Blog Archives
Fly Stone, Fly
Fly Stone, Fly by Dust Kunkel is a feral, river-haunted dark fantasy about Clayton Bergmann, a boy left alone in the Idaho wilderness after his parents disappear, who grows into grief, prophecy, and revenge with a foul-mouthed dog named Dammit, a Shakespeare-soaked mind, and a family curse snapping at his heels. The story moves from survival tale to Western Gothic blood-feud, with Big Jim looming as both villain and nightmare, and with stoneflies, river water, old stories, and bad dogs carrying more meaning than they first seem to bear.
I admired how strange this book is willing to be. Its voice has burrs on it: funny, wounded, profane, lyrical, and sometimes gloriously overgrown. Clayton narrates like someone trying to lash a broken raft together while already in the rapids, and that urgency gives the novel its pulse. The Shakespeare references could have felt ornamental, but here, they’re weighty, private, and handled often. The book’s best passages do not merely describe wilderness; they make the canyon feel sentient, accusatory, almost liturgical.
What I enjoyed most was the book’s refusal to sand down pain into easy nobility. Clayton’s loneliness is not pretty. His friendships are not tidy. Dammit, Lina, MK, and the rest feel carved from contradictions: loyal and dangerous, comic and damaged, ridiculous and mythic. The novel’s maximal style asks for patience; it can wander and double back. But that excess is also part of its charm.
The target audience is readers who want dark fantasy, Western Gothic, revenge fantasy, mythic coming-of-age, and literary fantasy with a rough comic streak. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s myth-in-the-modern-world sensibility or Stephen King’s gift for giving childhood terror a local address will find something kin here they enjoy, though Kunkel’s voice is more backwoods-baroque and river-drunk.
Pages: 498 | ASIN : B0DTDDG3T8
There Is An Unseen World
Shadow Walkers follows a married couple who are pulled into a spiritual war in which gifted women and their paladin partners answer to an old sacred order. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
There is an unseen world, not just something whispered about in sermons, but something real, organized, and ancient. This unseen world does have rules, hierarchy, and even strategy. So, to counterbalance this I came up with the concept of gifted women and their paladins. Theirs was a blend of faith, responsibility, and partnership.
And then I asked the more personal question: what would that kind of calling do to a marriage? Because at its core, Shadow Walkers isn’t just about demons. It’s about two people who love each other deeply, trying to navigate a life that keeps asking more of them than feels fair. That tension—that “we didn’t sign up for this, but we’re here anyway”—was really the spark.
Lisa is portrayed as capable but also uncertain and burdened. What drew you to writing a leader who wrestles with doubt?
Because everyone has flaws and strengths. Lisa’s strength isn’t that she’s fearless—it’s that she feels the weight of every decision and keeps going anyway. She knows people can get hurt based on what she chooses. She knows she doesn’t have all the answers. And yet… she still steps forward. It mirrors faith in a way. You don’t always feel certain, but you move forward because you believe you’re being called to.
The story shifts between intense action and moments of humor and tenderness. How do you approach balancing those tones?
I’ve been in combat, in Vietnam. Conflicts don’t happen in one tone. Even in the middle of something terrifying, someone cracks a joke. Someone reaches for a hand. Someone says something completely ridiculous just to break the tension.
Jason, especially, became my anchor for that balance, and then the quieter moments—the tenderness, the marriage, the little bits of normal life—they’re not breaks from the story. They are the reason the story matters. If you don’t care about the relationship, the stakes don’t land.
Who do you most hope connects with this book—fans of fantasy, readers of Christian fiction, or both?
I wrote Shadow Walkers for readers who want action, mystery, supernatural tension, and a little pinch of romance. But they also want meaning underneath it. Readers who enjoy a good battle scene and a conversation about purpose. Readers who laugh at a well-timed joke and then sit quietly with something deeper a page later. And maybe, most of all, I wrote it for people who just want a story about love that holds steady, even when everything else gets a little apocalyptic.
Author Links: Website | Amazon
But the rules have changed.
When the team’s spiritual gifts refuse to go dormant after a routine mission, Lisa knows a “great evil upheaval” is coming. The summons arrives from the regal Dorinda Fletcher: the team must deploy to Haiti. A powerful bokor named Alqadim has risen, commanding an army of the possessed, ancient demons, and a relentless horde of the undead.
To fight a physical war in a spiritual realm, the Gifted are joined by their Paladins—husbands and protectors armed with high-tech, non-lethal weaponry designed to incapacitate the possessed without taking innocent lives.
The Face of Expression 3: Fall of A King
The Face of Expression 3: Fall of a King by Aaron Woodson is a sprawling, deeply personal poetry collection about faith, masculinity, love, Black identity, heartbreak, endurance, and spiritual repair. It moves like a long testimony, beginning with surrender in “Chess With God,” swelling into declarations like “Leading With Love,” “Black By Popular Demand,” and “Heart of A Lion,” then circling through romance, loneliness, self-worth, social pain, fatherhood, exhaustion, and legacy before arriving at the title poem, “Fallen Kings,” and the quieter ache of “Swan Song.” The book feels less like a neat, curated volume and more like a life poured straight onto the page, sometimes polished, sometimes raw, but almost always emotionally direct.
I felt the force of that in poems like “Still on My Feet,” where the speaker is bruised but refuses to retreat, and in “Quitting,” where the honesty turns darker, wearier, and more vulnerable. Woodson writes often from the posture of a king, a soldier, a lover, a believer, but the most moving moments come when the crown slips a little and I can see the tired man underneath it. In “Anchor,” the prayer isn’t ornamental. It sounds like someone genuinely close to breaking, asking God to hold him in place before the storm takes him. That kind of naked need gives the collection its heartbeat.
Woodson’s style is conversational, repetitive, sometimes sermon-like, and he often leans into big declarations rather than subtle turns. I admired the sheer openness of the voice. Poems like “Waves” and “Pilot” stretch an idea almost playfully until it becomes metaphor, memory, flirtation, joke, and testimony all at once. “Black By Popular Demand” has a proud, pulsing confidence that feels communal rather than merely personal, while “Hello Handsome” turns self-affirmation into something funny, sensual, and strangely tender. The ideas in the book are not shy ones. Love heals. God rescues. Blackness is beautiful. Men hurt. People fail each other. Grace remains.
By the end, I felt like I’d spent time with someone determined to bless the wounds that shaped him, not deny them. The Face of Expression 3 isn’t a delicate book, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s loud, searching, romantic, wounded, faithful, proud, and full of hard-earned hope. This collection works best when read as a testimony in motion, not as a pristine literary object. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy confessional, faith-centered poetry with a strong spoken-word current, especially those drawn to reflections on Black manhood, resilience, love, and spiritual recovery.
Pages: 414 | ISBN : 1953526322
Tied To Something Older Than You Are
Daughter of Ash and Bone follows a chemist who inherits a strange Norse pendant and finds herself pulled into a world of tokens, gods, dreams, and old violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was drawn to the Brísingamen myth and the conflict between Loki and Heimdall—there’s a tension there that feels unresolved in a really interesting way.
I wanted to take that dynamic and reframe it by placing a woman at the center of the story as Odin—someone who isn’t just affected by that power but becomes the point it revolves around. That shift opened up a lot of questions about control, identity, and what it costs to be tied to something older than you are.
Alice begins as a grounded, practical chemist. What interested you about placing someone so rooted in logic into a mythic conflict?
I come from a scientific background, so I’m used to thinking in terms of logic and proof.
Alice starts from the same place. She doesn’t believe in the impossible—until she’s forced to confront it.
That shift gave me a way to explore mythology through resistance instead of acceptance, which feels like a fresher perspective for readers.
Beckett and Alice’s relationship grows alongside danger rather than apart from it. Why was that balance important to you?
I wanted to take a different approach to romance. Alice and Beckett start as friends, with a real sense of trust already in place.
So, when things become dangerous, their relationship doesn’t fall apart—it deepens. Instead of struggling to hold on to each other, their connection is what helps them move forward.
That felt more grounded to me, and more reflective of how some people actually respond under pressure.
Can you give us a peek inside the next book in the Ravens and Runes Saga? Where will it take readers?
The next book goes deeper—both into the mythology and into the consequences of what’s already been set in motion.
The world opens, but it also becomes more dangerous. What seemed contained starts to spread, and the lines between who can be trusted and who can’t begin to blur.
Alice is no longer just reacting—she must make choices that carry real weight. And some of those choices don’t have clean outcomes.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | SRamseyBooks.com
ODIN CLAIMS.
AND SHE’S CAUGHT BETWEEN GODS.
Alice Reed built her life on control—routine, logic, certainty.
Until a package arrives from a man who died centuries too late.
Inside: a pendant pulsing with impossible power.
Now storms follow her.
Shadows move.
Reality bends.
And the truth is worse than magic—
she’s been pulled into a war between Norse gods.
The pendant isn’t a gift.
It’s a weapon.
And it’s choosing her.
As her power grows, so does the cost.
She’s stronger. Faster. Changing.
But the deeper she’s pulled into the war, the more her life begins to fracture—
including the one person she trusts most.
Because in a world of gods and monsters,
even love can be used against her.
Loki is rising.
Odin is waiting.
And if Alice can’t control what’s awakening inside her—
she won’t just lose herself.
She’ll burn the world.
Perfect for fans of American Gods and Lore
Previously published as A Legacy of Ravens.
Lucky Storm: A Romantic Suspense Thriller
Lucky Storm by E.K. Rose is a romantic suspense thriller about Stormé LaChance, a successful woman in her 50s whose life is shaken by a calculated fraud scheme, old betrayals, and dangerous romantic entanglements. What begins with a chance encounter with Emile quickly becomes part of a larger con involving identity theft, corporate sabotage, revenge, and secrets tied to Stormé’s past. As the plot widens, private investigator Maurice Constantine enters the story, bringing both investigative skill and a second-chance romantic current that gives the book its emotional center.
The book doesn’t treat romance as something reserved for the young or untouched by history. Stormé is grown, accomplished, guarded, lonely, sensual, and still figuring herself out. That felt refreshing. The romantic suspense genre can sometimes lean into danger to the point where the characters start to feel like chess pieces, but here the author keeps returning to Stormé’s inner weather: her doubt, her desire, her need to trust, and her fear of being fooled again. It gave the thriller pieces more weight because the threat was not just money or reputation. It was dignity. It was the awful feeling of realizing someone got close enough to use your softness against you.
The author makes bold choices, especially in shifting between romance, crime, family drama, and steamy intimacy. The book moves fast and goes big. The villains are tangled in personal motives, the betrayals stack up, and the emotional temperature stays high. I found that entertaining. Rose clearly knows the kind of story she’s telling. This isn’t a cold procedural. It’s a romantic suspense thriller with heat in the room, secrets in the walls, and a heroine who has to reclaim the story people keep trying to write over her. The writing is direct and accessible, with a soap-opera pull that makes it easy to keep turning pages.
I would recommend Lucky Storm to readers who enjoy romantic suspense with mature characters, high-stakes betrayal, second chances, and a strong blend of passion and crime. It will especially appeal to readers who want a heroine in midlife who is still desirable, complicated, and capable of starting over. If you want a story with romance, danger, family secrets, and emotional payoff, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0FLTPFKGW
Every Place Held A Story
Question: Whispers of Blue Ridge follows a young woman tied to her family’s wealth and their North Georgia winery as she finds a connection with a charming rodeo rider. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Nina’s Answer: The inspiration for Whispers of Blue Ridge began during my time as an author-in-residence in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Spending two months there allowed me to fully absorb the rhythm of the area, the landscape, the community, and the feeling that something was always just beneath the surface, as if every place held a story.
Being surrounded by vineyards, local history, and the strong presence of the annual rodeo sparked the idea of bringing two very different worlds together. The vineyard represents legacy, tradition, and the weight of family expectations, while the rodeo embodies independence, discipline, and a life constantly in motion. That contrast became the foundation for the relationship at the heart of the novel.
From there, the story grew into an exploration of how the past shapes us, especially when it’s tied to secrets, and what happens when those truths can no longer stay hidden.
Question: What drew you to Blue Ridge as the setting for this story?
Nina’s Answer: What drew me to Blue Ridge as the setting was, in many ways, the idea of contrast. After writing five internationally set novels filled with diverse cultures and far-reaching landscapes, I felt a strong pull to bring the story home, to the United States, but in a place that still felt distinctly different from my own everyday life by the sea.
Blue Ridge offered that shift. The mountains carry a different rhythm, a different pace, and a sense of rooted history that contrasts beautifully with coastal living. It allowed me to explore a new kind of atmosphere while still grounding the story in something familiar.
That change in setting also signaled a new direction. While my previous books traveled across the world, Whispers of Blue Ridge begins a story that is more contained, more intimate, and deeply connected to place… where the landscape and the community become as integral to the story as the characters themselves.
Question: Do you think love in this book is more about attraction or about healing?
Nina’s Answer: I think the romantic love in Whispers of Blue Ridge begins with attraction, but it ultimately becomes something much deeper rooted in healing. There’s an element of opposites attracting… Jake lives a more transient, independent life, while Savannah is deeply tied to her home and her family’s legacy.
What draws them together at first is that contrast, that sense of curiosity about someone so different. But as they begin to peel back the layers, it becomes clear that their differences are exactly what allow them to connect. Because they’ve built such different ways of protecting themselves, they don’t trigger each other’s defenses in the usual ways. Instead, they’re able to see past them.
At its core, their relationship is shaped by shared loss and unspoken grief. What they begin to recognize in each other isn’t just attraction… it’s something familiar under the surface. That recognition allows them to truly see one another, and in doing so, they begin to find a sense of healing… not just through each other, but within themselves.
Question: What do you hope romance readers take away from Whispers of Blue Ridge?
Nina’s Answer: I hope romance readers are drawn to the connection between Jake and Savannah… the chemistry, the contrast, and the way their relationship unfolds. There is certainly a romantic thread at the heart of the story, and it plays an important role in bringing them together.
At the same time, Whispers of Blue Ridge is very much a work of women’s fiction, where the relationship is part of a larger emotional journey. Their connection is shaped not just by attraction, but by what they’ve each carried… loss, expectations, and the weight of the past.
What I hope readers take away is that love in this story isn’t simply about finding the right person. It’s about what happens when two people see each other clearly, and how that can open the door to healing, growth, and ultimately, truth
Author Links: GoodReads | YouTube | Instagram | Facebook | Website
Femme Led
Femme Led: Hard-Learned Lessons from Women in Leadership is an anthology of women’s leadership stories that asks what becomes possible when leadership is no longer treated as control, performance, or self-erasure, but as truth lived in public. Across its chapters, the book moves from Sierra Melcher and Stephanie Mikulasek’s framing of the “leadership leap” to stories of reinvention, illness, entrepreneurship, grief, courage, and generosity. Catalina Escobar Bravo’s memories of growing up in Medellín, sleeping with taped windows during years of violence, eventually deepen into her purpose-driven work with Makaia. Carol Britton’s account of stepping into a high-pressure procurement role at the Bank of New York turns fear into a managerial instrument rather than an obstacle. Anna Dravland’s stroke and her transformation from a woman who did everything into a leader who built like a starfish instead of a spider web may be the book’s most tender image of all. Together, these essays argue that leadership isn’t a costume women must wear correctly. It’s a reckoning with one’s own voice, limits, power, and capacity to keep becoming.
What moved me most was the book’s assertion that the body often knows before the résumé does. I felt that idea gathering force each time a woman chose alignment over appearances: Tracy Macdonald turning in her badge and weapon after realizing the Secret Service no longer fit the life or values she could carry, Catalina stepping aside from the CEO role at Makaia to protect the mission rather than her title, Stephanie admitting that certainty itself had become a cage. These aren’t tidy triumphs. They ache. The book does a great job of showing how the emotional truth of leadership is often found in unmarketable moments: fatigue that rest doesn’t fix, ambition that has gone hollow, success that starts to feel like betrayal. I admired the way the authors return again and again to intuition without making it flimsy. Here, intuition is data of another kind, less quantifiable, perhaps, but no less exacting.
Some chapters read like polished keynote addresses, clear, instructive, almost ceremonious. Others arrive closer to confession, with rougher edges and a more immediate heat. Anna’s chapter, shaped around the aftermath of brain injury, resists a conventional arc, and I found that choice not only compassionate but artistically right. It lets form carry meaning. I was also struck by the range of metaphors the book earns rather than merely decorates with: the “leadership leap,” the internal flame, the spider web in a storm, the starfish that can keep functioning while it heals. The ideas circle familiar territory around purpose, resilience, and authenticity, but the best pieces refresh those words by grounding them in the particulars that people actually lived through, like Janice Marquardt leasing an office so her work would stop being absorbed by the quiet gravity of household labor, or Alexandra Yung reframing business as giving rather than transaction.
Femme Led respects uncertainty as part of the work. Leadership becomes most humane when women stop asking permission to be whole. I’d recommend this book to women in transition, founders, executives, coaches, nonprofit leaders, creatives, and anyone who has achieved the thing they thought they wanted only to feel some private truth pressing against the edges of it. This book’s gift is reminding us that crossing over can be frightening, scary, and necessary all at once.
Pages: 200 | ASIN : B0GQJPDW8Q
Discover A Glimpse Of Truth
More Other Such Matters is a collection of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the persistence of the thinking mind that asks what remains when the thinking mind finally grows quiet. Do you see thinking as a barrier to truth, or a doorway that must be passed through?
I see it neither as a barrier, nor as a doorway. The mistake we make is that we get attached to our thoughts and mistake them for truth and then identify ourselves via those thoughts. Truth reveals itself when thoughts are left behind. In that sense we can use thoughts until they exhaust themselves and in the exhaustion, in that dead end, we might discover a glimpse of truth.
Many poems read like questions rather than declarations. Why is inquiry more important than certainty for you?
The origin of my poems lies in the questions that have posed themselves around everything, ever since I was young. When I started writing those questions I usually found that the things I thought I knew revealed themselves to be mere outer layers of deeper truths, which in turn, at some later point, would probably get turned on their head by more questions.
Declarations, while giving the impression of safety, a ground to stand on, are mostly self-defeating, rigid and therefore not really compatible with life. Life itself is constant change, a constant adventure of discovery. Once you draw the circumference of certainty around things, around your mind, it turns rigid and eventually gets suffocated inside dead concepts. If you dig deeply enough and with inner honesty, you will find that certainty does not really exist.
Are the more intimate poems, like those centered on love and loss, harder to write than the philosophical ones?
Not at all. I don’t set out to write poems of a certain category. All my poems start out with a kind of urgency of something wanting to be explored or said, or maybe even screamed out. I just follow their lead and sit down to write them down. They usually emerge fully formed, even though I often don’t have the slightest clue where they are taking me. Sometimes a poem about loss, for example, turns philosophical in the process of diving into the loss itself rather than avoiding it, by merely describing it from the outside.
You asked about a doorway before. The doorway is the very process of not avoiding anything that wants to show up, of digging into the deepest places I can reach, whether jubilant or terrifying.
I wonder whether purely philosophical poems that do not spring from love, loss, longing, happiness, loneliness, grief or fear can even spring from a pen. That would be more like a disembodied, scientific dissertation … or something like that.
What do you hope a reader feels—not just thinks—after spending time with this book?
I would hope for them to experience some of what I experienced when I wrote them. Would love for the readers to go inside themselves and allow themselves to ask their own questions or maybe recognize some of the landing spots I discovered in the process of writing. I would love for them to feel inspired to go on their own journey of exploration of what lies under the surface of their own being and burst out in wonder when they discover the sweetness that lives inside them.
Author Links: Website | GoodReads | Facebook
Discover More Other Such Matters by multiple award-winning artist Fella Cederbaum—the fourth installment in her poetic legacy.
This thought-provoking collection invites you to journey inward. Her verses reach beyond the ordinary, capturing the essence of what it means to live authentically, love deeply, and rediscover the divine spark within. Within the pages of this powerful collection of deeply probing poetry, Fella explores themes of love, truth, feelings, societal challenges, and the art of staying present in the unfolding of human experience.
Through poems like “Before You Were You,” “Show Me Who You Are,” and “The Orchid and the Daisy,” she distills profound wisdom into elegant simplicity—offering readers moments of pause, reflection, and transformation.
Often described as a true Renaissance woman, she brings her relentless questions to inspire self-examination and introspection. More Other Such Matters is an intimate companion for the soul—perfect for reflection, meditation, or quiet contemplation. This latest collection continues to remind us to be grateful, to breathe, be still, and return home to our most authentic selves.
The versatile Fella Cederbaum has achieved success in many creative endeavors—as a poet, author, painter, independent filmmaker with nearly two dozen short films, and skilled composer and arranger. Her earlier writings, two volumes titled Of Life and Other Such Matters, Speech Acrobats, and her two poetry with music albums, Truth and Destiny and Speech Acrobats, have solidified her reputation as a versatile and accomplished artist. She has been exceptionally well-reviewed and described as “an artist who is brave enough to be an original.”
Cederbaum’s has received over 120 awards ranging from Best Short, to Best Soundtrack and Best Script. She has garnered not one, but two coveted IndieFest Humanitarian Awards.
