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Celebration!
Cheer and shout! Sing and dance! Long days of darkness, doubt, dejection are gone and past. Dawn has come with celebration in the birth of a book, Written for all who never doubted the light would come. Now to celebrate, let us make merry. Rejoice! Cheer and shout! Sing and dance! Hairt Before Dawn is here at last.
After all these years of seeking an agent, a publisher, reviewers, and so on, Hairt Before Dawn a novel of perseverance is now available online as an ebook and as a paperback from Amazon, maybe from a bookstore near you, and as a signed copy from me.
The cover, created by Alison Lyne, shows Harriette Lindstrom, a blind girl called dumb Hairt, with her beloved coonhound Mutt. The subtitle, a novel of perseverance, is for me and my persistence in getting this story in print as much as it is for Hairt in her struggle to prove her worth.
You’re probably thinking as most readers do, “What’s the book about?” Here’s a bit of the back cover text to answer that.
Nothing—not blindness, shunning, or fire demons, not even the evil Mr. Dayton—can stop Hairt when she follows the spirit of Maybelle, her birth mother, and sets out to prove her worth.
Middle Tennessee, 1904. The Black Patch is torn apart in a violent struggle between tobacco farmers and against big business. Fifteen-year-old Harriette Lindstrom, dumb Hairt, is caught up in the conflict. Totally blind and determined to prove she can do more than milk cows and work tobacco, she leaves the farm, her adopted family and her dear coonhound Mutt. At the Tennessee School for the Blind, she has friends, learns her singing is exceptional, and meets the boy with a special voice. Best of all, cataract surgery restores some of her vision, and Hairt lives her dreams of love and acceptance until those dreams turn into nightmares of persecution and fear. Then the dreaded Night Riders appear.
I am very thankful for all the dear people who’ve had faith in me and my writing, and I want them to know this is their book, the one they asked for. I’ll say more about the process of writing and publishing of Hairt Before Dawn in future blogs.
Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. Psalm 98 NIV
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A New Beginning
Welcome to my new and improved blog. I say new and improved because, due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve had no blog at all for more than a year. Oh, the shame and sorrow of it!
Plus, I lost all the pictures that were in my previous blogs but later found most of them scattered throughout this new computer in no particular order that I could discern. I suspect the pics may be organized in some sort of chronological order but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear to anything in this crazy upside-down world.
Enduring the pandemic has been much worse than I ever dreamed, and it’s not over yet. I refuse to dwell on that for the simple reason that it won’t do a bit of good. So even though I’ve been shot and shot and shot, I continue to wear my mask when in public along with all the other masked marvels, as we attempt to proceed with life as it’s meant to be.
Maybe I should have said a normal life. But what is a normal life, or is there such a thing? Is it normal to be constantly bombarded with reports of violence on the streets and shootings of individuals or masses of people?
It might be normal, but I won’t be writing about that. People are mesmerized by news reports and sit glued to CNN for hours watching the news, they claim, but they are actually taking in opinions about the news. Opinions of other people, some well known and respected and others unknown, become what a viewer accepts as the truth.
Besides who wants to dwell on disturbances of political upheaval, natural disasters, global warming and environmental issues, the latest scandal concerning some celebrity in entertainment or sports, or even the weather. I just need to know enough about the weather to keep from drowning, freezing, or melting when I step out the door.
Maybe we should all just accept life with its ups and downs and go on living it to the fullest as Allan Karlsson in The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, the novel by Jonas Jonasson did.
To fulfill the promise of the lit ( literary) part of the blog title, I plan to include a review of a book I’ve read. Here is the first.
Unable to bear the thought of a celebration for his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson escapes out the window of the retirement home where he lives. In an adventure typical of his long life, he immediately disappears with a police inspector and the mob trying to chase him down.
In the past, his encounters with the likes of President Truman, Mao Tse Tung, and Stalin have prepared him to fit into any precarious situation and come out a hero. This last adventure is no different as he meets all challenges from the underworld and law enforcement agencies with the help of his new friends, an unlikely group including a runaway elephant.
With a not too-close a look at a few high profile situations of the past, this hilarious satire will scratch your itch for pure entertainment and keep you laughing. Just for fun, read The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.
The gray hair of experience is the splendor of the old. Proverbs 20:29 New Living Translation