On Liberty

Photo Credit: GenevaTalk.com

By David J. Roth, Jr.

4^th July, 2005

What price, Freedom?

What cost, Liberty?

What benefit reaped

For securing the two-edged prize?

Signatures on a document

Of protest, price paid in sweat

And blood.

Granting freedom, within limit

Offering liberty, with rational control

One thousand, two-hundred fifteen,

Year of our Lord and John,

By the grace of God King of England,

Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine,

And Count of Anjou, to his archbishops,

Bishops, abbots, earls, barons

Justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards,

Servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects

In short all free men.

Purchased at great cost

Redeemed at greater.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal;

That they are endowed by their Creator

With certain unalienable rights;

That among these are life, liberty,

And the pursuit of happiness.

Fourth day of July

Seventeen hundred seventy-six.

Two hundred nine and twenty years hence

Freedom is still a vague and fleeting mist

For some for whom it was purchased,

For others, escaped at will

And yet, truth, as it is known

Is that Freedom and Liberty

In their truest sense

Are not decreed by human mandate.

But rather in the simple declaration of God

Before John, King of the Britons

And George, Leader of the colonies

The profound truth was eloquently said

“You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free”

Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?

The morning was surreal on many levels.  September 11, 2001.  I usually opened the film lab I managed at around 6:00 am because we had the newborn contract for three of the five Grand Rapids hospitals with maternity wards.  Our runners would pick up the film, bring it to the lab where we would have it processed, printed, bundled and back at the hospitals by 9:00 am.

This morning was different.  One of my tech’s was opening and I got to sleep in.  I set my alarm for 8:00 am.  NPR was on.  Their first round of broadcast is live.  After that, the tape just loops, and believe me – NPR doesn’t interrupt their canned news show for anything, which, of course, means I was completely unaware that anything out of the ordinary was going on.

My car radio was set on the local country station.  Between songs. they kept talking about something big going on somewhere but no specifics.  When I arrived at my lab, located inside a Kinko’s, I didn’t have a clue.

Not until the Kinko’s manager called me over to a television in the back of his side of the store.  I arrived just in time to see the second aircraft hit the north tower.

Kinko’s employees, my people, customers from both stores stood in stunned silence as we stared at the impossible!  Soon the talking heads were saying it was a terrorist attack.  Commercial airliners had been hijacked.  One hit the Pentagon.  Another went down in a field in western Pennsylvania.

We were all shocked.  America had been attacked!

The fire departments and police departments of New York City lost their own who risked their lives going into the twin towers to get people out.

Later that day it became even more surreal when a customer who drove at breakneck speed across Canada to get to his family in Grand Rapids brought me a roll of film to develop – pictures showing both aircraft hitting the Twin Towers and their eventual collapse.  That might have been the next day.  I’m not so sure.

In January, four months later, Country icon Alan Jackson asked the world:  Where were you when the world stopped turning?

I was just arriving at work.

Where were you?

Guest Blogger Author Jesse V. Coffey

   I want to welcome A guest Blogger to Poetica in Silentium today as she kicks off the BLOG TOUR for her new book, The Brothers Cameron - An Opportunity for Resentment.  Jesse is the editor and publisher of the e-book version of my own novel, The Adventures of the Magnificent Seven, owner of Edin Road Publishing, host of Edin Road Radio, the Lexington Literature Examiner, Author of A Wager of Blood (soon to be published in e-book by Edin Road Press), the short story collection Illusions & Reality, actress, and a good friend. 
   Tell your friends about today's BLOG, and by all means, go out and buy her book!  You won't even have to take your jammies off because it's an e-book, which means you can get it without leaving your home,  and the price is right at a paltry $2.99.  Welcome Jesse V. Coffey!

First, a special thanks to David for letting me guest on his blog today. David is a wonderful storyteller in his own right. Edin Road Press was thrilled when we were able to score the ebook version of David's wonderful book, The Adventures of the Magnificent Seven. And being a guest here makes it a double honor.

But I'm here to talk about my book, The Brothers Cameron: An Opportunity for Resentment.

I originally released this in 2002 as The Brothers Campbell. Ah, the good old days. It was, quite literally, the second book I had ever written. I was sitting with some friends, chatting about how I wanted to write a story about two brothers, and the next thing I knew, the story was pouring out of me. Enough for not just one book but for three.

I have always been fascinated by two things—the Tudor/Elizabethan period of English history and the 1500s in general with both the Italian Renaissance (with its beginnings in the late 1400s) and the English Renaissance. It was an incredible time to be alive, with the beginnings of the enlightenment after the Dark Ages. There was new learning; science was beginning to bring forth new ideas about the world these people lived in, how it was formed, and the universe around them. There was art and literature being formed and created, new art forms in the paintings and sculptures. And the beginning of the Reformation movement in the church.

And that's where I started. The backdrop set in the last decade of the 1500s seemed perfect to me. Elizabeth was still on the throne, and this was the golden age. I had a fictitious village in mind, because it was easier than using a real one. That way I could set it up any way I liked and still be true to the place and time. I did a little research on England in that time and found a river and put my village of Edin-on-Norwich outside of the already existing city of Norwich, off the Wensom River, and there it was. I had my where; I just needed my who.

I found these two brothers, whom I based on two friends—who also happen to be brothers—and began there. Stephan is the oldest; he's impetuous, feels deeply for the commoners in their village of Edin-on-Norwich, and he's a bit hot headed. William is the youngest, four years younger than Stephan. He's more thoughtful, measured, but he has his demons. And when we meet the lads, they're dealing with those demons the only way they know how.

And now to take these two men and turn their world inside out. That comes in the form of a murder. A rival of the family was born in the form of Joseph Turnbull, the Baron of that shire and he has his own reasons for who he is and his misdeeds. The story came from there.

We, as in I the storyteller and you the reader, know that Joseph has paid a man to kill their father but Stephan and Will have only vague suspicions. Stephan wants to confront the Baron, Will wants to find the proof first. Joseph wants them both dead before they can. And if that's not complication enough, a lovely lady comes to the village. Lady Jessica Chynoweth arrives because her father has asked Joseph to be her guardian while he is away for his health. The problems immediately start when the lady becomes the object of lust, love, and infatuation on the part of all three men. And if having a man killed isn't reason enough, fighting for a woman certainly adds to the tension.

I loved writing this book. I loved meeting these men. I love being in their world. To be honest, there's been many a time that I felt as if I should have been born in that time to begin with. The best part is that I have two more books to write, so I get to go back there. But for now, enjoy this book.

The Brothers Cameron: An Opportunity for Resentment is published by Edin Road Press and is available through Smashwords right now for the pre-release price of $.99. The official release date will be September 15^th, 2001, when it will be available on all online bookstores—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc. At that time, the price goes up to $2.99, so go get it now while it's still at that low pre-release price.

And join me when the next book is released next year, The Brothers Cameron: A Crooked Rainbow Trail.

Review - Angel in the Storm by Lisa Grace

I generally avoid Christian fiction like the plague.  It tends to be sappy, too good to be true, bad writing with worse editing.  There are exceptions, to be sure.  Frank Peretti and Tampa area writer Angela Hunt come to mind.  Recently I have added another Tampa writer to the Christian fiction ‘A’-list.  Her name is Lisa Grace and what caught my attention is her recently released, Angel in the Storm, book two of a three part series.

In Angel in the Storm, as with her first book, Angel in the Shadows, Grace sets out to apply her craft to the daunting task of writing a Christian Young Adult (Y/A) series that would give the Y/A audience an alternative to the popular vampire craze.  “The difference between Vampires and Angels,” according to Grace, “is that Angels are real.”

Angel in the Storm is not like anything I have come to expect from Christian fiction.  Well written and well edited, Grace picks up where Shadows left off and delivers the second punch of a one-two-three rapid fire sequence that is as spellbinding and captivating as it is fast paced and moving.

We are reintroduced to Megan, a high school teen who can see angels, and, because they are also angels,  demons as well.  Because of her gift, Megan is targeted by the evil fallen angel/demon, Judas.  Yeah, it’s an obvious allusion to Judas Iscariot, but it can be forgiven.

In Storm, Judas has caused Megan’s little brother Max to be kidnapped and sold to a pedophile ring that transports the boy out of state to New Orleans during a fast approaching hurricane.  The storm which while very real, serves as a metaphor for the physical and spiritual turmoil in Megan’s life, and the very real battle for Max’s soul taking place in the spiritual world.

Megan and a few of her friends are suspects in the kidnapping and presumed murder of young Max, but with the help of good angel Johnny and several other good angels, Megan and her friends set out on a frantic race from Clearwater, Florida to New Orleans, Louisiana  to face the perilous, danger filled challenge of rescuing her brother from the pedophile ring, and ultimately rescue his soul from the evil Judas.

Good fiction regardless of genre is always a good story, well told, and Angel in the Storm like its predecessor Angel in the Shadows, meets both criteria.

I give the book 3 ½ stars, but only because I find the multiple first person present tense running narrative the writer employs as her vehicle distracting.  But, that’s a matter of preference.  I’m not her target audience, and other Y/A novels I’ve reviewed employed the same vehicle to tell their stories, so it must work for the target audience.

Both books in the Angel series would make excellent read and discuss material for any church youth group, or parents interacting with their teenage kids.  Less a theological treatise than Billy Graham’s Angels, Angels, Angels, and more personal than Frank Peretti’s landmark ‘Darkness’ angel stories because Megan can not only see both the good and the evil angels, she can interact with them as well.  There is a sense of realness to Megan’s angst that other Christian books don’t have without getting sappy.

A well written alternative to the mountains of paranormal fiction aimed at the Y/A audience, with a good, solid, moral Biblical perspective.

Book three, Angel in the Ice is scheduled for release November 1^st, 2011.

Code Blue - Review

Part Bones, part House, part Fabio, Little House on the Prairie, and not really as good as any of them, Code Blue, © 2010,  ISBN-13: 978-1-4267-0236-5, published by Abingdon Press,  is book one of an ongoing medical series by by Richard L. Mabry, M.D.

Few writers trying to do mystery and thriller but do it so it will be palatable for Joe Fundamentalist can pull it off, and Dr. Mabry, sadly, is the rule rather than the exception.

Dr. Cathy Sewell is returning to her home town of Dainger, Texas (yes, the town's name is Dainger - 'cheesy' flag to warn you that more of the same is to follow) to follow in her father's footsteps as a small town GP. Beginning with an auto accident of her own, if you were to make a random list of things that can go wrong for a single woman trying to fit into the good ole boys club, it's probably somewhere in this book, along with a tainted family history, a personal history of failed relationships, an old high school 'son of a preacher man' sweetheart who is now a hot shot lawyer who sill has the hots for her, another doc who is in a position to help or hinder her return hitting on her, and as Poirot once said while cruising the Nile, "there are too many clues here".

The idea is certainly sound enough, and the author clearly knows the medical side of his writing, but it reads like the author wrote a thriller and then when he was satisfied that he'd done a good job with it, went back and sanitized it for Christian audiences. Like so much 'Christian' fiction it is just too sappy. If the writer was trying for Robin Cook he badly missed the mark. This was sappy, predictable, and the Discussion Questions section at the end was a little much.

Writing good Christian fiction can be done. I offer Frank Peretti, Angela Hunt and Lisa Grace as evidence. The author should read those writers to get a feel for how Christian fiction can also be good fiction.

Two stars for Code Blue.  I read the Kindle edition that was released after the free edition Barnes & Noble gave away as one of their Free Book Friday promotions.