To celebrate the anniversary of THE FORTUNE TELLER, I’m having a giveaway through the end of June. Enter to win a signed copy of the book or audiobook, your choice!
Giveaway ends June 30, mailed within US only, Good luck!
General
Upcoming Virtual Events
Saturday, February 13th – I’ll be conducting two writing workshops with Southern California Writers’ Conference:
10:40am Intuitive Writing Workshop & 1pm Perfecting Page One
A summary of both can be found here as well as registration info for the weekend. There are a lot of great classes and workshops being offered.
On March 24th, I’ll be doing a virtual book event at Anderson’s Bookshop with author Constance Sayers to celebrate the release of her second novel The Ladies of the Secret Circus.
Visit the bookstore’s website for more details as the date gets closer. Here is Constance’s website with info about the book. I hope you can join us.
Hello in September! A Virtual Book Event in October
Hi everyone, it’s hard to believe we’re past summer and into fall now. 2020 continues to be a mire and we’re not through it yet. I hope you all are taking good care.
I wanted to let you know I will be doing a virtual book event on October 8th, 4-5:30pm PST with Adventures By The Book and teaming up with some wonderful mystery writers. It’s free for anyone to sign up. I’ve participated in their Book Bingo series before and they are a lot of fun. I hope you can join us.
Also if you’re looking for some good books to read right now here are my personal recommendations. (I’ve been busy reading nonfiction for research but these four novels I recently gobbled up each in a day.) They were all wonderful book vacations:
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous (connect with the Duchess on Twitter!)
The Once & Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow – coming in October, pre-order!
The Space Between Worlds by Michaiah Johnson
The Last Flight by Julie Clark
Signing off with a few pictures I took from my newest kaleidoscope that I ordered from kaleidoscopeshop.com. If you want to catch my pictures as they happen, I usually share favorites on Instagram or my Facebook author page. ♥
Crop Circles & The 2020 Season
We’ve entered crop circle season & if you read my last novel, The Time Collector, you understand my fascination. I researched the phenomenon for the book and became hooked with the mystery.
Crop circles appear every year like clockwork, generally between late May through August when the crops in fields are high enough to show the imprint. This is what is called “the season.” There are 2 kinds of crop circles – manmade ones using stomp boards, which damage the crops and are imperfect designs… then there are the other ones, which show geometric perfection that mathematicians can gleam theories and equations. The crops inside those circles are folded over at perfect uniform angles and not harmed.
Here is a good example of a crop circle from 2008 with a mathematical message. The design is the number Pi in geometric form down to 10 decimal points.
Why geometry? Well, for starters geometry is the language of the Universe. When NASA sends messages up into space, they send math.
So maybe we’ve been getting replies for years. Here is a picture of my all-time favorite crop circle, the Empire State Building of crop circles – a breathtaking design spanning almost 800 feet with 409 circles creating three interlocking spirals. This crop circle appeared in 2001 in the middle of the night with wet and windy weather conditions. And to give you a sense of scale, the lines in the fields are the tractor lines for the farmer. This crop circle is about the size of 5 football fields.
Now here we are in 2020 in the midst of a year we never could have imagined, and crop circles are starting their season once more. We’ve had three crop circles so far. The first one to appear on May 28th was highly unusual.
More details on each circle can be found at my favorite crop circle website, temporarytemples.co.uk. There is also an archive where you can click on a previous year and see all the circles they photographed.
I hope this phenomenon will gain more attention this year. Crop circles are really one of the most fantastical mysteries that we continue to live with and generally ignore. So let’s see what June, July and August will bring. I’ll be sure to share any images on Facebook and Twitter as I find them.
In closing here is a short 3 minute clip on YouTube from Ancient Aliens that touches on some of the highlights & and below is a screenshot where you can see people standing inside a circle. I plan to do that someday.
The Time Collector Interviews & Events
Hello! Happy summer all. I’ve just updated my website and gathered all the interviews, book talks and guest posts I’ve done for The Time Collector the last few months. You can click on this Press page to see the list and links. It’s been a lot of fun doing events and hearing from readers for this book.
COMING UP ON THE CALENDAR…
If you’re in the LA/ South Bay area, I have 2 more events towards the end of July. On July 21st, I’ll be doing the multi-author event, Smart Summer Reads, in Manhattan Beach. On July 31st, I’ll be at the El Segundo Library joining in their book-of-the-month discussion for The Time Collector. And online at Goodreads, I’ll be leading a discussion the last week of July with the American Historical Novels Group.
For anyone wanting to take a closer look at the inspiration behind the book, here is a link to the bibliography page detailing my research & the playlist of music that inspired me while I wrote.
Signing off with a recent favorite picture I took of one of my kaleidoscopes. I like to post them on Instagram if you want to see others.
Upcoming NC Book Events for The Time Collector
This coming weekend I’ll be heading to North Carolina for 2 book events for The Time Collector!
On Sunday 6/9 I’ll be in Durham at the metaphysical store Everyday Magic doing a reading and signing from 4-6pm.
Monday 6/10 in the evening at 7pm I’ll be at Bookmarks in Winston Salem doing a LIVE recording of Inside The Writer’s Studio with Charlie Lovett.
If you’re in either city or have friends who are, please join us and help spread the word.