Sheila's Guests and Reviews

Today I'm delighted to welcome author Peter Welmerick back to my blog as he tours the internet with his undead friends and a wonderfully post-apocalyptic Hunt for the Fallen (second in the Transport series). Welcome Peter! And have fun, dear readers, as Peter tells us about... HAVING FUN WITH THE UNDEAD When I first starting writing my TRANSPORT Military adventure series, I wasn’t quite thinking I’d have the shambling Undead wandering about in the background, foreground or side to side. TRANSPORT was originally going to be about a huge armored personnel carrier (the HURON) and its crew and the crap and adventures they’d endure in some kind of a hostile, post-apoc world. But then I had to figure out WHAT KIND of post-apoc world I wanted them to venture out and about into. Post-nuclear war devastation? Nah. Cool, promising, but, nah. Technology run amok, sentient robotic beings overtaking and/or fighting against humanity? Hmm, I’ll use that for something else. Zom...

I seem to be reading lots of books written in first person this week. Each tells of a time, place, or way of life that I don't know. But how the author tells the reader what's going on is different in each. I read somewhere that there are different kinds of first-person writing, so I'll see if I can figure it out as I work through these reviews. Find yourself a coffee, and enjoy. The The Jamie Quinn Mysteries by Barbara Venkataraman are narrated by the eponymous Jamie Quinn. She's a family lawyer, and I know nothing about family law. Jamie offers details to the reader in an enthusiastically natural voice, like a friend sitting over coffee. There are three books in the set (and a fourth coming out soon). And I like the way the "telling" is so personal - first person enthusiastic perhaps? Jamie could tell me tons about autism in " Death by Didgeridoo " but instead she tells a little - it's not something the character, Jamie, is passionate abou...

Last year, part of my research for writing children's Bible stories based on Acts was to undertake a study of Acts with a group of friends. Of course, Acts took place in ancient history - dark ages, dark times perhaps, and surely a world much different from ours. We looked at history, geography, social issues, non-Biblical resources and, of course, various books of the Bible. It seemed those were indeed dark times - days of wars, riots, political unrest and intrigue, refugee crises, death and destruction... Then I listened to this week's news from Europe, of refugees sailing from Turkey to Greece, storms at sea, shipwreck, and more... And I realized they are sailing the same dark seas as Peter and Paul must have crossed when Christianity was born. Hence my question in the title - do we live in dark times? And is the world really so changed? We have our new technologies, new countries and new laws. But the seas and shipwreck are the same. Politics plays the same games with r...

We're working on our next Writers' Mill Journal - volume 4, 2015 coming soon! But click on the image to learn aboutVolume 3. It's a collection of writings from our local writers' community, and any sales benefit our local library so...if you like what you see from the link, please buy copies for all your friends! Like all "random" anthologies, our journal contains entries in multiple genres, from poetry for kids to scary horror stories for uncles and aunts (well, maybe not too scary - it's still PG13), and I get the joy of making sure all the entries end up in the right place. This year "It's a Mystery" had so many entries we had to start splitting them up. Some went into the "Kids' Corner." Several book excerpts landed in "Book-It." One mystery whose answer lay under the bed was assigned to "Under the Bed." And the rest were split between Mysteries and Strange Tales. But what's the difference between a...