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



Wednesday, June 4, 2014

It's June: Summer, Life is Good, and There's Deep Space to Think About, Too

Merely Infinity: Deep Space From Hubble

In summer, my eyes turn toward the heavens because the Earth has tilted and now I can see my favorite star constellations like Scorpio and Arcturus. Lovely stuff, really. And NASA just released this photo of deep space objects, namely lots of swirling, twirling galaxies. Thousands of them, and each of them no doubt full of sun-like stars with Earth-like planets filled with life of some sort or another. It's ever so instructive to look outward, towards the unknown and unknowable, towards an infinity that our finite awareness can never hope to grasp.
Close to home, summer brings around the celebration of things like war and remembrance, one time battlefields where thousands died and now thousands play. For example, see here below. The first is a photo taken on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Terrified soldiers, many, many of them soon to be dead, are disgorged from a landing craft on a beach in France. The picture below that is what that beach looks like today. If I had to choose, I'd choose the second one.




We hope that, as we gaze out into an infinite Universe that if there is life out there, and there most certainly is, that it does better than life here on this finite, fat little ball. That just maybe life evolved without having to kill to survive, to love without hate, and live without dying. And why not? Come on now, really. Why not?
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