A.M. Offenwanger's Blog, page 48
March 28, 2016
Easter Eggs
Happy Easter Monday, to those of you who celebrate it (Germans, Canadians, Brits, Down-Under-ites?). Here’s Steve, being the Easter Bear, to add his good wishes.
Yes, we still have Easter eggs at our house, even though the Offspring are a few years past the Easter egg hunting stage. Much like I can’t imagine Christmas without cookies, I can’t have Easter without eggs. When we were kids, we always got some in our Easter baskets, or rather, we hunted for them in the garden. (One year, one got m...
March 24, 2016
Zootopia and The Power of Story
I’ve been thinking about the importance of Story again. My friend E. L. Bates recently posted the transcript of a talk she gave at her local library on that topic (read the full thing here, it’s well worth it). “This is what stories do,” she says, “they sink into our hearts and give us the tools we need to live more fully, more richly, in the everyday world around us.” Yes, exactly.
Last weekend, we went to see the new Disney movie, Zootopia. I’d heard that it was good, so while I wasn’t exp...
March 23, 2016
March 16, 2016
March 7, 2016
Camp NaNo, Once Again
Just three-and-a-half more weeks, and April’s Camp NaNoWriMo will be upon us! I just went and built us a cabin, so if you want to join the Word Count Slayers (that’s our cabin name. I know, right?) hop on over to the Camp NaNoWriMo site, make yourself a profile (if you haven’t got one yet), create a project, then let me know your username (either in the comments, or shoot me a mail at amo@amovitam.ca), and I’ll invite you.
The nice thing about Camp NaNoWriMo is that the word count on it is fl...
March 6, 2016
Jet Lag, Horse Stairs, Ulrich and Eberhard
Inner Courtyard, Altes Schloss, Stuttgart
It’s 4:00 AM, and I’m sitting in the living room catching up on my emails. Well, blog posts written by my bloggy friends, rather, while I was in the Fatherland with not-as-much time and internet access as I usually have. So here I am, making my way through about forty mails that accumulated over the last few days. Hello, jet lag, my old friend… (If my comment or “Like” on your blog post arrived kind of late, that’s why.)
I mostly went for a family vis...
March 3, 2016
Travel Reads
Greetings from Frankfurt Airport. I’m on my way back from a Blitzvisit to the Fatherland for a family birthday.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I suffer from a condition called Büchermangelangst, a phobia of a lack of books. It’s chronic and incurable, and can only be alleviated by carrying an adequate supply of reading material. So I bought myself a couple of new ones; one of them is a murder mystery set at the Frankfurt airport. Should be good motivation to get out of here.
See you soon!
...February 24, 2016
February 22, 2016
Chess, and Some Very Special Pieces
So, you know that Checkmate just came out, right? Of course you do, and you’ve already downloaded your ebook copy. And because you have, you know that it prominently features a chess game.
Oh, you mean you hadn’t got that far in reading the book yet? Sorry, didn’t mean to give any spoilers! But honestly, I’m not giving anything away by telling you that. I’m sure that even without getting to the part about the game, you’ve figured out that the story has something to do with chess – because you...
Oak and Mist – Download Free For a Limited Time!
Shout-out of a new writer friend’s book freebie! I just read Oak and Mist, and it’s great. Go get yourself a copy!
Oak and Mist, the first book in my Ambeth series, is free on Amazon from now until February 25th (e-book version only).
‘The end of everything? Great, no pressure then.’
Alma Bevan didn’t mean to go on a quest. But when she disappears between two trees at her local park and reappears in Ambeth, she finds they’ve been expecting her.
So now she has to find a lost...
