L. Jagi Lamplighter's Blog, page 4
April 2, 2018
A Light in the Darkness — New Christian Fantasy/SF newsletter
Hey Folks, Jagi here again!
Just wanted to let everyone know that Superversive Press now has a Christian Fantasy and Science Fiction Newsletter called: A Light in the Darkness.
This newsletter offers book news, freebies–ebooklets and wallpaper graphics–plus news of new releases, sales, and other intriguing topics.
Everyone who subscribes will get access to Sloth by our own Frank Luke (who often comments here) a Twilight Zone like story from his new book: Lou's Bar and Grill: Seven Deadly Tales — a book of faith and Faustian bargains– as well as access to a short ebook of a few of my most popular articles from the original Superversive blog.
Subscribe to:
A Light in the Darkness
March 29, 2018
Happy Birthday, Rachel and Sigfried!
Birthdays are a time of celebrations
Even the birthdays of imaginary characters. In the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, Rachel Griffin's birthday is March 30st, and Sigfried Smith's birthday is April 1st (falls on Easter this year.) The closeness of their birthdays allows them both to be the same age for two days every year!In honor of Rachel and Sigfried's birthday, three of their books are going to be on sale from March 29th to April 2nd.
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel — FREE
Rachel and the Many-Spendered Dreamland — on sale for $1.99
The Awful Truth About Forgetting — on sale for $2.99
And the fourth will be FREE for March 30th only:
The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin — FREE
March 3, 2018
February 25, 2018
Defending the Wood Perilous — Part Three: The Wood That Is Perilous
When I was in high school, we had something modern schools don’t seem to have called study hall. During study hall, you were free to do choose what to do. You could study, do homework, sometimes even talk quietly. Me? I chose study hall in the library, where I could wander through the stacks, reading titles and book blurbs, looking for the next thing to read.
Our school library was a place of magic. It had high dark shelves filled with books on all sorts of topics. I would wander among them, lost in daydreams, wishing that I had a magic power that would lead me right to a book I would enjoy reading. I read all sorts of books during study hall: historicals, romances, mysteries, the occasional fantasy, but my favorite books were the fairy tales.
High up on a shelf were a series of books, each of a single color: red, blue, pink, gray—Andrew Lang’s Red Book of Fairy tales, etc..
We did not have them all, and I don’t think I ever finished reading all that we did have, but I read a number of them cover to cover. I also discovered and read a wonderful book of Nordic fairy tales that included a number of stories of Cinder Peter* and what might be my favorite fairy tale of all, East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
* It was here that I learned that the familiar character Cinderella was really Cinder Ella—Ella who spends time in the cinders.
One thing I loved was reading fairy tales from around the world and seeing how much they had in common. For instance:
There is a Celtic tale of a man who came upon a beautiful woman bathing. Lying beside her was a cloak of brown fur. The woman was a selkie, a seal who had taken off her fur to enjoy the sun. The man grabbed the cloak and hid it. He took the woman home and made her his wife. She was a good wife and mother, but one day, while cleaning, she found her lost cloak, hidden in a box under some blankets. When the man came home, he found his children crying and his wife gone. She had fled, returning to the sea.
This tale is also told in the Scandinavian countries, only it is a swan cloak the man steals, rather than that of a seal. In Italy, she was a dove. In Africa, she was a buffalo maiden. In Japan, it’s a crane cloak; in the Americas, a bear cloak.
The story is told all over the world, always the details are the same, always as simple, only the animal changes.
This simplicity, which makes it so that I can tell almost the entire story in one paragraph, is one of the joys and mysteries of fairy tales. We go out of our way nowadays to write long descriptions, to make our writing “fresh”, to “show not tell”. And yet, fairy tales are almost entirely telling. They are age-old, and they stay exactly the same.
And yet, they are just as enjoyable now as they were three or five hundred years ago.
They are almost entirely pure story.
February 14, 2018
Venus is here!
In honor of St. Valentine's Day, here is Planetary: Venus — the anthology edited by A. M. Freeman and myself. This volume also contains a short story written by me that takes place in the Prospero's Children background and features Miranda and Astreus on their Honeymoon!
Venus, the second planet from the sun, a world of sulfurous gas and tremendous temperatures where the landscape features—mountains and valleys—are all named for love goddesses. Venus herself is the goddess most known for allure and romance.
Here are twenty stories featuring Venus, the planet, the goddess, or just plain love—both romantic and otherwise. Planetary Fiction explores the themes associated with these heavenly bodies as well as their astronomical, mythological, and in some cases even alchemical significance.
Just Look, I’ll Be There, by A. M. Freeman —A Gypsy boy leaves Venus for the stars, but his beloved’s eyes shine brightest of all.
Morning And Evening Star, by David Hallquist — A honeymoon among the sulfurous fumes of Venus takes an unexpected turn.
90 Seconds, by Bokerah Brumley — Online video blogger heads to Venus for the ultimate extreme sports, and jumps into something more than just the sky.
The Wrong Venus, by Lou Antonelli — The worst criminals are sent to a high security prison on Venus, but an intrepid criminal might get himself sent to a different Venus.
Enemy Beloved, by Monalisa Foster — Love is blind. But what will happen when the blindness ends and the terrible truth is reveled?
Texente Tela Veneris, by Edward Willett — If you could change the history of your love life, would you? That is the question a pair of tourists on a remote Grecian island must answer.
Happiest Place On Earth, by Misha Burnett — A story of pure love in an unexpected place.
Love Boat To Venus, by Declan Finn — On a tour around the solar system, elite fighters pause to give marital advice, until they are interrupted.
Venus Times Three, by Vanessa L Landry — Two lawyers travel to Mars to settle a will that, inexplicably, involves Venus. Will they be able to untangle this complicated web?
Avalon, by Dawn Witzke – A new school on Venus brings new opportunities for a young man to escape the shadow of his childhood friend.
The Rituals Of Venus, by Joshua M. Young — A hero fights cultists among the jungles of Venus for the sake of his love. Can he save her?
First Cat In Space, by Dana Bell — Some cat has to be lucky enough to be the first cat in space.
Venus Felix, by W. J. Hayes — A routine day at the bar turns into anything but for this gumshoe, when robots begin shooting at a newcomer.
The Rocket Raising, by Frederic Himebaugh — A young girl must choose between marrying her love and venturing to a new world for the sake of her people.
Star-Crossed, by Julie Frost — A werewolf detective helps an unlikely client in her revenge after her lover is murdered, but old memories aren’t the only thing that comes back.
Honeymoon In Fairland, by L. Jagi Lamplighter — Can love and trust be rekindled between a betrayed husband and his wife? Even when they are as powerful as Gods?
37 Shades of Yellow, by J.D. Beckwith — The new Venus base is up and running, but what does it take to live there when your wife is homesick for Earth?
The Fox’s Fire, by Danielle Ackley-McPhail — A spirited fox spirit seeks love in ancient America.
Smiley The Robot, by Amy Sterling Casil — An old woman living alone on Venus finds herself falling for Smiley, the police robot.
Stones In High Places, by Jane Lebak — A dying world watches with anguish as a young one awaits its demise, until one man conceives of a way to save them, but it will take an act of unprecedented love.
February 13, 2018
Now Available to Members of The Roanoke Glass Newsletter
This short ebook, beautifully typeset by my excellent typesetter, Joel C. Salome, is now available to anyone who joins The Roanoke Glass newsletter.
The link to download it comes in the third newsletter. There is also an oportunity to download a short fiction work in the second newsletter. The first four newsletters, with freebies, etc., come one week apart. After that, the newsletter is an occasional affair.
Subscribe to The Roanoke Glass!
February 10, 2018
He Anointeth Our Heads with Oil
I am always amazed at the things God asks us to do. Wrote this a few years ago.
In late August of 2006, I was driving to help my mother-in-law. The price of gas was over three dollars a gallon. As I drove along, it suddenly struck wrong to me that people should be having to pay so much for gas. Oil prices affected everything: gas, airfare, heating, shipping, food that needs to be shipped. It came to me quite strongly to pray about this.
My first thought was: prayer can’t change gas prices! But the quiet message seemed clear, so I prayed.
I started with the thought that oil was an idea and that all people had equal access to God’s ideas. I worked with Mrs. Eddy’s definition of oil: “Consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration.” (S&H 592:25) Consecration and heavenly inspiration were hardly the kinds of things that a person could own, fight over, or limit.
As I drove, the price of gas began to go down. It was $3.07 where I started, but each gas station I passed had posted a price that was a few sense less than the one before it. At the end of my hour trip, I filled my tank for $2.64 a gallon. The experience was awe-inspiring.
Once I got home, I pulled out my Bible. I found that we can a lot about oil in the Bible, especially about its abundance. Elijah asks a widow woman to made a little cake. When she explains that she has only enough oil for one cake left, he tells her to make one first for him and then for herself and her son. She does this, and the meager oil in her jar did not fail until the rain came again, and there was more food.
Elisha meets a widow who cannot pay her husband’s debts. She fears that her two sons will be made into slaves. He tells her to borrow vessels from her neighbors and filled them from her pot of oil. She does this and that one pot pours out enough to fill all the vessels. The widow sells this extra oil and is able to pay all her debts and keep her children.
While it does not appear in my version of the Bible, I also reviewed the story of the Maccabees, in which lamp oil enough for one day burns for eight days until a runner is able to return with more. This event is commemorated each year by the holiday known as Chanukah.
Obviously, petroleum is not the kind of oil used in Biblical times. Yet, I still found it interesting that in those times, like now, oil was used for so many things: eating, cooking, cleaning (instead of soap, one oiled one’s body and then scraped the oil off with a special scraper), as medicine (the good Samaritan puts oil on the injured man’s wounds,) and for lighting lamps.
The fact that in each of these stories more oil appeared, right where there seemed to be a shortage was quite eye opening to me! Inspired by these Bible stories, I prayed to understand that the earth was not a limited material object but a spiritual idea. Therefore, our access to the idea ‘oil’ could not be limited to a set number of pre-existent oil reserves but must be as dynamic as Mind itself.
A few days later, I happened to be flipping radio stations and caught a commercial for the Washington Post. It was a two line ad for an article announcing the finding of one of the biggest domestic oil deposits in years! I later looked this up on the Internet and found, yes, such a deposit had been found in the Gulf of Mexico. The New York Times called it “potentially the largest American oil find in a generation.” (New York Times: “Big Oil Find Is Reported Deep in Gulf,” Sept. 6, 2006) I felt that this was a reminder that there is no limit to ideas.
I continued to pray in this fashion. I even shared these ideas with some friends. When I had returned home from my mother-in-law’s, the price where I had started that first day had only gone down a penny or two from the original three dollar price. Over the next month, however, each day, when I went out it had gone down a little more. By the end of September, I bought gas in a nearby town for $1.98 a gallon. The price then stabilized at about $2.19 and remained in that vicinity for quite some time.
Has not God promised to: “anointest my head with oil?” (Psalm 23:5) When we turn to God in all things, we can be certain that, like the widow who consulted Elisha, our pot of oil shall “runneth over.”
February 2, 2018
Defending the Wood Perilous — Part One: We Live In A Fairytale
I have been working on this essay for a couple of years, finally got the first part done:
We live in a fairytale.
You might not realize this as you struggle to pay your bills or sit in a traffic jam on your way to work. You might miss the magic as you surf the web or rub your aching temples. You might think that this world is mundane, filled with dreary drudgery. But that does not make it any less true.
What fairytale is this, you wonder? It’s a story about a precious prince or princess who has become lost in a distant land, unable to find home again. It is a story about hope and the forces of darkness, and how all the Powers of Hell are bent upon the purpose of crushing the spirit of our main character.
It is a story about the Prince of all Princes, who left His throne to come slog through the mud and hang on a cross to open the door that will let our prince or princess pass over His threshold and find the way home again.
That fairytale. You know the one—the one where you are the hero.
If you read it in a storybook from start to finish, you would gasp with awe at the bravery of our little protagonist and cheer at the triumphs. If you could see it with all the traps and terrors—the demons that tempt, the imps that irritate, the willow women who weave deceptions over the eyes of the men, until they believe that black is white, up is down, and boys are girls—you \would cry out in fear at the hurdles our heroes and heroines must cross, and you would weep with joy when they, struggling through the webs and fog, refuse to leave the path.
