Category: Books

I’ve completed editing my newest novel, which I plan to release either in May or June of this year. It is a YA novel with plenty of magic in it. It was a 3 year journey to complete, and in the book, I have included an afterword that explains the process.

I’ve started another project which will be a collection of short stories. It’s more in the vein of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone–stories about the bizarre, with strange twists and turns. I’ve started one story already and am wrapping it up.

I’ve been wanting to write a collection of short stories for awhile. But instead of having distinct stories with no relation to each other, these stories will interconnect, though they will only be related because of a worldly event that has occurred.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, is a fun and engaging ride through the world of Narnia as seen through the eyes of its characters. The story is about four kids: Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter, who are staying in a house of a professor in England during the air raids of WWII.

While playing hide and seek, Lucy hides in a wardrobe. As she reaches into the recesses of the wardrobe, she discovers a world of snow and forest. She meets a faun, Tumnus, who takes her to his place for some rest. But later, Tumnus admits that he kept there so that the white witch could find her. He also tells her that the witch has made it winter in Narnia, but Christmas never arrives.

Tumnus decides to help Lucy escape before the witch finds her. When Lucy returns to her world, she realizes that hardly any time has elapsed since she was gone. When she tells the other kids what she saw, no one believes her.

Later in the story, she and Edmund enter Narnia separately. He encounters the white witch, and she offers him Turkish Delights to win him to her side. He has aspirations of becoming a king there, but only if he brings the other kids to the witch.

After they leave Narnia, Edmund tells the other kids that Lucy made all of this up. But they end up going to Narnia altogether, meeting Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, Father Christmas, Aslan, and other characters.

The story is a fun and fast read. There is lots of adventure with gripping tension as we discover how the witch is using Edmund. Like The Magician’s Nephew, the story is humorous and has great illustrations by Pauline Baynes.

The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis, is a fun story about two kids (Digory and Polly) that find magical rings in Digory’s uncle’s study (Uncle Andrew). The rings allow the two kids to teleport between worlds.

They first end up in a wood area with pools where they can choose which worlds they decide to teleport to. The rings have an order to them as well (yellow to enter, green to leave).

They decide to take a chance and explore a random world. Upon entering, they discover the ruins of a kingdom. They run into the witch Jadis, after Digory rings a bell which awakens her. They learn of a war that had transpired in her world, and her plans to escape to rule another world using her magic.

The kids must stop her, and in the process, they bring people from their world along to Narnia incidentally. There, we’re introduced to Aslan, the lion, and he awakens other animals that can speak. There is a biblical reference to the forbidden fruit. Digory must make a choice whether to bring the apple back to save his mother despite Aslan’s warning.

The story is easy to read and has funny humor in it as well. The end of the book is a precursor to the next book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It also establishes a quality about the wardrobe in the next book.

I also enjoyed the illustrations in the book by Pauline Baynes. They’re colorful and complement the book’s magical storyline.

I’ve been working hard on a new novel that’s coming out soon. It’s a YA/urban fantasy novel with magic and lots of mystery.

I made it a goal this year to complete 4 novels, and I’m getting close to finishing number 3. The 4th novel is still up in the air, but I know I’d like to take a break after novel number 3 and complete number 4 later on this year. If you haven’t checked out Rogue Experiment or The Birnbaum Case, please check those out. They’re out on Amazon as well as iBooks.

Sometimes I am just interested in so many books that it’s hard to focus on one. I might try to read a little a bit of each book, but one book usually ends up winning my attention. Especially with longer books, it’s a commitment to follow through and get to the end. I feel that if I slip away into another story while I’m in the middle of one book, I’ll start forgetting the details of the last book, and it would be harder to return to it later.

One analogy is movies. It would be like watching a movie, pausing it a quarter of a way through, watching another movie, pausing it a quarter of the way through, then switching to the first. The momentum is gone. It’s not the same experience. The focus has been disrupted.

I end up reading one book at a time anyway. It’s one of those things where you have to make a wishlist and prioritize what you want to read first.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Birnbaum Case

by Fallton Havenstonne

Giveaway ends March 23, 2020.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway

Enter for a chance to win one ebook copy of The Birnbaum Case. The giveaway ends on March 23rd.

My new mystery novel, The Birnbaum Case, will be released on 3 – 21 – 20. It is available on Amazon for preorder.

There was a time when I’d read nonfiction books voraciously, especially history, science, and mathematics. It was during a time when I felt I needed to learn as much as I possible.

One trend I noticed about all the nonfiction books I enjoyed was that I learned the most when they were told in the form of a narrative. The subject of history lends itself to this because each major event builds upon a chain of events . . . a series of decisions, actions, or inactions.

Science can be engrossing if written in the same way. To read about the struggles of scientists, the experiments they developed to test their ideas, the challenges they faced, this is much more fascinating and fun to read than to just have the facts given to you.

When we approach a work of nonfiction, we can have the facts, dates, and names given to us, or we can read how ideas or people shaped the events that have happened. I find I learn a lot more this way rather than just remembering the facts.

There are so many ways to approach reading nonfiction. You could read it educate yourself, to catch up on the news, or to simply digest information that’s useful.

The best nonfiction books I’ve read not only educate me on a subject matter, but inspire me to think about the world. They address ideas I haven’t considered, and even if I don’t agree with them, I find that in the process of questioning those ideas, I refine my own.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Rogue Experiment

by Fallton Havenstonne

Giveaway ends March 01, 2020.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway