Category: Nook

April 20, 2012 / In All Deep Places, Kindle, Nook / 4 Comments »

In All Deep Places – revisited

NOW AN E-BOOK!
Some years ago I wrote a book called In All Deep Places that really impacted me in the writing of it. It was my first – and to date only – time to write from the point of view of a man. I remember wondering the whole time as I wrote if I would be able to pull it off and I also remember my utter relief when my editor on that project, the amazing Nick Harrison, told me I had.
But it wasn’t the literary feat of getting inside the male point of view that left me pondering life’s inequities when I finished it. It was the content. I got the title for this book from Psalm 135:6 where we are told that God does whatever He pleases – in heaven, in earth, in the sea, and in all deep places. It is a marvelous and mysterious and mesmerizing thought that there is no place where God’s penetrating eye and strong arm can’t or won’t reach.

Marvelous because I sure wouldn’t want to be somewhere where God isn’t, but mysterious and mesmerizing because sometimes it seems like He has turned aside, shut His eye, withdrawn His hand – left the building, if you know what I mean.

In this story a mystery writer named Luke, who is happy with his successful life on the East Coast, comes back home to Iowa after years away when his father suffers a devastating stroke. Troubling memories of girl-next-door Norah re-visit him from the get-go and he quickly gets swept up in the unfinished emotional business surrounding this girl who was his first kiss. Norah tried to blossom despite the chaos of her dysfunctional family, and it seems to Luke she would have had God not continually turned His back on her.

Deep down he knows God would never do that, but it’s in those deep places that we all struggle to understand why God doesn’t bless or at the very least intervene. Luke’s question is the question of the ages. I don’t supply the answer-to-beat-all-answers of course; no theologian or philosopher has been able to definitively answer the problem of a good God allowing bad stuff to happen to people who don’t deserve it, but I spend a good part of the book contemplating this question, as I think everyone should at some point in their life.

Well, after several years being out of print, I am happy to say In All Deep Places is back from book heaven as an e-book, with a new cover and a new Part Two.
If you read the first version, you might recall writer Luke is compelled to pen his own story when he arrives back in Iowa, if nothing else than to purge his soul and find closure. His childhood story is Part Two of the book. In the new Part Two in this e-book version, Luke tells his story in the first-person, as most memoirs are best told.  This part came alive for me in the rewriting as I substituted he and his for I and my. The emotional tension and release was exponentially more satisfying when the story fully flowed from Luke himself. I hope you will agree!
Would love for you get a hold of the new e-version and let me know. It’s also available on Nook and Apple iBookstore.
Have a great weekend!
February 17, 2012 / A Seahorse in the Thames. Kindle, e-books, Nook / 4 Comments »

Seahorse, resurrected

There was a time, not so long ago, when a book would go out of print and that was that. If it was a title you wanted to own, you had to haunt used bookstores and estate sales looking for it. Sometimes you would find it, sometimes you wouldn’t.

Those were sad days.
Think what you will about electonic readers and the saucy way they plan to take over the book world, but they do for books what the print world could not – keep them available to be read.
I am happy to tell you that another one of my older books (older is a relative term, it’s less than ten years old) that had been out of print, is now alive again in e-book form with Greenbrier Books. A Seahorse in the Thames is a tale about finding beauty in unexpected places and I was inspired to write it based on a true event. A few years back, a London fisherman found a seahorse dancing about the weeds in the Thames, an arguably busy river that has been industrialized to the point of non-beauty. And yet, there in the reeds, where you’d least expect to find it, was a seahorse. A bit of beauty in a most unexpected place. I took that little idea and crafted a story about a young woman whose life seems to be uncharmed. She longs for a beautiful life; and she is nearly ready to believe it has passed her by until circumstances make her kneel down and look at a little bit of wonderful beckoning to her.

If you haven’t read it and like a different kind of love story, well here you go. It’s a great price at under five bucks, too. Here’s the Amazon link for Kindle and the B & N link for Nook.

Have you ever found beauty in an unexpected place? Do tell…