Jackson Coppley's Blog, page 19

Give a Unique Gift

Give A Unique Gift this ChristmasSend a giftwrapped, personalized copy ofLeaving Lisa, a novel by Jackson Coppley, nominated as Best Indie Book of 2016, to special people on your shopping list. The author will sign the book and personalize it with the name and message you provide.Here’s how to get your copies:Go to the Contact section ofwww.JacksonCoppley.com (Click Here)Leave a message containing your contact information and the name and address of each recipient (US addresses only), and the message you wish to send them (15 words or less) receiving a book.When your book is ready to be mailed, you will receive an email providing a link to a secure site where you can pay the $14.95 for each book via credit card or PayPal. Once payment is made, the gift will be sent on its way.That’s it. You will send a book, including giftwrapping and shipping, personalized and signed by Jackson Coppley, for the regular price of the book alone.Hurry! This offer is good only through December 14, 2016!Click Here to Begin!

Black Friday Plus One Deal

#novel #scifi #romance We're providing a special Amazon countdown deal today on the Kindle Version ofLeaving Lisa. From 8:00 AM (PST) Nov 26 through 12:00 AM (PST) Nov 27, buy the Kindle version for just 99¢!After that, the price goes up a buck each day until it returns to the regular price of $3.99.Click here to buy now!

Far as the Eye Can See

I boughtFar as the Eye Can Seeat a reading the author, Robert Bausch held, a chance to hear his story as an author and get a signed copy. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was just thinking about it again today, the sign of a good book.The story is about a civil war veteran who heads out West with no particular aim in mind, but Bausch makes him a charming, if crusty, character. It paints a more intimate feel for the old west where Native Americans are small bands of people surviving on the land and life is difficult.We have few good westerns these days, but this is one of them.

MUSTANG - Episode 9 - Carol's Loss

Carol was with Johnny all the time when he could get away on leave. Then he shipped out overseas. When Johnny drove Carol by the base, they passed rows and rows of tanks painted dessert sand camouflage. Johnny said those tanks were painted Russian forest green back in cold war days. Another time, another place was told by the paint.But it was still far away, overseas, in a foreign world, to which her Johnny was taken away.Johnny wrote her every week. She would take each and every one and read them over and over, then pulled them from between the pages of her algebra book and read them in class, silently. Then they stopped.She could find out nothing. She was just the girl friend. So the car with the two soldiers pulled up in front of someone else’s house, not hers. That house was Johnny’s parents, far away in Kansas. She wrote Johnny’s mom in Kansas and his mom wrote right back. It was a short and simple note, a single page. Johnny’s mom wrote, “We’ve lost Johnny, dear.” The words were a bullet through her young heart. She showed it to sister Cindy and spent the evening crying in Cindy’s arms as Cindy held her and kissed her on the head rocking her back and forth.We’ve lost Johnny,’ Carol thought. Johnny’s mother included Carol in the loss of Johnny. It touched Carol but it could not console her.Watch for new episodes in MUSTANG.Click Here to Start at the beginningSubscribe below to receive a weekly notice of postings.You can influence the direction of this story!Drop me a message inContactwith suggestions.

The Bubble

Imagine a world in which people live in information bubbles that echo what they believe and differing views are relegated to bubbles in which others live. You may say that this is the world in which we currently live, but take a moment to stretch your imagination. Imagine a future world in which geographical boundaries loose significance. Physical boundaries pertain to only those around you at any particular moment when you interact person-to-person, but those interactions are few and far between since most personal interaction is over the Internet. There are times in which you must move physically into someone else’s bubble, but that would be an experience similar to today’s trip to another country.Governments reshape over time. Perhaps the country-based governments of today vanish or at least become insignificant. Each bubble has its own government, and since all individuals are like-minded, the individual governments move in predictable directions. Immigrants lose bonds between each other as they become emigrants to a bubble of like-minded people of all backgrounds.  Each bubble forms its own security forces, but in this scenario, warfare changes. There is no longer a plot of land to conquer, to bomb to submission, to occupy. Cyber warfare becomes the norm. But, in this future there are reasons not to go to war. Trade is essential between bubbles. They rely on each other. Perhaps a conservative bubble handles most of the agriculture and a more liberal bubble, technology, and yet another, has rich space entrepreneurs in control of the weather satellites. They need to trade between them to survive.This future scenario is not nirvana. The outcasts and the starving masses will be with us always. There will be humanitarian aid supplied through cooperation between the bubbles, but the poor masses will be those the information bubbles leave behind.This future has possibilities for the writer. Imagine a security breach that threatens the security of one bubble and cyberwar ensues. What if there is an insurrection within a bubble? What would it look like? Could there be a future Romeo and Juliet as lovers from different bubbles?I welcome yourcomments. Who knows, you may shape the future… of a new novel.

MUSTANG - Episode 8 - Carol's First Love

Fortunately, Carol was not a shrinking violet. She always entered the room bubbly and eager to meet everyone. Being free and easy came naturally. Cindy was the serious one. Perhaps that allowed Carol to shine.But there were those blue days, the days when Carol felt she was walking a tightrope, telling herself not to look down. On those days, she would lie on one corner of her bed and hold Mr. Snug close to her chest. Mr. Snug was her one stuffed animal from her childhood.She would look at her hands, the hands everyone liked, but started seeing them as lost opportunity. ‘How does someone become a hand model anyway?’ she thought. ‘No one ever walked into the malt shop where I was sitting and said “Hey darling. Great hands! I’m going to make you a star.”’The one malt shop pickup she had was Private First Class Johnny Monroe in Killeen, Texas. PFC Monroe was Carol’s first big romance. She was sixteen and he was eighteen. Johnny, the soldier, was a big-time man of the world to Carol. He would take her on motorcycle rides. They would stop out in the country. He played a harmonica and made up songs about her. God, how she loved Johnny.It was on one of those trips, in the flat, wide Texas countryside as the sun set that Carol lost her virginity to PFC Johnny Monroe. He placed a gray blanket over the Texas sand. Carol still remembers the red and black crosshatch pattern to this day. That, and how tender PFC Johnny Monroe had been.Her friend Maureen lost her virginity before Carol ever met Johnny. She told Carol how it kind of hurt and that she was glad to get it over with. Not so, thought Carol. Johnny was so slow and tender. When she first cried out in pain, Johnny paused and kissed her lightly on her cheek. “It’s OK,” he said softly close to her ear. It continued, and it was OK. It was wonderful.Watch for new episodes in MUSTANG.Click Here to Start at the beginningSubscribe below to receive a weekly notice of postings.You can influence the direction of this story!Drop me a message inContactwith suggestions.

Delaware Beach Life

For readers along the Delaware coast, I invite you to stop by a magazine rack and pick up a copy of the holiday issue of Delaware Beach Life. The magazine contains an article about the guys who meet every other week to critique each other's writing. These guys contributed a lot to makingLeaving Lisathe fine read it is.

The Heartbeat

I played the piano this morning with a new metronome. I seldom use one, but my piano coach advised it, recognizing my ragged sense of rhythm. As I played to the cadence of the timed ticks of the device, I thought about the rhythm of our lives. It’s no accident that the range of beats of the metronome for most music, from a low of 60 to a high of 130 parallels the lows and highs of the beat of our hearts. It is the rhythm to which we were born. Even before our birth, we detected the heartbeat of our mother. Baby kittens, when separated from their mother, lie sleepless until a ticking clock is placed near them. They then calm and snooze hearing the faux beat of their mother’s heart. For humans, music provides either that soothing slow beat of rest found in a lullaby, or the rapid beat in heavy metal. Though wildly different, the beat goes on.The beat affects our inventions. Clocks use pendulums to divide the constant flow of time into ticks and tocks. Car engines harness small explosions in a rapid pulse of pistons.But the universe does not move about in pulsing beats; the stars and planets move smoothly and constantly, no matter how we attempt to describe their passage in seconds, years and eons.What if there is life on another planet whose species were just like us in every way, but one. Their hearts provide a steady flow of blood rather than in pulses. Would the sound of a flowing river calm their kittens? Would their music hum? Would their inventions work altogether differently?Such is the stuff of science fiction but draws attention to the power of our hearts.

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides wrote Middlesex over a decade ago and it remains one of my favorite novels. The slipcover tells you that it is ‘the story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan.’Although the central point of the story is the sexual anomaly of Calliope, that becomes secondary to a story that is at times brutal and then extremely funny. I recommend it and adding it to my online bookshelf.

Dining Among Roman Crockery

In Rome, we dined in Flávio al Velavevodetto set into the mountain of pottery refuse from which the area of Testaccio draws its name. Shipments of wine and oil to Imperial Rome were in pottery jars which, due to the impregnation of fluid into the crockery, could not be reused.  So, the Romans carefully cracked the pottery in layers and stacked them in what we would consider an ancient landfill. Hundreds of years later, modern Romans discovered that the temperature inside the base of the mound was perfect year round for storage of wine. Today these wine cellars may be a restaurant such as the one in which we dined.