New Gold City

I want to point you to a couple of independent writer/artists I've been in touch with while on vacation in Florida. See photos that have nothing to do with either author.  I read a great post by Laxmi Hariharan in early July titled "Dare to Be an Indie?" . That post inspired me to think about the end product of writing, particularly the product created by indie authors. So I explored Laxmi's offerings a bit and saw that she is a quality, thinking, vibrant author living in Londan. I just had to reach out and tell her how great I thought she was. I also let her know why her piece inspired me. She responded back with a guest blog request so if you're interested, you can see the result of her request at her website right now. Check out "Letting Go: Indie Marketing Made Easy" at Laxmi's site, Young Adult Old Soul . I mean every word I wrote there.  Today, I also happened to stumble onto Dan Benbow's website, Truth and Beauty . I've reported on th...

My introduction to how mysterious and seemingly magical the human mind is came from a reading of POWERS OF MIND , at one time a national bestseller written by Adam Smith (a pseudonym for George Goodman, a high-end journalist and editor). I read this book in the mid-1970s. Powers of Mind was basically a long set of straightforward descriptions of everything from biofeedback and memory quirks to meditation, rolfing, and psychedelics. I was 17 at the time. From there I devoured books by Carlos Castenada, Aldous Huxley, John Lilly, and Ram Daas. My favorite -- then and now -- was THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG , by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Needless to say, like so many people back then, I did my own experiments with consciousness, going as far as I felt comfortable on the outskirts of Mind and Reality. This experimentation lasted about six years. By the time I was 22 I just didn't have the emotional strength and intellectual stomach to run around on the frontier of psychology anymore. That...

Photo Source: A Knife and a Quill homepage In the past 10 days two online indie book websites have featured my novel, Beyond the Will of God . On Sunday, July 8, Indies Unlimited provided a Sneak Peak both at their website and on their FaceBook page. Today, A Knife and A Quill is featuring BWG. I am grateful to Kat Brooks at Indies Unlimited and Luis Vera of A Knife and A Quill for the quick work and turnaround time.  When both of these features were run, I dutifully posted information to FaceBook, Google+, and Tweeted proudly. I write today because I've received a number of responses from people who were surprised at the information offered about Indie Work at these two sites. These responses made me realize that a lot of folks are still not clued in to the Indie options out there. Www.indiesunlimited.com/ and aknifeandaquill.wordpress.com/ are two of several dozen quality information sites for readers and writers both. I'm going to post a list of my favorites below, just so...

 www.catenane.net/home/naturepaper2009december.html Growing up in the 1960s, I watched my mother take handfuls of Thorazine, phenobarbital, and God knows what else, every morning after her first cup of coffee. She'd already been through electro-shock treatment and spent time in psychiatric facilities. Later in life they got her on the old psycho-salt diet treating her mental illness with lithium. The funny thing here is that near her death several years ago we talked about how they'd never diagnosed what was wrong with her definitively. Was she schizophrenic? Bi-Polar? Manic? Dissociative? Something else? She said sometimes it seemed like the drugs were what caused her illness after her first breakdown in the early '60s. The medicines my mom took kept her functional more or less for most of her adult life. She was once a brilliant sociologist with feisty political energy and a penchant for picking fights with people about women's rights and taking care of the poor. By t...

Can you feel it? There's some lift going on again. The doors are open. So are the windows. And we're starting to move. We're not flying yet, but we're certainly not tethered to asphalt anymore, either. The potential of the human mind is now a big deal again, and it's getting to be a bigger and bigger deal if you're paying attention. That lift you should have noticed by now is a surge in rising awareness about the powers of the human mind. I find it interesting that my novel,  Beyond the Will of God , so much about the validity and mystery of these powers, was ready for publication in 2000 but didn't make it to the light of day until this summer...makes total sense, though. Twelve years ago few people wouldn't have gotten it at all. Let me explain as briefly as I can. A whole bunch of stuff is coalescing out there causing this lift. First, over the past several decades diagnostic tools for mapping the chemistry of the human mind have advanced dramatically...

Uph! Ya' missed it. The story, "So Beautiful," self-destructed at 10:37 PM, July 9, 2012.  You can find "So Beautiful" again in the story collection Implosions of America , due out in September and available in both Kindle and paperback editions. Check back here for another free story next month.  Don't forget to buy the Kindle edition of my novel Beyond the Will of God . It's still a steal at only $2.99. Just go to the top of the page and click on the cover of the book. Check out Trying to Care as well, and my short singles, too. 

Indies Unlimited is a great resource for independent authors and their readers. They post loads of information on quality books available at reasonable prices online. They also run a fabulous FaceBook page you should check out here: http://www.facebook.com/IndiesUnlimited At around 5:00 on Sunday evening, July 8, they will be posting one of their Sneak Peak specials on Beyond the Will of God . You can take a peak and then use their store to buy my novel through Kindle. Or, you can buy the book right now. A little more news here as well. I've been hard at work setting up a paperback version of the book. If you've been following this blog at all over the past few weeks, you know that this is one of the basic rules for Indie Writers that I've discovered ( Lesson #9 ). Kindle books are a great buy at under $9.99 (BWG is a steal right now at $2.99). But half the readers out there are still just not interested in making the investment in an e-reader -- or they have issues with ...

http://www.1krecordings.com/home for availability We had the opportunity last night, Independence Day Night, to attend an album release party for the new Global Illage album "The Complete Portland Sessions." I've written about this mind blowing quartet previously. They're all about improvisational music and, truthfully, I think they're channeling the 22nd Century pretty forcefully. Global Illage is Chris Cuzme on reeds and bass; Dan Sears, trumpet and keyboards; Jim Hamilton, percussion; and Tim Motzer playing guitar and electronics  (like a winged angelic mad professor blend of Frank Zappa and Pat Metheny) . Their music grooves, flies, digs, screams, settles, electrifies, and calls forth the spirits of so many of our greatest musical geniuses of the past 100+ years. I asked a couple other people at the concert last night what we would call this stuff. Our final pick was global acid jazz fusion beat . Each musician brings his distinct musical intelligence to the ...

I grew up watching the Andy Griffith Show several times a week. It ran from 1960 to 1968. We watched it when it was a prime time show and we watched it more once it became syndicated -- probably from 1968 through 1980 three or four times a week in one way or another. Andy Griffith is deep inside my head. News today that he has died gave me a long pause and then a shiver. Without Andy, I don't think I would have become the man I have become. Let me explain. The parents of baby boomers have been called the greatest generation . I don't want to debate that here, but I do want to say that while the fathers of the Greatest Generation had to face the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the insanity of the Cold War, and a host of major civil rights issues, as a group they didn't do a very good job being fathers. Many of them were emotionally distant, unyieldingly judgmental, and workaholics. Far too many of them also destroyed their families with booze, early death, ...