Or is it the final brain cell?
The final countdown to NDK is starting to feel like the final brain cell, for sure. Why does back to school have to coincide with convention season? In all fairness, this is better than my first year at NDK. Back in 2022, I was picked from the wait list and had only 30 days to prepare for my very first convention. Now this is my 4th year and it has become a routine event and returning to NDK feel like a family reunion. There is still much to do to get ready, like spray paint edges of books and finish up all my signage. There will be a new table display this year, as well. So, if you are going this year, come by and check us our and say hello.
You can find us at booth 14, right next to the 18+ section entrance (look for the long line). I also made a cosplay bingo card. It’s honestly my wish list of what kind of costumes I would like to see this year. If you like to play along, you can download a copy in my Linktree.
Audiobook sample
George is back to recording Son of Tenshi, book 3 of my Fallen Angel series! Here is a sample of the audiobook from chapter 5.
So far, he has about a 1/3 of the book recorded. If you haven’t listened to the audiobook version, now is a great time to catch up on books 1 and 2. You can do so through this link, here.
Other news
George is also a teacher at a college in Utah. He is teaching folklore this semester and has asked me to guest lecture for his class on Japanese Mythology. I am excited for this opportunity and thrilled to learn that he has been using my Fallen Angel books as examples in his classroom. As a Lit major, I feel like I have come full circle.
Sample from current WIP
Here is a snippet from I Was A Stranger. I have been working on the diary sections of the book, where we leave the modern timeline for the past that Bea is trying to piece together. This scene is from Keersten’s perspective, Bea’s great-grandmother. Her family had been missionaries in Japan since the the 1920s. This diary entry is from the summer of 1940 and blackout drills were becoming a regular occurrence as Japan was in a war with China.
Tonight we learned that you can’t run away from all of life’s problems. There was a blackout drill tonight. I guess they will be a regular part of our summer here too. On the plus side, the blackout drills here are far more enjoyable than at home. As soon as the call went out, Mama and us shut up the cabin, then Papa called us out to the lake. We climbed into his boat, he named it The Ugly Ducking, and we sailed out into the middle of the lake.
The dark mountains looked black against the blue sky― you could barely see their outline. There were no lights from the shore, making us feel alone in all of God’s creation. The sky was filled with stars, twinkling down on us, more than we could usually spot on a hot summer’s night. Mama said this must have been how the world looked back when man was just formed on the Earth. Papa then quoted Mark Twain from Huckleberry Finn:
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.
Mark Twain is one of his favorite authors. He sort of looks like him too with his hair and mustache, but I think he looks more like Albert Einstein with the color of his hair. Whenever I point this out, Papa laughs and says he looks like both. I liked Papa’s quote. It was fitting for tonight. We sailed quietly under that starry sky with only bits of discussion about how the world must have looked in those early days in Genesis. Then the plane flew above us and we knew that the blackout drill for the night was over. Lights came back on around the shore and we sailed back to the dock. As much as all of us find the blackout drills annoying, I think this summer, I could be okay with them. ©
