searching for him for a long time, as he is an old man. In dreams, we often encounter children. Jung tells us that
these children are manifestations of our inner child. Each time I encountered a child in my own dreams, I felt drawn in by
innocence, only to be murdered in some mythical way. I have been given the death touch by a six year old vampire. I’ve been
stabbed in the neck by a toddler driving a tank. This mysterious child figure plays as gentle antagonist to the narrator.
The reality of the story is a warped construction anchored in the concrete voice of the narrator. From the beginning, you
learn not to trust him. As his story becomes more fantastic, his disbelief reads as a credible account. I wanted his truth to be complex,
told in lies and irony. The magical elements of the story, when discredited by the narrator, feel like the most concrete part of the
story. The physical rigors of the lemon orchard itself, an alien terrain. A dream of nudity.
I hope readers pick up on the humor of the story. It was fun to write and I definitely laughed at some of my own bullshit. I
let the world around me be a part of it. The story would have been incomplete without the conversations I had with friends while I
was writing it. I was parked at the Patrick Smith Park on East Alameda when a drum circle showed up and started making rhythms.
I wrote them into the story and then got out of the bus and danced while they drummed, around my cane, like a magic staff. Music is
healing. Stories are healing. The river is healing.
I could not have written this book without Santa Fe. Even though New Mexico is not mentioned once in the text, the
theme of healing which permeates the subtext is one that I found here. I would love to hear from readers of my novel. You can find a
contact page on my website: ghostofamerica.NET Until then, I’ll be in the bus.
Thanks for reading,

" The Tearing Apart" by Luisa Elena Kolker

11/24/2021

Avalible on Amazon

Luisa Elena Kolker is the author of "The Tearing Apart," an award-winning collection of poems published by Renegade Oracle Press (available on Amazon).

"For me, poetry is a mystical language that bridges the space between my ego consciousness and the unconscious undercurrents of my life. It is a way I commune with the dimensions of aliveness that defy rational containment. I write poetry to visit and receive the healing power of those dimensions.

"Poems usually come to me when I feel deeply moved by the beauty or pain of life. I hear a phrase and it stays with me until I write it down. Sometimes I don’t understand the phrase, but I sense that it has intelligence and power. Once I write it down, the phrase becomes a skeleton key that opens doors into my psyche. I allow the words to flow in the moment and then usually revise, expand, and contract the poem over a period of months or years. Sometimes a poem arrives whole and complete, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. It’s important to me that each word and sentence in my poems convey soul essence."
—Luisa Elena Kolker

Luisa Elena Kolker

Thank you for stopping by!

A Short Good Life: Her Father Tells Liza's Story of Facing Death

10/15/2021

It's unusual to access a child's mind during the magic years of childhood. It's rarer when the child is facing her death. Liza, an ardent child with a deep love of cows and the color purple was diagnosed with leukemia at age four and died two years later in 1996. Liza was an unusually expressive child and her parents, both child psychiatrists, were uniquely oriented to appreciate the richness of a child's mind. Through writing this book, Liza's father strove to reveal the inner world of a child's mind--and a parent's mind--as few other books can. At its center, this is the story of a child's psyche growing and striving to understand all she could of her experience, and of a small family coping with life's biggest challenges. It is a story of love's power to help a family cope and endure despite loss, and to grow, through darkness, back toward a full embrace of life. Through the process, the family emerges transformed, awed by the capacities of this child.