Available Now: The First 4 Books in Mike Baron’s Bad Road Rising Series
The Badass Biker Detective Is Back In Two New Ultra-Violent Adventures…
By Mike Baron
Collect all four and get caught up before books five and six drop later this year:
Bad Road Rising, Book 1: Biker
Bad Road Rising, Book 2: Sons of Privilege
Bad Road Rising, Book 3: Not Fade Away
Bad Road Rising, Book 4: Sons of Bitches
The STEM – Sci-Fi Connection
Let’s cultivate the positive, uplifting science fiction so that we can inspire kids who will go out and create that world we’ve imagined for them.
By Tamara Wilhite
Someone described a classic science fiction novel’s cover as a book cover that launched a thousand engineering careers, and I completely understood the sentiment as an engineer, a science fiction fan and science fiction author. What many don’t seem to understand is the connection between science fiction and STEM.
The engaging imagery on the book cover often sells the book, and it sets the reader’s expectations (or explains the environment, as in the case of “Ringworld” and “Integral Trees”). We talked about how science fiction in general inspired many to go into STEM careers and on to actual inventions. You can find articles listing everything that Star Trek has inspired in real life to date. Yet there are several trends that are inhibiting this trend in the next generation.
PreTeena: May 14 – May 20, 2018
Sunday Comics!
By Allison Barrows
You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected]
The Destruction Hurricane Irma Wreaked in Our Back Yard
The Weekend Wilderness Feature: Every Sunday Images of Nature
By David Churchill Barrow
Submit your photographs of nature and the outdoor life to [email protected] to participate in this weekly feature exploring the natural world.
A 25 Song Playlist to Energize Your Writing
These are the tracks I return to regularly when I’m trying to create
By David M. Swindle
Yesterday in an online writing group, one sci-fi author wrote, “I am writing a chapter where the protagonist is (finally) leading a mutiny against her spaceship Captain. I need a playlist to write to. Taking all song suggestions!”
I threw a half dozen youtube videos at him and then decided that it might be worthwhile to compile a longer, more complete list of favorite tracks and explain how they assist me. So here you go.
I believe that essential to creative writing is the ability to shift and re-focus one’s normal state of consciousness — embracing the altered state. Thus, when I’m going to seriously write for a number of hours chances are it’ll be aided by some combination of caffeine, alcohol, sugar, exercise, and yes, specific songs. The objective of these varied methods is to prevent the mind from growing distracted and wandering to non-writing subjects. Music of numerous genres can contribute toward this shifted consciousness effect. Thus, I have chosen 25 tracks from throughout history and genres — from the Baroque era on through classic rock of the ’60s and ’70s, heavy metal and rap from the ’90s, and onto this century’s often more electronic pop songs.
I hope you find at least some of these tracks both useful and entertaining.
‘There’s an Official Washington Exorcist?’
See this excerpt from page 106 in Tales From the Black Chamber by Bill Walsh
By Bill Walsh
When one of her clients turns up dead after buying an apparently unremarkable 16th century breviary, antiquarian book dealer Anne Wilkinson is suddenly swept into a world that she had previously considered imaginary. An esoteric world of occult spells and invocations, of cryptic texts and secret doctrines, a world where necromancers spy through mirrors and armed assassins blow up her office and try to gun her down.
Before she knows it, Anne is recruited by representatives of a secretive government agency established by Calvin Coolidge to fight demons, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings—and finds herself caught up in the pursuit of a renegade priest who seeks the power to unleash one of the darkest forces of the past into an unsuspecting present. When the unthinkable occurs, only Anne and a handful of books stand between humanity and the end of the world. Can her intrepid band of scientist-librarians steeped in occult lore and schooled in NSA-level techniques of surveillance, explosives and heavy weaponry prevent the demon known as Abbadon from immanentizing the eschaton? You’ll have to read to the end of this page turning thriller to find out!
Click here to purchase and continue reading.
Interview: Lonesome George Author Roy M. Griffis Reveals His Writing Roots
By Roy Griffis
Griff discusses his career with Talk 4 Radio.
The Higher Loyalty
The New Adventures of Justin T. Fairchild, Social Justice Warrior: Episode 5
By Curtis Edmonds
I had lost the only remaining copy of the pee tape, the one thing that could bring down the Trump regime, but other than that my trip to Los Angeles wasn’t entirely wasted. My wife got to take Richie and his grandmother to see Mickey Mouse, and said grandmother bought Richie a whole wardrobe of Disney-themed outfits. I was less-than-thrilled about this, and said so, not wanting my only son to become a walking (well, crawling) billboard for a capitalist entity with a hundred and fifty billion-dollar market cap. But every objection that I made — on the grounds of anti-capitalism, anti-environmentalism, and occasionally, just good plain common taste, were drowned out by either my wife or my mother-in-law telling me how cute little Richie would look in said outfit. In other words, I was outvoted, and that’s a difficult thing for a Trotskyite to bear with grace.
New SciFi Fiction: The Fluidity of Memory
By Tamara Wilhite
I chose the avatar of myself at 25 for this meeting. I was in my prime at that point, youthful and strong, a subtle jab at her aging form without being obvious in the effort. And it would garner more respect from my sister than the teenaged avatar of myself I’d picked last week to try to relate to her kid.
My sister came alone to the meeting room this week. We shared pleasantries. Then she asked me about something, vaguely. I couldn’t understand the question, so I changed the topic. Repeatedly. She became flustered, then angry. “Don’t you remember what happened that day when you were nine, I was seven and Uncle Joe did THAT! I’m trying to talk to you because you’re the only person who I can talk to who can’t deny it, and you now you are denying it.”
“I’m not denying it. I don’t remember it,” I replied.
‘Why Would a Woman Like Judy Cohen Stay Married to An Arrogant Shmuck Like Bill McRae?’
Check out this excerpt from chapter 36, page 145 of Michael Sheldon’s The Violet Crow
By Michael Sheldon
A brutal murder stuns the quiet South Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. No grieving parents come forward to claim the unknown girl’s body, and there aren’t any clues. The police are inexperienced. The local media are casting blame and demanding answers. A mini-culture war is brewing . . .
So what do the civic leaders do? They hire Bruno X, Psychic Detective.
No joke, the guy’s got talent. And a track record. Sure, his psychic shtick is a bit unorthodox. Yet, somehow, he gets results—solving long-forgotten mysteries locked inside the old brick Quaker meeting house, and uncovering closely held secrets hidden within the biotech company whose symbol is the Violet Crow.
