HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! Here is a deeply unflattering picture of me on the beach this morning, wearing 4 layers under my gi and looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after doing 1100 sword-cuts with my iaido group at sunrise, a dojo tradition of "spirit training." After the Misogi - as it's called - we walked down to the ocean, to watch the waves materialize out of a horizonless gray eternity of fog.
Finally, I've had the time (and the mental energy) to thrash through the tiring and complicated process of uploading two new further adventures onto Amazon Kindle! I will upload them onto Smashwords (or its new twin, Draft-2-Digital) in a few days. It's been a very stressful couple of years, between tight deadlines, a summer of travel, assorted pressures from the Outside World, and some necessary house and car repairs. (I feel like I'm just starting to come out of the first phase of grief over my mother's passing, almost three years ago, and that slows everything down.) But, the stories are up on Kindle and people tell me they've downloaded them successfully, so I didn't screw that up. There have been a couple of changes to the Amazon-Kindle system in the past couple of years and I wasn't sure I was doing the upload properly, but evidently even the Table of Contents in Cat's Paw works. (I had my doubts). Cat's Paw is John Aversin and Jenny Wayn...
Father's Day memories of a Classic '50s Dad: kind, responsible, worked hard for his family and his Church, loved nature and took us hiking and camping and to museums (and to Disneyland - back when it was affordable! - even though he hated crowds!). Loved us. Loved my Mom. Like the animals in the wild that he loved, he believed in teaching his young to survive on their own (bank accounts when we were in our early teens, "always have an emergency fund.") Fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Roman history, Zane Gray; told us about the Iliad and the Odyssey (and got us the Classic Comics versions when they came out). Like Hector in the Iliad, who says of his baby son, "I would like one day to hear men say of him, 'He's a better man than his father.'" Knowing him - having him as a mentor - was one of the greatest gifts of my life. Love you, Dad! In other news: The next Benjamin January novel, "Murder in the Trembling Lands", will be out next month...
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