Tag: Books

The Strong Heart Series

Three books, stand-alone, one grand story….wilderness, adventure, coming of age, great animals, ancient legends….Scroll down for reviews and reactions….available everywhere books are sold….Available from Ingram Content Group

Set on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula and along the British Columbia coast, these tales follow an ornery young girl as she finds her power in an impossible way.

Strong Heart: One early summer Sarah Cooley, 14, orphaned, lands on the doorstep of a grandfather unaware he has a granddaughter, just as he and his friends are about to head into the wilderness. They decide to take her along to teach her a lesson. All too soon they discover she may be taking them….

Adrift: The following December, in the Gulf of Alaska, the container ship Seattle Express catches fire, forcing the crew to take to the lifeboats. One lifeboat crashes ashore against Haida Gwaii, remote islands in the Gulf of Alaska. A down and out salvage company races to seize the drifting ship. While the marooned sailors struggle to survive, relatives back on the Olympic Peninsula hatch a desperate rescue plan…..

Totem: That spring, Sarah and her companions want to return to Bear Valley in Olympic National Park before Buckhorn Corporation starts mining there, to see it one last time. At the same time, strange elk kills start appearing around the park and then deep in the interior. Sarah’s companions experience dreams or visions of an ancient past that somehow reflect their present reality just as impossible animals appear. Everything comes to a head in Bear Valley…..

Summers end….

The thing about having a little blog is it must be fed. When the summer comes out here, and the skies brighten and the rain stops, the trails and forest beckon. There are trails to revisit, or visit the first time, or areas off trail asking for attention, distant lakes to discover and reach, remote forest roads leading nowhere beyond which lies….? Of course, when you reach a certain age, and I fear – no, I am certain – I have reached it, you need to prepare for such excursions. Train. Walk miles, find nearby trails and hills to conquer, load a pack and climb stairs, or just walk, and walk, and walk. In the perfect world someone who wanders the woods would walk two or three hours every single day, all year, and then they would be ready for anything at nearly any age, even a greatly advanced age. I met such a man this year and he is a mountain goat, nearly as old as I am, going everywhere, on and off trail, as he has all his life. I envy him but could not keep up with him. Maybe after a year of training, and absence of injuries…

But you can write your blog in the evenings, some would say. This is true. But, to me, a blog is a strange sort of beast. On the one hand it offers a place to store tales, and ideas, and pictures, maybe even a few words about books written or envisioned, and as such, seems, to me anyway, a perfect place to store such things, whether anyone else cares to see them or not. On the other hand, in today’s monetize everything, build a mailing list, increase traffic to promote sales fever, the blog becomes a beast, a thing to be fed, its appetite endless and huge. When fun stories rise, or events beckon, the blog is fun, a place to record things, but when the money and traffic and out-there self promotion animal springs to life the blog becomes a monster, something loathed and avoided.

Maybe, too, this is all a function of two years of covid reaction and then the start of a European land war with the attendant media hype, lies, and hysteria filling all the airwaves and screens.

Then the forest beckons, the high and lonely places, difficult to reach, painful to achieve, but then, on the way and when arrived, silent but for the sounds of the wind, streams, insects, and animals. These are places that are still, InReach Mini2 aside, out of wifi range, phone range, web range.

Thank God.

There is a story I have been playing with now for two years, ever since I finished Totem as a matter of fact, maybe even another series, set in the future, so you can call it science fiction if you like. Whatever time I have spent with a pen and paper, or a keyboard and a screen, has been jotting notes and doing research on matters related to things future, plus the difficult task of trying to imagine a near future that might be realistic, which in these days of plagues and crisis and rage is hard to do.

All of which to say, this feeble little blog has gone dormant for half a year, now. But it is not dead, mainly because I find this a nice way to store stuff that I enjoy.