Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 253

Vanilla Heart Releases Earth Day Anthology

Vanilla Heart Publishing's Earth Day anthology Nature's Gifts "went live" in trade paperback today. Also available in multiple e-book formats from Smashwords, the anthology offers more than twenty short stories, poems and essays that focus in multifaceted ways on the natural world.

Since 2010 is Glacier National Park's centennial year, I contributed an essay about the stories coming out of the park's Swiftcurrent Valley over the years called "Bears, Where They Fought."

My brother Doug contribut...

Hello Librarians

If your library is interested in one of the limited number of copies of "The Sun Singer" available for donation, please see the note at the end of today's Malcolm's Round Table post Geek Your Public Library.

I'm happy to note that "The Sun Singer," "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire," and other Vanilla Heart Publishing books will soon be available on iPad. This comes from the recent agreement signed between Apple and Smashwords. VHP books are already available on Smashwords in multiple ...

Do you write to teach or to entertain

When writers discuss why they write, most of them don't claim to have an agenda that extends beyond storytelling. Some of us say we write because we have to or we feel called to do it or that our muses won't give us a break if we try to ignore them.

Maybe admitting to an agenda sounds presumptuous or, possibly nasty. Who are we that we might also teach or promote certain themes and ideas? Worse yet, who are we that we should do such things covertly via fiction rather than treatises and other n...

A Presumption of Dragons

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

--Scottish Prayer

More often than not, we presume that things that go bump in the night are nasty: burglars, murderers, ghosts, hobgoblins, werewolves, and repo men.

Might they not be: Santa Claus, the good faerie, your spouse making you a birthday cake or hiding your Christmas present, cats playing or lottery money manifesting on the kitchen table?

Night, the countryside outside the cit...

The Books Are Here

The most exciting phrase for an author--other than you're rich or won the Pulitzer--is "the books are here."

I first became aware of the impact of that phrase when I was 17 years old and heard my father say it when he answered the front door and received the author's copies of his latest journalism textbook from Prentice-Hall "How to Report and Write the News." He was an old hand at saying "the books are here," yet I could tell as he spread the copies out on the dining room table that he was p...

Light and Shadow

Sitting here in the late afternoon, I'm sipping zinfandel wine while pondering light and shadow, the theme of World Storytelling Day on Saturday. If there were any storytelling events in my area, I missed them. And that's too bad, for I was curious what storytellers might do with that theme.

Would they say we can't have shadows without the light or that shadows are what we get when something (or some one) blocks the light? Perhaps, but those symbolic kinds of statements have grown rather obvio...

Quoting Myself - Recent Books

"The power is out, the phones are out, the water is out, except for the lake which is in--a living creature from the Lucerne and St. Moritz rooms past the lake level rooms, down stagger alley into the laundry room." From "High Water in 1964," (when Many Glacier Hotel was flooded), A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years 100 Stories.




"Jock's dear old daddy always said, 'Jock, take my word for it. Sloppy people are all going to hell.' He also said, 'If a man smells like a whore house, he'...

Quoting Myself

"The power is out, the phones are out, the water is out, except for the lake which is in--a living creature from the Lucerne and St. Moritz rooms past the lake level rooms, down stagger alley into the laundry room." From "High Water in 1964," (when Many Glacier Hotel was flooded), A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years 100 Stories.
"Jock's dear old daddy always said, 'Jock, take my word for it. Sloppy people are all going to hell.' He also said, 'If a man smells like a whore house, he...

Remembering Sanchez Street

Born in Berkeley, California, some of my earliest memories are of this three-flat house on Sanchez Street across the Bay in San Francisco where my father's sister lived. She occupied the top floor and had a wonderful view of the city. As a child, I was impressed by the layout of the place, the nearby park and the Mission Dolores, and the steep hill on 22nd Street.

The layout included the fact that I could enter the building at the garage-level entry door, climb the stairs, and exit the buildi...

Monday Miscellany

Daylight Savings Time: A character in "Worst of Jock Stewart" pretty much sums up my opinion: "If the Lord had wanted daylight saving time, He would have created the world an hour later."

Actor Peter Graves: Yes, I saw him in "Airplane" and "Mission Impossible," but my best memories are of him in the TV show "Fury." My post about that is here: So long Jim Newton of the Broken Wheel Ranch.

Television Shows: I'm not sure why I keep watching Desperate Housewives. I'm not attracted to any of the w...