Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Wimps Unite!

Well, friends, I am back. I did the novel in thirty days ( http://www.nanowrimo.org/ ) thing and what fun! It was a lot of work but so much fun, especially watching the meter on your word count climb daily. I am so glad I didn't wimp out. But now I want to get back to writing words for you, our reader. We have several books in the queue for you, which I plan to get out to you over the next several days.


First up is a lean book called Weight Loss for Wimps: How to Lose Belly Fat, Look Years Younger and Get Healthy, Sexy and Thin by Kevin C. Myers. When I say this is a lean book, I mean lean. There are no extra words. Just get down to the bone, how to do it talk.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

SF Goes East: 2010's Best Science Fiction Stories

The Year's Best Science Fiction 2010
Twenty Seventh Annual Collection
Ed. Gardner Dozois
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 27th edition (July 6, 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0312608989
Available at Amazon

From the book jacket:

"For more than a quarter century, Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction has defined the field.  It is the most important anthology, not only annually, but overall."    -Charles N. Brown, Publisher of LOCUS magazine.


Stories are often the beginnings of sci-fi books.  Authors say that the characters, once created, dictate the direction a book will follow, so they can continue to live their lives after the first story ends.  But the first key to unlock the book is, for many authors, the story.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Intelligent Intelligence Thriller

The Breath of Allah
Steven W. Ritcheson
Copyright 2001
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 1466246774
Available at Amazon


"Thomas Jefferson only had it partly right -- eternal vigilance was not only the price of liberty, it was the price of survival  ...  even a paranoid has enemies.  I would regret later that I had not paid more attention to this warning."  Charles Rayson, TAG

If you are inspired by finding a nice calming historical read for an evening just to get away from those mundane daily activities, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you prefer something a bit more adventurous, with pulse-pounding action that will keep you turning pages to see what happens next, something that will keep you from getting your chores done until you finish the book, you'll like it a lot.

In this era of high-tech espionage, the folks in "The Breath of Allah" are constantly trying to keep one step ahead of a complex and ever-changing landscape of bad guys trying to kill them, while developing new ways of using technology to keep ahead.  Some of the tools they use are just a hair's breadth away from today's technology, and others will take awhile to be more than fiction, but all are plausible in this new world of black hat and white hat hackers:  a spy-vs-spy-vs-techie-vs-techie chess game.  The TAG is a team of experts with clandestine operations skills, techie know-how, inventive engineering capabilities, and battle-tested survival skills.  Their task is to know more first, to prevent the unthinkable before it happens.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Seeing the Unseeable



Have you ever heard sounds that you were sure didn’t exist? Maybe you smelled something you knew wasn’t in the area. Perhaps you experienced both, maybe even both together. I have and it is scary, so scary that you might think you are losing your mind. Never fear for me. I finally discovered I was having “awake dreaming” from lack of good, sound sleep. But the hero of our next book has not found himself so lucky.