WRITE IN THE THICK OF THINGS: Strange Attractors

Mark's solo SF time-travel novel.

Nominated for the 2012 Colorado Book Award for Genre Fiction.

Who knew time travel could make such a mess of a perfectly good cover-up?

Not to mention global bio-terrorism, the power of Jungian archetypes, and creepy little kids. No wonder thirty-something
virologist Morgan Johanssen is caught between her conscience and work on a secret government project, between childhood tragedy and fear of commitment, and between her loosening grip on sanity and a mysterious child who appears to her in dreams and waking visions.

But these are the least of her worries. Morgan doesn't yet know she's also caught between past and future, and the actions she's about to take will determine the fate of life on earth.

Available as a trade paperback or Kindle read from Amazon and a trade paperback from Barnes&Noble as well as a growing number of independent book stores.

But get the trade paperback at a 20 percent discount for bloggers. Enter the code BGWTSY9S at this link.

Mark's Goodreads Reviews

Mark's books

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

Over the past three years, the genealogy bug has really bitten me, and I've plunged into genealogical and genetic research that started putting together the pieces of who I came from. But when I'd learn that so-in-so moved from Virginia to North Carolina, and then the next generation split up to move on to Mississippi or Kentucky or Alabama, the documentation rarely told me why.

Enter Pulitzer Prize-winner Alan Taylor's American Colonies, the sort of historical nonfiction book I hoped could help explain what had inspired my assorted great-great grandparents to migrate to and among the various colonies and territories of British Colonial America. And wow, did I ever get what I bargained for.

Though not with what I expected. My doctorate had specialized in eighteenth-century American Studies, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on the times. But what Taylor's excellent and very readable prose provided was the disturbing exploitative nature of English colonial empire-building.

Taylor's opus is organized chronologically by colony (or territory), repeating the chronology for each colonial initiative, explaining the politics and socio-economic dynamics that existed on both sides of the Atlantic Pond. We think politics is complicated these days (and they are), but complexities faced by our ancestors equal ours in every way, and more.

Nonetheless, the underlying story is framed to explain the systematic displacement of indigenous populations and slave-driven economies fueling much of early colonial development. Taylor does this with copious statistics and first-hand accounts and justifications by our ancestors, but the author's tone is even and never descends into judgmental asides.

It felt like getting back into the classroom to learn a history that hasn't been sanitized by the victors, sobering but compelling.

Highly recommended.

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Strange Attractors

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