Douglas Arvidson is a past winner of the WICE/Paris Transcontinental International Short Story competition. His short fiction has been published in Paris, Prague, and in literary magazines in the United States and he was recently invited to be a staff writer for the Prague Revue, a cutting-edge, online literary journal (http://bit.ly/1mMT6ZC). The novels in his fantasy series, The Eye of the Eye of Stallion, include The Face in Amber, The Mirrors of Castaway Time, and A Drop of Wizard's Blood. His new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, was selected as a finalist in the ForeWord Reviews 2012 Book of the Year national awards and as a finalist in three categories in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards: Action Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction. It has become part of the pantheon of Pacific literature and is now included in school literature programs. Brothers of the Fire Star is an adventure story set in the Pacific during World War II and concerns two boys of different races and cultures who escape the island of Guam in a small sailboat when the Japanese army invades. They must then struggle to survive as they master the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators. Appropriate for young adults as well as adult readers, Brothers of the Fire Star is available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com (http://amzn.to/1j3axVk) and Crossquarter.com. Visit the author's website: douglasarvidson.com



Friday, November 15, 2013

Book Awards, Albuquerque, and the Unfettered Mind

The Great Physicist Richard Feynman: He claimed his I.Q. was 125
 
 
I'm in a hotel room in Albuquerque, seeking the illusive freedom of an unfettered mind. It is a struggle to get unfettered with all the buzz and hubbub and guilt and remorse, not to mention joyful stuff, too, all this detritus we have sticking to us after nearly sixty-seven years of living.
 
I seek freedom by writing, and I'm researching/thinking about my next piece for The Prague Revue which will be about the unfettered nature of geniuses like this wonderful genius pictured above. Meanwhile, I flew out west here for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards banquet which is this evening down in a meeting room at this hotel (the charmingly quaint Spanish-Pueblo Hotel Albuquerque).
 
Brothers of the Fire Star is a finalist in three categories--historical fiction, adventure fiction, and young adult fiction, and could, I suppose, actually win something, although being a finalist is actually winning because you get to put that big Finalist sticker on your book's cover, which I have done, and now I don't know where I'll put anymore stickers because there has got to be room on the cover so you can read the title and see the author's name.
 
In any event, I'm playing here with words and sentences and it feels good to trample on the rules of grammar once in a while. Writing a run on sentence can be an exhilarating experience, like shooshing down a steep ski slope without concern for consequences.
 
Today, after working a while, I'll take a long walk around town and breathe in the cool desert air and have a real Mexican lunch. Albuquerque is wonderful to me because it is a town in the desert and deserts are so very different than the wet and green I am used to.