Book Spotlight: Mother Gaia by Ricky Baxter

Today I have another book in the spotlight, a philosophic fantasy, mixed with a mortality tale, Mother Gaia by Ricky Baxter. Enjoy.

Mother Gaia by Ricky Baxter

4.54 billion years the earth has existed – forming life that has continued to grow and adapt. Of all the species that have evolved, mankind has exceeded the most, from the discovery of fire, to the Internet and advanced machinery. Unfortunately, the hearts of men have changed for the worse, due to greed, corruption and manipulative warfare. As such, the wrath of the earth has been stirred, and its creator Mother Gaia takes it upon herself to end the human race. Bearing the appearance of a beautiful young woman, Mother Gaia will experience the darkest hearts of mankind, with no light in sight. Political – full of scientific and religious contradictions that will leave you questioning your own morality, Mother Gaia is a reminder that nature is a force not to be reckoned with.

Mother Gaia is available on Amazon.uk

and Amazon.com

Author Bio:

Ricky Baxter is the author of Gideon and the Crimson Samurai, and Mother Gaia. He is an avid blogger and speaker, giving advice and thoughts to fellow creators from all walks of life. His other works include Colours of Destiny, a Youtube visual novel. Currently he lives in Leeds England where he writes and blogs. Starting out as a composer since graduating with a Ba(Hons) in music and multimedia, Ricky worked for many independent short film directors, gaining notable IMDB credits. Since then, he has embraced his earlier passion of writing fictional stories.

Blog: www.rickybaxter.wordpress.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rickyleebaxter

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writerrlbaxter

A Guest Post: The Books of Randy Attwood

 Author Randy Attwood stops by today, to share about his books, a collection of edgy novels:

 The Books of Randy Attwood

Crazy About You

I grew up on the grounds of a Kansas mental hospital because my father was the dentist for Larned State Hospital and the State provided our housing there. You grow up around crazy people and they don't seem so bizarre to you. Seemed natural that I'd write a story based in that environment, and so Crazy About You got started. Brad Adams is going to have a week in his life that grows him up faster than he ever wanted to. Reviewers have called it a coming-of-age, young adult; some see it has a mystery/thriller. I used to get upset when people asked how much of what I wrote was true. Did they think I didn't have any imagination? Later, I realized it was a high compliment. The words on paper had created a reality for them and they thought all I was doing was describing it. That, for me, is what writing is all about: using words on paper to create a reality for the reader. They think you are just describing a reality and don't realize that the words are creating that reality.

One More Victim

I started writing the poem that ends One More Victim about 1975. It was February. I had looked out the window of the back door of our small house in Hutchinson, KS and saw crows pecking holes in our black garbage sacks.

First stanza came easy enough:

In February the crows come,

To pick though my garbage,

Make holes in the black plastic sack

And scatter its entrails over the snow.

For some reason that prompted an idea for a story that I started, and then stopped, and then went back to, and then stopped. That continued for about 25 years. And when I finished the story – turned out to be a three-part novella – the end of the poem came to me. I consider it my Heart of Darkness.

Because the Holocaust is a critical element in the plot, the story is classified as world literature, Jewish. And the few times I have offered it for free, it hit the #1 free download Amazon ranking in that category. A couple of times it has reached #92 in the paid category. I've used One More Victim as the title of a paperback POD collection that also contains "The Saltness of Time" and three short stories.

SPILL: Big Oil + Sex = Game On

SPILL is a political satire: a comedy that was written out of despair. When you write for 30 years and have such little publishing success to show for it, you do tend to doubt yourself. I thought what I was doing was pretty good, but I might be self-delusional. So I decided to write a comedy. If you made a reader laugh, the writing succeeded. I had a bar acquaintance who worked as a small-package deliveryman. He mentioned one time that his delivery that day was taking the head of a dog to the state veterinary school for rabies testing. That whole scene stuck with me. And gas prices were soaring. And I, and my whole department, had been laid off at the educational institution where I had worked for 16 years. I had the time. The SPILL wrote itself in three months. I've never written any novel that quickly. And it gave me a lot of laughs. It also secured me my agent. Haven't sold it yet, but they come close. It also got me into epublishing. I'd always thought self-publishing was an admission of failure. But a couple editors at a couple houses encouraged my agents to urge me to do SPILL an ebook. So I did, and thought, heck, why not that other stuff that's just sitting in my file cabinets. Now I have 13 works live with three more to come. Here are the first two paragraphs from SPILL:

Fred Underwood was driving his 15-year-old, once-white, now rust-speckled Nissan pickup six miles over the speed limit on his way to deliver the head of a dog to the state’s vet school for rabies testing when several things happened to him.

He saw a sign announcing—as though proud of the fact—that gasoline at the upcoming station was selling for $4.15 a gallon. He looked into the rear view mirror when he heard a siren and confirmed that, indeed, a police car was chasing him. He uttered, “Shit,” but then felt his body swept with euphoria: an idea smacked him that would make him rich.

Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America

Long before 1984 arrived, I had a dream of writing a novel called 2084. I constructed long biographies and future histories to show how by the time 2084 arrived the religious right would have taken complete power over America and rule her with a Bible in each fist. I thought it would be a long book and be told in tales from various decades. And it came to nothing. Again it showed me that outlining was no use for me; it actually hindered my writing. But I had a beginning segment of a mason returning home after a 14 hour day working on construction a huge cathedral for the Church of the Evangels, who ruled America. I finally just continued with that opening scene show what life was like for Bob and his wife and their 14 children, one of them Bobby, who had an amazing memory for Bible verses.

Here's that opening scene for Rabbletown:

Bob Crowley, drunk and very tired, almost tripped over the broken toy truck before kicking it out of his way then trudging around the side of the house to the back of a former duplex that now housed six families of 50-some Christian souls. Work on the Great Christian State of Kansas Cathedral went on from dawn to dusk, almost a 14-hour, hot, summer day. After Bob had made the long climb back to the ground, he stopped at one of the small booze-holes at the edge of Rabbletown to drink its oily-smelling, stomach-wrenching, blessedly mind-numbing alcohol before going home. Now, in the doorway to his basement apartment, he burped and smelled the sour acid of his empty stomach. Pulling the burlap sack of tools off his shoulder and dropping it to the floor when he entered, the noise of his own household assaulted him. The twins came, screaming their welcome, and he picked the bag of tools back up, swung, and caught one of them on the side of the head, sending him sprawling sideways and setting up a wail of tears and pain that caused his wife to yell, “Stop beatin’ the kids, will ya?”

“Well keep the little retards away from me.”

Doesn't sound like a pleasant, Christian household does it?

Blow Up the Roses

I have never known the end of a story when I start it. It seems knowing the end is a fraud upon the reader. I start with a scene, or an idea, or a character, and then learn about the characters and follow what they do. When I found out the horror of what Mrs. Keene's renter was doing in Blow Up the Roses, I almost just quit writing it. But some characters demand their existence: this serial, pedophile killer tied me to my chair and extracted words from me as sure as blood from his victims. Blow Up the Roses is being published by Curiosity Quills and should soon be available as a paperback POD and an ebook. The language of flowers can be brutally frank.

Here's the chilling opening scene:

Mr. Brown closed the door on the whimpers and walked up the stairs to take a shower. He stood under the stream of water and leaned his head against the wall of the shower stall. "Mommy loves me. Mommy loveth me. Mommy loveth me," he whispered to himself as his heart slowed. Those pictures should really be something, he thought to himself. As good as these stills would be, though, he knew there was no way they would show the wriggling. That's what he loved, how they wriggled trying to get away from him. The audio cassette tape he supplied with the pictures made quite a package, but it was time to get into video-taping. He could invest some of the profits from the stills in good equipment. He already had the lights. If only he had a partner. But who could you trust in a thing like this? Sure there were plenty of others out there, if the way his distributor bought his picture-cassette tape packages were any guide, but how could you find one you could trust to work the camera? He'd just have to find some way to rig the camera in a static position. If he could afford it, he could buy about three cameras and ring the area, then splice the tape. He could be as careful as he was with the still pictures and the cassettes to ensure that nothing in them identified him. Maybe they offered some lessons on video tape splicing at the community college. They taught everything else there.

He reached for the soap, brought it to a lather in his hands, and then washed the blood from his penis.

You can check out Randy's books on Amazon

Storytime Wednesday: Poetry Remembered by Joann Brosnan

Welcome again to Storytime Wednesday, where we fire your imagination with the words from writers who share their stories or book excerpts.

Today’s narrative is a real treat, the graceful tale Poetry Remembered by Joann Brosnan, a delightful story of weddings, culture and marriage.

Poetry Remembered

Umniya stared through the delicate tracery of the screen surrounding her family roofgarden. Sleep had been a foreign thing and, in the hours before dawn, she had crept to this rooftop to experience her last breaths of freedom. Tomorrow - - No, later today, she would become the bride of Aaqil.

Umniya had been three years old, Aaqil almost five, when her mother had taken her to visit his. They had played together and listened to their mothers' conversation. Aaqil had been gentle and kind to the younger girl-child. The next time they visited, he was no longer allowed free run of the women's rooms. She wondered if he was still kind. Their mothers had discussed a bit of poetry, now long forgotten, that involved the gift of a love token from a prince to his loved bride. She remembered Aaqil saying that someday he would gift his love with such a thing.

Streaks began appearing in the eastern sky and the mezzuin began his call.  “Allaho Akbar, Allaho Akbar, Ash-hadu al-la Ilaha ill Allah - Ash-hadu al-la Ilaha ill Allah . . .”

After the prayers, Umniya stood for a moment, then turned to see her mother coming up the stairs.

“Come, child, you must be made ready. Today you will become a wife.” her mother said.

In the next hours, Umniya was allowed to do nothing for herself. As she was fed and fussed over, bathed, lotioned, perfumed, painted and primped, her mind wandered again and again to her betrothed. She remembered, when she was nine, the day she had been taken to purchase her first niqaab. Her mother's friend, Aaliyah, mother of Aaqil, had accompanied them. She remembered the moment of panic when, veil in place, the mesh eye cover had been lowered, discretely, over the eye holes. Suddenly, there seemed no air to breath, she would surely suffocate. Then as the two women proudly led her from the shop, Umniya had seen boys in the street, playing. One of them was Aaqil and he waved to his mother. As his eyes passed over his mother's companions, it seemed to Umniya that there was something different in his eye as it briefly touched her, then quickly, politely passed over. She had held herself a little taller, as they walked, secure in her mother's protection and her own nearing womanhood.

Her mind slid to the day when a betrothal was decided. Aaqil had requested that they say Salat-l-Istikhara to assure that this decision was right for both. When the prayer had been said, she knew that she would not be forced, she had the right to refuse, but what other choice was there. With head bowed, she silently nodded her assent and was allowed to retire from the room. Peering through the lattice from the next room, she looked at her betrothed's unsmiling face with its heavy eyebrows and dark eyes; the fierce black mustache that covered his upper lip; the full lower lip that made something in her stomach flutter. She would come to know this face very well.

Now, sitting still under the ministrations of her mother, friends and cousins, she felt the flutter begin again. A small knot of terror was born. Everything she knew in life was about to end. They pulled her to her feet; turned her in front of a trio of large mirrors. She, Umniya – the desired – was gone. The woman looking from the mirror was a stranger, a wife. The terror grew. It was time to go.

Her cousin, Jumana, turned from the door, holding a covered silver tray and a note, which she handed to Umniya. The note read:


Beloved,

Were you too young to remember the poem of the prince and his gift to his beloved bride? I bid you accept the gift of your prince to his princess.

Aaqil


Umniya lifted the cover from the tray and there, on a silk cloth, lay a single, perfect white rose. The fear faded, replaced by a gentler quiver. “Aaqil means 'wise'” she murmured. She picked up the rose and tied it to one of the colorful ribbons on her wedding dress then, surrounded by her ladies and holding her head very high, she went to her wedding.


Author Bio:

Joann Brosnan is a Capricorn woman, faithful friend, intrepid adventurer, steaming through her 60s; she finally sprung her writing on the world, and is having great fun with that.
“Next up - figuring how to get paid for same. Ah, well, hope springs. Maybe better luck with photos. It can be a bit distracting, having a soupçon of many talents and no one big one!”

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