By Jan S. Gephardt Since our prehistory, humans have focused on creating a calendar, then using it to keep time. We’ve based calendars on the seasons, the sun, and the moon. We’ve scratched symbols into clay, bone or stone, dug sequences of pits, erected poles, or even dragged enormous stones for fabulous distances, all to get a handle on “WHEN are we?” But creating a calendar that’s accurate over a long period of time is a harder thing to do…
By Jan S. Gephardt Do they celebrate holidays on Rana Station? Of course they do! Personally, I think holidays are not only some of the most fun and interesting things religions or other types of communities do. Despite all the stresses and upheavals we hear so much about, holidays fulfill basic human needs. The reasons for the seasons Even sober, serious, hard-working adults need to play, once in a while. We need to break the routine. To relax with friends…
By G. S. Norwood I Always Wanted One of Those Life is good, yeah? You’ve mastered working from home. You’ve successfully kept your social distance, and, so far, haven’t strangled your partner or any of your kids. You have behaved yourself. So you deserve a little treat, right? A small but oh-so-necessary indulgence, as a reward for making it this far through the pandemic. But what kind of indulgence? Temptation is all around. You flip through a catalog and spot…
By Jan S. Gephardt To anyone who asks, “Can you tell me about your book?” I can only offer hints and glimpses. Of course, that’s all any of us can offer, short of a full read. But which hints and glimpses? It becomes marketing It becomes marketing, whether we authors and our might-be-readers care to think of it that way or not. We not only want to give the asker a good idea of what our story’s about—we want them…
I love to read. If you’re reading this, you probably love to read, too. I can get completely lost in a fictional world, but sooner or later my dogs insist I take them out. Or the cats get really obnoxious about that whole food-in-the-bowl-now thing. That’s when I reach for one of my trusty bookmarks. Or, as one friend and avid reader calls them, “Quitter Strips.” How could we read without them? Whether they are automatically inserted by our trusty…