Bill Hiatt's Blog, page 15

News Update

Between my work at school and my various writing projects and marketing efforts, I realize I haven’t updated my loyal blog followers very often recently, so here are some highlights from the last month or so:

Living with Your Past Selves received the Indie Reader Seal of Approval, a quality certification bestowed by the Indie Reader reviewers. Results for the Independent Reader Discovery Awards (IRDA) are not yet out, but the book’s approved status means I am at least still in the running.
April has been my best sales month so far. Over 70 kindle copies of Living with your Past Selves were purchased by readers in five countries. The novelette prequel, “Echoes from My Past Lives” sold nine copies, but 179 readers snatched during a free promo day.
Living with your Past Selves is soon to be available in more venues. You can check out the details on the LWYPS product page, but the book is now available online at The Titan Bookstore (a UK based online bookstore), Feedaread.com (another UK based operation), and, through Feedaread, will shortly be available by special order from virtually any bookstore that takes special orders. I’ll keep you posted on availability, but the expansion in distribution means you will soon be able to buy at the bookstore of your choice. Also, if you live in Tucson, Arizona, you will be able to buy Living with Your Past Selves at Booktopia as soon as that store is open for business. (Booktopia is the second physical outlet to stock the book. Hopefully, it will be the second of many!)

Thanks again for your continued support!

And here’s another special offer!

Use coupon code CE37M at checkout to get a copy of Living with Your Past Selves free on Smashwords. Visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/263653 to read the description, download an excerpt, watch the book videos, and, if you like what you see, claim your free copy. Don’t wait too long, though. This offer is only good today!

Special Offer!

Act now! This special offer is only good through May 6. You can find the details here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bill-Hiatt/431724706902040 . Check the post that begins with “Ssshhh” (near the top).

This offer is for loyal website followers and for fans of my Facebook page, so please don’t share the link.

Thanks for Your Good Thoughts During the ABNA Contest!

Thanks to all of you for your support during the ABNA contest. Unfortunately, I did not qualify for semifinals–this year. If one wants to succeed as a writer, one has to take the setbacks in stride. In looking at the feedback, I think I probably should have entered my YA fantasy in YA rather than in fantasy, so perhaps I will try that next year. Then again, I might have a different book to enter by next year…

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Yesterday 179 people in the U.S., plus 9 in the UK and one each in France, Germany, and Canada, downloaded “Echoes from My Past Lives” while it was free. (That’s not much by the standards of a free promo in the old days, but it’s very respectable now, with hundreds of free promos going on every day!) At one point EFMPL was #2 among free downloads of Arthurian fantasy.

Even more remarkably, “Living with Your Past Selves” had its best day so far, with 12 sales (10 U.S. and 2 U.K.)–and it has already had 2 sales today! I’d like to think some of you downloaded EFMPL and decided you wanted more! Anyway, I really appreciate all of your help and good wishes!

“Echoes from My Past Lives” is FREE on Amazon Today!

The title says it all.

Here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Lives-Spell-Weaver-ebook/dp/B00BZIROVE/

Read an excerpt from “Echoes from My Past Lives”

Looking for a quick shot of fantasy (1/2 an hour to 1 hour)? May I suggest “Echoes from My Past Lives,” a short prequel to Living with Your Past Selves? It will enthrall you whether you are a fan of the original novel or are entering the world of Taliesin Weaver for the first time.

Below is the first part of “Echoes from My Past Lives.” Enjoy! (And if you enjoy enough to want to buy, “Echoes from My Past Lives” is free April 13!) http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Lives-Spell-Weaver-ebook/dp/B00BZIROVE/

 

 

I could feel the sword as it cut into my stomach. I could feel the blood trickling down from the wound. I could almost hear the drops hitting the ground.

Yeah, and yesterday I could feel the bullet just before it tore through my brain.

None of it was real, any more than any of the other images of my own death I had been experiencing for the past several days were real.

The hospital room was real, though. Oh yeah, definitely. Even with my eyes closed, I knew it. I could smell disinfectant. I could hear monitors beeping away. I could feel their connections on my arms and chest, as well as being able to feel the little oxygen tube in each nostril. I could also feel the roughness of the sheets, so different from the ones at home. Don’t get me wrong—I would have loved it if the hospital weren’t real, but denial only gets you so far.

I opened my eyes cautiously. Before they were even completely focused, I spotted a mass of black, curly hair and knew that I was not alone. My buddy Stan was looking at me with his most anxious expression. Damn! I had probably screamed again, or something. It was bad enough that I felt as if I was going to get shipped off to some lunatic asylum at any moment. I didn’t want Stan thinking I was crazy too. I didn’t want him to give up on me.

“Tal,” he said cautiously, his even-higher-than-normal voice undercutting his effort not to sound worried, “you okay?”

I tried to smile, but my face seemed to have forgotten how. “Yeah, I’m okay,” I whispered. I didn’t seem to be able to manage much more than a whisper or a croak these days.

“That’s good,” Stan replied, his voice suggesting that he really didn’t believe me. “Can I get you anything?”

Yeah, how about getting me the hell out of here. How about taking me back in time to before all this happened. “No, I’m good. Actually, I’d like it if you went home. You don’t need to waste your whole day here. It’s Sunday. You’ve been here every evening and all day on weekends, except when you went to Temple on Saturday.”

I liked Stan too much to want him to have to spend all his time with me, but to be honest, part of me would have started yelling, “NO!” if he had moved a muscle to leave. I know it’s weird, but sometimes I had the feeling that if Stan left for too long, somehow I’d be gone  when he got back. Not dead, maybe. Just gone.

No danger of Stan leaving, though. Since my “accident,” or whatever the hell it was, he had been here as long as hospital staff and that overprotective mother of his would let him. He looked at me with his sad brown eyes as if I had suggested that he should jump out the window. “I want to stay, Tal. I really do. I’ll go home pretty soon.”

I leaned back again and closed my eyes. “Suit yourself, dude. I’m afraid I’m not going to be very entertaining company, though.”

“You never are. Somehow I survive anyway.” I opened one eye at that. Stan trying to joke was a good sign. I couldn’t remember his joking any other time since I had been in the hospital.

“Yeah, I’m sure that your busy social life is always way more exciting than hanging out with me.” I realized right after I said that that it was really a low blow, though I didn’t mean it that way. Actually, Stan didn’t have too many friends aside from me. Despite that, he smiled, probably because I was being sarcastic, kind of like the way I used to be. You know, before.

Before my brain exploded or something in the middle of a soccer game, right in front of everybody: the team, Stan, my parents, miscellaneous spectators…and Eva.

Yeah, Eva. If you are going to start acting crazy in front of a large audience, screaming for something to stop, something no one else could see or hear, rolling around on the ground as if you were having some kind of convulsion, then naturally your girlfriend should be there to see the whole thing. Now I know some of you are going to snicker about the idea of a twelve-year-old having a serious relationship, but to me it was serious.

I heard Eva had come to see me a few times, but I was always asleep or sedated—as in my screaming was getting on the staff’s nerves, so someone decided to dope me up. No, I know that isn’t really what the staff was doing, but sometimes that is the way it felt, particularly when I missed a visit from Eva. On the other hand, who was I kidding? Did I really want Eva to see me having another screaming fit? Probably not. But I did want to see her. Once, hauntingly, I smelled her jasmine perfume when I woke up, and once I found a strand of hair—I’d swear it was her strawberry blonde—lying on the pillow right next to me as if she had been leaning over me, perhaps bending over to give me a kiss. Yeah, I know, probably wishful thinking, but in this nightmare my life had become, it was about the most pleasant thought I had.

Certainly it was a more pleasant thought than wondering why Dan hadn’t visited me at all. If I had one friend as close as Stan, it was Dan. All three of us had grown up together, so I really couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t both in my life. Unfortunately, they had never been in each other’s lives much—Dan was an athlete and Stan was, well, a mathlete, but when the three of us were together, they at least tolerated each other. Clearly, we would never be the three musketeers, but at least I could count both of them as good friends to me. Well, that’s what I thought until I landed in the hospital. Stan stuck with me, and Dan vanished as if he had been a dream—I woke up, and he was gone.

I was just about to get Dan and Eva out of my mind and concentrate on Stan, but then I had another “episode,” as one of of the doctors referred to them. You gotta love medical jargon. It can make everything sound so clinical, so neat and tidy—quite a trick when someone is talking about my head getting sandblasted from the inside. No, that image didn’t quite do the experience justice. Think about the famous “chest-buster” scene in Alien, except that instead of an alien bursting out of my chest, I had one ripping its way through my brain and blasting my skull apart.

No, that doesn’t really capture the experience either. It wasn’t quite that painful, though I could feel all of the experiences I was imagining, and since most of them seemed to involve my death, some of them did inflict pretty heavy pain, but that wasn’t the worst part. Far worse was the feeling that my mind was being torn into tiny pieces by some…well, at the risk of repeating myself, some alien presence. Yeah, the feeling of my brain being invaded by someone or something that did not belong there was definitely the worst part. Ever come home and find that your house had been robbed? Multiply that feeling by a thousand, and you have some small idea of how what was happening to me felt.

This time I was being strangled. I could feel someone’s cold, callused hands on my throat. Someone had sneaked up on me. I grabbed at his hands, but he was much stronger than I was.

In earlier experiences I had been too shocked to really focus on the details, but I had promised myself that next time I would try to figure out what was going on. In this case, I had to figure it out quickly. I could feel myself struggling to breathe, feel the hands tightening.

Think! Think!

I tried to take in as much detail as I could. Oh, did I mention that these feelings came complete with full visual hallucinations? Anyway, the room I was in was one I had never seen before. Someone rich lived here, though. The furniture was very fancy, antiques mostly. The room was large, very large, like one in a mansion, and the place looked spotless, as if the owner had a large staff to maintain it. Glancing down, I saw my hands still clawing at the killer’s hands. Well, not my hands, but rather those of a much older man. Could I somehow be seeing my death some time in the future? By this point “I,” or the person under attack, whoever that might be, was on the verge of passing out, so I wouldn’t be able to get any more information this time.

The “episode” ended as soon as it had begun. For some reason I never quite died in them, so I guess I should count my blessings, but the jolt of returning to reality wasn’t exactly easy to take.

I could hear Stan calling my name insistently. I opened my eyes, and he was reaching for the nurse call button.

“Stan! Don’t call anyone!” I rasped harshly. Stan froze, torn between his desire to do what I wanted and his feeling that I needed help.

“Tal, you were…shaking, and gasping for breath. I was afraid…”

“No, I’m fine,” I said, managing a little more than my usual whisper, much to my surprise.

“But…”

I nodded my head in the direction of the monitors. “See, my oxygen saturation’s normal, my pulse is normal, and my heart rate is normal.” No twelve-year-old should know how to read those monitors, but I did. Lucky me.

“They weren’t a minute ago. I’m surprised the nurse didn’t come in on her own. The heart rate one in particular was all over the place.”

“Chalk it up to old equipment. I’m sure the nurses know that some of the rapid changes don’t really mean anything.”

Stan looked skeptical, especially since the hospital was well-funded and didn’t have old equipment, but somehow my manner reassured him. I could see him visibly relax back into his chair.

I was evidently getting better at covering up just how much pain I was in during these experiences. I guess practice makes perfect.

“Taliesin! Let me in!”

Despite myself, I jumped a little, and Stan was instantly back on high alert. I swear he reacted faster to this kind of thing than even my own mother did.

I tried to wave him back into his chair, but the voice kept yelling for me to let him—or it—in. Oh, good. Full-blown hallucinations of painful death were not the only treat in store for me. No, I got to have plain, old-fashioned voices in my head too. There was clearly no end to my luck.

Shut the hell up! I shouted back to the voice in my head. To my surprise, it did—but who knew how long that would last?

“You’re shaking again,” said Stan in a “please let me call the nurse,” voice.

“I’m fine,” I insisted in as firm a voice as I could manage, but my tone wasn’t convincing, even to me. Then the voice in my head started in again, even louder this time.

“Tal, you’re crying now,” said Stan, obviously shocked. Great. Now all I needed to do to really trash what was left of my male ego was wet myself. Then I could truly call it a day.

“I am not…” I began, though at this point I knew Stan would call the nurse regardless of what I said. However, before I could finish the sentence, the world around me disappeared as abruptly as changing a TV channel. Gone was the institutional white of the hospital room, the hum of the monitors, Stan’s alarmed face.

Instead, I found myself sitting in a bright green meadow next to a large lake that, judging by the darkness of its water, must have been nearly as deep as it was wide. Farther away, the meadow was bordered on every side by what appeared to be dense forest. Farther away still were tall mountains, most of them snow-capped. Well, at least this was a more pleasant hallucination than my usual ones—or would have been, but for one thing.

I was not alone.

Read an excerpt from “Living with Your Past Selves”

(Photographic background is copyrigted by  Pavel L Photo and Video and licensed from www.shutterstock.com . Type is licensed from www.digitaljuice.com .)

Want more than a blurb to make up your mind? Below is the first chapter of Living with Your Past Selves.

“Stanford, can you hurry it up?” I said with mild irritation. Yeah, his name really was Stanford, though I didn’t usually call him that unless I was annoyed with him. Guess where his parents wanted him to go to school.

“I’m doing this as fast as I can, Taliesin!” he snapped back, his fingers clicking extra hard on the keys. I knew I had pushed too hard. He never called me Taliesin unless he was genuinely mad at me. “And it’s Stan.”

“I know. Sorry. I’m just anxious…”

“You’re always anxious! Maybe if you would learn how to use a computer better yourself, you wouldn’t have to rely on someone as slow as I am.”

“You’re not slow,” I replied, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Hell, you could probably work faster than the people who designed the computer in the first place.” That wasn’t just empty flattery. Stan knew technology like a time traveler from the future. I, on the other hand, couldn’t quite figure out how to update my Facebook status.

“Okay,” said Stan in a tone that suggested I was not yet quite forgiven, “the virus scan finished, and I made sure all your security software is up-to-date. Your computer is clean for now, but stop clicking on links in email from people you don’t know.”

“Thanks, Stan. My computer would have gotten the digital equivalent of leprosy long ago if you hadn’t been around.” I got a little smile out of Stan then. I made a mental note to be more careful not to call him Stanford. It wasn’t that he was really that temperamental. Well, actually I guessed he was pretty temperamental, but he had good reason. His parents put as much pressure on him as if they believed he was coal and were trying to make a diamond out of him. Whatever he achieved—4.5 grade point average, getting into AP Physics (normally a senior class) as a high school freshman, creating a successful website design business with several corporate clients—nothing, and I mean nothing, was ever enough. They gave him some praise, yes, but then they started right on pushing him toward the next big achievement.

Add to the parental pressure the fact that Stan and I had known each other practically since birth, but that recently, I had been a constant reminder of what puberty hadn’t yet done for him. We were both sixteen, but I had, as the adults were fond of saying, “shot up” and “filled out,” so that, though I didn’t exactly have the build of a basketball player or a bodybuilder, I could draw the occasional female glance and was sometimes mistaken for eighteen. Stan, by contrast, was a sixteen-year-old who looked thirteen or fourteen. It’s okay to look like a cute little kid when you are a little kid, but not really all that great when you’re sixteen. The fact that I could fend off the bullies that would otherwise have circled Stan like sharks should have been some consolation, but, though we never talked about it, I felt sure Stan didn’t want to be dependent on me—or anyone else—for that kind of protection. He had tried martial arts, where his size wouldn’t have been as much of an obstacle, but he apparently didn’t have the coordination for it, so he ended up dependent on me, whether he wanted to be or not.

“Tal?” asked Stan. I glanced over, and Stan was looking back with an odd expression on his face. He looked like guys our age look when they first realize their parents have left some details out of the sex talk, and they want to ask a buddy but don’t quite know how to bring the subject up without sounding completely clueless. Since I was pretty sure Stan’s parents viewed him as more machine than guy anyway, I could almost see the gaping holes his dad’s talk would have contained—if they had even had the talk at all.

“Yeah?” I replied curtly, mentally bracing myself.

“Can I ask you something?” Oh God, here it comes!

“Sure!” I said with very, very fake cheeriness. “Ask away.”

“You remember a few weeks ago, when you stayed over at my house?” Okay, so I hadn’t seen that one coming.

“Yeah,” I answered, trying to figure out where he was going with this.

“Do you know you talk in your sleep?”

The question hit me like a brick right between the eyes. Hell, more like a whole brick wall. I realized that I had started breathing faster and tried to appear calm.

“I don’t know,” I quipped lamely. “After all, I’m asleep when it happens.”

“Well, you do.” Stan opened his mouth as if to continue, but he didn’t.

“Okay, enough with the suspense.” This time the fake cheer sounded fake even to me. “So what did I say?”

“I didn’t know at first. I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until later I realized I had left my computer on that night. I have a very sophisticated language recognition program on it, something my uncle, you remember, the Berkeley linguistics professor uncle, sent me as a Bar Mitzvah gift. I also have a really powerful microphone on that computer, and it picked up what you were saying. The language program identified it and tried to translate it.”

And here I was, worrying about what I might have said, when the biggest problem was apparently how I said it.

“The translation part didn’t work,” continued Stan, sounding more and more puzzled. “The software didn’t have a complete dictionary and grammar for the language you were speaking built in. But the program could at least identify the language. It was Welsh.”

“You know, my family is from Wales. My parents don’t speak Welsh, but I do have a few relatives who do. I must have picked up—”

“No!” shot back Stan, so vehemently that I reflexively pulled away from him. “There has to be more to it than that!” Now it was my turn to be puzzled.

“Why? Usually you are all about the logic, and that is a perfectly logical explanation.”

“Except that the language wasn’t modern Welsh. The software could have translated that. It was medieval Welsh, apparently an early form that is actually closer to the original Celtic. Unless someone in your family has been around for fifteen hundred years, you couldn’t have picked it up from them. There aren’t more than a handful of specialists in the world that can read it, and no one who can speak it fluently. My uncle confirmed that!”

Well, damn your uncle to hell. “Okay, Stan, there must be a glitch in your software.”

“I have double-checked…”

“So, what are you suggesting?” The cheerful tone was really wearing thin, but I didn’t know what else to do at this point. “Demonic possession? I think then I’d be doing Latin backwards, not medieval Welsh. No, maybe I’m a vampire who lived in medieval Wales. Though I’d like to think my abs are really more like a werewolf’s…”

“Don’t make fun of me!” Stan’s retort wasn’t exactly a shout, but it was certainly higher volume than he needed to make his point to someone who was sitting practically right next to him. It was also high pitched enough to be funny, but I suppressed even the faintest hint of a smile. “I’m asking a serious question,” Stan continued, slightly more calmly. You’re my best friend. If you don’t take me seriously, who else is going to?”

Choose your words carefully. “Stan, I’m not making fun of you. You have to admit, though, that the question isn’t exactly scientific, and you are always scientific in the way you analyze situations. Maybe the problem is that I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

Stan leaned closer and almost whispered, a sharp contrast to his previous shout. “The ancient Celts believed in reincarnation.”

The implicit question hung in the air for a while. I’m ashamed to admit that for a split second my old battle training almost took over. Yes, for one bloody, irrational moment I thought about how many times I had killed before, how easy it would be to kill Stan and dispose of the body, all before my parents got home. Then I got a grip on myself. All of that killing was so long ago. I hadn’t killed in this life, and I didn’t want to. Besides, I was an only child, and Stan was the closest thing I had to a brother, as well as my truest friend. He was almost the last person I would ever want hurt, let alone kill. However, the fact that I was shocked enough to think such a dark thought for even a fraction of a second gives you some idea of how I dreaded what I knew was about to happen.

Stan, little human supercomputer Stan, had figured out my situation, as unscientific as it was.

Yeah, I know, unbelievable—but true, nonetheless. And now my best friend was going to hound me about it like the Gwyllgi, the black hound of destiny from the tales of my people.

Why the idea of my best friend knowing my secret horrified me so much I couldn’t quite say, but ever since I had known the truth myself, I had also known that if anyone else shared that knowledge, the consequences could be unimaginably horrible. It was as if I had forgotten some tynged (“binding spell” is the closest I can come in English) that required me to keep the secret, on pain of death or worse. My heart grew colder than the fog sweeping in from the sea on a dismal night. I could almost feel the sharp fangs of the Gwyllgi biting through my chest.

The question was, what could I do about the situation now? Was it already too late? Was the cliché cat out of its bag already, and was it ready to claw out my eyes?

“Reincarnation?” I finally managed. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Think about it. I didn’t notice it when we were kids, but recently you have done a lot of things that can’t really be explained any other way.”

“Such as?” I asked, trying to sound contemptuous about the whole idea but sounding shaky instead.

“Well, there’s that,” said Stan smugly, indicating my harp with a sweeping gesture. “You played the guitar for years, but you never touched a harp, and out of nowhere you con your parents into getting you one, you take a few lessons, and suddenly you’re a concert quality harpist? I don’t buy that for a minute. But if you had played the harp in a previous life, your sudden ability makes sense. You know literature better than I do, but didn’t Arthur Conan Doyle write a line for Sherlock Holmes something like, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’?”

“Mastering the harp took more work than you think.”

“No, it didn’t. We hang out all the time, Tal. How much time did you spend practicing the harp? Enough for appearance’s sake, I guess, but not enough to really learn it from scratch—and you know that as well as I do.”

“Okay, so I’m a prodigy. Mozart was composing music when he was a toddler.”

“Exactly, he didn’t start when he was twelve or so. Statistically, if you are a prodigy, you are an awfully late-blooming one.” Well, he had me there.

“I still play guitar, though.”

Stan raised an eyebrow at that. “Yeah, in a garage band that should never have gotten out of the garage.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t pretend to be offended. Even you used to say you guys sucked. Then, all of a sudden, you become the Bards, and you are actually good, pretty much overnight.”

“We aren’t that good.”

“Horse manure.” That was Stan’s idea of cursing. “You played at the Troubadour last summer. I was there, remember.” Yeah, I’d had to do some heavy lobbying with Stan’s parents to let him go to LA for a weekend with a band. Now I wished I hadn’t.

“And then there is that.” Stan pointed to my fencing foils, leaning again the wall in their carrying bag. “You were in AYSO soccer for years, all set to be starting varsity in high school—and then you just dropped it, and started fencing instead. And you were good at fencing right away, just like the harp. I’ve been to some of your competitions. I’ve seen you beat people who have been fencing for years. I heard my parents talking about it. They don’t understand why you aren’t trying to do what it takes to get on the Olympic team. Tal, the Olympic team! Four years ago, you didn’t even know what a fencing foil was. Then there is your sudden interest in medieval reenactments.” That last I used as a way to camouflage my possession of some real weapons, but I had to admit I had kind of become the star of the show—I should have been more careful.

“And just look around the room, Tal.” I did, and again, he had a point. How could I have been so sloppy? I should have kept up the typical teenage boy decor: sports poster; maybe a band poster or two; images of strikingly beautiful, if unattainable, models and celebrities; something that would have made me seem more normal. Instead I had Celtic crosses, Welsh flags, mythologically themed art reproductions. The room was altogether too medieval, not to mention too green, to seem anything like the typical teenager’s lair. In retrospect, I was surprised Stan hadn’t started asking questions much sooner.

Stan fell silent, clearly waiting for a response. I couldn’t even begin to think of a suitable one. How could I possibly explain all the changes in my life, without letting him know who—and what—I really was?

So instead I walked over and started to play the harp and sing—in Welsh. Nothing much to lose at this point.

Stan was dumbfounded…during the brief time he remained awake. One trick I had mastered long ago, at least 1500 years ago, give or take a century, was using my music to charm someone to sleep. Needed that one for my parents more than once, I can tell you. Anyway, Stan looked as if he were trying to fight the effect, but if so he only lasted a few seconds; then he slouched over in his chair, nearly falling off. My reflexes were good enough for me to catch him in time and lay him gently on my bed. Whenever I used that kind of magic on someone, they never seemed to remember it afterward, so at least I hadn’t made the situation any worse.

“Yes, Stan, I should have known I couldn’t fool you,” I whispered to him. “I can’t just tell you the truth, or I would have, believe me. What can I say? My parents don’t know it, but they named me Taliesin for a reason.” Stan twitched almost as if he had heard me, but I knew he was under too deeply for that.

Not knowing what to do with Stan, or even if anything I did with him would help at this point, I listened to the slow, steady sound of his breathing and let my mind wander back over the last few years.

I remembered vividly how much I had resented my parents for naming me Taliesin, not exactly the most masculine sounding choice any way you look at it. Maybe in Wales such a name could have worked, but in the United States? Ridiculous! Despite the name, though, I had been a fairly normal kid, good at soccer, so-so at school, someone who played my rock music louder than my parents thought necessary, and then…

And then puberty had hit, and when I say “hit,” I mean “HIT”—like a sledge hammer to the skull, smashing my mind into hundreds, maybe even thousands, of little, bloody, screaming fragments. The worst part was not being able to tell anyone, not even my parents. I kept imagining spending the rest of my life in a mental institution, and the Hollywood images stirred around by my pre-teen imagination could conjure up a fairly lurid picture of what mental institutions were like. Whatever was happening inside me made me physically ill, like the sharp edges of my shattered mind were twisting around and ripping up my innards. I was even in the hospital for a few weeks. It wasn’t a mental hospital, but I figured it was only a matter of time until I ended up in one.

Then, just as abruptly as my mind had come apart, it had snapped back together like someone assembling a psychic jigsaw puzzle. Sure, everything wasn’t in exactly the same place, and there were days when I felt like pieces were missing, but at least I could function. You see, nothing was actually broken in the first place; it just took my adolescent mind a while to process what was happening to it.

And what was happening? People associate a belief in reincarnation mostly with eastern religions, but, just as Stan had said, the ancient Celts had a similar belief—and, if my experience was any indication, they were right. Sometimes people have fleeting memories of previous lives, but for the most part they live in blissful ignorance of who they might have been and what they might have done. I didn’t know why, but suddenly the dam that separated my past lives from my current one had dissolved, drowning me in a tidal wave, thousands of years of memories and of radically varying personalities all pouring over me, giving me no room to breathe. I might have lost myself; I might have washed up on shore, broken and rotting, and ended up in the mental institution I so dreaded. Somehow I had hung on. Eventually my current life personality reasserted its dominance, though flavored by my newly remembered past, as my changing interests indicated.

My parents told me afterward that Stan had been at the hospital almost as much as they had, that he often held my hand and talked to me, that almost as often he cried when he thought nobody was looking. I often wondered if his friendship had somehow anchored me, saved me.

And yet here I was, standing by him as he slept, with some of my ancient and medieval past personas wanting to throw him out the window, smother him with a pillow, run him through with a sword—anything to mend the tynged and save me from that uncertain something waiting to swallow me up. I didn’t really blame them in a way—some of them came from much more savage times in which moral dilemmas did not interfere with survival. Fortunately, they were just echoes of the past; I was the one who was in control, and if I had to face death or worse so Stan could live, then I would. Easy to say, I know, but at the time I really believed it. My past lives gave me a wild side I sometimes had to restrain, but they also gave me wisdom “beyond my years,” you might say.

That did, however, leave the question of what to do with Stan. I could do more than charm him to sleep. I could, for example, make him forget, but that process posed more risks. I would have trouble wiping just the memories that threatened me, and, looking down at him and thinking about his brilliant mind, I just couldn’t make myself take the chance. Besides, unless I erased much more, and took an even bigger risk, he would just come to the same conclusion again at some point in the near future. Instead of erasing his memories, I settled for a temporary fix and made him think he had dreamed the conversation with me. When he awoke, he would be a little groggy, not prone to act out the discussion he thought he had dreamed. I would walk him home—he lived just down the block—and I would buy myself a few days perhaps, to figure out what to do.

“Yes, Stan,” I whispered to him again. “You were right. I am Taliesin Weaver right now, but I was also the Taliesin who journeyed with Arthur to Annwn and then wrote about the journey later. And I was the more ‘historical’ Taliesin who was the court poet to King Urien of Rheged. I am betting you looked him up in Wikipedia and would have asked me about him had I given you half a chance. I have been other Taliesins as well, and many, many other people. The best part of all that, though it almost crushed me, is I can access any memory, use any skill from any of them; at least I can if I concentrate hard enough. Why that is true, what the purpose of all of it is, I really, really, wish we could find out together, but that, my friend, is a journey I am going to have to take alone.”

With that I brought him back to semi-wakefulness, just as I had planned, walked him home to make sure he got there in one piece, went back to my place, had the usual tense dinner with my parents, played the harp a little, and then crawled into bed, though naturally I couldn’t sleep.

Around midnight I heard howling that would be enough to freeze anyone’s blood, let alone someone like me who knew what it meant. The howl was followed soon enough by harsh scratching at the windows and by a moaning lament in, you guessed it, Welsh.

Over breakfast, my parents speculated about what could have caused all the racket last night, but I already knew.

We had heard the Gwrach y Rhibyn, the Welsh Banshee. When it spoke, it spoke to the relatives of the one who was going to die, wording its lament from their point of view.

Last night it spoke to my parents. It repeated, “Oh, my son!” to them over and over.

Now what Stan did or didn’t know became the least of my worries.

The tynged had been broken, and the price for its breaking was death. Mine.

See more and buy at http://www.amazon.com/Living-Selves-Spell-Weaver-ebook/dp/B00987M4CI/ for the Kindle edition, or at http://www.amazon.com/Living-Your-Past-Selves-Hiatt/dp/1479295698/ for the paperback edition.

St. David’s Day Giveway Winners Announced

It is my pleasure to announce the following winners:

Grand Prize: Jude Bailey, United Kingdom

First Prize:  Ariel Banayan, United States

Second Prize: Melissa Bowerstock, United States

Third Prize: Shannon Shulte, United States

I will be in touch with the winners shortly to arrange for the appropriate distribution of prizes.

Check back soon for new giveways. The next lucky winner might be you!

St. David’s Day Giveaway Winners To Be Announced

The winners will be announced within the next week, and I will be contacting them for prize details.

Check back from time to time for new prize winning opportunities.