Tag: a personal note

A Coming Attraction

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Book No. 6 of my Bell Mountain series, The Palace, has been sent to the printer and should be finished in a week or two.

Reminder: You can pre-order the book from The Chalcedon Foundation, by phoning them at 209-736-4365209-736-4365 and speaking to Jill at “Orders”. You can all pre-order the book at Chalcedon Store Site.

To help launch the book, I will be a guest on Tim Wildmon’s American Family Assn. online TV show, tentatively scheduled for Monday, March 24. Don’t miss it! If the book becomes a best-seller, I can hire someone with a really good voice to speak for me from now on.

The Palace features the usual mix of adventure, wonder, war and treachery, redemption, and overall excitement: believe me, you don’t want to miss the Battle of the Brickbats.

I’ll have more details for you as I get them. Stay tuned.

A Lesson in Prayer–From a Mouse

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Which is better–to make one or two really long prayers every day, or to make a lot of really short ones?

Personally, I think both will serve, depending on the needs of the moment. Much is said in favor of long prayers. I agree with it. But I have something to say in favor of a lot of little prayers.

I used to have a pet mouse named Sleepy. I’ve had many pet mice, but Sleepy was unusually affectionate, and the bond between us was especially close.

Sometimes I would take her out of her cage, lie down on the living room floor, and turn her loose to see what she would do. (No, we didn’t have cats then!) She would venture a few feet away, then come skittering back to me as fast as she could. Sniff, sniff, pet, pet. Then she’d explore a few feet farther, and come running back again. She’d go a little farther each time until she reached the end of the room, and always come back.

I have no idea what a grown human being looks like to a mouse. Really, it’s impossible to imagine. But my mouse must have loved and trusted what she saw in me, because she showed it by her actions.

We could do very much worse than to run back to God for a few moments, many times a day.

My Next Book

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Sometime very soon–in fact, I can’t imagine what’s holding it up–the sixth book in my Bell Mountain series, The Palace, will go on sale. It’s action-packed, I promise you. And editing has started on #7, The Glass Bridge.

But at the forefront of my mind is #8, which is nowhere near having a title. What it has, so far, is a lot of plot problems to solve and a number of tantalizing scenes that have bubbled up in my imagination. I can hardly wait to start writing them. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can tell you about them without spoiling the preceding two books. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

Beyond #8 I cannot yet see anything. I pray the ideas will keep coming: they are gifts from God.

I wonder if I’ll be called to go back into Obann’s past–maybe all the way back to the story of King Ozias and his reign. Maybe back to the wreckage left after the destruction of Obann’s Empire. Then again, maybe Book #9 will take me some years into Obann’s future. I’ll just have to wait and see what the Lord gives me.

Meanwhile, I’m eager for reader feedback, either here on the blog or as Customer Reviews on amazon.com. Sometimes writing a novel is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean.

 

‘Bell Mountain’ Paperback on Sale

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I just noticed the price of Bell Mountain in paperback has been cut down from $14 to $7. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so… get it cheap while you can!

Tell your friends, tell your family.

I don’t know how to promote the book, so, please–help me out if you can.

Miss Marple Comes to Life

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Let me take a day off gender choices and phony Global Warming.

It’s hard for an actor to play a well-established, popular, beloved fictional character and bring that character to life on the screen. Christopher Reeve did it with Superman. Both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett succeeded in “becoming” Sherlock Holmes. David Suchet is Hercule Poirot.

And if you haven’t yet seen those TV movies from the 1980s starring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple–well, you’ve missed something wonderful. But you can find most of them on youtube, free of charge, or rent them from amazon.com for instant viewing for a very small fee.

Agatha Christie herself wanted Hickson to play Miss Marple someday–although when she told the actress that, in person, Hickson was only in her 40s and some decades away from Miss Marple’s age. Christie’s instinctive choice was right on the money, though.

No one can play Miss Marple like Joan Hickson! Anybody else, nice try, but no cigar.

Imagine–a detective who’s not a cop, not a private eye, but just a little old lady who has lived in a village all her life and has, in the words of one of her acquaintances, “a mind like a bacon-slicer.” She hunts down murderers, but she can’t defend herself physically and she can’t run away, nor does she carry a gun. It must always be born in mind that any murderer who got wise to Miss Marple could very easily bump her off.

If you can watch one of these films without thinking, at the end, that, if only you could tell your troubles to Miss Marple, she’d know what to do… well, then, the performance just didn’t speak to you.

Note: Patty and I did watch one of the Miss Marple movies made after Hickson’s death, and it just didn’t come up to snuff–not even close.

Once you’ve seen the real deal, nothing else will do.

Spring is Coming!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yes, we have almost two feet of snow on the ground, and enormous piles of snow everywhere you look–but Spring is in the air, big-time.

We have throngs of birds, all singing and calling at once, including a big bunch of robins. The trees are budding like mad. Like Helki the Rod, I always listen to what the birds and the trees are telling us. It might snow some more, but I think we’ve seen the end of sub-zero temperatures for now. (Yes, I know it sounds like famous last words.)

So here’s my prediction: an early Spring, probably a little cooler than usual, but burgeoning and busting out all over.

What hath God wrought? I love it!

The Wilderness of ‘Young Adult Fiction’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, picking up a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. This freeze-your-butt-off-every-cotton-pickin’-day Global Warming is getting her down. Maybe Hercule Poirot could cheer her up.

Naturally, I paused to look at the offerings in the Young Adults section. As usual, I wish I hadn’t.

For reasons which may be supernatural, for all I know, grown-up authors are frantically churning out books about sexual confusion, social pathologies, self-destructive fads like “cutting” yourself, seasoned with depictions of teens using “magic” to circumvent adult authority and get anything and everything they want. This is what they think youngsters should be reading. Why? All we get is a lot of half-baked twaddle about “you shouldn’t try to hide from kids what the world is like.”

So again we run head-on into the sophomoric credo that whatever is evil, ugly, or painful is “realistic,” and whatever is good, beautiful, or wholesome is just a delusion. This is how stupid people pretend they’re smart.

So what have you got for your children and grandchildren to read? And maybe more to the point, what are their “teachers” and school librarians urging them to read? You’d better look into that–you might get a rather nasty surprise.

There are books out there–and have always been, so far–that offer a positive vision: books that don’t seek to fill the teenage reader’s head with toxic garbage. You ought to be looking for them.

And when you find some, please let me know.

Your Old Toys Are Worth Big Bucks

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was shocked when I discovered that my little plastic dinosaurs from the 1950s, manufactured by Marx Toymakers, now sell for anywhere from $5 each, for the really little ones, to $20 each for the big tyrannosaurs and brontosaurs.

I have an awful lot of these. Many of them came in a play set that cost $5 at the time–which my father said we couldn’t afford, it was way too much money; but then I got it as a Christmas present. Others were purchased individually, from 10 cents to 25 cents each. Quite a few I acquired by trading with other kids (“Look, I’ll give you four army men for that stegosaurus”).

Then there are the little dinosaurs that used to come free inside boxes of cereal, and the big wax ones made by the Miller Company. I only have a couple of those, because they were notoriously fragile and easily broken. I don’t know what my Miller stegosaurus would fetch on eBay.

If I sold off all my toy dinosaurs, I would probably get a couple hundred bucks for them (I can just imagine the shocked expression on my father’s face: he worked at the Ford plant, and worked hard, and here we’re talking several weekly paychecks’ worth of stupid little toys).

But then they would be gone, and I’d never get them back. The family members who gave them to me as loving little gifts, they’re all gone.

Too much is gone that was good.

I think I’ll keep my dinosaurs.