"Dancing Priest" Free on Amazon Kindle This Week

Dancing Priest, the first novel in the series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week. 

Michael Kent…
A young man studying to become a priest finds love, and learns that faith can separate.
A university cyclist seeking Olympic gold finds tragedy, death and heroism.
A pastor thousands of miles from home seeks vocation and finds fatherhood.

Sarah Hughes…
A young woman living abroad finds love and loses family.
A university student meets a faith she cannot accept.
An artist finds faith and learns to paint with her soul.

Dancing Priest is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes and a love, born, separated, and reborn, in faith and hope.

Book 1 in the Dancing Priest series available here. 

Saturday Good Reads: Four on Kindle

One nice thing about combining a long stretch of holidays and vacation days is the opportunity to catch up on some reading. Here are four short works that I’ve read recently on Kindle.

The Battle for Christmas Castle, by Eldon Eric Johnson. This is something of a morality tale for children, but the basic message is also aimed at adults. What Christmas rules your heart – the Christmas of materialism or the Christmas of the King? Johnson tells his story through the eyes of a little girl named Emma and a talking dog named Shu-Shu, along with a few talking horses, mice and a chipmunk who overcomes a bad self-image to become something of a hero. And applying his own lesson, Johnson is giving all the proceeds of this book to a special cause, which you can read about at Emily Wierenga’s blog.

 

Picturing Christmas: A Novella, by Jason Wright and Adrien Fuss. Jason Wright has written a number of popular Christmas stories, including The Christmas Box. In Picturing Christmas, Aubrey Porter, an only child, has just graduated from college and aims to make a career in photography in New York City. What she can’t deal with is her parents’ recent divorce. Her parents are also having a difficult time dealing with it. New York becomes a kind of getaway, with its glamour, Darwinian business practices, and street crime. She meets Jole Muller, a young and successful entrepreneur who has sought New York for his own kind of getaway. Picturing Christmas is a love story but it’s one with a strong dash of realism.

Vermont November: Poems, by Jonathan Neske. With all the controversy swirling in the publishing world over e-books versus traditional publishing, one positive thing about electronic publishing is the ability to create a poetry chapbook. This is a small collection of poems, written by Neske as he stayed a friend’s cabin in Vermont. The poems reflect much of the season and the natural world he experiences – the winter, the wind, what he sees on a given day, simple working tasks like chopping wood, and the snow thaw. The collection even includes a short, short ghost story. The poems are beautiful.

Why We Run from God’s Love, by Ed Cyzewski. This is actually more of an e-article than an e-book, and bit it thought-provoking and the subject will be familiar to many Christians (including me). Cyzewski found himself struggling to pray, and much of it had to do with how much he was running and the busyness that fills up a life. “the problem with loving Jesus, at least for me,” he writes, “is that I can’t see him.” He needs to touch the Lord, because he feels the gap between himself and God.

Photograph by Kajoch Adras via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Poetry at Work” Featured at the High Calling; Kindle Edition Now Available

My new book Poetry at Work has been featured at The High Calling. In The High Calling’s Community section, an excerpt of the Tweetspeak Poetry article by L.L. Barkat has been posted. You can read it here. 

And the Kindle edition of Poetry at Work is now live at Amazon.

‘Dancing Priest’ Free on Kindle

My first novel, Dancing Priest, is free on Amazon Kindle today, tomorrow and Thursday:

Michael Kent…
A young man studying to become a priest finds love, and learns that faith can separate.
A university cyclist seeking Olympic gold finds tragedy, death and heroism.
A pastor thousands of miles from home seeks vocation and finds fatherhood.

Sarah Hughes…
A young woman living abroad finds love and loses family.
A university student meets a faith she cannot accept.
An artist finds faith and learns to paint with her soul.

Dancing Priest is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes and a love, born, separated, and reborn, in faith and hope.

(And if I had to pick my favorite scene in the book, it would be the closing ceremonies in the Olympic Stadium in Athens. Or the Christmas Eve scene with Michael and young Jim. Or possibly the Last Tango in Edinburgh. And then there’s…)

Merry Christmas! 

“Dancing Priest” Free Today on Kindle

It was supposed to have been cyber-yesterday, but today my first novel Dancing Priest is free on Amazon Kindle. The predecessor to A Light Shining, it is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes. From the summary on Amazon:

Michael Kent…
A young man studying to become a priest finds love, and learns that faith can separate.
A university cyclist seeking Olympic gold finds tragedy, death and heroism.
A pastor thousands of miles from home seeks vocation and finds fatherhood.

Sarah Hughes…
A young woman living abroad finds love and loses family.
A university student meets a faith she cannot accept.
An artist finds faith and learns to paint with her soul.

Dancing Priest is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes and a love, born, separated, and reborn, in faith and hope.

Update on "Dancing Priest"

Dancing Priest is now available for Nook at Barnes and Noble, in addition to Kindle at Amazon.

And the book has its first blog review. Louise Gallagher, over at Recover Your Joy, must have read it almost straight through the night. She posted her review this morning. Part of what she said was this: "I had to read the whole thing. I couldn't stop. The story kept pulling me on. In. Into the lives of two people whose journeys intersected, separated, intersected, separated. And no. I'm not going to tell you which direction they ended up in. You'll have to read it all for yourself."

It's a wonderful review. Of course, I'm biased. But still, it's wonderful.

"Dancing Priest" is Available on Kindle

We thought it would happen Thursday, but the Kindle version of my novel Dancing Priest is now live on Amazon.

The Nook version should be available soon at Barnes & Noble. And a few days after that for iBook.

I am sitting here very quietly. Very quietly.

I am trying to be cool.

I am not succeeding.

Thanks to Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver for bringing the news to my attention.

I am staying calm.

I am so NOT staying calm.

Me and My Kindle

I had delayed buying an e-reader for a long time. It wasn’t that I was a “physical book I can hold in my hand or nothing” kind of person. It was more “this isn’t a priority right now.” I knew I did not like reading a book on my desktop computer. But Father’s Day was coming, and I solved my wife’s problem for a gift by saying I’d like to have a Kindle.

In due course, it arrived, “it” being the Kindle 3G. A friend at work had an earlier version. He had recently upgraded to a 3G, which he said was a vast improvement over earlier models.

Having the Kindle in my hands, I had to test it out. Immediately. The instructions were simple, and within seconds I had my first e-book, Gravestone by Travis Thrasher.

Oh, my goodness.

Instant gratification.

Press a button and it’s here.

Okay, so obtaining a book was easy. What would it be like to read one? Would I like it, or would I discover that that Father’s Day present was destined to sit on a shelf, gathering dust?

Gravestone was surprisingly easy to read. It was a good introduction to reading an e-book – fast paced and engaging, I’d read a page, press the advance button, and keep going.

I finished Gravestone and said, OK, that was all right. But what about poetry?

Right about that time, Maureen Doallas over at Writing Without Paper had a feature about poet Julie Kane, and noted that her first book of poetry, Body and Soul, was only available on Kindle. Ah, ha, a test! So I downloaded the poems, and found that poetry was just as easy to read.

Since then, I’ve two more, the suspense novel The Undertaker by William Brown and Underworld: The Modern Orpheus, poems by Matthew Duggan. And I took advantage of two promotional specials I ran across, one on Facebook and the other on a blog, and downloaded the English Standard Version of the Bible and another mystery/suspense novel, both of which were free (there may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free book) (and the ESV is still available on Kindle for free, as least right now). And I downloaded Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit by Luci Shaw, just in time to start reading it for the weekly book discussion at The High Calling.

Two novels and two books of poetry later, I can say that I really like this little e-reader. I like it a lot. It’s easy to use. It’s back-lit, so you don’t get a lot of glare. It’s easily portable. And it can carry up to 3500 books. That last factor alone wowed my wife, who sees a solution to the bookcases that threaten to overwhelm our house.

It’s not better or worse than reading a physical book. And there are going to be some books that simply won’t work on a Kindle; I’m thinking here of books like The Four Holy Gospels, illustrated by Makoto Fujimura, which is more like a work of art than books.

But for the vast majority of books, the Kindle will work fine. 

As I sit here, reading on my Kindle, that with the cover weighs less than 14 ounces, I’m beginning to glimpse one of the forces transforming the book publishing business. 

I Done Got Me One

I can’t remember a time when books weren't important to me. As I’ve mentioned here before, I can remember my mother reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me when I was three or four; the first book I bought on my own; the monthly Scholastic Book Club at school; and the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift.

I remember my father forbidding me to Sunday Night at the Movies on TV when the movie was On The Beach, based on the novel by Nevil Shute and about the last days on earth after a nuclear war. I couldn’t watch it, so I bought the book instead.

My 8th grade reading teacher introduced us to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a science fiction novel called Day of the Triffids and another novel about nuclear war, Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon. She got into trouble for assigning us to read William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, which was a bit heavy for 13-year-olds. She had to rescind the assignment. I read it anyway.

My mother wanted to read Peyton Place by Grace Metalious when it was published in paperback, but was too embarrassed to buy it herself. So she sent me on my bike to the drugstore to get it. She read it, and I did, too.

Other book memories crowd in: reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged when I should have been studying for a history exam; reading Don Quixote for the first time in high school and almost 30 years later during a beach vacation; reading Twain and Dickens and discovering C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton; and discovering Latin American literature, with names like Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. And the poetry books!

I love books: I love to hold them and touch them. I love the smell of bookstores and used bookstores. I love beautiful books, like The Four Holy Gospels illustrated by Makoto Fujimura.

So what on earth am I doing with my new Father’s Day present – a Kindle?

The opportunity to buy one has been there for quite a while, but in this case I wasn’t an early adopter, nor was I eager to be one. I don’t like reading a manuscript or a book on the computer. But I decided to see what there was to this ebook reader thing, and if would really work.

It arrived Thursday. The instructions were simple and clear. Within 10 minutes of opening the package, I had purchased and downloaded a book – Gravestone by Travis Thatcher.

Someone put some thought into the Kindle’s design. The screen isn’t back-lit, which makes it easy to read. Turning pages is simple – hitting that side tab. It charges quickly. It’s surprisingly small – 4 ¾” by 7 ½” by ¼”.It comes preloaded with two dictionaries, and it was already registered to me. And my wife, who has suffered through almost 38 years of books dominating bedrooms and basement, is thrilled with the fact that the Kindle will hold 3500 books.

So now I’ll learn how important the physical aspect of books really is to me. So far, it’s a hit.

The only drawback is that it doesn’t smell like a bookstore.

Top photograph: Old Books by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Kindle photo by yours truly via my smart phone.