ravenwillow393

Last weekend I was in rural North Carolina giving a talk to a Masonic group there. As I commented at the time, most of the Southerners I know are very hospitable people, and so are most of the Masons I know; combine the two and hoo boy. It was very pleasant. During one of the intervals when the womenfolk were present, I was introduced to the wife of one of the brothers, who is also a writer. She didn't tell me that, and seemed embarrassed to have it brought up, but I'm glad that came up in the conversation.

Sharon K. Bradshaw (that's her name) is a preschool teacher, and her book, Rainbow Circle's Big Worry!, is for preschoolers.  It's got animals for characters, and it's short and well illustrated, the sort of thing that not-quite-beginning readers can pick their way through without too much difficulty and five- and six-year-olds can take in easily when it's read aloud. The reason I mention it here is that it's about listening. 

Ms. Bradshaw mentions in the foreword that she's asked her students, "What's the hardest thing about being a child?" (Not many adults would have the courage to ask that question, much less take in the answer.) The answer far more often than not was "Nobody listens to me." I'm not sure how many of you can relate, but I certainly can; having to deal with most of the issues I faced alone, without a single sympathetic person I could talk to, was one of the things that made my childhood a very bleak time. I wonder how many people remember Cat Stevens' song "Father and Son," with the son's harrowing lines: 

"How can I try to explain? When I do, he turns away again
That's what Rainbow Circle's Big Worry! is meant to address. Its overt purpose is to teach children to think of listening -- and the broader set of skills to which Ms. Bradshaw gives the name "attuning" -- as a valuable talent and a skill worth learning. I suspect that a covert purpose is to slip the same insight through to parents and other adult caregivers. On the off chance that my readers know children (or adults) who could benefit from this, I figured a signal boost was worth doing. 

You can get a copy from Bookshop and from all the other usual suspects. 

I'm very pleased to announce that the fourth Ariel Moravec occult detective novel, The House of the Crows, is now available for preorder.

It's winter in Adocentyn, the strange old East Coast town where 18-year-old Ariel Moravec is studying magic with her adept grandfather, and a new investigation has come her way. One of the old mansions south of Coopers Bay is haunted by the ghost of an old woman with a cane, who is only seen by moonlight. Behind that shadowy figure is a mystery professional ghost hunters have failed to solve -- a tangled web of grief and passion that began with a 1931 gangland massacre, and set cascading consequences in motion down to the present. The further Ariel investigates, the outline of a forgotten tragedy begins to surface, centered in the old mansion and the uncanny numbers of crows that haunt it day and night...

The House of the Crows will be released on April 7. If you're interested, you can preorder a copy now and get a 20% discount off the cover price. The ordering link is here: 

https://sulbooks.com/bookstore/p/the-house-of-the-crows-by-john-michael-greer

Use the discount code JMG2026 when placing the preorder. 

BTW, for those who like their novels in matched sets, the new publisher is bringing out all three of the previous volumes with cover art by the same artist who did this one. Details will be out this coming May.