tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79927251669088011692024-03-13T11:27:41.356-07:00PageTurner Editionsmchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-13002647433510250212014-12-16T13:10:00.000-08:002014-12-16T13:10:00.655-08:00DIGITAL PARCHMENT SERVICES Announces the Republication of William Charles Rotsler's PATRON OF THE ARTS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Digital Parchment Services<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">Is Proud to Announce the </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Republication o</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">f </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">William Charles Rotsler</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">'s Nebula, Hugo and Locus Award Finalist Saga<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">PATRON OF THE ARTS<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For Immediate Release<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Digital Parchment Services, through its Strange Particle Press science fiction imprint, and the estate of William Charles Rotsler are proud to announce the exclusive publication of an enhanced edition of Rotsler's 1974 novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patron of the Arts</i> ... based on his triple-award nominee fiction novelette of the same name. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Born in 1926, William Charles Rotsler</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;"> was truly a renaissance man: acclaimed novelist and short story writer, photographer and filmmaker, much-admired artist and illustrator and – how he is perhaps best remembered – and as a warm and special part of science fiction fandom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek</i> fans particularly owe Rotsler a debt for giving Lt. Uhura the first name of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nyota</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Rotsler had a hand in locating the fossils, crystals and stones for the Nebula Award trophies as well as receiving five Hugo awards for his cartoon work that appeared in fanzines, convention program books, and magazines such as <i>Locus</i>. To honor Rotsler, The Southern California Institute for Fan Interests created the William Rotsler Art Award in 1998.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>William Rotsler died in southern California in 1997. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">"<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patron of the Ar</i>ts gives us a future where art is a major driver in the culture. He envisions new technologies that deepen our arts and alter how we see our world. Rotsler at the top of his form." –Gregory Benford<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Brian Thorne was a billionaire. There were only two things he cared about: women and art. And because he could afford it, he paid the world's finest artist to combine the two, to make a work of art of the unforgettable, incomparable Madelon in the new and extraordinary artform: the sensatron. Then Madelon and the artist disappeared – through the sensatron. And all the money in the world could not help Brian Thorne. To solve the secret of the sensatron, he was strictly on his own... <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>That is how Brian Thorne, billionaire, found himself helpless—caught in a magnificent crystal creation that grew on Mars, and without any resources even if he could get away from the killers who trapped him there. For although they knew he was Brian Thorne, he couldn't prove it. To find Madelon and the sensatron, he had gone to considerable trouble to cover his tracks. Now he wished he had not been so thorough in turning his back on the luxury-lined and very well-guarded life he lived back on Earth. Now, when it was too late!<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">"A fine novel!" –Harlan Ellison<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">This new edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patron of the Arts</i> features special bonus content – including a foreword by Nebula winner Gregory Benford, an afterword by Lambda finalist M.Christian, and a biographical sketch written by the author himself. The enhanced ebook version is available now – and a premier trade paperback edition will be coming in January, 2015.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Coming soon from Digital Parchment Services will be new releases of William Rotsler's novels <i>To the Land of the Electric Angel</i>, <i>Zandra,</i> <i>The Hidden Worlds of Zandra</i>, and <i>Far Frontier</i>, as well as a collection of Rotsler's short stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Authorized William Charles Rotsler site<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.williamcharlesrotsler.com/"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://www.williamcharlesrotsler.com</span></a><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">ebook: </span><a href="http://amzn.com/B00PI945CW"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://amzn.com/B00PI945CW</span></a><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Introductory price:</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> $2.99</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> – </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">regularly $.5.99 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">ISBN: </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">9781615085828<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">For Review Copies Contact:</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">M.Christian</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Publisher</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Digital Parchment Services<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="mailto:m.christian@digitalparchmentservices.com"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">m.christian@digitalparchmentservices.com</span></a><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://digitalparchmentservices.com/"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://digitalparchmentservices.com</span></a><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Twitter: @DigiParchment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Facebook: Digital-Parchment-Services<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-29246621549907161812014-12-10T18:20:00.000-08:002014-12-10T18:20:53.725-08:00Free Read Sample Chapter EPIC Award Finalist Family Memoir Interesting Times<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
Free Read Sample Chapter Joe Vadalma's EPIC Award Finalist Family Memoir <i>Interesting Times</i></h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">
CHAPTER SIX: SCHOOL DAYS</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In September of 1938 I
started Kindergarten at LaSalle School in Chicago. On my first day, some of the
kids cried, but I liked school. There were toys and other kids to play with.
The teacher was friendly. The only thing that went wrong on my first day was
that I did not go inside after recess when the bell rang. After all the other
children were gone from the play yard, I did not know how to return to class. I
did not cry but simply stared at the heavy door that I could not open until
someone noticed I was missing and came for me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">But that was me. I was
always a little different, living an active fantasy life and a bit ahead of
others my age in certain ways.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">School was like a new
life for me. I took to learning like a desert traveler stumbling upon an oasis,
drinking in knowledge as though my capacity was limitless. In addition, I loved
the independence school gave me. I was no longer always under the thumb of my
parents since the teachers allowed me a certain amount of freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, even honey has hazards. For me the
sting came because I was small, quiet and not athletic — an easy prey for
bullies. In my innocence, I let it be known that I did not believe in God,
earning me a Christian beating in the schoolyard.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">When I started first
grade, my mother returned to work part time from nine o’clock until one in the
afternoon to supplement my dad's low income at the candy factory.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In the first grade, I
was the third best reader in the class. I loved books and reading, probably
because my parents read a lot. I would have been the best reader, except for one
question on the test that puzzled me. It asked what a robin said and what a
horse said and given a choice of "Cheer-up" or "Neigh."
Being a city boy, up to that point I had never seen a robin, and all the horses
I had ever encountered, never said a thing. So I figured that logically a horse
would be friendly and say “Cheer-up.” The only choice for a robin had to be
“Neigh.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In those days, there
were still work horses in the city. Men drove wagons pulled by horses through
the alleys to collect junk. They would yell, “Old iron, old iron.” The kids
called them “rag pickers.” Many of these men were African-American. Some of the
kids in the neighborhood warned me that the “niggers” carried big knives and
would hurt me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My parents had an ice
box in lieu of a refrigerator, which meant an iceman would come into the house
carrying a big block of ice with tongs. This went into the top part of the
icebox and slowly melted into a large pan underneath. Every couple of days, the
pan needed to be emptied. I would take one end, my dad the other. Sloshing
water all over the kitchen floor, we took it to the sink to empty it. During
the summer, I and my friends would steal slivers of ice off of the ice trucks.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">By third grade, when
other boys were engaged in sports and rough games, I escaped through books.
Soon I exhausted the library shelves for my age group and began to read books
written for older children. By seventh grade, my tastes were for adult fare.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Nonetheless, I was not
a recluse. With my close friends I would play marbles, toy soldiers, cowboys
and Indians, Americans and Nazis, hide-and-go-seek, street softball and other
childhood games. One of my best friends was the impoverished Bobby, whose
clothes were ill-fitting and patched and who always seemed not exactly clean.
Sometimes after dark, we boys would sneak into a closed lumberyard by the
Chicago River to play war among the forbidden heaps of sand and gravel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I also enjoyed
listening to music on the radio or on the phonograph. The 1940s was the era of
the big bands and crooners, such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The bands I
liked were Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Stan Kenton. My
favorite singers were the Andrew Sisters, Nat King Cole and Lena Horne. When
alone in the house, I used to dance around to Rum and Coca Cola. As I grew
older I began to appreciate jazz and rhythm and blues.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">During the depression my
grandfather, Laszlo, had opened a dry cleaning store which failed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and my grandmother lost their life savings
which they had invested in it. But poverty was not new to them, and they made
the best of it. Laszlo returned to his old trade as a tailor for other people's
cleaning businesses. While my grandfather's establishment was still viable, my
uncles worked with him and learned the business. Uncle John became a spotter
which was the highest paid position in the cleaning business. The other two of
my mother's brothers worked as pressers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Although my parents
were poor, they still enjoyed life. They took long walks in Lincoln Park, went
to North Avenue and Oak Street beaches to swim in the summer, played cards and
had family picnics. To celebrate Christmas the married couples in the family
took turns having the others over for dinner and a party. The family grew as my
mother's siblings married and had children of their own. When it became too
large to have their celebrations at someone’s home, they chipped in and rented
a hall or restaurant for the party, and each family brought food to share.
Usually soft drinks and alcohol could be purchased at the establishment. But
that was much later.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Sometimes when my dad
worked nights at the candy factory, my mother was afraid to go to sleep until
he came home. It was difficult for him to adjust to a sleeping pattern because
they changed shifts every few months. By the time he got used to one shift the
factory changed his hours again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">During the early years
of her marriage my mother had many sore throats and colds. Also I was often
plagued by bronchitis. In 1939 when I was six years old, my mom and I had our
tonsils removed. We stayed overnight in rooms in the doctor's office which was
like a clinic. I was given an anesthetic which put me to sleep. I recovered
quickly and was able to eat ice cream after two days. My mother's tonsils were
removed under a local anesthetic. She was required to hold a bowl to spit out
the blood. Removal of the first tonsil went well, but my mom became so upset by
the time the doctor had a difficult time removing the other tonsils. My mom's
neck swelled up, and she could hardly swallow for the next two weeks. The
doctor botched the job so that the rest of her life, she had trouble with that
side of her throat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">One Christmas my
parents bought me an electric train, and my dad and my uncles stayed up half
the night playing with it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The movie “The Wizard
of Oz” was a great influence on me. My parents took me to see it in a theater.
It was not so much the movie itself that influenced me as the fact that I
became interested in the Oz Books, the entire series of continuing adventures
of children who visited the wonderful Land of Oz, by Frank Baum, Ruth Thompson
and J. R. Neill. My dad once built a replica of the Tin Man out of old stove
pipes. Another children’s book that I read over and over was Lewis Carroll’s
“Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.” Some of my other favorites
were “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry
Finn,” and books about pirates like Captain Kidd and Blackbeard.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In September 1939 when
I was six, Hitler invaded Poland. That year the economy improved and jobs
became more plentiful because of the war in Europe. Many factories shifted to
arms production to sell to nations involved in the conflict. The world was
preparing for the world's worst conflict, World War Two.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In 1940 my family moved
to Burling Street across the street from Newberry Grammar School, where I
started second grade. I became good friends with Harriet, a girl my age who
lived on the first floor of the house next door. Soon after we moved, my
parents purchased the house where Harriet lived, a two-story two-flat brick
building. My friend now lived downstairs from me. However, when Harriet's
fireman father was killed in a fire, my good friend moved away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Also, in 1940, my Uncle
Chuck bought a two-flat frame house down the street. He made a lot of
improvements to the building. For this, he was awarded a prize of five hundred
dollars by the Lincoln Park Conservation Association.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The house I lived in
from the time I was seven until I left home was a two-story brick building on a
twenty-five by hundred foot lot. It was set back from the sidewalk a few feet.
A picket fence divided our property from the public walkway. Half of the front
yard was paved, and we used this as a patio. My dad had a flower garden in the
other half. A gangway on the left facing the building led to the backyard.
There were two entrances. The one on the left led to a staircase to the flat
where we lived. The one on the right led to the first floor apartment. At the
rear of the house, the backyard was paved near the house and unpaved from there
to a storage shed except for a paved walkway that ran down the middle. Fencing
divided our house from the neighbors.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The upstairs and
downstairs flats were laid out identically. The main rooms were in a line as
follows: the living room was at the front of the house and had a closet to one
side; next was the dining room with my bedroom to one side of it: near the rear
of the house was the kitchen with my parents' bedroom off of it. The bathroom
was to one side between the dining room and the kitchen. It contained a bathtub
and sink, but no shower. At the rear of the kitchen was an enclosed porch which
was used for both storage and as an extra sitting room. I usually played with
my toys there except when the winter weather made it too cold.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My parents had an iron
stove in the kitchen which they called a garbage burner. In it they burned
trash, newspapers, wood and coal. Sometimes it would get so hot it would turn
cherry red. There was a tray at the bottom which had to be emptied of ashes. In
the winter my dad would spread the ashes on the steps and walkway outside so
that people wouldn’t slip on the ice and snow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My mother had a round
washing machine which had a ringer on top. After the clothes were washed, she
ran them through the ringer to get the excess water out. The ringer consisted
of two rollers which turned mechanically by a crank or by an electrical motor.
The clothes would go in-between them. The type that turned by an electric motor
could be dangerous. My mother had to take care not to get her hand or clothing
she was wearing caught in the ringer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In the dining room we
had an oil space heater. This posed all sorts of dangers, from fuel oil spills,
clogged pipes and chimneys, and possible explosions. Our radio had vacuum tubes
and was housed in a piece of furniture. My Aunt Anna had a windup Victrola. My
parents were modern and had an electric phonograph that played 78 rpm vinyl
records.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Under the house was
crawl space with a narrow aisle that was entered from the backyard by opening a
trapdoor and walking down concrete steps. After a heavy rain this would flood,
and my parents and I would have to bail it out by hand using buckets.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In September of 1941 I
started third grade. In the school library I read a book about a trip to
various planets of the solar system. This turned me on to science-fiction,
astronomy and science in general. My favorite subject in school was arithmetic.
I enjoyed it so much that I made up problems to do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">On December 7 of that
year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Franklin D. Roosevelt with the
concurrence of congress declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan, known as the
Axis Powers. I was seven years old and heard the news over the radio. When war
broke out, there was a big parade in downtown Chicago that lasted fourteen
hours. Many unions and workers marched to show there solidarity with
Roosevelt's decision to declare war on the Axis.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">During the war, certain
foods and heating oil was rationed. My parents bought meat from a butcher on
Willow St., but the government closed him up because he was sympathetic to
Hitler. They went to another butcher, but he refused to sell meat to new
customers because it was scarce. He said his steady customers came first. They
continued doing business with this butcher and bought end pieces of sausage and
bare bones to make soup. After a few weeks the butcher finally sold them meat.
Another scarce item was nylon stockings. As a result my mom did not wear any
for the duration of the war.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The stores were
different in the forties. There were no malls or supermarkets. Except for the
big department stores downtown, shopping was done at little mom and pop
specialty stores. Meat was bought at a butcher shop; groceries at a grocery
store; drugs at a pharmacy (which didn’t sell other stuff); magazines, comic
books, candy and cigarettes were sold at a candy store; chickens were sold at a
chicken store where the customer picked out a live chicken, the owner took the
choice in the back, killed it and removed the feathers; and of course there
were the malt shops, where the high school kids hung out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Our family was issued a
ration card with stamps for things in short supply such as meat, gasoline,
cigarettes and coffee. Because my dad was a friend of the man who owned the
candy and cigarette store in our neighborhood, I would be sent to buy cartons
of cigarettes hidden under the counter for my dad while adult customers who
were strangers to the owner would get sent away after being told that the
supply of cigarettes was sold out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">There were practice
blackouts where everyone drew heavy drapes across their windows and turned off
most of the lights in the house. In school I bought “war” stamps which were
pasted into a book, which when filled could be exchanged for a Twenty-five
Dollar War Bond, similar to a Twenty-five Dollar Savings Bond of today.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">During the war our
family was glued to the radio news broadcasts. The newspapers had maps showing
the progress of the war. Besides the news I and my parents listened to the
radio variety shows such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny, sitcoms such as Fibber
McGee and Molly and Duffy’s Tavern, and dramas such as The Inner Sanctum which
featured a squeaking door. In the afternoons, I hurried home from school to
listen to serials such as Terry and the Pirates, Jack Armstrong, All American
Boy and The Shadow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In 1942 I entered the
fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher was tall, unattractive and thoroughly
disliked by all the students. Her name was Miss Palmer. Behind her back, the
students called her “Palmer, Palmer, the old Jap Bomber.” Her favorite thing
was to have the class copy pages out of books while she left the room to do who
knew what. One time, I became disgusted and scribbled nonsense. When I refused
to copy pages, I was sent to the school psychologist, and my mother had to take
a day off of work for a conference.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .2in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">When I was
ten-years-old (1943), my parents allowed me to travel downtown by myself. I
felt quite the adult riding the subway to the downtown shopping area. I enjoyed
Marshall Fields and other department stores and liked to ride the escalators. I
especially enjoyed browsing through the book department. If I had the money, I
would buy an Oz book. Around Christmas time, the big department stores had
displays with moving characters and other attractions to lure children and
their parents into the stores.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Many children of all
ages lived on our block. We played cowboys and Indians using cap pistols and
bow and arrows and medieval combat in which we had at each other with sticks
for swords. We also played, marbles, softball with a sixteen-inch softball
(this ball was softer than a normal softball so that it could bounce off parked
cars without doing too much damage), hardball in Lincoln Park, hide-and-seek in
which kids would sometimes never be found, and crack-the-whip on roller-skates.
Sometimes in the evening, the neighborhood kids got together on a stoop to
simply talk and joke around.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">One time I and some
friends were playing hardball in the park and my cousin Kenny was the catcher.
A foul ball caught him in the teeth. He was lucky that none were knocked out.
Another time my family had a picnic in our backyard and was playing Bingo with navy
beans for markers. Kenny stuck one in his ear, and it swelled and would not
come out. He had to go to the hospital that time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I had accidents as
well. One time Kenny and I were chasing each other around my grandmother's
yard. As I ran toward the gangway, Kenny yelled something to me. I turned to
hear what Kenny was saying, but kept running. When I turned back, a ladder that
had been leaning against the side of the house in the gangway was right in
front of me. I smacked right into it, practically knocking myself out. Another
thing that we kids used to do was climb on the fence and swing on the limb of a
tree that grew there. One time, the limb broke; and I fell knocking the wind
out of me. Another time, I hit my friend Ted with a board on the head. What I
did not know was that it had a large nail in it. Blood spurted from the wound.
Nonetheless, Ted was essentially unhurt except for a scalp wound. His parents
were furious with me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I and my friends
climbed on the roofs of sheds that were in each backyard, sometimes going from
shed to shed on their roofs. One time I climbed up on the garage of the man who
lived in back of our house. The roof of which was shingled with brittle ceramic
shingles that easily worked loose. The neighbor spotted me and came after me
with a pitchfork.</span><br />
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/INTERESTING-TIMES-AMERICAN-TWENTIETH-TWENTY-FIRST-ebook/dp/B00H3P6BN0/" target="_blank">To read all of Joe Vadalma's award finalist memoir of his family through two world wars, the turn of a new century and beyond click here - only $2.99 - free for Kindle Unlimited.</a></span></h2>
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PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-56735854069765120052014-12-09T18:34:00.000-08:002014-12-09T18:34:07.293-08:00PageTurner Author Joe Vadalma's Family Memoir "Interesting Times" Named 2015 EPIC Non-Fiction eBook Awards™ Finalist We are proud to announce that our author, Joe Vadalma, has been named a finalist for the 2015 EPIC eBook Award in the Non-Fiction category. When fantasy author Vadalma, the Morgaine Chronicles, sent us his non-fiction family memoir, <i>Interesting Times: The Story of an American Family in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century</i>, we found it a fascinating read and knew it was something special. We are thrilled that the EPIC Awards committee agreed with us. We wish Joe all the luck in the world at awards time, and if he doesn't win, it won't be because he wrote an unworthy book.<br />
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Here is how the author describes this memorable memoir: "The story of my family from the time my grandparents immigrated to the United States just prior to World War I until the present day. It relates how historical events and circumstances affected us. The earlier chapters are based on my research of the life and times of those periods and stories I was told by my elders. The later chapters consist of my memories of my adventures up to the present date."<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/INTERESTING-TIMES-AMERICAN-TWENTIETH-TWENTY-FIRST-ebook/dp/B00H3P6BN0/" target="_blank">Click here to start reading this EPIC Award Finalist book right now for Kindle at Amazon - only $2,99.</a></div>
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<br />PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-28862567854025967282014-11-30T13:05:00.000-08:002014-11-30T13:05:00.731-08:00DIGITAL PARCHMENT SERVICES Publishes MIRROR, MIRROR By Star Trek And Fantastic Voyage Writer Jerome Bixby!<a href="http://futurespast-editions.blogspot.com/">(from Futures-Past Editions)</a><br />
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<a href="http://amzn.com/B00PUKJ5TC"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f5L8Eu7d7y0/VHYLUgSQuXI/AAAAAAAANtA/IgDKDYfR3Qw/s1600/Mirror%2BMirror.jpg" height="400" width="258" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt; text-transform: uppercase;">DIGITAL PARCHMENT SERVICES<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;">Is Proud To Announce The Publication Of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 24.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 20.0pt;">MIRROR, MIRROR<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Classic SF By The Famed <i>Star Trek </i>And <i>Fantastic Voyage </i>Writer</span><span style="font-size: 24.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">NEW JEROME BIXBY COLLECTION<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">CONTAINS THREE SF MAGAZINE STORIES THAT INSPIRED TELEPLAYS HE WROTE FOR THE ORIGINAL STAR TREK TV SERIES (1966-69)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">For Immediate Release<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Mirror, Mirror", the first collection of Jerome Bixby's science fiction in nearly fifty years, showcases three forgotten pulp magazine stories by that Bixby adapted for the acclaimed Star Trek episode.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Before he wrote four fan-favorite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek</i> episodes (receiving a nomination for the coveted Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation), and the screen story for the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantastic Voyage</i>, Jerome Bixby (1923-1998) was a highly regarded professional science fiction magazine editor and writer remembered for his "yeoman work in raising the standards of the science fiction action story (…) whose own stories, though few, are much sought after by discriminating readers." (Science Fiction Stories 1953) </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Bixby soon deserted magazine editing for Hollywood, where he wrote a number of low-budget, late-1950s monster movies including It<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">: The Terror from Beyond Space</i> (the acknowledged inspiration for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>), and landed scripting chores on the documentaryesque early science fiction television series, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Men Into Space</i>, before striking it big when he sold <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantastic Voyage</i> to a studio.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Jerome Bixby is best remembered, however, for the four episodes he wrote for the original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek</i> television series, and is much revered by series fans for introducing, in "Mirror, Mirror," the concept of the "mirror universe" where The Federation and Kirk, Spock, et al, are all their evil exact opposites in character and deed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Bixby also wrote three other episodes, "By Any Other Name," "Day of the Dove," and, "Requiem for Methuselah," all of which critics and fans rank among the best in the series. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Fans of all types will thrill to learn that this first-ever collection focusing on Jerome Bixby's science fiction will showcase a trior of never-before-reprinted novelettes containing ideas that Bixby would later mine and transmogrify in two of his highly regarded <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek</i> episodes, "One-Way Street" and "Mirror, Mirror" (both used in the ST script "Mirror, Mirror") and "Cargo to Callisto" (used in "By Any Other Name"). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The collection will also contain Bixby's most famous short story, "It's a Good Life," memorably dramatized first on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Twilight Zone</i>, then in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twilight Zone Movie</i>, and finally reinterpreted for the twenty-first century on the series 2002-3 incarnation, in "It's Still a Good Life." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Other Bixby classics include his first SF story for a pulp magazine, "Tubemonkey" (1949), and his very last, "The God Plllnk" (1964). You will also find a half-dozen other "lost" stories and novelettes reprinted for the first time since their original magazine publication in the 1950 and '60s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Mirror, Mirror was edited and features a long personal Introduction by his son, screenwriter and producer, Emerson Bixby.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">To be released in both trade paperback and as an ebook, "Mirror, Mirror </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Classic SF by the Famed <i>Star Trek </i>and <i>Fantastic Voyage </i>Writer</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">" is a collection with something for everyone; it's for fans of pulp magazines, for fans of good science fiction writing, and for every fan who has ever journeyed along the space lanes with Kirk, Spock and McCoy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Digital Parchment Services ebooks and <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">paperbacks are available online through Amazon, B&N, and other sites, while our ebooks debut at Amazon for Kindle, and other platforms and bookselling sites to be announced.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://amzn.com/B00PUKJ5TC">http://amzn.com/B00PUKJ5TC</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Introductory price: $3.99</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> – </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Regularly $6.99<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">ISBN </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">9781615082414<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">ISBN </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">9781503302433</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Distributed by Futures-Past Editions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">M.Christian</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Publisher</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://digitalparchmentservices.com/"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Digital Parchment Services</i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">is a complete ebook and print service for literary estates and literary agents. The founders of Digital Parchment Services are pioneers in digital publishing who have collectively published over 2,500 ebooks and PoD paperbacks since 1998. <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-73648454098662655932014-11-28T13:08:00.000-08:002014-11-28T13:08:00.039-08:00FREE READ SAMPLE CHAPTER "THE EMPEROR MARKED FOR DEATH" ADVENTURE OF THE 1ST NON-COSTUMED SUPER HERO!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HTLrIrGLfC8/UypApq1ZZXI/AAAAAAAABTQ/lCiClCAuzxU/s1600/Emperor-Marked-for-Death-300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HTLrIrGLfC8/UypApq1ZZXI/AAAAAAAABTQ/lCiClCAuzxU/s1600/Emperor-Marked-for-Death-300.jpg" height="320" width="201" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">DRAMATIS PERSONAE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The Heroes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">THE EMPEROR – Central figure of The Emperorverse, smart, swift, capable of amazing feats, all but indestructible, well dressed, and able to charm beautiful women with a single smile, Charles Lee Jackson, II, not only leads the fight for law and justice against all odds but collects the records of his cases and those of his partners to dramatize them for you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">BILL MILLS – Musician, stuntman, and adventurer who joined The Emperor to make motion pictures and stayed to fight crime. Whether on stage or in the field, a winner.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">MAX DECKER – Federal Intelligence agent who met The Emperor in the field and worked for many years as a crime-fighter while masquerading as a criminal gang-leader, The Gila.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">CHRISTOPHER "KIT" CASSIDAY – Innocent secretary who gets caught up in the deadly battle between The Emperor and the villain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The Villains – but not this time</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">VARAN HARUCHI – The Black Dragon, leader and creator of Continent-Eight, the international Executive of Crime, expatriate Japanese criminal whose exposure to arcane experimental chemicals has resulted in his long-lived youthful appearance, and who, due to plastic surgery, now bears an uncanny resemblance to The Emperor.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">DR. YALTA – Doctor and dentist recruited by US intelligence for his resemblance to warlord Adolf Hitler, kept young by the same accident, supervises medical and scientific crimes for Continent-Eight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">MASKMAN – Mysterious helmeted figure, whose true identity is unknown even to his partners in crime, who supervises scientific crimes, and conducts experiments for the Continent-Eight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The Villain</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">HORST STERLING ROSEFELD – Mysterious and powerful leader of the Church of Nihilism, dedicated to the destruction of the human race, and ruthless enough to accomplish it. His great strength and endurance make him a dangerous foe for The Emperor.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">CONTENTS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter One Miner Difficulties</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Two In Your Philosophy</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Three The Dead and the Quick</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Four The Terrors of the Earth</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Five Idylls of The Emperor</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Six Storming the Castle</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Seven Going Bughouse</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Eight A Mighty Man Is He</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Nine The Old Town Tonight</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Ten The Not-so-quick and…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Eleven Deadly Cold</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter Twelve Relatively Heroic</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Last Chapter Alice's Queen Refigured</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">PROLOGUE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">YOU SEE ALL sorts of things out in the country.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Understand, I didn't see this, didn't hear of it, didn't even know about it until recently, but once a few facts came to light and I started to put things together, this is what I found.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It was like a sort of ripple, or a flat dust-devil, a loose agglomeration of particles loping across the ground. The first mention of it was in a police report, out near the desert town of Llano, north of Los Angeles. It was November of nineteen seventy-seven. Several elderly folks complained about ants crawling over their feet – but there were no ants to be found, no indication of their passage, no bite marks, nothing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Christmas that year brought an account of "dust bunnies" on the highway near Red Rock Canyon. A park ranger claimed that something that looked like little tumbleweeds not only rolled past him, but detoured around him when he stepped in front of them. The ranger followed the tumbleweedy stuff for over an hour, observing that it was really more like a wave, thicker enough in spots to be obvious but thinned out in others.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In Mojave, California, the next spring, things that looked like actual tumbleweeds were spotted blowing through town – except that the wind was from the east, and the "tumbleweeds" were moving against it. A woman at a motel swore that the dusty stuff had broken open, diverting around the building!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The last report came from a couple of superannuated hippies who'd been camped out in the wilderness north of Edwards Air Force Base. They claimed to have seen waves of dust converging on a central point, where they climbed one upon the other, building into a tower about six feet high, a mass that coalesced into a man!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The man roughed up the couple, knocking down the hippie and threatening the girl until she gave him some of their clothes; for the man's own suit, some sort of uniform, was scorched and tattered.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Given that when the pair stumbled into the local sheriff's office both were somewhat the worse for wear and not a little under the influence, the report was taken and filed and forgotten.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It shouldn't have been, but one can hardly blame the sheriff for discounting the story. He'd never heard any of the other reports, and wouldn't have connected them if he had.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But it sure would've saved me a lot of trouble.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I'D JUST COME back from a science-fiction convention the Thanksgiving week-end of that year, where I'd been one of many guest speakers. Being too early Monday morning for any reasonable person to be awake, I was dressed casually, which means no neck-tie. I'd just sat down when my executive assistant, Heather McKenzie, entered my office and without preamble said, "When did you sell the Lone Star?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I looked at her, five and three-quarters of a foot of pretty – and pretty efficient – young woman with sandy blonde hair and bright green eyes, dressed in a sharp looking straw-colored suit and a beige silk blouse with a scarf-neckline.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Never."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Well, we just got a call from Ramsom saying some guy named Sterling showed up this morning with papers saying you did."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> To bring you up to speed, the "Lone Star" is a little silver mine I own up in Idaho, and Ramsom, the foreman, is a young member of the family that had originally owned it in the nineteenth century. Both that family and I have brought a lot of ore out of that hole, and I've used my share of the resultant wealth to finance my what-you-call second career, the fight against crime.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I mused only a moment before saying, "Then I'd better run up there and disabuse this 'Sterling' of that notion."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Yes, Sire," McKenzie said with a smile, "Nobody steals from… The Emperor."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chapter One</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Miner Difficulties</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">BEFORE SUNDOWN I was standing in the trailer that comprised the office of the Lone Star Mine, an hour out of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Outside was a verdant landscape only slightly blighted by the diggings. Like the original owners, I'd kept the mine entrance concealed, and left the surroundings unblemished.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> If you're not familiar with me, that was my name on the title page, and my nom de guerre in the title itself. As a crippled child, I had strived to overcome my difficulties and had succeeded more thoroughly than anyone could have guessed, and now I'm gifted with abilities and skills beyond those of ordinary men. Though my career is entertainment, my responsibility is using my power for Good. So I'm a story-teller by day and a crime-fighter by, well, by day, too. In the late 'seventies I was primarily involved in making motion pictures, but images or words, the adventures I produce are based mainly upon case files of actual events in which my Swashbuckling friends and I have been involved.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> You may have seen some of my re-creations, and if so, you'd recognize me: five, ten; brown hair with a bit of red in it and a little gray; blue eyes with green sunbursts in them; a ready wit and the smile of a pirate, dressed most often in black trousers and shirt, with a gray jacket and silver neck-tie. You couldn't miss me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I was running my operation from an office in a building north of Hollywood Boulevard, into which I'd recently moved after my previous location nearby had been fire-bombed by an organization known as "Dominion" in retaliation for my foiling two of their devilish plans of conquest and destruction, about which you may have read. My associates and I were settling into the new digs well, and it looked at the time like we'd be back in business on a full time basis soon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Part of that business was entertainment, but the part of it upon which I had just embarked was the other part, trouble-busting. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> After speaking to foreman Ramsom by telephone, I'd made a few other calls, squared away the entertainment business for the day, and fired up my favorite aircraft, Skystar, a jet plane styled like the famous Concorde, with its modified delta wings and "scoop snoot", but about a third the size. Equipped with panels of a gravity-defying metal, it can take off and land pretty much anywhere, so it was now settled in the middle of the mine's dirt parking lot. As the employees had all been sent home that morning, there was plenty of room in that lonely location.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">IDAHO MAY BE more famous for potatoes, but it's also a great place for forestry, services, and mining. Deposits of silver and molybdenum in several parts of the state have brought in millions over the years, though within a decade of this particular adventure some of the old holes would be played out to the detriment of the market.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The Gem State joined the Union in eighteen ninety, and some parts of it seemed unchanged since those days; in fact, a sign reading "Lewis and Clark wuz here" wouldn't have looked out of place in Shoshone County, in the east part of the tall skinny neck of the state. That rustic quality wouldn't last long, though, for the population had been on the increase for decades, and the trend looked like it would continue through the turn of the century.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Shoshone is Rocky Mountain country, and one of the silver-bearing areas is in a pastoral area just north of the Saint Joe National Forest, and about ten miles from the county seat, Wallace.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Recent rains made the area lush, with pines and grass competing for any available green. Even the other mines, several in a comparatively small tract, made less of an impact on the environment than they might have, with little surface evidence beyond the big holes in the ground. Most of the offices adjacent to these mines were temporary structures, for all the many years they'd stood.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">IN MY OFFICE/TRAILER, for example, I was standing over a fellow seated at what should've been Ramsom's desk. Sitting in his place was this stranger, nicely dressed in a brown sharkskin suit, tan shirt, and maroon neck-tie, a stocky fellow, about six feet tall, with a lantern jaw and black eyes. His complexion was sallow, but seemed like it should be ruddy, somehow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> He scowled up at me, entirely unimpressed by my striking figure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I'm here to see the manager," I said, starting out polite.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I'm in charge here," he claimed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "You're not the manager," I told him. "I'm looking for Mister Ramson. He was here the last I time I came up."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Ramson's gone. I'm in charge here, now. If that's all, good day."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "It's not all. Do you know who I am?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I don't care who you are," he said. "I'm in charge of this property."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I'd like to know how. This mine has been in the same hands for almost twenty years."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Well, it's not any more. I bought this mine property free and clear from the owner, and that's all there is to say. Now get out."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "You're welcome to try to move me, Mister…?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Sterling. Horst Sterling."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Sterling. Can you make me leave my property?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Your property? My company, Sterling and Associates, bought this property from a…" he paused to look at the top sheet on a stack of papers on his desk, "…Charles Jackson of Los Angeles."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Who happens to be me," I pointed out. "And I haven't sold this mine to anyone."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Sterling stood. "I don't know who you are, Mister, but I met with Jackson last Friday in town and we signed the papers."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I stepped over to my left to a file cabinet and collected a heavy brochure, and slapped it down on the desk. I slipped a finger under the cover and opened the brochure to the title page, where there was, among other things, a photograph of me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I don't know who you met with, but you can see it wasn't the owner of this mine."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Sterling stared at my face in print and looked up to my face in person, but it was obvious he was still going to be belligerent about it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Now, I suggest you go find your lawyer and find whoever took your money and get it back. Or my lawyer will be up here to help you go."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I don't know what's going on here, but I paid a lot of money for this property and I'm keeping it. You want it, you'll need a lot more than your word."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I've got a lot more," I said. "I can have federal marshals here by tomorrow morning to remove you from these premises."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> That got some action, but not what I was expecting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">STERLING PRODUCED A small capsule from his jacket pocket, and threw it in my face! The pellet burst with a puff of weird smelling gas, which provoked a sneeze from me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sterling, however, seemed startled. But only for a moment.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Moving with a speed surprising for someone of his bulk, he fairly leapt from a sitting position, flying over the desk and tackling me amidships. Unprepared, I was knocked back several steps before I caught my balance. And by the time I did, Sterling was already on the attack, hammering at me with fists like pile-drivers. Anybody else would've been pounded senseless.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">He struck at my jaw, my chest, my stomach. Dancing around me he pummeled me with a fast dozen kidney punches. I spun on my heel, catching him in the solar plexus with my elbow and following it up with a right to his jaw.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> He'd seemed surprised and confused that his attack had been ineffective against me. I was surprised it had been as effective as it had been. Contrariwise, I was startled that my counter-attack against him had been relatively ineffective.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> His strength was impressive, and so was his endurance. My double strike had only cost him his footing, and he sprang upright again almost immediately.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> An old-fashioned fist-fight was not what I'd been expecting from what seemed like an ordinary high-binder trying to chisel my mine, but now that we'd taken the measure of each other, that's what it was sure to be.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I am, as I said, rather more than I appear. I'd worked very hard to overcome my childhood disability, and I hadn't stopped when I was on an even footing with everyone else. I'm very quick, and very strong, and impervious to most injury. (I'm also very smart and handsome, but you didn't hear that from me; modesty, you know.) This superior ability is what got me into the trouble-busting business in the first place, and my proficiency at it is what commands the respect of my fellow crime-crushers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It also gave me the wherewithal to back up my position.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> As Sterling was finding out.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">HE THREW HIMSELF forward, grabbing me up in a bear-hug. He lifted me from the floor and began to close his grasp. The pressure was amazing; intended to crack ribs, it was the strongest grip I'd ever felt.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Sterling grew red in the face, and sweat beaded upon his forehead. He was really trying, and had lost sight of common sense.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I hooked my ankles behind his knees, and head-butted him as hard as my poor leverage could manage. His head snapped back from mine and his knees buckled. He released me as he toppled backward, and I got in one line-drive to his jaw as he fell.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> But his stamina was amazing, and he rolled over and regained his footing even as I sprang sidewise from where I had alighted. Sterling came at me but was just behind the curve, missing me by inches. I back-handed him across the base of his skull as he passed, and he stumbled forward, crashing headlong into the row of steel file-cabinets, the fronts of which buckled under the impact.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> He went down to hands and knees, shaking his head as though to clear it. He stood up, turning to stare at me through eyes obscured by blood that now trickled down from a wide gash at his hairline.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ignoring what ought to be severe pain, he charged me again. This time I used a trick I'd been perfecting recently: I simply stepped aside so fast he didn't even see me move, and his charge was so single-minded that he sailed right past me through the space I'd occupied, slamming against the front wall of the trailer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The structure couldn't stand the strain, and the thin metal wall and a window therein gave way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sterling ended up half in and half out, his torso dangling against the outside of the trailer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Coming outside, I stood before him, lifting him by the shoulders, assuming he'd be unconscious. He wasn't.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">HE HIT ME with a line-drive fist right in the face. Caught off-guard, I was knocked completely off my feet. I skidded to a stop in the dirt and rolled over, getting back upright.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Sterling came at me full tilt, and I side-stepped only slightly, hooking an elbow through his and sending him spinning. He twirled and sat down hard, and swore at me in some language I didn't recognize.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> He started to get up, but I closed in, bringing up a good old hay-maker to the point of his jaw. It stood him up, but, rather than falling over backward, he stayed on his feet and came at me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I was quick, but even so Sterling was at me again before I could brace myself. His freight-train attack picked me up and knocked me flat. Sterling slammed himself down on my chest and grabbed another of those pellets from his now torn and soiled jacket.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "I don't know why the first one didn't kill you, but this one will!" he shouted.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I was staring up at him in wonderment, my jaw drooping. He shoved the capsule into my mouth and crushed it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It tasted like the odor in a powerhouse, and I coughed, spewing a cloud of the unpleasant gas into Sterling's face.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> He'd expected the gas to be poisonous to me, but I don't poison easily. I don't know what I expected the gas to do to him, but it wasn't what did happen.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> His head became transparent. Then his whole body became insubstantial.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> At first he was surprised, but then an evil leer crossed what little I could see of his face. He leaned forward, pushing his face and shoulders against me. I swatted at him, and his body blew apart like smoke in a breeze.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The rest of him reared away from me, and collapsed into a sort of dusty tumbleweed for a moment before reinstating itself as a man. (You see how this ties in with those strange events I mentioned earlier. Obviously there was a lot more going on here than I knew at the time.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sirens sounded in the middle distance, and as Sterling solidified once again, he poised on the balls of his feet for a moment, clearly weighing the odds of fight versus flight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Flight won.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> By the time the local sheriff pulled up, summoned by complaints about the noise we'd been making, I was all tidied up after the fight, and entirely alone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Marked-Death-Amazing-Adventures-ebook/dp/B00FN385TC" target="_blank">Finish <i>The Emperor Marked for Death</i> only 99 cents at Amazon for Kindle.</a></span><br />
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-80904331955108440372014-11-26T13:07:00.003-08:002014-11-26T13:07:38.114-08:00All Of Toffee: The Wild Fantasies of Charles F. Myers!Read all the fabulous Toffee books - compliments of <a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/">Futures-Past Editions!</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Classic Fantasy in the Tradition of "Topper"!</i></span></div>
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<i>Marc Pillsworth's dream girl materialized from a magical plane—but she turned out to be a nightmare of comic proportions!<br /><br />Pillsworth was dreamer. That was good; it helped make him a success in advertising. But it was bad when his idle imaginings of the perfect woman turned out to be so strong they tapped the magical plane and she came to life right before his eyes!<br /><br />You'd think that would be a miracle, but Marc found out otherwise! For, like so many "dream girls" since the dawn of humankind, his dream girl, Toffee, had a mind of her own—and a life of her own, too! Worse yet, she had magical powers and insisted on using them on Marc's behalf. That might have been a miracle, too, but lacking worldly experience, the impulsive Toffee's efforts had a way of proving disastrous for Marc. Soon Marc's fiancée, the police, various citizens, and even members of the local underworld are all out for Marc's scalp—and just when he has succeed in sending Toffee away!</i><br />
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<ul style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 2.8em; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/?p=235" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">THE DREAM GIRL [The Hilarious Adventures of Toffee #1] by Charles F. Myers</a></i></b></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/?p=236" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TOFFEE HAUNTS A GHOST [The Hilarious Adventures of Toffee #2] by Charles F. Myers</a></i></b></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/?p=237" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TOFFEE TURNS THE TRICK [The Hilarious Adventures of Toffee #3] by Charles F. Myers</a></i></b></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/?p=125" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">THE SHADES OF TOFFEE [The Hilarious Adventures of Toffee #4] by Charles F. Myers</a></i></b></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://futurespasteditions.com/?p=126" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">THE LAUGHTER OF TOFFEE [The Hilarious Adventures of Toffee #5] by Charles F. Myers</a></i></b></li>
</ul>
</div>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-21197912630374455862014-08-24T11:55:00.001-07:002014-08-25T13:43:26.743-07:00HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLING SELF-HELP BOOK; The 68 Fatal Mistakes You Should Avoid<b><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ed8kQ1v0NLY/U_lzm5qnsGI/AAAAAAAAB2U/eZuutveYe_U/s1600/How%2Bto%2BWrite%2Ba%2BBestselling%2BSelfHelp%2BBook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ed8kQ1v0NLY/U_lzm5qnsGI/AAAAAAAAB2U/eZuutveYe_U/s1600/How%2Bto%2BWrite%2Ba%2BBestselling%2BSelfHelp%2BBook.jpg" height="320" width="204" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">"Five
Stars. Jean Marie Stine did something I've never seen done before. She found
all the Do Nots an author must revise in order to insure a best selling
manuscript. Her book revealed many subject I needed to address in my own
writing. I highly recommend reviewing any writings, you wish to publish,
against the information the author presents in this book." -</span><span class="a-size-normal"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> Bruce Lelievre, Amazon review</span></span></span></span></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The "must have" book by the acknowledged expert for self-help/how-to business, recovery, sports, health, self-improvement, hobby, crafts, and New Age writers. "If you follow only a third of her advice, you'll have a successful book." Jeremy Tarcher. In this unique book, author-editor Jean Marie Stine shows writers how to avoid the errors that keep most self-help books from finding publishers and off the bestseller lists if they are published. From the author: "Before starting this book, I carefully reviewed stacks of rejected self-help manuscripts from aspiring authors. I also looked at first drafts which publishers had asked me to rewrite before they were deemed suitable for publication. I kept a running list of the defects I noted. Altogether, I found 68 key mistakes most inexperienced authors seemed to make. "In this book I describe each of the 68 key mistakes so that you can recognize them when you see them in your own work. Then I explain how you can avoid or correct the problem. The result should be a zero-defect manuscript and book proposal that will sail through the editorial and publishing committees to acceptance."</span><br />
<br />
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</b>PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-58295723783423000072013-12-31T11:47:00.001-08:002013-12-31T12:09:37.666-08:00NEW COVER FOR MARISSA ST. JAMES' DOING IT WRITE: A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR POLISHING YOUR MANUSCRIPTUnique Book On Manuscript Polishing! If you are someone who has chosen
writing as a possible career, or who is considering it – then you need
this short, invaluable book! When it comes to writing, there are tons of
easy-to-find rules. To do it right, budding authors need to be aware of
those lesser known rules that can make or break their work. Grammar,
spelling and punctuation are the basics of good writing, just as
submission guidelines are the basics of a successful submission. With a
touch of humor and a couple of writing exercises, this reference deals
with some common mistakes beginning writers tend to make. Examples are
concise, and there are several interactive quizzes with answers at the
end of the reference. In addition to being an romance award-nominee,
Marissa St. James has taught writing workshops and groups. For authors of romance, erotica, science fiction, mysteries, etc, - and even nonfiction.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLUI/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0023ZLLUI&linkCode=as2&tag=sizzlediti-20" target="_blank"><img alt="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLUI/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0023ZLLUI&linkCode=as2&tag=sizzlediti-20" border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RJiwg0879nA/UsJMhtTuUcI/AAAAAAAABGo/_MuMbk081-0/s320/Doing+it+Write+copy.jpg" width="203" /></a></div>
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PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-59939380142372276462013-12-10T10:36:00.003-08:002014-08-25T13:42:34.343-07:00WOMEN YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD OF - BUT SHOULD, #1 of a Series!:CATHERINE LEMMON MANNING<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iXF0RMpPnRA/UqddqjKILuI/AAAAAAAAA8I/rpLPLXcaK24/s1600/WOMEN1-B.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
Many notable women who would have been mentioned in the history books, if they had been men, weren't. Or, they were relegated to mentions in books about larger organizations, and today may primarily survive as brief Wikipedia entries - or may not. This is the first of an occasional series presented by PageTurner Editions dedicated to to reclaiming some some of these undersevedly forgotten women, with profiles drawn from the pages of the by-gone magazines and newspapers of their eras. These entries revel the cultural predilections and prejudices of the time, and the text is often thought-provoking, to say the least, when read by modern eyes. In this installment, we present the text and photograph for a 1936 profile of Catherine Lemmon Manning, Stamp Detective:<br />
<br />
"One<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--u5qdVQCJSg/Uqdzw8vHOiI/AAAAAAAAA8Y/Cz2T0CAbvzc/s1600/WOMEN1-DETECTIVE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--u5qdVQCJSg/Uqdzw8vHOiI/AAAAAAAAA8Y/Cz2T0CAbvzc/s640/WOMEN1-DETECTIVE.jpg" height="640" width="415" /></a> counterfeit stamp carried Catherine Manning from an obscure souvenir shop in Washington, D.C., to the position of America's foremost stamp detective. One day, working as a clerk in the shop sorting stamps, her sensitive fingers discovered a fake, and saved her boss a lot of money. Now, after years of study, she knows all the crooked tricks of the trade. Her sharp eyes detect patches in torn stamps, water-color retouching, and unauthorized issues from stolen plates. Secret service men follow her tips. Recently showed up 43 rare stamps as fakes, and saved the prospective buyer $65,000. In 14 years, Mrs. Manning has advised 10,000,000 collectors and put her stamp of approval on millions of stamps. Here's her advice to collectors: "Locate a reputable dealer through the stamp reporter of your nearest city newspaper. Brush stamps with benzine to bring out flaws. If you're not sure then, use a microscope." Mrs. Manning is now custodian of 65,000 rare stamps in the Smithsonian Institution." (from The American Magazine 1936)<br />
<br />
For those interested in learning about her, below is her Wiki entry:<br />
<h1 class="firstHeading" id="firstHeading" lang="en">
<span dir="auto">Catherine Lemmon Manning</span></h1>
<table cellspacing="3" class="infobox biography vcard" style="border-spacing: 3px; width: 22em;"><tbody>
<tr><th colspan="2" style="font-size: 125%; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;"><br /></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Born</th>
<td>January 24, 1881</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Died</th>
<td>April 14, 1957</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Nationality</th>
<td class="category">USA</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;"><b>Engineering career</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Institution memberships</th>
<td><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philatelic_Society" title="American Philatelic Society">American Philatelic Society</a></td>
</tr>
<tr class="note">
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Significant projects</th>
<td>Curator Emeritus of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Postal_Museum" title="National Postal Museum">National Postal Museum</a>; first woman to hold elective office at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philatelic_Society" title="American Philatelic Society">American Philatelic Society</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row" style="text-align: left;">Significant awards</th>
<td><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APS_Hall_of_Fame" title="APS Hall of Fame">APS Hall of Fame</a></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>Catherine Lemmon Manning</b> (1881–1957), of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C." title="Washington, D.C.">Washington, D.C.</a> served the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philately" title="Philately">philatelic</a> community by her work in several philatelic societies, and the American public by her service at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Postal_Museum" title="National Postal Museum">National Postal Museum</a>.<br />
<div class="toc" id="toc">
<div id="toctitle">
<h2>
Contents</h2>
</div>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lemmon_Manning#Serving_the_Smithsonian"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">Serving the Smithsonian</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lemmon_Manning#Philatelic_activity"><span class="tocnumber">2</span> <span class="toctext">Philatelic activity</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lemmon_Manning#Honors_and_awards"><span class="tocnumber">3</span> <span class="toctext">Honors and awards</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lemmon_Manning#See_also"><span class="tocnumber">4</span> <span class="toctext">See also</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lemmon_Manning#References"><span class="tocnumber">5</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<h2>
<span class="mw-headline" id="Serving_the_Smithsonian">Serving the Smithsonian</span></h2>
From 1922 to 1949, when she retired, Catherine Manning served as the
Government Philatelist at the National Postal Museum, which is part of
the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution" title="Smithsonian Institution">Smithsonian Institution</a> in Washington, D.C. She was subsequently named to the post of Curator Emeritus, a position she held from 1949 to 1957.<br />
<h2>
<span class="mw-headline" id="Philatelic_activity">Philatelic activity</span></h2>
Manning, during her early years, gained experience in philately by working for stamp dealers, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_%28John%29_Murray_Bartels" title="Julius (John) Murray Bartels">Julius (John) Murray Bartels</a>, in the Washington, D.C. area. At the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philatelic_Society" title="American Philatelic Society">American Philatelic Society</a>,
she was the first woman to hold an elective office in the organization,
serving on the Board of Vice-Presidents from 1935 to 1937. At the
American Philatelic Congress she served as a council member, and at the
Bureau Issues Association, later renamed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Stamp_Society" title="United States Stamp Society">United States Stamp Society</a>, she was declared an honorary member. Manning was also a Trustee of National Philatelic Museum, located in <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia,_Pennsylvania" title="Philadelphia, Pennsylvania">Philadelphia, Pennsylvania</a>.<br />
<h2>
<span class="mw-headline" id="Honors_and_awards">Honors and awards</span></h2>
Manning was honored by an award for her work from the Philadelphia's
National Philatelic Museum in 1949. In 1990 she was named to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philatelic_Society_Hall_of_Fame" title="American Philatelic Society Hall of Fame">American Philatelic Society Hall of Fame</a>.<br />
<h2>
<span class="mw-headline" id="See_also">See also</span></h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philately" title="Philately">Philately</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<span class="mw-headline" id="References">References</span></h2>
<ul>
<li><a class="external text" href="http://www.stamps.org/Almanac/alm_halloffame_1990-94.htm#Manning" rel="nofollow">Catherine Lemmon Manning</a></li>
</ul>
PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-16120398370690120742013-11-06T13:41:00.001-08:002013-11-06T13:41:26.993-08:00Futures-Past And Deerstalker Editions On Tumblr!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
For all you folks who like to cruise the very cool images - and other fun things - on Tumblr here's some great news: <a href="http://futurespast-editions.tumblr.com/"><b>Futures-Past Editions</b></a> (our science fiction/fantasy/horror imprint) and <a href="http://deerstalkereditions.tumblr.com/"><b>Deerstalker Editions</b></a> (our mystery and thriller imprint) have new faces there!<b><br /></b><br />
<a href="http://futurespast-editions.tumblr.com/"><br /></a>
Keep an eye them for special news, treats, and all kinds of interesting stuff!mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-64695734937255909592013-07-22T11:52:00.004-07:002013-08-12T10:09:25.009-07:00Out Now: Monterey Noir By Patrick WhitehurstPageTurner/Deerstalker Editions is extremely pleased and proud to
announce the publication of the first of a brand-new series by the
incredible Patrick Whitehurst. <a href="http://amzn.com/B00DUNTWE4"><i><b>Monterey Noir </b></i></a>(the first of the Barker Mysteries) is thrilling, charming, unique and an absolutely fantastic read!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://amzn.com/B00DUNTWE4"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UtffCI0y7lY/Ue1-3F7fpjI/AAAAAAAALDI/hdmyLUkYk44/s400/81WQnKoLu5L._SL1500_.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“The elusive Barker is a deserving member of an exclusive society; that
of the great detective. He uses his intellect in a way that most people
fail to do and cuts through to the heart of the mystery with precision.”
-Billierosie<br /><br />Not every hero lives in a mansion or works from a
smoky, hard-boiled office. Enter Barker, a mysterious man with no memory
of his past. Ferociously handsome and acutely observant, Barker makes
his home under the soggy planks of Old Fisherman's Wharf along
California's foggy Central Coast. His closest friends are an assortment
of stray dogs, ranging from a large Rottweiler to a tiny Shih-Tzu, who
live with him. Adventure and intrigue have an uncanny knack for crossing
Barker's path.<br /><br />In the first entry of the series; Nickel,
Barker’s sole human friend, bestows his makeshift home upon the man and
his dogs just before dropping dead. It’s up to Barker to honor Nickel’s
last wish, to atone for his sins, which doesn’t prove an easy task.
Meanwhile, forces are at work in other parts of the fog-swept city,
which will lead the homeless detective and his dogs to a deadly
confrontation in the heart of Monterey Bay itself.<br /><br />Patrick
Whitehurst, born on the Monterey Peninsula, currently lives in Sedona,
Ariz. As a journalist, he's written hundreds of stories for newspapers
across the Grand Canyon State, as well as two regional non-fiction
books. Whitehurst can be found online at
www.patrickwhitehurst.blogspot.com.</i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-11749815917268812152013-06-02T11:22:00.002-07:002013-08-12T10:09:32.517-07:00The Emperor's Gambit<br />
<br />
Check out this wonderful short promotional video for <a href="http://amzn.com/B00CMHWOBC"><i><b>The Emperor's Gambit,</b></i></a> (by Charles Lee
Jackson, II), the first in a series of comic, action/adventure, science
fiction novels published by DeerStalker Editions.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>For forty
years, Charles Lee Jackson II has been producing a body of work
unprecedented in the annals of pulp magazines and comics. He has
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Emperor'.</i></blockquote>
<a href="http://amzn.com/B00CMHWOBC">Available as a paperback ($8.99) and as an eBook ($3.99) from Amazon.com</a>mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-83762857235135760202012-08-09T10:23:00.000-07:002013-08-12T10:09:41.836-07:00Welcome to Weirdsville: Fantastic Fairs, Festivals, And Frivolities<br />
As further celebration of the release of <a href="http://ome-to-weirdsville-fantastic-fairs.html/">M.Christian's</a> new book, <b><i><a href="http://amzn.com/B007TXXMC4" target="_blank">Welcome to Weirdsvile</a></i></b>, here's a fun piece on some of the more (ahem) unusual fairs and festivals around the world.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nxx_53vCTYE/UCFN62KJlqI/AAAAAAAAHaA/DlfgxGdQiKo/s1600/Weirdsville.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nxx_53vCTYE/UCFN62KJlqI/AAAAAAAAHaA/DlfgxGdQiKo/s400/Weirdsville.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="font-size: large;">FANTASTIC FAIRS, FESTIVALS, AND FRIVOLITIES</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Weird festivals? Strange celebrations? Bizarre events? Those of us in the United States have our share. I mean – </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">sheesh: </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">how about giant balloons in the shape of cartoon characters from long-cancelled shows? Celebrities waving from flower-covered 'floats'?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Weird, strange, bizarre, though, really is in the eyes of the beholder. As one travels the globe and observes the variety of fairs, festivals, and frivolities, that point becomes crystal clear. Although human behavior doesn't vary much, the methods of public celebrations certainly do.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">For some baffling reason, for instance, people like to throw things. And depending on the country, what they throw is likely to be different. In Binche, a small town in Belgium, the projectile of choice is a fruit. On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday Binche the town is visited by masked figures called </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Gilles </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">who – later on in the festivities – carry large baskets of oranges through the town. Many of these oranges are calmly, orderly, handed to residents as well as tourists. Others, though, are rather vigorously ... well, thrown at wary residents and unfortunate tourists.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Buñol, Spain, on the last Wednesday in August, you also might want to duck as the fruit thrown there – while not as hard or potentially damaging as an orange – can still sting a bit. What's fun about Buñol isn't just the hurled tomatoes but that the town, which normally has a population around 10,000, swells to closer to 60,000 as folks from all over come to throw – and get thrown at.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">If you happen to be in Taihape, New Zealand, things will be flying through the air but none of them – at least as far as we know – have been thrown at anyone. Nevertheless, a festival where people try to throw a gumboot as far as possible could pose some risks to passersby and participants alike.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">"Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">are words you might want to keep an ear open for if you're in Japan during Setsubun, and happen to see a member of your household holding a handful of roasted soybeans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Mamemaki is the term for it, and </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">"Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">(Demons out! Luck in!) is what is traditionally said before the beans are thrown out the front door – or at another member of the family.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">If you happen to be in India during </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Holi, </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">the festival of color, you also might want to avoid wearing your best suit of clothes. As part of the celebration, a brightly dyed powder called abir is merrily thrown everywhere – and especially at each other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Fortunately, not all festivals in the world include hurled objects. Some just have unique themes. Japan's </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Hōnen </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Matsuri </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">is a fertility festival, uniquely celebrated in the city of Komaki. By unique we mean prodigious, tumescent, large, and ... okay, enough with the jokes, especially since the object of the fertility being celebrated is that certain part of the male anatomy. A similar festival is also held in Kawasaki, called </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Kanamara Matsuri.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">While nothing is thrown, and nothing terribly phallic is evident, there's a festival that absolutely has to be mentioned: an event featuring tremendous beauty that ends with ashes and smoke.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Around the middle of March, the city of Valencia, Spain, has a festival called Falles – a celebration of Saint Joseph. But long before the Falles, Valencia, the third largest city in Spain, begins to prepare: neighborhoods and a wide variety of organizations form groups called </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">Casal Fallers </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">who raise money for their own contributions to the festivities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">It's these contributions that make the event so incredible. Each group – working from a common theme selected for that year – creates a </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">ninot, </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">or puppet. Fashioned from paper, wax, Styrofoam, and a few other materials, ninots are whimsical, outrageous, profane, comical, political, and every one is incredibly beautiful.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">The artisans of Valencia have had a very long time to perfect their craft, and it shows in each and every </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">minot. </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Each figure and tableau is a hallucinatory mixture of a Renaissance masterpiece and a three- dimensional cartoon. Each one, too, is frequently a wildly executed satirical jab at everything from politics to tradition, from pop culture to the Falles celebrants themselves. Nothing is sacred, nothing is spared.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Then come the fires, and then the ashes. Yes, you guessed correctly: each and every </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">minot, </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">every figure and tableau is lit – exploding into the night sky in a roaring conclusion called </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;">La Cremà. </span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">In the morning there is nothing but ashes, and the memory of the wonders of the falles.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'; font-size: 14pt;">Regardless of location, the one thing every fantastic fair, festival, and frivolity has in common is that they all show how we're all very much the same – and that all humans, no matter where we live, are more than just a bit bonkers. </span><br />
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<i>As always, a tip-of-the-hat to Avi Abrams and his <a href="http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2010/02/weird-festivals-strange-celebrations.html">Dark Roasted Blend</a> where this first appeared.</i></div>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-90789687193560403532012-07-27T08:43:00.001-07:002013-08-12T10:09:53.267-07:00Welcome to Weirdsville: Things That Shouldn't – But Still Do – Go Boom!<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0zkVZAmmo9s/T-CsB8_RruI/AAAAAAAAGkA/aXr9j-4XTGE/s400/CHRISTIAN-12-2.jpeg" /></a></div>
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In further celebration of the release of <a href="http://meinekleinefabrik.blogspot.com/2012/07/welcome-to-weirdsville-things-that.html">M.Christian's</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville" style="background-color: white;"><b><i>Welcome to Weirdsville</i></b></a><span style="background-color: white;"> - a compendium of strange, bizarre, and - yes - outright weird stuff that's all around us, here's a nice one about things that shouldn't, but still do, explode:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">THINGS THAT SHOULDN'T – BUT STILL DO – GO BOOM!</span></div>
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There are rules about such things ... or so we think. After all, apples don't fall up, lions don't have feathers, and lakes don't explode.<br />
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Sure enough, Macintoshes don't fall skyward, and panthera leo doesn't have beautiful plumage.<br />
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But if you happened to be living in Cameroon you'd know all too well that lakes can, and do, explode.<br />
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Take for example the Lake Nyos in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. Part of the inactive Oku volcano chain, it's a extremely deep, extremely high and, most importantly, very calm, very still, lake.<br />
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But it hasn't always been so calm or still. In 1986 something very weird happened to Lake Nyos, a weirdness that unfortunately killed 3,500 head of livestock ... and 1,700 people.<br />
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No jokes this time. No clumsy 50's horror movie metaphors. What happened to the people in the three villages near that lake isn't funny. Most of them luckily died in the sleep, but the 4,000 others who escaped the region suffered from sores, repertory problems and even paralysis.<br />
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All because Lake Nyos exploded.<br />
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Before the why, here's some more: what happened to the villages of Cha, Nyos, and Subum that time isn't unique. The same thing happened to lake Monoun, also in Cameroon, in 1984. That time 37 people died, again not very pleasantly. What does sound like a scene from some only horror flick is the story of a truck that had been driving near the scene. Mysteriously, the truck's engine died, and then so did the ten people who got out: suffocating within minutes of stepping down. Only two people of the dozen survived, all because they happened to be sitting on top of the truck.<br />
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The technical term for what happened to Lake Nyos and Monoun is a limnic eruption. To get one you need a few basic elements: one, a very deep volcanic lake; two, said lake has to be over a slow source of volcanic gas; and three, it has to be very, very still.<br />
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What happens is that volcanic gas, mostly carbon dioxide but nasty carbon monoxide as well, super saturates the lake. A clumsy way of thinking about it is a can of soda: shake it up like crazy and the fluid in the can, held back by pressure, doesn't do anything.<br />
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But pull the top, or in the case of Nyos and Monoun, a small landslide or low magnitude earthquake, and all that trapped gas rushes out in an immense explosion. That's bad enough, as there are even some theories suggesting that the subsequent lake-tsunami from the gassy blast has wiped out still more villages, but what's worse is that those gasses trapped in the lake water are absolutely deadly.<br />
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Heavier than air, the carbon dioxide flows down from the mountain lake, suffocating anything and anyone in it's path – which explains how those two lucky passengers managed to escape: they were simply above the toxic cloud.<br />
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Fortunately scientists and engineers are working on ways to stop limnic blasts. Controlled taping of the gasses, bubbling pipes to keep the water from becoming super saturated, it's beginning to look like they might be able to keep what happened to the 1700 people of Nyos from happening again.<br />
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But what keeps other scientists awake at night is that there are more than likely lots of other lakes ready to explode, the question being ... when?<br />
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Okay, so lakes can explode. But fruit doesn't drop to the sky and feline African predators aren't born with fluffy down, and frogs don't pop ... right?<br />
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Not if you happened to live in Germany a few years ago: for awhile there toads were doing just that. And we're not talking a few here and there. Over 1,000 frogs were found burst and blasted in a lake that was soon stuck with the pleasant name "the death pool."<br />
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Theories flew like parts of an exploding frog: a virus? A crazy who had a thing for dynamite and toads? A detonating mass suicide? What the hell (bang) was going (boom) on (kablam)?<br />
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The cops checked out the area and the local nut-houses but there wasn't anyone with that very weird and very specific MO. Scientists check out the exploded remains but found no suspicious viruses, parasites, or bacteria.<br />
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They one veterinarian came up with the most likely answer: crows.<br />
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As anyone who has ever watched a crow knows they do not fit the label bird brain. Extremely clever and resourceful, crows are not only fast learners but they study, and learn from, other crows. What Frank Mutschmann, one clever vet, hypothesized was that it was happening was the meeting of smart crows and a frog's natural defenses – plus the allure of livers.<br />
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Wanting that tasty part of the toads, the crows had learned how to neatly extract it from their prey with a quick stab of their very sharp bills. In response, the toads did what they always go: puff themselves up. The problem – for the amphibians that is – is that because they now had a hole where their livers were that defense then became an explosive problem. Weasels might not literally go pop in that old kid's song but that seems to be just what was happening to that lake of German toads in 2005.<br />
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But that still doesn't change that Pipins don't fall up, and lions don't have tails like a peacock's, right? And what about ants? They don't explode, do they?<br />
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But they do. Ladies and Gentlemen allow me to present camponotus saundersi. Native to Malaysia, this average looking ant has a unique structure giving it an even more unique behavior when threatened.<br />
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Running the length of its little body are two mandibular glands full of toxins. That's bad enough, as any critter that decides to try a bite will get a mouthful of foul-tasting, maybe even deadly, venom, but what sets this ant aside from others is what happens when it gets pushed into a corner.<br />
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By clamping down on a special set of muscles these ants can commit violent and, yes, explosive suicide: taking out any nearby threat with a hail of nasty poisons. It's certainly a dramatic way to go but you can bet anything threatening it's colony will get a shock it won't soon forget.<br />
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Sure apples do not fall up and lions don't have feathers – but what with exploding lakes, bursting toads, and suicide-bombing ants it you might want to check that your grandmother's homemade pie doesn't float away or that lions aren't about to swoop down from the sky and carry you off.</div>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-23126563623307695482012-06-29T17:57:00.009-07:002013-08-12T10:10:01.061-07:00Eiizabeth Joyce's Historical Romance "The Turbulent Years Trilogy"<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cI7ONumGX6g/T-5bLZOF7kI/AAAAAAAAAT4/zfVz5ggyD68/s1600/TRUDIE%2527SWAY-TURBULENTYEARS1-510.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5759641224760127042" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cI7ONumGX6g/T-5bLZOF7kI/AAAAAAAAAT4/zfVz5ggyD68/s200/TRUDIE%2527SWAY-TURBULENTYEARS1-510.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 134px;" /></a><span style="font-family: arial;">The Turbulent Years ia an epic trilogy of a sister's love of her brother - and a woman's love for her man – set against the turbulent background of World War II.<br /><br />Book I: Trudie's Way: Trudie loved her brother Karl more than anyone else in the world. But it was the middle of the Great Depression jobs were hard to come by and Karl's only choice was to join the Army. No one worried, America was at peace. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed, American went to war - and Karl was reported missing in action. Suddenly, for Trudy, beauty school, dating, movies and her social life were no longer enough. Trudie determined find Karl no matter what it cost. But first, she would have to join the military and get posted overseas to start her search. But the position she was offered was one of the most dangerous in the Army. Take intelligence training and go to Europe as a spy. Without Karl, the only one who had ever understood her, life didn't seem worth living. Soon Trudie was commissioned as an officer and intelligence operative. Then she met Chuck, who also understood her, and Trudie began to feel something for him she had never believed she could experience. Now both the men she loved were in danger - and her heart was torn in two. Assigned to her first mission, Trudie left for the European Theater of war praying for both men. Fear for her own safety as a spy operating behind the German lines never occurred to her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;">The Turbulent Years Trilogy<br />I. Trudie's Way<br />II. Trudie's War<br />III Trudie's Men</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VrjBBuRxrNo/T-5b1eQ4gdI/AAAAAAAAAUE/IpbK2WPDIKE/s1600/TRUDIE%2527S%2BMEN-TURBULENTYEARS3-510.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5759641947668513234" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VrjBBuRxrNo/T-5b1eQ4gdI/AAAAAAAAAUE/IpbK2WPDIKE/s200/TRUDIE%2527S%2BMEN-TURBULENTYEARS3-510.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 134px;" /></a></div>
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PAGETURNER EDITIONShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01937144714690212539noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-8678559745080112012-06-27T11:17:00.002-07:002013-08-12T10:10:08.854-07:00Did You Know? (Ep 002) Weird Facts - #2 - Mima Mounds<br />
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As a <b><i>very</i></b> special celebration of the release of <a href="http://did%20you%20know/?">M. Christian's</a> book <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville">Welcome to Weirdsville</a></i></b>, <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/">Renaissance E Books/PageTurner Editions</a> are pleased to present the second in a five part series <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://youtu.be/1dRhZJs__cE">Did You Know?</a> </i>written by our publisher Jean Marie Stine and produced by<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>by our resident magnificent media master, and great guy, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/billmills">Bill Mills</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0zkVZAmmo9s/T-CsB8_RruI/AAAAAAAAGkA/aXr9j-4XTGE/s400/CHRISTIAN-12-2.jpeg" width="266" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
<i>"A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics. Will keep you reading just to found out what's going to be covered next. Highly recommended for all lovers of weird & wonderful this side of the Universe." -Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend. </i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
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<i>Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaces nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville">Welcome to Weirdsville </a></b></i><br />
M. Christian<br />
$9.99<br />
PageTurner Editions<br />
183 Pages<br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Available where all ebooks are found </span><br />
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-22585421423031662992012-06-19T09:55:00.001-07:002013-08-12T10:10:15.439-07:00Did You Know? Weird Facts #1: The Hellfire Club<br />
As a <b><i>very</i></b> special celebration of the release of <a href="http://did%20you%20know/?">M. Christian's</a> book <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville">Welcome to Weirdsville</a></i></b>, <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/">Renaissance E Books/PageTurner Editions</a> are pleased to present the first in a five part series <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://youtu.be/1dRhZJs__cE">Did You Know?</a> </i>written by our publisher Jean Marie Stine and produced by<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>by our resident magnificent media master, and great guy, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/billmills">Bill Mills</a>.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1dRhZJs__cE" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0zkVZAmmo9s/T-CsB8_RruI/AAAAAAAAGkA/aXr9j-4XTGE/s400/CHRISTIAN-12-2.jpeg" width="266" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
<i>"A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics. Will keep you reading just to found out what's going to be covered next. Highly recommended for all lovers of weird & wonderful this side of the Universe." -Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend. </i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaces nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340124270&sr=8-1&keywords=welcome+to+weirdsville">Welcome to Weirdsville </a></b></i><br />
M. Christian<br />
$9.99<br />
PageTurner Editions<br />
183 Pages<br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Available where all ebooks are found </span><br />
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-50589532664318447162012-06-08T13:31:00.001-07:002013-08-12T10:10:34.080-07:00Welcome to Weirdsville: The Benevolent Sea-Devil<br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's an rollicking sample article from <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/SearchResults.asp?Search=christian&Search.x=0&Search.y=0">M.Christian's</a> new collection of what Avi Abrams of Dark Roasted Blend called "A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics:" <b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339186158&sr=8-1">Welcome to Weirdsville</a></b></span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339186158&sr=8-1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-903a0czl9ok/T9JbzdLRQXI/AAAAAAAAGes/QKwbDZ-8Y7A/s400/WelcometoWeirdsville510.jpg" width="266" /></a></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaced nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?</i></span></blockquote>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-E9Feb40WNPE/T9JdRXegILI/AAAAAAAAGe0/Aq6lhkq5BO8/s1600/Luckner.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-E9Feb40WNPE/T9JdRXegILI/AAAAAAAAGe0/Aq6lhkq5BO8/s320/Luckner.png" width="202" /></span></a></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The Benevolent Sea-Devil</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The year: 1917, the height of the War To End All Wars, sadly now referred to as World War 1. The Place: The Atlantic Ocean. You: the captain of an allied merchant ship carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aires. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then, like a ghost from the distant past, a ship appears: a beautiful three mastered windjammer flying a Norwegian flag. Staggered by this hauntingly lovely anachronism you think nothing of it coming alongside – it was common, after all, for friendly ships to want to synchronize their chronometers – until, that is, the ship's Norwegian flag is quickly replaced by the German eagle and the captain, in amazingly polite terms, backed up by guns that have mysteriously appeared in the windjammer's gunwales, explains that your ship is now his.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And so you have been captured by the Seeadler ("Sea Eagle" in German), captained by Felix von Luckner, or, as he was known by both enemies as all as allies, the Benevolent Sea-Devil.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some people's lives are so broad, so wild, so amazing that they simply don't seem real. The stuff of Saturday Matinees? Sure. But real, authentic, true? Never! But if even half of Felix von Luckner's life is true – and there's no reason to really doubt any of it – then he was truly a broad, wild, and utterly amazing fellow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Born in 1881, in Dresden, Felix ran away from home at 13. Stowing away on a Russian trawler, he fell overboard – rescued, so the story goes, by grabbing hold of an albatross, the bird's flapping wings acting as a signal to a rescue party. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Making his way to Australia, Felix tried a number of – to put it politely – odd jobs: boxer, circus acrobat, bartender, fisherman, lighthouse keeper (until discovered with the daughter of a hotel owner), railway worker, kangaroo hunter, and even had a stint in the Mexican army. During all this Felix also became a notable magician and a favorite entertainer to no less than Kaiser Wilhelm himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Making his way back to Germany he passed his navigation exams and served aboard a steamer before getting called to serve in the Navy on the SMS Panther. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Which brings us to that War That Was Supposedly The End To All Wars. Even though it was fought with steel and oil, the German's outfitted a number of older ships as raiders – hidden guns, more powerful engines and the like – and sent them out to harass allied shipping. Most of them were, to put it politely, a failure. But then there was the Seeadler, under the command of Felix von Luckner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">During the course of the war Felix sank or captured no less that 16 ships – a staggering amount. What's even more staggering is how Felix did it, and that he did it with grace, honor, and even a certain kindness. You see, while the Seeadler took out those ships it, during its entire campaign, did it at the cost of only single human life. Most of the time the scenario went just as it did with your merchant ship carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aries: the Seeadler would approach a target, raise its German eagle and that would be that: the crew and cargo would be captured and the ship scuttled. Sometimes she'd fire a shot to two to get her pint across that she was serious, but it wasn't until the British ship, <i>Horngarth</i>, that anyone had actually been killed. Tricked into thinking they were investigating a stricken ship – Felix had actually used a smoke generator – the captured <i>Horngarth </i>had refused to stop broadcasting a distress signal. A single shot took out the radio but unfortunately killed the operator. Felix von Luckner, though, gave the man a full military funeral at sea and even went as far as to write the poor man's family telling them that he had died with honor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To give you even more evidence that Felix von Luckner more than deserved the "benevolent" in his "Benevolent Sea-Devil" nickname he treated everyone he captured with dignity and respect: captured sailors were paid for their time while on his ship and officers ate with him at his captain's table. When the Seeadler got too packed with prisoners, by this time more than 300, Felix captured the <i>Cambronne</i>, a little French ship, cut down her masts and let all his prisoners go with the understanding that if they happened to get picked up before making land they wouldn't tell where the Seeadler was going. Respecting Felix's honor they didn't.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Alas, the Seeadler's rule of the Atlantic had to end sometime – but even that just adds to the broad, wild, and utterly amazing life of Felix von Luckner. With the British – and now the Americans – hot on her tail, Felix decided to take a quick barnacle-scraping break from piracy by putting the Seeadler into a bay on Mopelia, a tiny coral atoll. Now stories here conflict a bit – Felix always claimed that a rogue tsunami was to blame – but I think the more-standard explanation that the crew and prisoners of the Sealer were simply having a picnic on the island when their windjammer drifted aground.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Taking a few of his men in some long boats, Felix sailed off towards Fiji intending to steal a ship and come back for the Seeadler. Through a series of incredible adventures – including claiming to be Dutch-Americans crossing the Atlantic on a bet – the Sea-Devil was himself tricked into surrendering by the Fijian police who threatened, after becoming suspicious of one of Felix's stories, to sink his boat with an actually-unarmed ferry. By the way, the remaining crew and prisoners of the Seeadler had their own adventures, leading eventually to the escape of the prisoners and the capturing of the Seeadler's crew.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But even a Chilean prison camp wasn't the end for Felix, or not quite the end. Using the cover of putting on a Christmas play, he and several other prisoners managed to steal the warden's motorboat and then seize a merchant ship. Alas, Felix's luck ran out when they were captured again and spent the rest of the war being moved from one camp to another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But rest assured the story doesn't end there. Far from it: after writing a book about his various adventures, Felix von Luckner toured the world entertaining audiences about the Seeadler – as well as demonstrating his strength by tearing phone books in half and bending coins between thumb and forefinger. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">While, with the rise of Hitler, some people thought of Felix as an apologist, the captain had no love for the Nazi's – especially since the German government had frozen his assets when he refused to renounce the honorary citizenships and honors he'd received during his travels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But the story of Felix von Luckner still isn't over. Retiring to the German town of Halle, he was asked by the mayor to negotiate the town's surrender to the Americans. While he did this, earning not only the respect of the Americans and the gratitude of the citizens, his reward from the Nazi's was to be sentenced to death. Luckily, Felix managed to flee to Sweden where he lived until passing away at the age of 84.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">War is horror, war is pointless death, and war is needless suffering. But because of men like Felix von Luckner, war can also show the good, noble side of man – and that some men can remarkably earn the respect of friend and enemy alike.</span></div>
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mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-21703977674752826302012-06-06T12:08:00.002-07:002013-08-21T11:07:39.441-07:00Out Now: No Accounting For Danger By Laird Long<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a real special treat for fans of hardcore noir mysteries - with a humorous twist: <b><i><a href="https://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=LONGL-01">No Accounting For Danger </a></i></b>By Laird Long</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EFf3eWS07Hk/T8-qfKWPOFI/AAAAAAAAGec/3CwAQFPp08Y/s1600/NoAccountingForDanger510.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EFf3eWS07Hk/T8-qfKWPOFI/AAAAAAAAGec/3CwAQFPp08Y/s400/NoAccountingForDanger510.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<i>When this CPA crunched the numbers, they added up to crime. After graduating from university, gun Clint Magnum, accountant-in-training, is hired by Twinkle & Winkle Chartered Accountants of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He quickly discovers many of the firms he is assigned to audit are less that squeaky clean, and that many have balance sheets that hide criminality - or worse. These include: Roadhog Trucking - a company whose corporate vision is a load of something other than clarity; a senior citizen-run crafts emporium where the blue-haired merchants are importing more than just knickknacks; the clandestine tax reclassification of the oxymoronic Democracy Foundation. Along the way, Clint and his buddies, Spud Morgan and Vanya Holden, are forced to attend a training session in the secluded hinterland of Eastern Manitoba, under the unbalanced guidance of a host of crackpot consultants and technical shamans. And as the months crawl by like wounded snails, Clint realizes the more he knows the greater a threat he becomes to his bosses and clients. When a man knows too much, he needs to be very careful. But as Clint finds out, even that may not be not be enough, because as careful as you are - there is no accounting for danger. Then comes a climax filled with emotional sparks and electrical blackout.</i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-21868436424552664582012-05-14T09:00:00.000-07:002013-08-21T11:07:47.801-07:00Out Now: Welcome to Weirdsville By M ChristianSure, you may know <a href="http://www.mchristian.com/">M. Christian</a> as an erotica master - or even as a respected author of science fiction (see his <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/WITHOUT-CONTROL-Fantasy-Science-Fiction/dp/1615082166/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337010866&sr=8-1">Love Without Gun Control</a></i></b> for example) but did you know that he is also the author of this brand-new book of historical - and humorous - essays and tidbits? Read <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-to-Weirdsville-ebook/dp/B007TXXMC4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337014573&sr=1-1">Welcome to Weirdsville</a></i></b> and we'll promise you'll never look at the world the same way again!<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NmAnFDZorvk/T7ErXfy9AvI/AAAAAAAAGR0/cyGep1d59zg/s1600/WelcometoWeirdsville510.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NmAnFDZorvk/T7ErXfy9AvI/AAAAAAAAGR0/cyGep1d59zg/s400/WelcometoWeirdsville510.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<i>"A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics. Will keep you reading just to found out what's going to be covered next. Highly recommended for all lovers of weird & wonderful this side of the Universe." -Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend. </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaced nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?</i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-69434210146928775222012-01-23T10:36:00.000-08:002013-08-12T10:10:40.839-07:00Out Now: Far Out Within - Off-Trail Science Fiction & Fantasy By Ralph Greco, Jr.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-AQa73BIBuM/TMX3K9jkYMI/AAAAAAAAE0k/qAq8wKcYMaU/s1600/futures-past-1-master.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="87" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-AQa73BIBuM/TMX3K9jkYMI/AAAAAAAAE0k/qAq8wKcYMaU/s320/futures-past-1-master.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here's a very special treat: we here at PageTurner Editions love the work of Ralph Greco, Jr., so we are very excited to be able to bring you a magnificent collection of Ralph's science fiction and fantasy tales. It simply doesn't get any better than this: <b><i><a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=GRECO-11">Far Out Within: Off-Trail Science Fiction & Fantasy By Ralph Greco, Jr.</a></i></b></div>
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<i>The first ever collection of science fiction and fantasy from the widely published author. Greco writes of this dazzling assemblage of tales: "Considering the many subgenres of science fiction, I have attempted to keep this collection focused on stories of a more 'out there' nature. Even when the action takes place on Earth, aliens (either in body or concept) are responsible for or involved with the action to such a degree they're be no story without them. A few are light-hearted (at least I hope you'll think so), some a tad bit darker and there are those time travel ones (did I mention those?) but I hope you will be entertained by them all. Enjoy this short little batch of stories, some far out and some within." Includes:<br />BLUE BASS GUITAR BLUES<br />AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR IN THE MIRROR<br />THE VERY LAST REACTION OF THE POSITIVE NEGATIVE MAN<br />THE BODY OF...<br />THE SEAM<br />THE HUMMING PLACE<br />BOMBASTIC CHRIST<br />A MATTER OF WAITING<br />UNIVERSAL APPEAL<br />TO LOOK BUT NOT TO SEE<br />THE 'C' FACTOR<br />and others..</i></blockquote>
<br />mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-85769237398019887672011-07-06T11:09:00.000-07:002013-08-12T10:10:50.136-07:00Out Now: The Eye Of The World: A Lost "Thought-Variant" Pulp Classic By Don Wilcox<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a rollicking space opera/pulp classic like no other! Check out <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KE-ACK-04"><i><b>The Eye Of The World</b></i></a> and you'll see why <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/SearchResults.asp?Search=DON+WILCOX&Search.x=0&Search.y=0">Don Wilcox </a>is considered to be a master of the genre.<br />
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<i>"Magnificant! It's got everything, humor excitement, science fiction, and plenty of suspense." W. Paul Ganley, Weirdbook. Here is a thrilling tale of A lost sorld of futuristic marvels, a lost legion of American soldiers, a lost soul in search of redemption, a lost alien determined to conquer the world or destroy it - and a love that defied death! The Eye of the World is a mind-bending "thought-variant" novel from the 1940s intended to change the way its readers viewed reality forever! From the text: "What Allan was seeing was a gigantic room, nearly two miles high. And there were clouds of orange fire rolling out of the top of a volcano-like cone. It was the cone itself that struck Allan with awe. It must have been two miles in diameter – yet the room was not filled by it. The great loop of the glide-walk moving around it gave it the effect of slowly turning. It was strangely illuminated, and over its perfectly symmetrical surface Allan could see hundreds – yes, thousands of patches of color ... a glass-like surface composed of small, sharply defined squares. Each square, only about three by three inches, contained a picture. Sixteen squares to the square foot – and how many thousands of square feet? There must be billions of tiny pictures set side by side over this surface – each picture was a person – a face. These pictures were in motion. Was it an actual image of persons in other lands – images that revealed their actions and expressions of this very moment? And then he was sure that all this spectacle before his eyes was happening now. He took a few steps upward. He was walking on faces – illuminated, tinted photographs. The expressions of the faces were quite unaffected by the contact of his heel plates. He caught his breath with sharpened interest. A billion? two billion? Was it possible that there was room here for everyone? Some squares were in darkness ... purple and black – and the deed was murder! Scores of different murders were being pulled off right before his eyes. Some were American, others were murders in India, on some desert island, on the snow field that might have been Siberia. Although the pictures revealed an amazing variety of bloody deeds, they showed up as a group, dominated by a single color-tone. What was the meaning of such a colossal mirror, hidden below these lost mountains of Africa?" Rog Phillips' Eye of the World is a never-reprinted, lost masterpiece of pulp science fiction that award-winning author, editor and critic Terry Carr hailed as one of the "standout" stories of the year after it first appeared in the January 1949 issue of Fantastic Adventures. </i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-6005628376037682032011-07-06T11:03:00.000-07:002013-08-21T11:07:55.638-07:00Out Now: The Shades Of Toffee [The Hilarious Adventures Of Toffee #4] By Charles F. MyersA guaranteed classic laugh riot! Check out <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KE-23"><i><b>The Shades Of Toffee </b></i></a>by <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/SearchResults.asp?Search=CHARLES+F.+MYERS&Search.x=0&Search.y=0">Charles F. Myers</a> and discover why these books are still considered masterpieces of humor!<br />
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<i>When Mark Pilsworth's dream girl, Toffee, came to life right out of one of his daydreams, he knew he was in trouble. But when he invented an antigravity device, he found Toffee plus antigravity equaled dynamite! Pixilated dream girls from the dream plane, who couldn't keep their clothes on and kept appearing every time his geal-life girlfriend Julie was around, were one thing, but communist spies, scheming capitalists, and the shades of the Pillsworth family were another, and a far more deadly explosive mix. If you like classic fantasy served up frothy and bewitching, don't miss this, the only full-length Toffee novel ever written. Marion Kirby had nothing on our gal Toffee. It's a deliriously heady brew recommended for whatever ails you.</i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-63689087400414383792011-07-06T10:59:00.000-07:002013-08-12T10:10:58.502-07:00Out Now: The Fantomas Centennial Omnibus Edition By Pierre Souvestre And Marcel Allain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The legendary master of murder and horror is back in this new edition of <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=PACKWOOD-PD-01"><i><b>The Fantomas Centennial Omnibus Edition</b></i></a> by <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/SearchResults.asp?Search=PIERRE+SOUVESTRE+AND+MARCEL+ALLAIN&Search.x=0&Search.y=0">Pierre Souvestre And Marcel Allain! </a><br />
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<i>"Fantomas." "What did you say?" "I said: Fantomas." "And what does that mean?" "Nothing.... Everything!" "But what is it?" "Nobody.... And yet, yes, it is somebody!" "And what does the somebody do?" "Spreads terror!" <br />
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A century ago, a new villain was born. The Founder of the Criminal Feast of 20th Century Supervillains is one hundred years old now, still surprisingly fresh and spine-tingling with its gory Grand Guignol blood spattering and grisly tortures of flesh and spirit. And even now he is being reconceived and reborn as a film by Christophe Ganz, director of Brotherhood of the Wolf. Fantomas returns yet again to haunt our nightmares. In 1911, French readers discovered their Horror-Shock, Grisly Pulp Fiction, Arch-Criminal: Hannibal Lector, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhies rolled into one. Europe’s original pulp fiction, the “Lord of Terror” Fantomas, is the anti-hero of France’s best detective thrillers. Written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, it is one of the most influential and enduring works of popular culture published in the 20th Century. From Fu Manchu, Doctor Mabuse, Lex Luthor, to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, to Dr. Evil, the chameleon face of criminality, ever changing, ever renewing is shaped by the character Fantomas, Emperor of Crime. He relishes the lurid details of criminality, crimes, and savage mayhem, clothed in royal robes, or the rags of a street musician, or the simple habit of a homicidal nun. His last chapter escapes surpass even those of the legendary Harry Houdini, then in his prime and height of world-wide fame. <br />
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The initial five books in the series are collected in this Fantomas Centennial Omnibus Edition: FANTOMAS: The Adventures of Detective Juve in pursuit of a master in crime. FANTOMAS VS. JUVE: In this continuation Fantomas appears as the leader of a gang of Apaches, and as a physician of standing. Juve tracks the criminal to his secret hiding-place, but Fantomas escapes. THE VENGENCE OF FANTOMAS: Filled with hair-raising incidents this tale is a fascinating recital of remarkable happenings in the life of the master-criminal of Paris. FANTOMAS AND THE NEST OF SPIES: In this volume Fantomas is an ambassador for a foreign power engaged in Paris in obtaining important military secrets for Germany. Detective Juve unmasks him, but the criminal again escapes. FANTOMAS AND THE ROYAL PRISONER: This volume tells of the daring exploits of Fantomas in his attempts to get possession of the King of Hesse-Weimar's famous diamond. </i></blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7992725166908801169.post-84053711847871669662011-06-13T13:13:00.000-07:002013-08-12T10:11:06.358-07:00Out Now: The Mad Monster of Mu-Ungu [The Ki-Gor Collection] by John Peter DrummondKi-Gor continues in another rip-roaring adventure in the jungle! Pick up <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/SearchResults.asp?Search=John+Peter+Drummond&Search.x=0&Search.y=0">John Peter Drummond</a> amazing pulp thriller, <a href="http://shop.pageturnereditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KE-PD-003"><i><b>The Mad Monster of Mu-Ungu</b></i></a>, and you will not be disappointed!<br />
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In this adventure, Ki-Gor, the jungle king of the pulps is lured into a trap by a man who saves Helene's life. Drugged and hypnotized, by a power mad despot, Ki-Gor unwittingly leads Helene, along with his two closest friends, the Masai warrior Tembu George and N'Geeso chief of the pigmies, and their tribes, into the hands of a fiend. A helpless pawn in a madman's scheme, Ki-Gor's only hope is a Zulu wizard (fans of H. Rider Haggard will recognize the inspiration for this character) whose aid the jungle lord has already spurned. As an added treat, this electronic edition reprints the original magazine blurb for the story. With an original Introduction discussing the character, his creators, and the story itself. Plus a complete list of all the Ki-Gor novels from Jungle Stories. With the original pulp magzine cover illustration. </blockquote>
mchristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11887406428164757014noreply@blogger.com0