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



This Blog: The Great Cognitive Walkabout

All right, so  here I am, sixty-four years old, standing in the jungle, spiders all around me, sweat trickling down my back and from under my armpits, but I still have the stamina to pose for the camera. This is me, the impulsive blogger, the novelist, the short-story dreamer, the questing intellectual. Now, by intellectual, I don't mean I think I'm particularly smart; I'm just interested in ideas--all sorts of ideas, from quatum physics to traditional ways of oceanic navigation to French Romantic art to what goes on in a dictator's squirming-toad-filled skull. I'm a big fan of the thrilling, intellect-rattling, unshackled life that being a skeptic, a free-thinking secular humanist--an athiest, if you must--allows.

 I have spent much of that life on both an intellectual and physical "walkabout"--a never-ending rite of passage, traveling around both the world of ideas and the world itself, looking, observing, wondering. So, while other writers' blogs are about writing--just about their writing--I find that I am fundamentally incapable of limiting this blog to musings about my own scribblings and pictures of my own book covers. 

This blog is about whatever has my attention at the moment, from the silly to the wonderous to the horrid to the terrifying. In the end, when I look back through the years of entries, I hope to have pretty good picture of who I was in the world I lived in. In other words, as a man and a writer, because, of course, the two are inseparable.

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