The presses have been quiet for awhile, but I am beginning work on a new book about my family home in Albemarle County, Virginia known as Gale Hill.
The old house was built in 1775, with a major addition in 1857 – and everything burned down in 1930 when my mother was 10 years old. But Gale Hill was sincerely mourned by the many people who had spent time there. Many of them wrote their memoirs – or interviewed others in search of anecdotes, which they dutifully typed up and passed on to subsequent generations.
As the “family historian” in my branch, I was given copies of many of these documents, and I made an effort to gather together as many photographs as I could. Now it is time to digitize these faded photocopies and old snapshots and put everything together into a book.
I believe that the result will have value for more than just my family connections, for it will include numerous songs, jokes, accounts of old customs, and a century-and-a-half of American history as revealed through the lives and traditions of a large and active family (the Minors) and its connections (including Trices, Davises, Byrans, Cockes, Willistons, and Caskies).
This project will take some time – publication will probably be in early 2014.
My degree was in biology, though I didn’t pursue a career in that discipline, partly because there were few jobs outside of the medical arena – even fewer jobs that didn’t involve cutting up or dissolving organisms. But in my new science fiction ebook, entiitled Ammonite: An Eco-Fantasy, I find myself in a biological research station that is studying a living fossil – a life form that was believed to have gone extinct even before the dinosaurs.
However, this ammonite is special – it has noticed the negative effects on the marine ecosystem caused by mankind and has allowed itself to be captured so it can study humans and see if anything can be done about them. It learns to use a computer and devours information on the internet to help it evaluate the future prospects of the planet Earth.
Obviously, this is a very bright mollusk – even brighter than squids and octopuses (some of which are compared to house cats in intelligence. This is recognized by Pippin – an intern at the station – but not by her superiors, the Ph.D.s who plan to have a dissection party with ammonite as the main course. Whatever will the wily cephalopod do?
It’s a quick read with some surprising twists and turns.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again coin collector since my early childhood in the mid to late 1950s. During the last couple of years, a bout of unemployment plus an increase in my responsibilities made it necessary for me to “sell up” and stop buying coins.
The end of active collecting has given me a chance to reflect on my experiences. Coins have played a role in almost my entire life. I have learned a lot from them and had many moments of enjoyment and discovery. I even acquired enough knowledge to allow me to write a guidebook and “cherry pick” some extremely rare and valuable coins.
Coin Stories is a full-color illustrated collection of memories of coins that I have owned and/or been inspired by during the past 55 years. Writing it gave me the chance to poke fun at myself and relive some of the great – and not so great – moments I have experienced as a coin collector. My specialties have ranged from U.S. silver dollars and Lincoln Cents, to die varieties (e.g. doubled dies), ancient and medieval coins, and Asian Indian coins.
Coin Stories is available on Amazon.com as an ebook and as a paperback.
This is all-new stuff: a Kindle collection of nine short stories about aging. Despite the title, it isn’t about “senior moments” in the usual sense – it’s about the realizations and growth that can and should occur when we get old.
I don’t consider myself in that realm quite yet, but I am in the suburbs (age 60) and I’ve seen the challenges and triumphs of older generations at close hand. All of these stories are fictional, but most are based on actual people and experiences.
Some of the stories are very short – more like anecdotes – others more developed. There are some surprises – an after-life encounter with Wilt Chamberlain, for example. There is also pain, joy, love, surrender, and a few laughs. The whole batch amounts to 15,000 words – a quick read and priced as such. Enjoy!
This is a collection of 48 accounts of theophanies – visions of divine beings – from many times and faiths and cultures. These experiences are especially interesting for their similarities. For example, a bright sacred light is often described, and mountaintops are frequent places for epiphanies. Sometimes a being with human form is confronted; other times it is just a hand or a voice or an energy.
For many of us, stories of encounters with extraterrestrials are interesting but impossible to evaluate – we must see for ourselves. The same is certainly true with face-to-face meetings with God or Goddess. However, if the stories seem plausible, then perhaps we are more likely to keep our eyes open.
Now available as a paperback or Kindle book, this new publication deals with the 2nd century emperors of Rome. I noticed a progression in the characters of the so-called “five good emperors” – Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius – that paralleled the moral development of a single individual. To simplify: from shrewdness (Nerva) to activity (Trajan) to worldly knowledge (Hadrian) to virtue (Antoninus Pius) to wisdom (Marcus Aurelius).
So how could Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus (the bad guy in “Gladiator” and “Fall of the Roman Empire”) surpass his predecessors? Well, according to history, he didn’t. He broke the string of good emperors and his reign began an unrelenting decline in the Empire. However, it intrigued me that he certainly tried to outdo all previous rulers – by attaining god-consciousness. He proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Hercules and the “son of God”.
My exercise in this book was to give some context through a series of factual biographical sketches of the emperors involved, followed by imaginary letters from each of the 5 good emperors to his successor – and an apology, of sorts, from Commodus to his deified father. I conclude with a brief fictional Epilogue that gives a plausible explanation for the historical circumstances of Commodus’ assassination.
The result is not a reappraisal of Commodus but, perhaps, a greater understanding of his aspirations in light of his predecessors and, especially, his father’s values and advice (as shown in selected passages from the famous “Meditations” adapted in the form of a letter of advice to his son).
In an earlier post, I described the long and winding road of my first serious effort to get published, the illustrated “Selected Lives: The Autobiography of a Soul”. The latest chapter in the saga is the publication of an ebook version on Amazon, available here.
For this edition, I have restored several of the episodes from the original 1986 manuscript that were left out of the print version. These include episodes featuring the historical figures Pythagoras, Jesus, and the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu. Also added are a plant life, a Neanderthal dream, and episodes in ancient Turkey and Melanesia.
As I said in my earlier post, “Selected Lives” was an early effort and a learning experience. Some of the artwork is a bit tentative (“flat”, said one reviewer), but some of it still pleases me – and some of it still inspires me.
Way back in 1994, I wrote a children’s story entitled “Visit to Red Eft’s Mountain”. It told the tale of a box turtle who, along with his friends Gray Squirrel, Raccoon, and Black Snake, journeyed to a mythical mountain. Box Turtle was hesitant to leave his home valley, but trash, pollution, and a close encounter with a car convinced him to seek a safe haven. When they got to the mountain, Box Turtle and his friends encountered a very wise red eft, who advised Box Turtle to go back to his valley, where he was “part of the scenery – part of what makes it beautiful.”
Recently, I decided to publish this story on Amazon, in paperback and as an ebook. I prepared several new illustrations and expected a quick edit of the text was all that was needed to “go to press”. However, I discovered that my feelings about the ending had changed.
Box turtles have always been especially dear to me. One of my first friends was a box turtle named Yertle, and one of my first books was called “The Adventures of Yertle the Turtle”. My brothers and I have saved hundreds (if not thousands) of box turtles from possibly becoming road kill by stopping and carrying them off of busy roads. Seeing box turtles, especially after a summer rain, was a common and happy experience for almost all of my life – until the last couple of years. I haven’t seen a box turtle in the wild for at least 3 years. And I have heard that they are becoming scarce throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic region, maybe even in danger of extinction!
This breaks my heart. And I realized that telling Box Turtle to “go home” and struggle to survive in the midst of habitat destruction, pollution, and careless or malevolent motorists wouldn’t do. So I wrote a new ending that places responsibility for box turtle welfare in human hands. I won’t give it away here, but I think it will strike a chord for all turtle lovers like me. “Turtle Crossing” is now available as a paperback and ebook.
OK, I’ll admit that I am as spoiled as anyone when it comes to free content on the web. If I want to hear a song, I go to YouTube; if I want to look up something, I’ll browse Google rather than a bookstore. So much information and content is available for nothing that I have become reluctant to part with my hard-earned credit.
This bodes ill for the many people (like me) who wish they could make a living as a writer/artist/photographer/musician. I price my books as low as I can go, but sales for most of them remain very slow. I’ve wondered if it’s because my books don’t interest people or if (like me) they just don’t want to pay for them.
In order to find out – and in the hopes of getting some feedback – I decided to take advantage of Amazon’s KDP Select “Free Promotion”, which allows an author or publisher to offer a book for $0.00 for up to 5 days every three months. I started with my full-color children’s book about the Roman Empresses. I’ve had some wonderful comments about it from people, but had only sold 9 copies on Amazon in 3 months, so why not? I was amazed at the result: in three days, ending last night at midnight, 773 people in 5 countries “stole” my book! Of course, I hope that at least one or two will repay me with a positive review, but just having that many people bother to take a look at my work is very gratifying. And I’ve learned that people ARE interested in at least one of my books if the price is right (nothing).
I’ve resisted Amazon’s KDP Select program for most of my titles because it seems like a strong-arm tactic to put their competition out of business. And it probably is – but if I can share my work with more people in one weekend than all of my other outlets have attracted in two years, it seems worth playing along, at least temporarily (I can always opt out of KDP Select after 3 months).
Sooooo – I am offering nearly ALL of my ebooks for free this week (start and end times vary). So far, the numbers are looking good. All of them will be back to their “normal” prices of $2.99 or $0.99 by the end of the week, so act quickly if you’d like to check them out. The following titles already are discounted or will be by noon PDT tomorrow (9/26/12): Dreamweaving; Dreamweaving: Screenplay; Bulla Felix; Bulla Felix: Screenplay; Vipsania; Tiberius and Vipsania: Screenplay; Wisdom Illustrated. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a free Kindle viewer and read them on your computer screen.
Books by Jasper Burns 