Inspiration by Tolkien: A Guest Post by Sheila Deeth

Today, author Sheila Deeth stops by on her blog tour to talk about Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and how it connects to her Five-Minute Bible Story Series and her new book, Bethlehem’s Baby.

How the Silmarillion inspired a book of Bible Stories

Once upon a (student) time I got a copy of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion for Christmas. I took it back to college with me as term began, and rationed myself to reading one chapter a day—kind of like rationing chocolate to two pieces a day (which I also did), and cake to one slice. It was hard to read so slowly though. I really loved the book and was hooked right from the first tale—the Music of the Ainur. What a wonderful “creation” story! What a haunting blend of weighty prose, musical language, and thrilling fantasy. “Never since have the Ainur made music like to this music,” the author writes, “though it has been said that a greater still shall be made before Iluvatar by the choirs of Ainur and the Children of Iluvatar after the end of days.” The words begged to be sounded aloud, and the press of eternal meaning bore into me. But I was a mathematician, studying the logic of number systems and the vagaries of function and form. I was already a “mongrel Christian mathematician” though, so Tolkien’s Biblical hints dug deep. I went to Christian Union meetings, represented the Catholic Chaplaincy, and wondered—oh heresy of heresies—why didn't God use interesting authors like Tolkien to write the scriptures?

I was kind of an accidental mathematician really. When it came to a choice between studying mathematics or writing, I chose math because at least when you're right you're right and no-one’s going to tell you you're not good enough. In contrast my son, when faced with the identical choice, plumped for writing because those who judge words can only give opinions; they can't definitively declare your answer’s wrong.

So what’s an accidental mathematician, with a love of writing, a sudden total addiction to Tolkien (especially The Silmarillion), and a deep Christian faith to do? In my case, dreaming was way easier than doing, so I dreamed a set of Bible stories, written so kids (and teens, and students too) might actually want to read them, written to be fun and spoken aloud and shared, and going all the way from creation to revelation—from that first music of Tolkien’s Ainur until the end of days. Then I got a job and wrote computer programs, got married and had kids, got another job and broke computer programs, became infinitely more mongrel, learned tons of stuff about the Bible and Biblical times, lost my job… and then I started writing those stories I'd dreamed of long ago.

The kids are grown, and one of them even writes. So now the Bible, science and history feed my muse, Tolkien and faith inspire my intent, and the Five-Minute Bible Story^TM Series keeps growing, though Creation to Revelation’s already taking six books with Bethlehem’s Baby’s recent release, and many more in the works.

Meanwhile I still love The Silmarillion best of all my Tolkien books. I just found it again while tidying up the shelves, so please excuse me while I curl up and read.

Thank you so much for welcoming me to your blog, Anita.

Links:

Find Bethlehem’s Baby at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EY172MA/

More of the Five-Minute Bible Story^TM Series on the publisher’s website: http://capearagopress.com/Five-Minute.html

Connect with Sheila at:

Sheila Deeth: http://about.me/SheilaDeeth

Blog: http://sheiladeeth.blogspot.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sheila.deeth

Fan page: https://www.facebook.com/SheilaDeethAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sheiladeeth

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2853735.Sheila_Deeth

Being a Storyteller: A Guest Post From Sheila Deeth

Today we welcome talented author, Sheila Deeth, as she stops by on her blog tour for her new book, Divide by Zero.  She chats about her writing, her book and...

Being a Storyteller  

I love to write but, more importantly, I love telling stories. I’ve been telling stories since long before I learned to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. In elementary school the teachers of older classes would send students to “borrow” me, so I could keep the class quiet with a story while the teacher stepped out of the room. I imagined all sorts of exciting lives for an every-changing cast of characters ranging from cats and dogs to superheroes and angels and saints. Then in high school a teacher asked for an essay on whether I’d prefer a short exciting life or a long boring one. Which one would you choose?

Short and exciting seemed like the obvious answer. After all, if I didn’t want a short exciting life, why did I keep telling short exciting stories? But I’d learned the joy of making people cry somewhere along the line. (My teacher said it’s much harder to make them laugh, but I was working on that.) Class-mates cry when heroes and heroines die. And short exciting lives do tend to end in haunting tears.

I’d already started my essay but I turned it around. No, I thought, I don’t want a short exciting life. I want a really long and boring one in which I can write a million books and live and die vicariously through the characters I create.

Of course, in school I had a captive audience for those tales. I still remember the faces of elementary students as I perched precariously on the teacher’s chair. I still remember high-school friends sitting silent while the teacher read out one of my stories. But real life, long and boring, was soon joyously filled with the excitement of growing children. My new captive audience was my kids and I told them exciting stories while delighting in their lives. Now they’re grown. I’ve started writing those “million books” and I wonder if anyone will read them. My precious needling words hide in a haystack as big as the world or, at least, as big as the internet. My teacher’s chair sits in front of a blank computer screen. And I can’t see my audience.

Will you read my book? If you do, I just might make you cry, like I did in school. I hope I’ll make you laugh a bit as well. And I hope you’ll feel the time spent with my characters was well-employed. For the most part, they’re just living their everyday lives, joyously filled with the excitement of growing children, and haunting overshadowed by the past. But even some relatively boring lives get cut short. And excitement might be less important than knowing how to move on.

Divide by Zero creeps into the heart of community, then watches a small boy’s innocence and wisdom set that heart beating again after trauma intervenes. I hope you’ll read it but, more importantly, I hope you’ll like it.

Divide by Zero

It takes a subdivision to raise a child, and a wealth of threads to weave a tapestry, until one breaks.

Troy, the garage mechanic’s son, loves Lydia, the rich man’s daughter. Amethyst has a remarkable cat and Andrea a curious accent. Old Abigail knows more than anyone else but doesn’t speak. And in Paradise Park a middle-aged man keeps watch while autistic Amelia keeps getting lost.

Pastor Bill, at the church of Paradise, tries to mend people. Peter mends cars. But when that fraying thread gives way it might take a child to raise the subdivision—or to mend it.

Divide by Zero is available from:

Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Divide-Zero-Sheila-Deeth/dp/1600763405/
http://www.amazon.com/Divide-by-Zero-ebook/dp/B0090NFH56/

Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/Divide-Zero-Sheila-Deeth/dp/1600763405/ 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Divide-by-Zero-ebook/dp/B0090NFH56/

Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/divide-by-zero-sheila-deeth/1112782597

Powells http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781600763403-0

Waterstones http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/sheila+deeth/divide+by+zero/9420931/

And more.

Author Bio:

Sheila Deeth grew up in the UK and has a Bachelors and Masters in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. Now living in the States near Portland Oregon, she enjoys reading, writing, drawing, telling stories and meeting her neighbors' dogs on the green.

Sheila can be found on her website: http://www.sheiladeeth.com

Find her books at http://www.sheiladeethbooks.com

Or connect with her on:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sheila.deeth
http://www.facebook.com/SheilaDeethAuthor

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sheila-deeth/17/21b/3b9

Gather: http://smd.gather.com/

Goodreads:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2853735.Sheila_Deeth

Blogger: http://sheiladeeth.blogspot.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sheiladeeth
 

Tardy with an Award

A few weeks ago, (almost a month ago actually), my blog had another award bestowed upon it, the Liebster Blog Award given by the talented Angela Yuriko Smith and her wonderful blog Dandilyon Fluff.  Between writing, reviewing and general forgetfulness, I neglected to post about it until now. But better late than never I suppose.

So here it is:

“The Liebster Blog Award started in Germany and was intended to drive traffic to hidden gems.” Liebster is German for “friend”. The rules are simple:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
2. Reveal your top blogger friends and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.

My top blogger friends (besides Angela) are:

Pat Bertram (who has so many blogs I’ve lost count). Check out her main one at: http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/

Joylene Nowell Butler, a wonderful writer with an insightful and helpful blog: http://cluculzwriter.blogspot.com/

Sheila Deeth, an exquisite writer who also does great book reviews: http://sheiladeeth.blogspot.com/

Rhetta Akamatsu, who writes about blues music, ghosts and the paranormal and steampunk: http://rhetta.wordpress.com/

And all the bloggers over at Murder by 4. There is always something interesting brewing at that blog: http://murderby4.blogspot.com/

Check them out, you won’t be sorry.

Storyteller: Guest Author Sheila Deeth

Please welcome author Sheila Deeth to the blog today.  She is currently on a blog tour for her new book, Flower Child, and she's stopping by today to talk about her books and writing.  Take it away Sheila...

I Tell Stories.

I used to tell children’s stories in church and called them children’s sermons. But I tell stories for littler kids too, with pictures; and big kids’ stories, with words; and grown-up stories, short and long and all points in-between; and they’re all stories. One day I tried to call myself a writer and the first question anyone asked me was, of course,

What do you write?

An answer that covers every possible age-group and genre might not be quite what the questioner’s looking for. So I looked at the books I’ve had “properly” published (as opposed to published by myself). I’ve got three ebooks out with Gypsy Shadow, and tried to decide what genre they’d fit into.

It wasn’t easy. My books don’t seem to have an awful lot in common. Refracted’s set in the future, except it’s the past, and the present, and all points in between. Perhaps it’s sci-fi. Time-travel? Something like that. Meanwhile Black Widow’s firmly set in the past—except it’s a slightly altered past where sorceresses can reinvent themselves and Holy Grails can change the world. My new ebook, Flower Child, is set in the present, except… Well, except it’s a present where a mother grieving her miscarriage can develop a relationship with her unborn child. Maybe that word “except” is the common factor.

Actually, my books do have some things in common. They’re all speculative, in that they all tell about things we can’t analyze or hope to understand. They’re all spiritual too, in that they’re linked by Biblical symbols and hints of stories from the Bible. They’re all fiction—well, obviously. And they all involve some element of someone searching for identity.

In fact, I suspect most of my writing, as well as my search for a genre, has identity issues. I’m not quite sure what that says about me. But at least I have an answer to the question now.

What do you write?

I write spiritual speculative fiction and other things too…



You can find the “other things” as well as the Gypsy Shadow books on my websites:

http://sheiladeeth.weebly.com/

http://www.sheiladeeth.com/

Or find links to all my pages at http://about.me/sheiladeeth.

About Flower Child:
When Megan miscarries her first pregnancy it feels like the end of everything; instead it’s the start of a curious relationship between the grieving mother and an unborn child who hovers somewhere between ghost and angel. Angela, Megan’s “little angel,” has character and dreams all her own, friends who may or may not be real angels, and a little brother who brings hope to her mother’s world. But Angela’s dream-world has a secret and one day Angela might learn how to be real.

Where to find Flower Child:

On Gypsy Shadow’s site: http://gypsyshadow.com/SheilaDeeth.html#Flower

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Flower-Child-ebook/dp/B005PGMT4O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317398482&sr=8-1

On Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/91467

About the Author:

Sheila Deeth grew up in the UK and has a Bachelors and Masters in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. Now living in the States with her husband and sons, she enjoys reading, writing, drawing, telling stories, running a local writers' group, and meeting her neighbors’ dogs on the green.

Sheila describes herself as a Mongrel Christian Mathematician. Her short stories, book reviews and articles can be found in VoiceCatcher 4, Murder on the Wind, Poetic Monthly, Nights and Weekends, the Shine Journal and Joyful Online. Besides her Gypsy Shadow ebooks, Sheila has several self-published works available from Amazon and Lulu, and a full-length novel under contract to come out next year.

You can find all the stops on her Flower Child Blour Tour Here:
http://sheiladeeth.blogspot.com/2011/09/flower-child-blog-tour.html

A Luminescent Book: A Review of Refracted

My book review of Refracted by Sheila Deeth:

Refracted by Sheila Deeth is a book where religion meets existential thought, wrapped in beauty. The novel is, technically, science fiction, but it is far more of a love story spun through history, theology and the human spirit.

The tale in Refracted is woven through a series of vignettes, always revolving around two people set against history and religion, which pull the thread of the story through to its conclusion, where we find one man in a pivotal life struggle.

There is a certain poignant tone lilting through the graceful prose and the reader is inexorably drawn into the mysterious and multifaceted story. Ms. Deeth pours genuine emotion into her characters and manages to convey remarkable continuity, despite the rapid changes in settings. This novel is a delicate and affecting piece of writing.

The book offers an apparent scientific explanation for the events that unfold, but the brilliant heart of the story is that details don’t matter; whatever is happening, the inspired essence would stay as heart-rending if it were a dream, past life remembrance, or as the author depicts.

The only flaw I found in the book was the occasional modern language usage in the historic passages; it was a bit distracting and sometimes jarred me out of the narrative. But such a defect can be easily overlooked considering the total quality of Refracted.

I can only give this book my highest recommendation.


Sheila Deeth at Gyspy Shadow Publishing:  http://www.gypsyshadow.com/SheilaDeeth.html