L.B. Graham's Blog, page 2

I am just back from Cincinnati where I attended the GHC Midwest for the first time. Conventions like this can be grueling when you’re manning a booth on your own, but fortunately I had an opportunity to catch-up with three old friends who stopped by to help me pass the time at my booth. To each of them, my gratitude.

The main purpose of this post is that I wanted to send a ‘shout out’ to any and all who stopped by my booth to see what my books were all about. If you are visiting my site after buying a book, or after browsing my titles and thinking about buying one of my books, I wanted to say thanks for stopping by. There were many booths and many products vying for your attention, so I am grateful that you stopped in to see me.

I also wanted to tell you that while I have been fairly dormant on my site of late, there have been periods of productive blogging in the past, so not all hope is lost. More specifically, I wanted to say that there are a fair few posts in my archives that might give you a sense of my writing and about me. Feel free to browse.

Lastly, as I undertake the task of writing “The Elder Star,” the final book in my current series, The Wandering, I intend to blog about the process. You are cordially invited to stop by from time to time and see how it is coming along.

Now that I have cover art for The Colder Moon, I wanted to share it. As with The Darker Road and The Lesser Sun, the cover was designed by Daryle Beam of Bright Boy Designs and illustrated by his brother-in-law, Michael Salter. And, like those covers, I think it looks great.

For the few who still check here in the hopes of finding news about the third book of The Wandering series, I have good news.

The cover is now finished – at least the front cover. We are still working on the copy for the back cover. The editing is finished, I now have just a few internal tasks like the table of contents and the acknowledgements page. Soon, work will begin on the interior design, preparing the book for upload to CreateSpace for the print version and upload of the ebook version too.

I know it has been a long time coming, and I appreciate your patience. AMG’s decision not to do any more books in the series meant I needed both to finance the final steps and to shepherd the book through the process, and it has taken some time. I do hope you will be rewarded for your wait when the book is finally available.

When will that be, you ask? I don’t have a specific date, but I hope it will be ready for you to take on vacation this summer and enjoy as you take a break for a while, somewhere sunny and warm.

As a young teacher I learned a valuable lesson: the hardest paper to grade was always the first one. The longer I put it off, the more I procrastinated and did something else, the larger the stack of waiting papers loomed and the more difficult it was to start.

On the other hand, if I just picked up a paper and graded it – any paper, long or short, good or bad – the psychological advantage was amazing. The stack was basically just as high, but I had started. I had made some progress. It wasn’t nearly as daunting to pick up and grade the second paper as it was the first.

I hope writing this blog post will be like that. Having been essentially inactive on my site for far too long, I am hoping that writing this will be like picking up that first paper and grading it. Maybe it makes the next blog post easier to write. Maybe.

And as I bring this first real blog post in some time to a close, I have to give a shout out to my friend Rob Treskillard, who has totally redesigned my site. He set up my first blog, has been my technical guru from the beginning, and has once again volunteered his precious time to bring me into the modern world.

With the 3rd annual Realm Makers conference just around the corner – where I will once more be happy to serve on the faculty – I have a new interview posted at the webpage for the Faith and Fantasy Alliance. I have posted the link here for any who might want to go and read it, just click here.

I know I haven’t posted anything ‘original’ in a while, but I am rereading To Kill A Mockingbird and just had to come here and say, it has been a long time since I first read it, but it is just as great as I remember it.

It is hard for me to explain just how dear to me certain books are. It may be a cliche to say they are like ‘old friends,’ but I don’t care. They are. A book like To Kill A Mockingbird on a cold winter’s night is just the thing.

I hope you have had that experience with reading. I hope you still do have that experience with reading. If you haven’t, or if it has been a while, maybe you should pick up Harper Lee’s masterpiece and give it a read – or a reread. A great book can be just as great the second time around…

Last year I participated in a huge, multi-author scavenger hunt organized by fellow speculative fiction writer Brock Eastman. Brock has an ongoing KickStarter campaign that wraps up in about a week, so I wanted to post some information about it. Here it is:

Sages of Darkness is an exciting action packed series about a demon hunter. It put readers face to face with the battle between good and evil and teaches them about spiritual warfare. HowlSage the first book was released in 2011 with Destiny Image. But in 2012 Destiny Image closed their fiction imprint and the series was left in limbo. With the rights to all three books returned and the covers given to me, I set out to fund the editing of the final two books via a KickStarter campaign. This campaign seeks to unite myself the author with readers so we can publish the trilogy together. I’ve kept the budget as low as possible and every dollar will go to either the editing or reward fulfillment of the campaign. It’s an exciting endeavor, but one that has been successful for other authors and publishers. Please team up with me to provide more great YA christian fiction!

You can join the KickStarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/258946671/sages-of-darkness-book-series-fighting-demons

I want to thank Family Fiction for the chance to do an interview about “The Lesser Sun,” the second book in The Wandering, to correspond with its Fall release. While the book doesn’t look like it’ll be out in October as we’d hoped, I trust it won’t be delayed too much longer.

In the meantime, follow this link to the interview if you’re interested, and while you’re there, check out all that Family Fiction has to offer…

http://www.familyfiction.com/authors/l-b-graham/features/q-a-l-b-graham-the-lesser-sun/

Just a quick note to say I have a new interview posted at the Enclave Publishing website. Here’s the link if you are interested.

My thanks to Morgan Busse and Enclave for the chance to do the interview.

This post is part of a series on Ray Bradbury and his book, “The Martian Chronicles,” which will run from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend.

Well, way back over Memorial Day weekend when I posted my first official post for my summer project of doing a ‘book club’ on Ray Bradbury’s classic, The Martian Chronicles, Labor Day and the end of both summer and my series seemed to be pretty far away. Now both are here, and it is time to wrap this series up.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I used to teach this book, which is true. I think I taught it about ten times over the years, but I haven’t now for almost a decade. So, as I think about this past summer and how much fun it was to spend time with the book again, there are a number of things that come to mind as parting thoughts to briefly reflect on here.

One thing that comes to mind is the originality of Bradbury’s description of the Earth’s encounter with Mars. I think of 50’s movies about Martians and they are nothing like this. First of all, in Bradbury’s book we go there, whereas it always felt like in the movies they were coming here. Also, while there is hostility in the initial encounters, it isn’t of the ray gun, take me to your leader direct conflict type. The personal vendetta of “Ylla,” the big misunderstanding of “The Earth Men,” and even the cold, calculated trap of “The Third Expedition,” they’re just so different then those movie scenarios. And, in the end, it is the Earth that wipes out Mars and not the other way around.

Another thing that comes to mind as I reflect back is just how vivid many of Bradbury’s descriptions are of Martian culture. I enjoy the whole book, all three distinct ‘parts’ as I describe them in some of the earlier posts, but my favorite is probably the first part when the Martian culture is still alive and well to be encountered. There’s a bright, sunny feeling to those stories that is really unusual for scifi and space stories. The darker world of Mars after that first part feels more like the standard story of man in space.

I could also mention here that Bradbury’s ability to successfully knit together a book from such disparate stories is impressive. While I feel that the term ‘novel’ really shouldn’t be applied to The Martian Chronicles, I understand why it is. The book is more than just a collection of short stories, it rises above that to something else, and lacking a specific title for that something else, I suppose novel will do. As a short story writer, Bradbury shows off his mastery of the form time and time again, as he seems to achieve maximum effect in each short encounter, no matter how different the setting or event or tone.

Thematically, neither of the big themes in the book are terribly surprising. Writing in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki explain pretty well Bradbury’s fear that we were on a trajectory to destroy ourselves. That also explains Bradbury adopting perhaps that most ubiquitous of all scifi themes, the idea of only caring about whether we can do things with technology and not enough about whether we should.

What’s interesting to me is that after the utter pessimism of a story like “There Will Come Soft Rains,” that he would write a story like “The Million Year Picnic” where he suggests that the solution is to get rid of the institutions of Earth and start over. That suggests that man’s problem is something extrinsic to himself – ie, in the institutions we create, and not in us. It seems to me, rather, that man’s biggest problems are not institutional, they are personal – they are inside us, not outside of us. Thus, Bradbury’s final images of important Earth documents being burnt as survivors of the great atomic apocalypse prepare to start over on Mars seem to me strikingly naive for someone who seems so pessimistic about mankind elsewhere in the book.

Of course, I am a Christian and see man as a fallen mess, whose great hope is deliverance from the outside, and Bradbury clearly didn’t see the world that way. Still, while I can’t agree with the way he saw people and our future, and while that disagreement makes me both more optimistic than he is (I don’t think a sovereign God will let us annihilate ourselves) and more pessimistic (completely starting over will never fix things as long as we’re the one’s making the new institutions), I still enjoy Bradbury as a writer and a story architect very much – and I sincerely hope that anyone who has taken this opportunity to read Bradbury too can say the same.