Shepherd.com asked me to select five favorite books around a common theme, and I chose “Books that transform how we see the world.” As opposed to, say, your living room or your inner life. It was a lot of fun selecting the books and explaining why, a way of reliving the read. Enjoy the rides.

https://shepherd.com/best-books/transform-how-we-see-ourselves-in-the-world

New book! Tales from Mnemosyne retells Classical myths, largely known from Ovid, in the voice and tradition of an Appalachian storyteller, in this case, the goddess Mnemosyne. As the goddess of Memory and mother of The Muses, she is uniquely qualified to set the record straight—to tell the true stories without the usual patriarchal propaganda, all the while keeping things fun and only slightly blasphemous. Mnemosyne, as a timeless goddess, knows now and then backwards and forwards and has as much to say about the here and now as way back when. These fourteen tales include the most famous—Daphne and Apollo, Europa and Jove, the Birth of Athena, Cupid and Psyche—along with some too-often-forgotten ones, such as Tiresias and his daughter Manto, and Oenone, the abandoned wife of Paris. Charon, appropriately, concludes the proceedings.

http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-258-9.php

I had a great time doing this interview with Alex McHugh in a wide-ranging conversation from Peter Kropotkin to Taylor Swift.

After a horrific smashup on the interstate, Danny inexplicably acquires the ability to foretell and experience specific moments from others’ future lives. This gift destroys his marriage and pushes him to the brink of madness. He finds solace and release as a soothsayer in the back room of the Tree of Life Book Shoppe, handing out tidbits from the futures of his largely narcissistic clients.

Kristi, a Tarot reader extraordinaire at the shop, has known since she was an adolescent visited by strange beings who might be goddesses or aliens—who’s to say—that she can cast spells that transform peoples’ lives, sometimes with disastrous results. When she sets her sights on Danny to win his love, she makes a deal with the Triple Goddess—his love for the pair’s help in fulfilling a wish of the goddess’s own, to save the planet from its inevitable demise from human hands.

Thus begins The Soothsayer & the Changeling in which the varied self-absorbed lives of a stunning beauty, a no-talent screenwriter, a bereaved Christian widow, a disgraced professor, an over-medicated depressive, and a lonely mountain boy with a way with animals are woven together to yield a dream of doom to awaken the slumbering world before it’s too late.

Promising epiphany over apocalypse, The Soothsayer & the Changeling pits our deeply personal obsessive lives against a dying planet upon which all our dreams depend, and offers the possibility of hope and love.

Check it out:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FW5J6YV

My lovely wife Sarah has been working long and hard to bring a hostel to Richmond, and the fruits of her labor are starting to pay off. Michael Paul Williams did an extremely nice piece in the Times-Dispatch. Check it out: Planned Hostel Would Bring World to Richmond.

This has been a wonderful year for me, though not at all in the way I expected or hoped for, but that’s the way with good years, isn’t it?  I had just finished one novel with promising prospects, and was into another I had high hopes for.  The marketplace shrugged at both.  I shrugged back.

Then I literally was called back to teaching fiction writing in February, receiving a call a few weeks into the semester asking if I would take over an advanced fiction writing class for an ailing colleague.  I’m not sure how effective I was, but I had a great time and met some wonderful young writers.  That led to a summer workshop and two in the fall, and another this spring.  I want to thank my students for showing me a wonderful time.  The experience has energized my short fiction as well.  I don’t know the publication date yet, but I just sold a story to Lightspeed Magazine which was particularly gratifying because it’s a new, ambitious piece that represents the kind of work I most want to do now.  Besides, Lightspeed is totally cool.

I’m looking forward to attending ICFA this year again in March and returning to Readercon in July.  I’ve been asked about other events, but nothing is confirmed yet.  Now that I have finally licked the muscle pain that plagued me for a couple of years, I can travel again—not to mention sit comfortably for a panel discussion.

About that pain.  I had made the rounds of physical therapists, acupuncturists, spinal injections, etc., and though it would get better for a while, it would always come roaring back.  Finally, my new cardiologist asked if I’d tried going off statins.  I was taking Crestor at the time.  I had, but had had the idea nixed by other medical professionals.  When I quit, the results were dramatic.  Within a few weeks of being off the statins, my pain steadily retreated.  As I have stated elsewhere, I also changed my diet in response to my heart ailments instead of dosing it and I feel infinitely better.

Another reason this has been a great year is yoga.  I have always hated any kind of exercise classes.  It was only through Sarah’s persistent suggestion (some would say nagging) that I gave it a try.  (Thank you, Sarah).  When I found a really good instructor, Viktoriya Kosta, I quickly became hooked.  Mind and body both are better for it.  Namaste, Viktoriya.

I’ve started another novel—I can’t help myself—and I have a half-dozen stories in various stages of completion.  For the first time in years, there are no doctor’s appointments looming in my future.  Sarah, Ethel, and I plan on lots of walks to the river.  Life is good on Maplewood.  I like 2013 already.