Blog Archives
The Best of Both Worlds
Disheartened follows a woman living a separate life in 1860 and 2020, remembering everything as she drifts between the two, struggling to protect the people she loves in two different centuries. How did the concept of E.V.E. first develop?
The concept of E.V.E. (Essence Voyager Era ― the inherited gift of having the ability to live two parallel lives on two separate planes of existence as the soul travels nightly – essentially falling asleep on one plane and awakening to a new day on a new plane) came about due to a strange dream I had in the summer of 2009. I immediately started writing the first book in the E.V.E. series, Essence. After it was published in 2011, it grew into a series of four books that centered on Jocelyn (Sidney’s younger sister) and Jackson’s relationship. The Spirit Quest series is a spinoff of the original series, except this series focuses on Sidney’s experience with E.V.E.
Sidney carries the memories of two different lives. What was the greatest challenge in writing her perspective?
The greatest challenge with this particular character and period was researching from both perspectives (North and South) for the 1860 era and trying to offer a varying perspective of the 2020/Covid era experience, which we all lived through.
Foreknowledge plays a central role in the novel. How would you respond to the question of whether knowing the future is a gift or a burden?
Different members of different families who have inherited the gift (or curse) of E.V.E. have expressed their opinions of it. Some believe it to be a gift that allows them to experience the best of both worlds. Others feel it is a curse because despite knowing what the future holds, they are almost helpless to stop it in any meaningful way.
What lies ahead for the Spirit Quest series?
The third installment in the series, Foreshadowed, is due to be released later this year. The span of the novel covers the day after the 1860/2020 presidential elections through the first shots fired at Fort Sumter. It focuses on the personal challenges Sidney faces with the global pandemic, extended family pressure, and navigating increasing political division that is tearing apart the country in both of her lives.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facbook | Website | Scarlett Ink Publishing | Amazon
Sidney is heartbroken watching everything her loved ones and countrymen from her other life fought to preserve be undone by a minute mindless minority of entitled fanatics and a political party so hell-bent on spreading violence and hate, they would rather burn the nation to the ground than relinquish power.
But what can she do? Can one small voice change the mind of millions with hate in their heart? Can she find her way back to the solace she once treasured in both her lives?
Everyone’s Always Performing
Hypnotized follows an Army veteran, a missing teen, an aspiring actress, and a retired detective who become entangled in a decades-old disappearance. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Hampton’s character grew out of a short story I wrote back in the late 60s about draft dodgers. He was hanging out in a pool hall when he met a Whittier woman named Margo who attempted to convince him to burn his draft card. Also, legends about Hell’s Gate and Turnbull Canyon Road are numerous, and I wanted to use them to provide an atmosphere that would hopefully intrigue my readers.
Nick’s reflective narration gives the novel a distinctive personality. Why did you choose him as the primary voice rather than the detective?
Detective Roach was introduced in my previous book, Surf and Sand, The Girl in the Seaside Hotel, wherein he’s seen considering his upcoming retirement in Whittier. See, I was already thinking about Hypnotized then. But when I actually started writing it Nick was the first character that came to me, and I soon realized I wanted to tell most of the story from a first-person perspective and let the novel become a kind of memoir. I’d just reread Charles Portis’s novel, True Grit, and was inspired by the narration of his character, Mattie Ross. She’s an elderly woman looking back on something that happened to her when she was young. I wanted to try and capture that feeling. (And by the way, everyone’s seen the films, but if you haven’t heard Donna Tartt‘s narration of the audio book, well, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!)
Identity, performance, and self-deception appear repeatedly throughout the novel. Why do those ideas interest you?
Identity is kind of a big deal these days, but I wasn’t trying to make any statements about that, I just want my characters to live in other people’s heads besides my own. I worked on this book for about 7 years, on and off. Eventually the characters take over and can even become kind of demanding. And when we look at real life, people are always performing, aren’t they? Trying to do their best, or to be as good as someone they admire, or to be “like” someone they look up to. Self-deception too, is common, just look at my not so healthy diet! But performance is something else when it’s used to deceive others.
Without giving anything away, what do you think continues to haunt Turnbull Canyon long after the final page?
Memories. Wishes. Hopes. Desires. And a few deadly curves!
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
We Fear What We Can’t Explain
Mitten Discovers His Shadow follows a curious kitten on his first adventure out of the barn, who discovers his own shadow and thinks it is a monster. Did the story begin with the science concept or with Mitten as a character?
The concept for Mitten Discovers His Shadow came first, and the character showed up right after. I was driving home from work one evening and noticed my car’s shadow keeping pace beside me. I thought, what an interesting thing to explain to a child. At the time, my son was two years old, and we had cats at home. So, I had my audience and my main character living in the same house. Telling the story from a kitten’s point of view gave me the right eye level—down where the shadow is enormous, and the world hasn’t been explained yet.
Why was it important for Mitten to move from fear to curiosity rather than simply be told there was nothing to worry about?
Being told there’s nothing to worry about almost never works—for children or adults. We often fear what we can’t explain, or don’t understand, and reassurance doesn’t explain anything. Mitten’s mother doesn’t solve his “monster kitten” problem for him; she gives him a way to think about it. She calls his shadow his “sun picture,” and then he has to test that answer for himself. Cats are curious and like to investigate, so Mitten’s reactions to his shadow are natural responses. I wanted the relief at the end of the story to be something Mitten earned rather than something he was handed
Young children often become frightened by things adults consider ordinary. Why was it important to treat Mitten’s fear seriously rather than laugh at it?
A fear that gets laughed at doesn’t go away; it just gets buried deep down. When that happens, a child learns not to mention the next one to avoid being made fun of again. To young children, a dark shape that copies your every move and doesn’t leave when you try to get away from it is a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of. If the story had treated Mitten’s fear as silly, the comfort at the end wouldn’t have been worth anything. I wanted children to see that being scared of something is an okay place to start—it’s just not where you have to stop.
Do you imagine Mitten having more barnyard adventures?
Yes, absolutely! Mitten Discovers Snow is in development now, with Mitten Discovers Rain to follow. The pattern I’m building on is one small mystery per book—something ordinary that’s brand new to a young child—and a barnyard full of animals that have their own opinions about it. Mitten has a lot left to discover, and I don’t think he’s going to leave any of it alone.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Instagram | Facebook | Website
A charming, science-themed picture book about a curious kitten’s big adventure and his magical “sun-picture” friend. Perfect for ages 2-5!
Mitten the kitten is finally big enough to explore beyond the red barn, but he isn’t alone! A long, dark shape is following his every move. Is it a monster kitten? Or something much more magical?
Young readers will follow an adorable tuxedo kitten as he pounces, hides, and eventually befriends his own shadow. Through playful sensory language and vibrant illustrations, this gentle story introduces children to the science of light and shadows in a way that feels like a game of hide-and-seek.
The Hero
Eve M. Riley’s The Hero, the seventh novel in the Techboys series, is a contemporary workplace romance centered on James Royce and Sadie Turner, two gifted but emotionally guarded employees at a New York cybersecurity company. James is reeling from the collapse of a twelve-year relationship and a suicide attempt, while Sadie is concealing both an abusive home life and a damaging lie about her education. An unusual living arrangement brings them together, allowing friendship, mutual attraction, and domestic intimacy to develop alongside the pressures of work. Although the novel features returning characters, it gives readers enough context to understand James and Sadie’s story on its own.
The book’s strongest element is its patient characterization. James’s dependable professional persona masks profound loneliness, while Sadie’s silence reflects years of adapting to poverty, intimidation, and limited choices. Their connection grows through ordinary acts such as cooking, discussing fantasy novels, caring for a difficult cat, and helping each other face uncomfortable truths. These scenes give the romance a convincing emotional foundation. The alternating perspectives also reveal how frequently each character misreads the other, creating tension without relying solely on artificial misunderstandings.
Riley combines the romance with serious examinations of depression, coercive control, economic insecurity, workplace ethics, and recovery. The darker material is direct, but humor and affectionate banter keep the story from becoming emotionally uniform. At times, the number of external crises gives the later chapters a heightened, dramatic pace, yet those events also force James and Sadie to move beyond protecting each other and begin speaking honestly about their own needs. The explicit romantic scenes are consistent with the novel’s emphasis on trust, vulnerability, and learning to experience intimacy without shame or obligation.
The title’s meaning becomes clearest when Sadie recognizes, “Perhaps he isn’t the hero of my story. Maybe I learned how to do it all by myself.” That realization captures the book’s thoughtful understanding of love. James doesn’t rescue Sadie by taking control of her life, and she doesn’t cure his depression through romance. Instead, they create the safety and encouragement each needs to reclaim personal agency. The Hero is an emotionally generous, character-driven romance about rebuilding after loss, accepting support, and discovering that heroism can consist of listening, staying present, and helping another person step confidently into the light.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0GTWLBY4V
Our Own Self-imposed Isolation
So Easily Swept Away follows a disaffected middle manager whose life, marriage, workplace, and town begin to fracture until a hurricane forces him to discover that belonging is built through shared responsibility. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It is all too easy to slip into our own self-imposed isolation, mistaking fleeting text and online chat for meaningful connections with others. That is especially true of the community that surrounds us; we live among people but can avoid any real shared experience. I know this isolation all too well. Writing this allowed me to give a voice to the low-key sadness that flows from loneliness. Both Jarvi and Scotty are made of small elements of many different people.
Jarvi is allowed to change without becoming an entirely different or suddenly more admirable person. How did you approach writing that kind of gradual, believable transformation?
I am thankful if readers do feel it is believable and genuine. In my own way, I gravitate toward the ‘anti-hero,’ the protagonist that most of us generally don’t like at first. Or simply may overlook. Again, within the theme of community, much of what passes between us is overlooked. Good people, flawed people, are generally overlooked. I didn’t want to make a story with a stark, obvious moral decision point. If this is a redemption story of sorts, maybe only one person was salvaged. But to save one, you can set the momentum for others to be positively impacted, too.
Mary often seems to embody the practical competence and generosity Jarvi has avoided. What did you want her character to reveal about work, recognition, and community?
As an objectively good person in the story, Mary suffers her own isolation by being coldly overlooked at work. I was concerned about adding race as an aspect of the indifference that holds her back, but let’s face it – that is the condition far too many of our fellow neighbors face. I have always liked the phrase “chance favors the prepared mind.” Mary’s advancement in the story is built upon that. Her spirit of character is not set to counter Jarvi. Instead, it hopefully completes the mental circle most of us swirl within on life’s daily moral choices.
Scotty’s attraction to conspiracy theories is portrayed with unusual empathy. What interested you most about the relationship between loneliness, distrust, and the stories people choose to believe?
Originally, conspiracy was simply a character trait for Scotty. Within his mind, he is deeply connected and aware; it allows him to maintain a semblance of intellect and gravitas that he knows is otherwise missing in his daily life. This is why his attention to it online is sensitive; he is trying to convince himself of some self-worth as much as he may be trying to convince others of some dark global force. Today’s massive expansion of innuendoes, untruths and finger-pointing is an unhealthy evolution of mankind’s use of superstition over time.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
The Frequency
Randall D. St. Claire’s The Frequency is a science-fiction conspiracy thriller with a rugged survival story at its center. Bronx Rousselle, a former professional hockey player and Marine who now owns a pawnshop in northern Minnesota, has built his life around keeping people at a safe distance. That changes when Heather Li asks him to help her brother escape and offers him a collection of inherited Inuit artifacts, maps, and writings as payment. Those documents point toward a petrified whale, a mysterious burst of light, and a secret hidden near the Arctic Circle for decades. What begins as a shady favor quickly grows into a chase involving assassins, corporate interests, wartime research, and a discovery with enormous implications.
Bronx gives the novel most of its personality. He’s abrasive, funny, impulsive, suspicious, and surprisingly tender when his usual defenses start breaking down. His running commentary, odd expressions, and instinct for bargaining make him feel more like a difficult guy you might actually meet than a polished action hero. The book’s intimate third-person narration stays close to his fears, appetites, regrets, and survival calculations, giving the violence and Arctic danger a personal edge. His evolving relationship with Malina also gives the adventure an emotional anchor, since his larger journey is about learning that loyalty and attachment are worth their risks.
The novel shifts confidently between small-town crime, historical mystery, corporate conspiracy, and wilderness survival. Its strongest passages take place in Greenland, where cold, hunger, isolation, wildlife, and failing equipment create threats as urgent as the armed men pursuing Bronx. St. Claire has a cinematic way of staging action, but he also makes room for unusual details, dark humor, and the eerie history behind the abandoned Nazi installation. The Inuit documents connect the modern plot to an older experience of the land, while the energy technology at the heart of the mystery raises questions about greed, ownership, and what powerful people will do when a discovery threatens the world they control.
Readers of Michael Crichton will recognize the combination of speculative science, corporate ambition, historical clues, and ordinary people confronting a discovery far beyond their understanding. Like Congo or Timeline, The Frequency turns research and scientific possibility into fuel for a physical adventure, though St. Claire’s voice is earthier and more irreverent. The novel is built for readers who enjoy big ideas delivered through chases, gunfights, bitter cold, and a hero who solves problems with equal parts planning, stubbornness, and nerve. At its heart, it’s a story about a guarded man discovering that survival means more when there’s someone waiting for him to come home.
Pages: 381 | ASIN : B0H72V8NGL
Poetic Healing: That Unforgettable Tuesday Morning
Al Hall’s Poetic Healing is a sustained poetic response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the emotional, social, spiritual, and national consequences that followed. Hall explains in the preface that he passed the burning Pentagon on his way home from work and decided to respond to the day’s horror through poetry. He writes not only about what occurred, but also about what he heard people saying and what he imagined they were feeling. That purpose shapes the entire collection. Its eleven sections move through images of destruction, the experiences of children and families, changes in daily American life, collective mourning, anger, faith, military response, the anthrax attacks, public service, and eventual expressions of hope and unity.
The book’s most affecting quality is its attention to individual experience within an event remembered on a massive scale. Hall repeatedly brings the reader from familiar public images into private scenes of uncertainty and grief. In “Mommy, Is the Fire Still Burning?” a child wonders whether firefighters can save her father, while “Where is Grandma Sleeping Tonight?” presents a child preparing a pillow for a grandmother who hasn’t returned home. Elsewhere, Hall writes from the perspectives of bereaved spouses, displaced workers, surviving employees, military families, firefighters, postal workers, and people confronting fear or prejudice. The simplicity of the language gives these poems a direct, testimonial quality. Hall repeatedly returns to recognizable acts such as waiting, calling, praying, working, comforting children, and searching for loved ones.
As the collection progresses, grief becomes connected to the broader question of how people respond after catastrophe. Hall considers anger, retaliation, racial and religious suspicion, emotional distress, faith, and the responsibility to remain humane. Several poems directly challenge the impulse to direct collective anger toward innocent people, particularly Muslims and Americans perceived to look like terrorists. In “Lord, Help us Avoid Becoming What We Hate,” the plea, “Lord, help us avoid becoming / the things we hate,” captures one of the book’s central ethical concerns. Healing, in Hall’s treatment, therefore involves more than endurance. It requires emotional expression, compassion, restraint, community, and an active refusal to let violence determine how people treat one another. That idea is stated with particular clarity in “Elation Competes with Devastation,” where a grieving new mother must learn to inhabit sorrow and joy at once: “She will find a place to be herself. / That’s what healing is all about.”
Poetic Healing functions as both a literary memorial and a record of the emotional atmosphere surrounding September 11 and its immediate aftermath. Its chronological and thematic breadth allows Hall to document not only the attacks themselves, but also the days of rescue and recovery, economic anxiety, communal prayer, military deployment, anthrax fears, public service, patriotism, and the continuing search for peace. The final section expands the book’s concern beyond national grief, asking that compassion extend to people experiencing war throughout the world, before “The Flag” closes on an image of freedom, remembrance, hope, and unity. Hall’s collection succeeds most clearly as an act of witness and consolation, preserving a wide range of human reactions to a defining national tragedy while insisting that healing depends on memory, faith, empathy, and continued care for others.
Pages: 128 | ISBN: 0595664903
The Lord of Records Speaks: Channeled Dialogues on the Universe
The Lord of Records Speaks is an ambitious metaphysical journey built around Adria Sanders’s conversations with the spiritual presence she calls the Lord of Records. Beginning with her transformation from pragmatic skeptic to spiritual seeker, Sanders gives readers the personal context behind the dialogues before opening the discussion to larger questions about consciousness, parallel realities, the soul, emotion, matter, manifestation, time, energy, and the Source. The book’s scope is expansive, but its purpose remains personal: to explore how human life might look when viewed as one part of a much larger, interconnected universe.
The question-and-answer format gives the book its conversational energy. Sanders doesn’t simply record a series of declarations. She challenges what she receives, asks for examples, admits when an idea is difficult to accept, and works through contradictions in real time. That openness makes her an approachable guide through material that can become highly abstract. Her background in psychology and business also adds an interesting tension to the narrative, since she frequently tries to translate extraordinary experiences into language a practical, analytical mind can understand.
Some of the book’s most engaging sections explore emotions, especially love, hope, self-doubt, happiness, and the instinct to survive. Here, the larger cosmology becomes closely connected to everyday experience. Sanders presents emotion as more than a human reaction. It becomes a creative force, a source of information, and a means through which consciousness develops. The later discussions of holographic worlds, timelines, energetic strings, artificial intelligence, and humanity’s future broaden that foundation into a complete spiritual framework. Chapter summaries help readers pause, gather the central ideas, and carry them into the next conversation.
Sanders writes with genuine curiosity, vulnerability, and a clear desire to share an experience that changed the way she understands existence. Readers drawn to channeling, the Akashic Records, multidimensional consciousness, and spiritual cosmology will find a rich collection of ideas to consider, while reflective readers may be especially moved by the book’s emphasis on personal responsibility, curiosity, and the creative power of choice. The Lord of Records Speaks turns the mysteries of the universe into an intimate conversation about who we are, why our choices matter, and how much more we may be capable of becoming.
ASIN : B0GX72WZPV
