Blog Archives
So You Want To Be A Teacher
So You Want To Be A Teacher, by Linda Soules, is an engaging and informative career guide for children ages eight to fourteen. The book begins with a powerful reminder that every doctor, astronaut, chef, engineer, and leader was once taught by someone. From there, Soules presents teaching as the profession behind every other profession. The author gives young readers an honest look at the patience, preparation, flexibility, and care required to help students learn and grow.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its realistic portrayal of a teacher’s daily life. Readers follow a teacher from the quiet classroom early in the morning through lessons, classroom challenges, and evening grading at home. The book celebrates the rewarding moment when a struggling student finally understands something, but it also discusses tiring days, disrupted lessons, and the work teachers complete outside school hours. This balanced approach helps children understand that teaching can be difficult while still being deeply meaningful.
The book is also filled with practical and age-appropriate information. Young readers learn about lesson plans, manipulatives, classroom management, teacher training, and the importance of asking thoughtful questions. They are introduced to many different teaching careers, including kindergarten, high-school science, special education, and robotics coaching. Profiles of influential educators such as Anne Sullivan, Jaime Escalante, Maria Montessori, and Confucius add historical interest, while the glossary, fun facts, and career-readiness questions make the book especially useful for home or classroom learning.
Soules writes in a conversational tone that respects young readers and never talks down to them. The colorful illustrations make the information approachable, although a few visual details may appear inconsistent or oddly shaped. Even so, the strong writing and thorough research make this an excellent introduction to education as a career. So You Want To Be A Teacher is highly recommended for children who enjoy helping others understand new ideas, as well as for parents and educators who want to encourage thoughtful career exploration. It is both a practical guide and a sincere tribute to the teachers who shape lives one lesson, question, and encouraging word at a time.
Pages: 42 | ASIN : B0H9CNJM5W
The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought
Wendy Walker’s The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought is a strategic argument for treating business-to-business marketing with the creative ambition, commercial rigor, and human understanding its economic importance warrants. Walker organizes the book around “buyability,” which she defines as a brand’s durable readiness to be recalled and chosen when a buyer’s need finally arises. That concept gives coherence to the book’s wide-ranging discussion of positioning, category design, demand generation, measurement, team structure, artificial intelligence and privacy. Rather than presenting marketing as a sequence of isolated campaigns, Walker describes it as the sustained construction of confidence across long buying cycles and complex groups of decision-makers.
The book is particularly persuasive when it examines the psychology of B2B purchasing. Walker shows that corporate decisions may be supported by data, procurement procedures and financial models, but they’re still made by people managing professional risk, reputation and accountability. Her observation that “The decision may be shared, but the risk rarely is” neatly captures why reassurance, identity and emotional credibility matter alongside evidence. This human-centered perspective also strengthens her critique of generic product messaging. Buyers aren’t simply evaluating functionality. They’re considering whether a choice can be explained internally, defended under pressure and trusted when circumstances change.
Walker’s strongest practical contribution is her insistence that brand and demand, marketing and sales, and creativity and performance are interconnected parts of the same commercial system. She replaces the conventional linear funnel with a loop in which buyers repeatedly return, consult new stakeholders and test whether a brand’s claims remain coherent. Positioning, in this model, must be useful throughout the organization, not merely polished for an external campaign. Briefs must create space for judgment, measurement must recognize effects that develop over time, and performance creative must build memory as well as generate immediate activity. The book’s later chapters extend this reasoning thoughtfully into AI and data use, arguing that technology can accelerate production and analysis while leaving responsibility, restraint, and strategic choice firmly with people.
Written in direct, polished prose, The B2B Reset functions as both a leadership framework and a working standard for modern marketing organizations. Its chapters are concise and deliberately cumulative, repeatedly connecting creative quality to commercial outcomes such as pricing power, trust, preference and ease of selection. Walker’s statement that “Proof establishes parity but purpose creates preference” summarizes the book’s central conviction: evidence earns consideration, while meaning makes a brand worth choosing. For marketing leaders, strategists, creative teams and revenue executives, the book offers a disciplined vocabulary for building B2B brands that are distinctive, internally defensible and memorable long before a purchase is imminent.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0H4SGQXTT
Stay Adventurous
Charlie, Bob and Me (Harry) Meet Puggles follows a koala, a wombat, and their Australian animal friends as they help a lost baby echidna search for his mother and discover that family can be found in unexpected places. What inspired you to make belonging and found family central themes in Puggles’ story?
Books can be amazing teaching tools, and some young people struggle with belonging, fitting in, and acceptance; you don’t have to be biologically connected to be family.
Why did you choose to represent Puggles’ disability through his malformed feet and difficulty digging?
With our ever-changing environment, I have found that our wildlife is also subject to malformations and disabilities. I felt that using malformed feet in an echidna, was an interesting way to teach young people that even though we are different, we can still be successful and live a full life while overcoming challenges. This is very important as echidnas rely on their back feet to establish new dens.
How did you balance teaching children about Australian wildlife with keeping the story adventurous and entertaining?
I have always liked to use many opportunities as teaching moments. By telling the story from the animals’ perspective, I feel that the story was able to stay adventurous and entertaining without coming across as too educational.
Which character was the most enjoyable to write, and did any of their personalities change during the writing process?
I always like to write about Harry. He is a gruff but very lovable character who keeps the group together. He is the one who always comes up with the big ideas. He is always so brave and stoic. It was good to write him up in a different light when he admitted to his fear of the dark and small spaces.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Join Charlie, Bob and Harry, on an exciting adventure to help Puggles, a young echidna separated from his family after the Big Wet. Puggles, with his unique challenges and positive attitude, embarks on a journey to find his missing family with the help of his newfound friends. As they search high and low along the riverbank and surrounding bushland, encountering friendly faces and overcoming obstacles, Puggles learns the true meaning of friendship and family.
A delightful story that celebrates diversity, resilience and the bonds that unite us all in the Australian bushland.
A Survivor
Creatures of the Night follows an orphan fleeing captivity into the Yukon, where she finds a community of women and confronts human predators and a monstrous presence stalking them. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve wanted to write horror – and a werewolf horror in particular – since I’ve been writing. I was a little kid thinking about how scary werewolves are. But what scared me about them was not a big, menacing dog. I never really got into the stories about the person who has the werewolf curse. For me, I was always more sympathetic toward, or I was more scared for, whoever the other character was. I really loved The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. It scared me so much as a kid. That centralized the victims, not the predator, as werewolf stories tend to do. Talbot and such. We’re supposed to feel for them. And in the other movies, Jenny Agutter’s character, or Emily Perkins’ Brigitte, or Dee Wallace in The Howling, I was always so much more on their side or feeling for them because here was someone they loved and trusted who turned into an out-of-control beast and tried to kill them in their own homes. Of course, that is absolutely a very real and horrifying situation for many women and children out there in the world, especially women and children. So it had to be young women. And of course all kids go through puberty, but for women it’s this huge transition around them where they go from innocent, cute little doll to something to be preyed upon and sexualised, sometimes consciously but also unconsciously, and by members of their own family. The men and women in their own homes suddenly start treating them differently. All of a sudden the world is full of predators, and they are the prey. And it happens so young for them, you know, you listen to women talk about the first time a family member sexualised them, either by accident or deliberately, and it’s like, they’re kids. Children. I think that Little Red Riding Hood takes on a whole new meaning when you know that. The coat being red is a metaphor: the predator, the girl going out on her own. It’s such a vulnerable time.
So I had that. Little Red Riding Hood was the big one, but all of the stories that have used lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence. I am a huge fan of Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, and I love Ginger Snaps the movie, but I wanted to bring the concept back to the Red Riding Hood origins, where adolescence makes the girl a predator, which I think is a little unfair, and instead makes them vulnerable to society’s predators. And I needed a setting where all of that could come together, so to speak, with the men everywhere, and religion, and the authorities, all these patriarchal, male-dominated spheres. So a mining boom was perfect. And when I found Donald Trump’s connection to Klondike – his grandfather Frederick was a vile, sex-trafficking pimp and predator; that’s where the Trump fortune started – I had to, because who is the most prominent face of a predator of children today? Of course. Epstein’s number 1 fan and friend. Plus Yukon, Dawson City, it’s so remote, so cold, so isolated. I love Canada’s landscapes. I spend as much time as I can there, and I always feel like I’m going to be inspired by the surroundings. And I did follow the White Trail up to Dawson City, by car – I’m not crazy – and I couldn’t think of a better, or worse, situation to put these women in.
How did you approach writing Eliza’s transformation from the frightened Miss Laura into someone capable of defining her own identity?
As much as I love them and they are an inspiration, I’ve also always been a little offended by the metaphor of adolescence turning a girl into a monster. You see it a lot. Sometimes it’s done beautifully well, with great sensitivity, but I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to have it, yes, make her vulnerable to predation, but also that feminine rage that comes upon so many girls in puberty; that’s a strength. That’s a defensive mechanism. And with everything I just described, how society just turns on so many girls, of course they lash out. Of course they scream and slam doors and go nuts. I wanted it to both make Eliza vulnerable but also be the defining difference that makes her a survivor and helps her stand up against the dangers.
The women in the novel have remarkably distinct voices and relationships; how did you develop them as individuals while maintaining the sense of a shared found family?
I worked in a women’s prison for three years as a teacher. I taught creative writing and various other literacy-based courses, and while I would never directly depict anyone’s personality with whom I met in there, there were certain dynamics among the women that were really inspiring. The depths of their character. It sounds silly, but women in prison are not only a cohort that are demonized, painted in very simple dimensions, but stupidly sexualised by predator filmmakers as well. But found families were everywhere in there. I saw women who hated each other come to one another’s aid if a vulnerable moment should have come upon them in the presence of the guards or something; the need to protect each other from predation – which the screws in that prison absolutely were – came before any other disputes between the women. It was amazing. Society never looks deep enough to see how amazing the dynamics are in a women’s prison. And who else gets treated like that? Sex workers. In horror especially, the genre has a lot to answer for; the sexual women always die horribly, and they’re never really explored. They don’t have origins or destinations. They’re just victim one, victim two, and the way they’re written, especially if you go back to slasher movies from say twenty to twenty-five years ago, there was almost a fetishised delight or voyeurism in watching these characters die.
So it was very important to get their individuality. I spent a lot of time on that. Who are these women, where do they want to be, where did they come from? I had a great cache of experiences to draw from since the prison.
Was the creature intended to represent the predatory behavior of the men in the story, or do you see it as having a different symbolic meaning?
It was a culmination of the predation by the men, yes, and the religious institutions, and the authorities. Once you open that door, you see it everywhere. Structural predation. Not just enabling predators, but maintaining the vulnerability of their prey. That’s why I had to have a culturally diverse cast. Because as bad as it could be in a Catholic orphanage, there were also residential schools, there were brothels run by Trump-esque men, there were police who used their authority and their positions to prevent people from protecting themselves while not protecting anyone as they should. And of course the fetishisation of Shuya’s culture. You see how a woman like Tigra could occur. I’m not asking for anyone to sympathise with Tigra, really, because she’s ultimately doing her share of awful things, but you can see how a person like that could be created by a world so fiercely predatory.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
They don’t know she is being followed. A beast out of mythology will stop at nothing to possess her forever. Or destroy her and everything she loves.
A Small Memory
Robert Dyer’s A Small Memory is a heartfelt coming-of-age novel about friendship, responsibility, and the lasting effects of trauma. Set in Ohio during the 1970s, it follows Mike Youngstown, an eighteen-year-old college basketball player who moves into a group home with his best friend, Ted Dirksen. The two young men work as live-in counselors for adults with intellectual disabilities while balancing school, relationships, and their first real taste of independence. Their arrangement begins as an exciting new chapter, but it becomes far more demanding after Ray, a troubled new resident, enters the home.
The relationship between Mike and Ted gives the novel its emotional center. They tease each other constantly, compete over everything, and communicate with the ease of people who’ve known each other for years. Beneath the jokes, though, there’s genuine devotion. Early in the book, Ted tells Mike, “We’re in this together,” a simple statement that becomes increasingly meaningful as their lives change. Dyer makes their friendship feel lived-in through private nicknames, late-night conversations, petty arguments, and small acts of loyalty. Because that bond is established so carefully, the later scenes carry real emotional force.
The group home setting also gives the story warmth and depth. Stuart, Mark, Paul, John, Kevin, and Ray aren’t treated as a single interchangeable group. Each has his own habits, fears, abilities, and relationships. One especially revealing moment comes when Stuart resists a job promotion because he’s afraid success will separate him from his friends. He finally admits, “I don’t want to be alone.” Moments like this show how independence can be both a goal and a frightening prospect. They also push Mike to become more patient and observant, even when his confidence tells him he already understands the people around him.
Mike’s narration is direct, energetic, and emotionally open. He can be protective and generous, but he’s also impulsive, stubborn, and convinced that determination can solve nearly anything. After Ted suffers a devastating brain injury, that confidence turns into guilt and a desperate desire to repair what has been damaged. The second half of the novel follows Mike as he tries to support Ted’s recovery while holding on to basketball, college, and his relationship with Karen. At times Mike’s thoughts circle repeatedly around blame and forgiveness, but that repetition suits a character who can’t simply reason his way out of grief. His growth comes from learning that caring for someone doesn’t always mean controlling what happens to them.
A Small Memory is a tender story about the many forms friendship can take after life changes it. Its most affecting scenes are often quiet ones, such as a returned hug, a remembered nickname, or a familiar joke emerging through confusion. The novel handles painful material with compassion while still making room for humor, romance, and the ordinary messiness of college life. Dyer’s book asks what it means to remain loyal when a person can no longer return to the life everyone expected for them. Mike’s answer isn’t perfect, but it’s deeply human: he stays, adapts, and keeps choosing the friendship they built together.
Pages: 304 | ASIN : B0H6GQ6SW6
The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango
Devil’s Tango is a sprawling political-action thriller built around secret organizations, military intelligence, elite assassins, experimental research, and a conspiracy that reaches into public institutions. The story opens at a funeral where veteran operative Kai Lovac discovers that his friend’s death may be connected to the Third Estate, a hidden network that influences governments and controls people through money, leverage, and carefully placed agents. From there, the plot pulls medical student and former pilot Sophie Allard into Lovac’s investigation. Sophie is already fighting to preserve her career when she’s accused of a crime she didn’t commit, and her search for the truth soon becomes tangled with Lovac’s hunt for Dossier 1627, the mysterious Professor Milo Anderson, and the secrets surrounding Project Afterburner. The book establishes its dangerous world immediately, filling even a chapel with armed mourners, concealed loyalties, and the expectation that violence could erupt at any moment.
The book’s greatest strength is its momentum. Scenes move quickly from hospitals and military hearings to covert bases, private estates, aircraft, underground laboratories, and heavily guarded political events. Lovac approaches each environment as a tactical puzzle, constantly studying exits, body language, weapons, and possible threats. Sophie brings a different kind of energy. She’s impulsive, compassionate, stubborn, and highly capable, which makes her a lively counterweight to Lovac’s controlled intensity. Their uneasy partnership gives the story much of its personality. They argue, withhold information, rescue each other, and slowly develop trust without losing the friction that makes their conversations entertaining. The large supporting cast can take some concentration to track, but the shifting alliances suit a story in which nearly everyone has a hidden connection or competing agenda.
Readers of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne novels will recognize the book’s fascination with concealed identities, compromised institutions, specialized operatives, and conspiracies layered inside other conspiracies. Lovac shares Bourne’s ability to enter a room and instinctively calculate danger, though he’s more settled in his identity and more closely tied to the shadowy professional world pursuing him. The novel also has something in common with Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp books, particularly in its mixture of political power struggles and direct, tactical action. Still, Devil’s Tango gives its story a distinct flavor through Sophie’s medical and aviation background, the almost ceremonial culture of the Assassins Guild, and the Third Estate’s preference for manipulating systems.
The novel ends with several major revelations and victories while leaving the larger struggle open. Sophie gains more control over her future, Lovac returns to the Guild with valuable leverage, and hidden identities inside the Third Estate finally come into view. That ending captures what the book does best: it treats trust as something dangerous, valuable, and constantly renegotiated. The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango is an ambitious thriller with a dense plot, cinematic action, and characters whose relationships matter as much as the secrets they’re chasing. It’ll appeal most to readers who enjoy long conspiracies, tactical detail, morally complicated alliances, and endings that open the door to a larger conflict.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0GXXCZT6X
Creative Journey
An Era in Anddemar is an epic science fantasy in which godlike Guardian Powers watch over nature, love, the entire galactic community, and the mysterious realm of the Dreaming. What was the inspiration for the story?
As happened with Tolkien, the ’tale grew in the telling’ and as such, was a journey of discovery rather than invention. I had to get myself out of the way, so to speak, to receive what was welling up from the depths of the World Soul in the form of a new myth for our time. I became a kind of mediator, or holding vessel for an overwhelmingly powerful creative drive to help birth this myth. What initially triggered the vision of Anddemar was a powerful dream I had decades ago, which featured a Goddess at the heart of a galaxy, where she was protecting and guiding children across a plain of broken glass. From thereon, visions, imagination and inspiration took over as an entire galactic community – and the unique threat they faced – came into clearer focus. It was as if I was eavesdropping and sightseeing, then recording what I saw, felt, tasted, smelled, overheard and touched. My other main source of inspiration was my deep love for the works of classic mythopoeic authors, including E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, David Lindsay, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams; hence there are homages to all of these in the book.
What makes Sir Jaide the right character to guide readers through such a vast galaxy?
As ’the foremost of Anddemar’s knights’, Sir Jaide is passionate, noble, intense, brave, brooding, impulsive, empathic and kind. As such, he perfectly embodies everything that the bland Grey enemy of Anddemar is not. He represents both Anddemar’s active resistance to the invading Greyness, as well as the creative fire, decency, chivalry, and deep love of beauty, communal solidarity, poetry, and Nature that permeate Anddemar as an interwoven network and advanced cosmic consciousness. He’s also one of the few able to journey into the Dreaming – the deepest realm of Anddemar – and the Ring, which he alone wields, is able to take him instantly anywhere in the galaxy. That makes him the ideal guide, not only to and throughout other worlds, but also into the inner sanctuary of the soul, since he’s also prone to deep reflection in his endless quest for insight and deeper understanding. Above all, it’s Sir Jaide’s passionate love for Anddemar – as a living web of stars and beings – that deeply enfolds him in the galaxy’s beating heart.
How did you balance science fiction, fantasy, mythology, and spirituality without letting one overwhelm the others?
It just naturally panned out that way. As a new mythology, the creative journey leaned toward a merging of vision, science, soul, Nature, and art into a seamless whole that reflected an advanced, holistic consciousness and intricate tapestry of relationships. Myths always unify through the alchemy of imagination, because they arise from the uttermost depths of soul, or what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’, as a timeless union of spirit and substance, eternal and temporal, fire and ice, lunar subtlety and solar intensity.
What do you hope readers experience emotionally while spending time in Anddemar?
I hope they enjoy immersing themselves in the richly detailed worlds, the vast mythology, the unique human and non-human characters, their relationships and solidarity, their struggles, challenges, journeys, battles and triumphs. I hope they feel a breathless sense of wonder as they explore a galaxy pulsing with music, passion, love and mystery. I hope they awaken to an understanding that evil, in contrast, is something banal, ugly, monotonous, empty, and an enemy of the ‘Great Dance’ of life. I hope they rediscover their own love of beauty, poetry, Nature, community, and their capacity to contribute to all that is authentic, decent, truthful, and life-enhancing. I hope they enjoy an experience of the artistry and beauty of language – of how language can become music of the soul – and a celebration of the rhythmic pulse of life embraced as a grand symphony and vehicle of transcendent Mystery.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Sanphire | Website | Amazon
A lifeless Greyness is threatening the living spiral galaxy Anddemar, unsettling Nature, dimming stars, fuelling tyranny, unleashing destruction, and disrupting the Great Dance of the Heavens. In response, a colourful alliance – including an exiled Shapemage, wormholes that channel music and poetry, shamans, the Grail, and a marooned band of Earth scientists – helps to repel this enemy of Anddemar’s enduring marriage of dark and light. And weaving through it all is the exquisite love between the foremost of Anddemar’s knights and the Vidar Quain of the Dreaming. An Era in Anddemar is a groundbreaking, vast mythology for lovers of breathless Romance, epic high stakes, compelling characters, richly detailed worlds, unexpected twists, and the poetic artistry of language.
