Book Review #14: The Power To Write
The Power to Write by Caroline Joy Adams is intended to encapsulate what you can learn during a writing workshop. The material focuses on “seven keys to discover your writer within.” In her opening, Ms. Adams states that “The Power to Write is intended for everyone who wants to write but who may need a […]
Book Review #13: Chicken Soup-Life Lessons from the Dog
At some point during the past 26 years, you’ve likely heard of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. Until now, I’d never taken the time to read one and was pleasantly entertained by this book. Released in 2019 by Amy Newmark, Life Lessons from the Dog: 101 Tales of Family, Friendship & Fun […]
Book Review #12: Zombies Need Brains 2018 Anthology Threesome
Zombies Need Brains (ZNB) ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2018 for a three anthology collection: Portals, Alternate Peace and Temporally Deactivated. I supported ZNB’s 2017 campaign and was excited they were running another one. What has interested me most is the ZNB approach to getting several authors to apply their interpretations to a single concept. […]
Guest post: A Photograph of My Father by Dean Robertson
The photograph of my father arrived in mid-March—less than a month ago–sent in an email by one of my cousins. The subject heading of the email, innocent enough, “Your Daddy Fishing.” It was an old black and white photograph but, even scanned and emailed, it was perfectly clear. What I see: My father is standing […]
Book Review #11: One Of Our Thursday’s Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
In this sixth book of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, Thursday is supposed to attend the Racy Novel Peace Talks, but she’s missing. Yup. Gone. Poof. Where and why is what we want to know. Written Thursday, a.k.a. Thursday5, or as I call her – T5, is the one who must sleuth it […]
Book Review #10: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
In this fifth book of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde we find Thursday twisting through the parallel realities of Swindon and BookWorld. She must also cope with her son appearing in multiple planes of time, and apprenticing other versions of herself. It would be easy for Fforde to lose the reader, but he holds […]
Book Review #9: Looking for Lydia Looking for God by Dean Robertson
Though I now feel myself in this position, I am infrequently at a loss for words. It’s not for lack of something to say. Rather, I’m somewhat overwhelmed with the number of things that traversed my mind while reading this very engaging tale of a group of women brought together by desire and need. I […]
Laura Toplis: Business Continuity Planning
Much of my career has been working within the emergency management field and we were always concerned about business continuity. The real issue is that is doesn’t matter what size your organization is or what it does, you should evaluate your risks and take steps to reduce them I asked Laura Toplis to provide some […]
Book Review #8: Shadow Resistance by B.J. Cyprian
One of my most recently created quotes is “Randomly meeting ordinary people makes for an extraordinary life.”, and B.J. Cyprian is a fine example of this. We initially engaged through social media and found some common ground. When she asked if I would read a review copy of her book I said “sure”, thinking I’d […]
Dean Robertson Guest Post #3: THEY DON’T LIKE MY NOVEL??
This morning, “On Writing #3” was a short essay describing the next phase of the writing of my autobiographical novel. It followed smoothly and logically from “On Writing #2”– some thoughts on the first four pages and the elaborate techniques I developed to avoid writing them. All as planned. These are, after all, summaries of […]
Dean Robertson Guest Post #2: Book Covers
I thought I would get this bit of flaunting over with. Here are the covers of all my books. The first is a professional job by a fine publisher in Virginia Beach, Virginia–Koehler Books. The next two I designed as part of publishing independently using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP is not a perfect system, […]
Dean Robertson Guest Post: On Writing #1
Two novels completed. Not one viable idea for a next book. I find I can’t simply take a break. I am now no longer capable of not writing. And so, the question arises. What in-between writing can I find this time to keep my hand in, to keep my brain fresh, to operate like playing […]