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New for
you!
What does it mean to live a full life? How do we
stay happy and content in a world that often seems to be
throwing more at us than we can handle? Thirty years in
the making, Universal Principles
of Living Life Fully explores different aspects of our
selves as human beings, aspects that we are able to develop and
expand when we need to in order to make ourselves more
comfortable in the world we live in. It explores 57 different
elements of who we are, from love to mindfulness to adversity to
prayer, in an effort to help you to figure out just where to
focus your energy and attention when life is being difficult for
you. Use the link to the left for the Kindle edition, or click
here for the print edition. |
Welcome to the Universal Principles for Living Life Fully! This
book has been several decades in the making, ever since I started
studying books and articles and passages that have been written about
how to make our lives happier, healthier, and more fulfilling.
This has been a constant study of mine for many years, and my goal with
this book is to provide a synthesis of the principles that I've read
about and seen in real life among friends and acquaintances.
The book is based on the principle that we all have many facets of our
selves. In my life, there are things that I do really well, such
as study and grow intellectually, while other things have come much more
slowly to me, such as my ability to love myself. And while I'm
familiar with the reasons for the latter problem, as far as this book is
concerned, a look into my past isn't the most important thing--what
really matters is that I learn how to love myself here, today.
Then I'll be able to make the most out of the life that I have.
(Of course, this doesn't mean that I feel it's not important to explore
root causes of issues--but expanding the book into those areas would
have made it at least 1,000 pages long!)
In this book I examine 57 different aspects of our selves, from
awareness to mindfulness to friendship to love to oneness to nature. . .
all topics that are found on the website. My goal is to examine
them in ways that help us to understand their importance in our lives
and to possibly developing strategies that will help us to make each
element a strength rather than a weakness--or if we're not able to do
that, then at least developing strategies for compensating for these
areas of weakness.
Over the years I've read hundreds of texts from hundreds of authors, and
I've done my best to pull out their universal messages that apply to the
greatest number of people possible. There's very little on
religion, for two reasons: first, there are no universal
religions, and second, spirit is going to be the specific topic of an
upcoming book.
So please enjoy this book--it's definitely a work of love, and I
sincerely hope that you find material within it that's helpful and
useful to you! |
When Taylor is out walking her dog
early one cold November morning, she's perplexed to see that Sarah's
door is still closed--after all, Sarah's always the first one up and her
door is always open, no matter what the weather. When Taylor
investigates, she finds a scene so horrible that it's beyond anything
that she ever could have imagined.
And thus starts the day of horror for the town of Canyon Bluff, a small,
dying Colorado mountain mining community. Sixty years earlier,
events had been set into motion that would take six decades to unfold,
and now it's time for the current residents of the town--and the law
officers who come up to investigate--to pay the price
for what had happened all those years ago. And they're paying the
price with their lives.
Nogglz is my sixth novel, a book that
was written to flow quickly and smoothly through the events that happen as
a result of a terror being unleashed upon the inhabitants of a small
town. While I wanted to write a horror novel, I also wanted it to be
a horror novel with a bit of class--strong character development and
believable action, as well as a bit of humor sprinkled through it.
While people being killed certainly isn't a humorous situation, there is
room for humor in such a story because people are people, and we find
ways of coping with things that are too much for them to process
fully--and humor is one of those ways. I also didn't want to write a
gorefest; I didn't want the book to be gory murder after grisly
murder. There are some unsettling images in the story, but I did my
best not to take them too far. They're necessary for the plot, but
it wasn't necessary to expand them. Alfred Hitchcock terrified
people with the movie Psycho without having to show the knife
plunging into the victim's body, and I've always kept that lesson in mind,
especially when I watch works by others who haven't learned--or choose to
ignore--that lesson. People's imaginations can supply everything
needed to make them afraid.
The setting of this novel is intended to be almost a character in
itself. I grew up hearing stories of Crested Butte, Colorado, where
my mother grew up, and Canyon Bluff is named thus as a tribute to the
original CB. My mother's stories were always about the people there,
but the town itself was an integral part of every story that she
told. Somehow the diverse collection of human beings who lived there
turned the town into something more than just a town. It had
personality of its own, and it was never just a place, neither to my
mother nor to me. (And I write of the Crested Butte of the
coal-mining days and after, not the modern-day tourist resort that really doesn't
resemble what the town used to be at all.) I remember visiting the
town when I was a kid, before the money and the skiing came in, and it was
a fascinating place full of ruined houses, older people, and innumerable
stories.
In Nogglz, I use Canyon Bluff as an idea of what Crested Butte might have
become one day if the money for the skiing had never come in. Who
would still be there? Why? What would their lives be like?
I don't want to go into the characters too deeply because I think that would
give away too much of the plot. Let's just say that from the Sheriff
to the townsfolk to the Nogglz, I tried to make them believable in a
situation that they were wholly unprepared for--nobody could have been
prepared for what's happening to them and around them in the town.
The Nogglz themselves are also kind of unique, as I wanted them to be
somewhat sympathetic villains. They weren't good guys by any means,
but they certainly didn't choose to go through what happened to them to
turn them into what they are now. A book like this needs its
monsters, but it's possible to create a bit of sympathy for those
monsters--this was a lesson that I learned from the original King Kong,
as well as other, similar stories. The monsters are rarely purely
evil.
There are also many life lessons here. Many of the characters are
older, and they're facing their own imminent deaths--and each is doing so
in a completely individual way. The law officers who are also
trapped there, though, are very surprised at how calm the people seem to
be--the officers are young, and they can't yet understand what it means to
have led a long and full life, and to realize that the end must come
someday, somehow. The perspective definitely isn't intended to be
fatalistic or negative, but rather realistic and somewhat uplifting.
All in all, this novel is a tribute, but it's also a page-turner, an
action story that is compelling and frightening. One reviewer uses
the word "convenient" to describe some of the occurrences, but
believe me, there are specific reasons for everything that happens to
every character. I didn't want to take the easy way out on
anything--everything had to be explained clearly and adequately, while
still maintaining an extremely strong pace so that the reader won't become
bogged down in lengthy explanations or descriptions. It was quite a
challenge to write, but I'm very happy with it as it turned out--and I
hope that the readers are satisfied with the story.
I hope that you enjoy this novel! I certainly enjoyed writing it!
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