Now that I’ve recovered from my Turkey coma…

Greetings, Bearers!

Hopefully all of you (or at least all of you in the States) had a great Thanksgiving, with much to be thankful for and much to eat.  I certainly had my share of food last Thursday, especially with regard to the multiple pieces of pie I ingested.   Let me tell you: if you’ve never had a chocolate pecan pie, you really need to do so.  Just make sure you exercise more self-control than I did! 😀

My Packers remain on top with an 11-0 season, and my Wolverines finished strong with a 10-2 record, including a fantastic win over that school from Ohio.  I couldn’t have been more thankful in that regard, and for those of you who love the gridiron as much as I do, hopefully the past weekend found you sitting well with your teams in both college and pro! 

Well, I was hoping to give you an update from Kim regarding my cover, but unfortunately she has not yet gotten back to me.  No doubt she’s probably pretty busy, so I’m not worried about it.  Blame it on me being neurotic.  So until I have a cover to show to you, I’ll keep writing and working, editing and finishing works, and sharing my progress with you.

Speaking of which… I plan on putting up another short story excerpt from Alternate  Endings in the next few days, provided my editor gets things in order.  And if she doesn’t… well, I’ll just have to take things into my own hands.

Somebody had better call the fire department 😀

Okay, back to work for me.  Keep reading and rooting for the teams!

See you in the Vein!

J. Dean

A poem for your pleasure…

Greetings, Bearers!

In a rare moment of impulsive writing for me, I put up a free little poem on Smashwords.com entitled “The Shadow and the Sun.”  Usually, poetry’s not my thing, but I decided to give it a shot, putting together a quick little freeverse about an imaginary conversation between the sun and a shadow,  inspired in part by R.C. Sproul’s narration of a book he wrote entitled The King Without a Shadow. 

I hope you take a moment to read it and enjoy it! 

And with that, I press on.  North, Miss Tessbacher!  Always North!

See you in the Vein

J. Dean

P.S.-if you get my last line, you’re either as old as I am, as much of a geek as I am, or a little of both. 😀

Where have you gone, Joe Paterno….?

Greetings, Bearers!

I’m in between work right now.  Helping Mrs. J. Dean out with some work at her place (Well… actually, I’m just keeping her company.  Not much I can do for her that’s hands-on, except distract her by trying to be cute and romantic, and that’s not a good thing to do to a working woman.  Not if you don’t want your fingers broken, at least…).

I wanted to throw out a few comments about Joe Pa and the whole mess at Penn State.  As a football fan, it’s been both fascinating and sad to follow the stories of Paterno and Tressel, seeing their downfalls like this.  While I’m a Wolverine fan and relish beating both the Nittany (Nifty) Lions and the Buckeyes on the field, I don’t take any sort of personal pleasure in either situation, so if you’re a fan of either of these schools, you have my sympathies right now.  This is a mud dragging for your programs, and I don’t wish that on anybody, no matter how much of a rival he or she may be.

The thing that’s most interesting is how one incident in the lives of both of these men has wiped out years (or, in Paterno’s case, multiple decades) of an otherwise solid reputation.  Both of these men garnered personal respect, even outside of their own programs and schools, and had a reputation for being men of staunch character and trustworthy ethics.  But now, all of that has been erased.  I guess the words one of my youth ministers stated many years ago to us in a chapel meeting still hold true: It takes thirty years to build a reputation; it takes thirty seconds to destroy one.

There’s a lesson there, one I don’t need to spell out, and I hope that all of us take it to heart.

In the meantime, while I await the completion of the cover for my short story collection, please continue to enjoy my works, and spread the word about them.  I’ve been encountering new readers here and there, and if you are a new reader, I encourage you to drop me a line letting me know what you think about the stories.  I love hearing from readers, so don’t be bashful!  Write me!

See you in the Vein

J. Dean

 

10:15 and Fraidy-Cat removed.

Greetings, Bearers!

So it’s done.  I’ve removed “Fraidy-Cat” and “10:15” from the Smashwords site. Those of you who were able to get and enjoy them, more power to you!  Don’t despair if you didn’t get to read them, though.  I’m going to take them and clean them up for the upcoming Alternate Endings collection.  And, of course, Nick is still available, along with my novels and a couple of poems, so there’s still some other free stuff. I’m not a total Scrooge.  😉 

Some of the stories in Alternate Endings will be previous releases, but a good deal more of them are new releases never before seen by the public at large.  When I’m finished editing (ugh… not fun..) and Kim from hotdamndesigns.com sends me my cover for evaluation, the book will soon be available for your enjoyment.  (By the way, if you go to Kim’s website, you’ll note that most of the covers are romance-based.  Don’t sweat it though: I don’t do romance covers, and asked for something far different for my own book 😀  I’m confident that she’ll have something good for me to see.).

I’m still making progress on The Summoning of Kran, and am bringing the journey of our third Bearer to the end.  If all goes well, I’ll have an excerpt for you to check out come Christmas time.  I was hoping to have the book ready for you just in time for stocking stuffers, but unfortunately things aren’t working out as well on that front as I thought they would, so I hope that a little sample will work for you.

If not, you can teepee my house. Just leave two large pepperoni pizzas on the front porch 🙂

So back to writing I go.  Enjoy what’s out there, and I’ll let you know as soon as my cover comes through!

See you in the Vein!

J. Dean