What are YOUR favorite books? What books impacted you as a child or continue to draw your interest?
When I was young, The Chronicles of Narnia were my favorite books. I probably read the entire series at least a hundred times. When The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was first announced, I got chills every time I watched the trailer. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy I adored the most. I look forward to the release of Dawn Treader the winter of 2010!
I'd definitely list Watership Down as an all-time favorite. Adams used the plight of a group of rabbits to tell a very touching and human story of survival and friendship. Those who've not read this book are really missing out on a classic.
When I was a teen, I discovered Anne McCaffrey's world of Pern. I loved The Dragonriders of Pern series. And while science fiction in nature, her books are relationship-driven. I credit The White Dragon as my inspiration for becoming an author. Considering the state of special effects, I think now would be a good time to turn these books into movies, too.
I've always been a fast reader, but I read Jurassic Park in a record two days. It was the ultimate page-turner, and I think they did a fabulous job with the movie.
Last on my list is a non-fiction book, The Five Love Languages. Chapman's creation is the ultimate relationship book and a must-read. We have several copies on our shelf that we loan out, and this book is always included with wedding gifts.
So what are some of your favorite books and why?
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
And Now For Something Completely Different...
Today - a French lecture on sheep-aircraft!
Some great stuff happening in the virtual world of books this week!
Even Storm Troopers need a little love!
Some great stuff happening in the virtual world of books this week!
Beth recommends some of her favorite writing books – Beth Groundwater
Here’s a blog that will hold your attention for hours! Thanks to Callista at SMS Book Reviews for the tip! Awful Library Books
Really great tips from Yvonne on using articles to market your book – Writers in the Sky
Have you signed up for the Muse Online Writer’s Conference October 14-18?
Details here- Muse Online Writers Conference
Yahoo Group signup here- Yahoo Muse Conference Group
Alyce talks about Book Blogger Appreciation Week September 14-18- At Home With Books
April found this great quiz – what type of crazy writer are you? (I was Tom Wolfe) – Café of Dreams
Walt discusses advertising vs. publicity and what it means to an author/publisher - View From the Publishing Trenches
Thanks once again to TexasRed Books for giving me the Humane Award!
And I FINALLY set up The Circle of Friends Group on FaceBook - had fans prodding me for one, and now they have it! The Circle of Friends on FaceBook
* MOVIE REVIEWS *
We plan to tackle the new Harry Potter next week.
In the meantime, here's some recent NetFlix pics-
Eagle Eye - B+ Much better than anticipated! And with a bit of a sci-fi twist. (SkyNet anyone?)
Knowing - B- This one was a solid A until the ending. We love the director and his visual style, and the whole numbers thing was intriguing. But *spoiler alert* Angels are in fact aliens? Just didn't buy the ending!
* PHOTO OF THE DAY *
Even Storm Troopers need a little love!
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The Thursday Excerpt - The Conductor
Today I welcome an incredibly talented writer who goes by the name of DgenRetEliteRabbit online.
"Rabbit" is one of the best unpublished writers I've discovered. Her style is gritty, tough, and raw, so it's not for the faint of heart. However, she conveys an incredible amount of feeling and description in just a few short sentences.
She has numerous works, but today I feature an excerpt from her novel, The Conductor. Please visit her site DgenRetEliteRabbit for more chapters and other works.
"Rabbit" is one of the best unpublished writers I've discovered. Her style is gritty, tough, and raw, so it's not for the faint of heart. However, she conveys an incredible amount of feeling and description in just a few short sentences.
She has numerous works, but today I feature an excerpt from her novel, The Conductor. Please visit her site DgenRetEliteRabbit for more chapters and other works.
The Conductor
The middle-aged secretary was staring at me from her desk, I could feel it. I took a deep breath and looked at the shining steel toes of my boots, thinking maybe she’d get bored of me and look at her typewriter or the fresh coffee stain on the front of her shirt. But she didn’t stop. I glanced up to cloudy sapphire eyes with red lines in the whites peering at me over pearlescent-rimmed reading glasses on a rainbow-beaded chain. The scrunched expression of dislike on her puffy face was palpable enough the moment I stepped into the offices, but now, she was just being rude.
My head jerked up and I sneered at her disdainfully. Her face twitched in response and her eyes planted themselves on the desktop. Her cheeks flushed red. I snorted and adjusted my position on the short difficult wood bench.
Barely the second Monday of the fiscal school year, and the Powers That Be already had me queued up for the shrink. Set one dumpster on fire your freshman year and they never forget! Geez.
I sat in the tiny waiting room that served the counselors offices in the administration building. These offices were right across the narrow hall from the nurses station and the Office of Administrations, whatever that meant anymore. Seems they just kept packing the kids in without a thought as to where and who and what anymore, accurate file keeping be damned.
This place was always so depressing. Grey and grey-green glossy paint, terrible foe-marbled mold-green tiles from the Fifties I guess, sound-buffering boards with a specific number of pinholes for the ceiling coupled with really old neon lights. Rust on the painted steel and long frosted bulbs flickering every few feet. The school board really went out of their way to make this place a definitive institution. Impressive.
Yeah, institution of learning. What a joke. Reminded me of jail or bedlam.
Building A1-AL, they called this particular structure of double decker cells posing as offices and to a lesser extent classrooms for the French course and the numerous Spanish classes. I still don’t know why the building was called A1-AL. None of the other buildings had such alpha-numeric names. Someone once posed that it was the first building of what used to be known as Abraham Lincoln High School. Except the school had never been called Abraham Lincoln. Just Pacific High. Another mystery of modern day high schooldom. Who cares.
I kicked out the heels of my boots, stretching my legs out straight, and crossed my ankles. Why on earth every single seat in any school had to be hard and uncomfortable–made out of injection-molded plastics that snapped like twigs under the influx of different weights and frames or out of what I could only figure was what happens when you deli-slice wood–why they had to be so cheap and blistering was beyond me.
However, the wooden ones left behind a bit of history; I would give these torture devices that much. Many students before me had left there mark on the bench I was planted on, and I couldn’t help tracing some of them. Kind of like cave paintings in a way. Graffiti dating back to probably the 1970's, if one looked hard enough for the ‘Disco Sucks’ or ‘Bay City Rollers O.K.!’ carved into the worn seat. Funny stuff. Bad jokes. Old prank phone numbers and disses. History unraveling in dead varnished wood.
Looking at the scrolled armrest, I could make out the name of this really nice guy from my freshman English class, carved almost Old English style into the dirty wood. Daniel Sanchez. Kid was a phenomenal comic artist. Could replicate James O’Barr’s stuff effortlessly. Did some amazing gear of his own too. Gave me a really nice copy of an Interview With The Vampire comic once. He was really nice, kinda cute too. Liked my stupid poetry and short stories, even wanted to ink some of my scenes into a book. His mom hated me though, thought I was gonna corrupt her son, full-on bible-beating Christian she was. Called me a heathen of Sodom or some such religious spunk. I only laughed.
I don’t know what happened to Danny, though. It seems he just disappeared one day, middle of sophomore year. I miss him. He understood me, in a way only certain teenagers understand other teenagers. Probably the only one who did in the entire school.
I traced my fingertip over the intricate D of Danny’s name a few times, absently smiling at it, thinking about his face and the ink-stains on his fingertips.
The secretary, Miss Cathy I think her name was, sighed heavily and squirmed in her hard little desk chair. Greying old mare, she was rather bulbous in certain parts of her physique, like all the fat accumulated in only these places and nowhere else. Namely her hips and ass. She could’ve used this bench I sat on better than my bony little butt could’ve. I snickered a little to myself. She didn’t look up but her hands adjusted her bra beneath her arm through the thin K-Mart pink t-shirt that showed too much of her armpit hair. Her hand just manipulating the underwire around like no one was there at all. The look on her face said the bra was pinching her. The look on my face surely said ‘I’m gonna barf.’
Third Period late bell rang and I jumped a little, lifting my eyes to the wall clock, ticking steadily like a bomb up near the ceiling.
Annoying sound, school clock ticking. Like everyone else in the world who ever met the public school system, I swore that second hand would skip backwards and force time to last for an extra five to fifteen minutes of this dreariness every day. Slowly bleeding life and energy from every kid what ever stumbled across the thresholds of a campus.
The middle-aged secretary was staring at me from her desk, I could feel it. I took a deep breath and looked at the shining steel toes of my boots, thinking maybe she’d get bored of me and look at her typewriter or the fresh coffee stain on the front of her shirt. But she didn’t stop. I glanced up to cloudy sapphire eyes with red lines in the whites peering at me over pearlescent-rimmed reading glasses on a rainbow-beaded chain. The scrunched expression of dislike on her puffy face was palpable enough the moment I stepped into the offices, but now, she was just being rude.
My head jerked up and I sneered at her disdainfully. Her face twitched in response and her eyes planted themselves on the desktop. Her cheeks flushed red. I snorted and adjusted my position on the short difficult wood bench.
Barely the second Monday of the fiscal school year, and the Powers That Be already had me queued up for the shrink. Set one dumpster on fire your freshman year and they never forget! Geez.
I sat in the tiny waiting room that served the counselors offices in the administration building. These offices were right across the narrow hall from the nurses station and the Office of Administrations, whatever that meant anymore. Seems they just kept packing the kids in without a thought as to where and who and what anymore, accurate file keeping be damned.
This place was always so depressing. Grey and grey-green glossy paint, terrible foe-marbled mold-green tiles from the Fifties I guess, sound-buffering boards with a specific number of pinholes for the ceiling coupled with really old neon lights. Rust on the painted steel and long frosted bulbs flickering every few feet. The school board really went out of their way to make this place a definitive institution. Impressive.
Yeah, institution of learning. What a joke. Reminded me of jail or bedlam.
Building A1-AL, they called this particular structure of double decker cells posing as offices and to a lesser extent classrooms for the French course and the numerous Spanish classes. I still don’t know why the building was called A1-AL. None of the other buildings had such alpha-numeric names. Someone once posed that it was the first building of what used to be known as Abraham Lincoln High School. Except the school had never been called Abraham Lincoln. Just Pacific High. Another mystery of modern day high schooldom. Who cares.
I kicked out the heels of my boots, stretching my legs out straight, and crossed my ankles. Why on earth every single seat in any school had to be hard and uncomfortable–made out of injection-molded plastics that snapped like twigs under the influx of different weights and frames or out of what I could only figure was what happens when you deli-slice wood–why they had to be so cheap and blistering was beyond me.
However, the wooden ones left behind a bit of history; I would give these torture devices that much. Many students before me had left there mark on the bench I was planted on, and I couldn’t help tracing some of them. Kind of like cave paintings in a way. Graffiti dating back to probably the 1970's, if one looked hard enough for the ‘Disco Sucks’ or ‘Bay City Rollers O.K.!’ carved into the worn seat. Funny stuff. Bad jokes. Old prank phone numbers and disses. History unraveling in dead varnished wood.
Looking at the scrolled armrest, I could make out the name of this really nice guy from my freshman English class, carved almost Old English style into the dirty wood. Daniel Sanchez. Kid was a phenomenal comic artist. Could replicate James O’Barr’s stuff effortlessly. Did some amazing gear of his own too. Gave me a really nice copy of an Interview With The Vampire comic once. He was really nice, kinda cute too. Liked my stupid poetry and short stories, even wanted to ink some of my scenes into a book. His mom hated me though, thought I was gonna corrupt her son, full-on bible-beating Christian she was. Called me a heathen of Sodom or some such religious spunk. I only laughed.
I don’t know what happened to Danny, though. It seems he just disappeared one day, middle of sophomore year. I miss him. He understood me, in a way only certain teenagers understand other teenagers. Probably the only one who did in the entire school.
I traced my fingertip over the intricate D of Danny’s name a few times, absently smiling at it, thinking about his face and the ink-stains on his fingertips.
The secretary, Miss Cathy I think her name was, sighed heavily and squirmed in her hard little desk chair. Greying old mare, she was rather bulbous in certain parts of her physique, like all the fat accumulated in only these places and nowhere else. Namely her hips and ass. She could’ve used this bench I sat on better than my bony little butt could’ve. I snickered a little to myself. She didn’t look up but her hands adjusted her bra beneath her arm through the thin K-Mart pink t-shirt that showed too much of her armpit hair. Her hand just manipulating the underwire around like no one was there at all. The look on her face said the bra was pinching her. The look on my face surely said ‘I’m gonna barf.’
Third Period late bell rang and I jumped a little, lifting my eyes to the wall clock, ticking steadily like a bomb up near the ceiling.
Annoying sound, school clock ticking. Like everyone else in the world who ever met the public school system, I swore that second hand would skip backwards and force time to last for an extra five to fifteen minutes of this dreariness every day. Slowly bleeding life and energy from every kid what ever stumbled across the thresholds of a campus.
©2008-2009 *DgenRetEliteRabbit
Original version and remainder of this chapter of The Conductor can be found here:The Conductor
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Author Tom Morrisey
This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing
Pirate Hunter Bethany House (July 1, 2009)
by Tom Morrisey
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Morrisey is a mountaineer, aviator, shipwreck diver, and explorer, who holds a Full Cave certification from the National Speleological Society - Cave Diving Section.
He has launched, edited or contributed to numerous national publications and is an award-winning adventure-travel writer. A popular speaker, he is also active in both evangelism and the arts. Morrisey earned an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University, and his fiction has been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines.
His first novel, Yucatan Deep (Zondervan, 2002) was a finalist for the Christy award, and he is the author of six novels, including Wind River and In High Places. In addition Tom has also written two nonfiction books: 20 American Peaks & Crags (Contemporary Books, 1978) and Wild by Nature (Baker Books, 2001). He and his family live in Orlando, Florida.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
High Seas Adventure Meets a High-Tech Quest for Pirate Gold West Indies, 18th century Young Ted Bascombe is rescued by notorious pirate Captain Henry Thatch, finding himself caught up in a world of crime, adventure, and a daily fight for freedom.... Key West, 21st century Marine archaeologist Greg Rhode embarks on a treasure-hunting expedition in the turquoise waters of the Florida Keys, but he's as beguiled by a beautiful diver with different-colored eyes as by the lure of pirate gold...The Hunt Is On! Interweaving these two stories, pro deep-sea diver Tom Morrisey spins a multilayered tale of two young men's quests to escape their past by losing themselves to adventure on the high seas. Romantic and thrilling, this unique novel explores the timeless truth that "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
If you would like to read the first chapter of Pirate Hunter, go HERE
The book link is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764203487
Pirate Hunter Bethany House (July 1, 2009)
by Tom Morrisey
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Morrisey is a mountaineer, aviator, shipwreck diver, and explorer, who holds a Full Cave certification from the National Speleological Society - Cave Diving Section.
He has launched, edited or contributed to numerous national publications and is an award-winning adventure-travel writer. A popular speaker, he is also active in both evangelism and the arts. Morrisey earned an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University, and his fiction has been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines.
His first novel, Yucatan Deep (Zondervan, 2002) was a finalist for the Christy award, and he is the author of six novels, including Wind River and In High Places. In addition Tom has also written two nonfiction books: 20 American Peaks & Crags (Contemporary Books, 1978) and Wild by Nature (Baker Books, 2001). He and his family live in Orlando, Florida.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
High Seas Adventure Meets a High-Tech Quest for Pirate Gold West Indies, 18th century Young Ted Bascombe is rescued by notorious pirate Captain Henry Thatch, finding himself caught up in a world of crime, adventure, and a daily fight for freedom.... Key West, 21st century Marine archaeologist Greg Rhode embarks on a treasure-hunting expedition in the turquoise waters of the Florida Keys, but he's as beguiled by a beautiful diver with different-colored eyes as by the lure of pirate gold...The Hunt Is On! Interweaving these two stories, pro deep-sea diver Tom Morrisey spins a multilayered tale of two young men's quests to escape their past by losing themselves to adventure on the high seas. Romantic and thrilling, this unique novel explores the timeless truth that "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
If you would like to read the first chapter of Pirate Hunter, go HERE
The book link is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764203487
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