My parents sent me this postcard. They did their Christmas shopping here. Drumnadrochit in Scotland is one of the gateways to Loch Ness, famous for its monster. My earliest memory of Scotland was of standing on the shores of Loch Ness, shouting “Ness-ie!”

You’re seeing a typical Highland stone village, with a garden exhibit that shows Urquhart Castle. Urquhart (pronounced, roughly, Urk-hart) is a fantastic castle that juts out into the loch.

The “ch” in Drumnadrochit is hard, a bit like the “gh” sound in “cough.”

This is Jamaica Inn. It’s the Jamaica Inn that Daphne du Maurier wrote about. Wreckers. Smugglers. Dastardly murders. I remember it as a bit of a tourist trap but the scenery is just as moody as the book. Good beer, too.

Tell us a bit about your novel The Fey. What’s it about? Who is the main character?

At its most basic level, The Fey is about a young woman, Alexandra Hargreaves, who was cruising along in her life. She had a wonderful job, a great team of people to work with, a handsome devoted husband and a wonderful home. In the wink of an eye, everything changes. We meet her at the moment of that change. And everything just gets worse.

The Fey is a fast-paced thriller that will keep you riveted to the page from start to finish. The romance will warm your heart. You’ll even laugh at the antics of Alex and her friends.

How long have you been a writer? Is it something you always did, or something you aspired to and then did?

I’ve written, and told, stories all of my life. As a child, I always wanted to be an author. Life had other plans for me. I returned to writing with a self-help column, Claudia’s Corner, in a local newspaper in 1995. I wrote inspirational self-help for the Open Grove for about six years.

It’s been a long and winding path back to writing fiction. I’m grateful now for the opportunity write a serial fiction called Denver Cereal as well as start the Alex the Fey thriller series with The Fey.

What kinds of writing do you do, and which do you like best? Why?

I enjoy writing both fiction and non-fiction. I enjoy the concrete nature of non-fiction. My job is simply to help make facts understandable to the average person. I enjoy working with the language to make that happen.

My true love is writing fiction. I love the opportunity to meet a character and learn about their lives. I’m always amazed at what happens on a page. For me, writing fiction is a marvelous experience of discovery.

To anyone interested in becoming a writer, what advice would you give?

If you want to be a writer, then write. Don’t mess around with classes or groups or conferences. Do what the professionals do and write. There are more people capable of reading now than in any other time in the world.

The Internet provides marvelous opportunities to connect with readers.
If you aren’t writing now, then don’t worry about it. Go out and live your life. Gain life experiences. There will be a time when those experiences will form the backbone of your stories.

What do you do for fun (other than write?)

I’m a beekeeper. I keep a couple of beehives behind my home in Denver. I have large vegetable gardens in the summer and enjoy knitting in the winter. Living in Colorado, my husband and I enjoy getting out hiking and backpacking in the summer. I’m also a big fitness buff. I’m training for the Rock and Roll half marathon in Las Vegas this December. I enjoy lifting weights.

The Fey is the first in the Alex the Fey thriller series. What can you tell us about the series?

We follow Alex, her family and friends through the series. The second book, Learning to Stand, takes off where The Fey ends. Will Alex be able to step into herself and her new life? The third book, Who I Am, finds Alex attempting to live her new life. While I have eight books outlined, I enjoy these characters and will continue to tell their story as long as they have story to tell.

How can readers get a copy of The Fey?
For a 10 percent Raven’s Range discount at our store, feel free to use this code: QU86XUYL. The Fey is serialized at AlextheFey.com and is also available at Amazon (discount doesn’t work there). The novel will run through the end of the year, then will be removed.

Learning to Stand, the second in the Alex the Fey series, will take its place in February, 2010.

Claudia has graciously offered a signed copy of her book to a reader of Raven’s Range. Come back tomorrow for details of a blog contest to win!

Disclosure: Claudia has a generous affiliate program for her blog tour hosts, though I didn’t hear about that until after I offered blog space. She is still looking for hosts, so contact her to take part!

Books purchased using the discount code above do provide a financial kickback. Since Claudia is a supporter of Operation Shoebox, I have asked her to donate any money from Raven’s Range sales to that worthy non-profit. Don’t forget that you can check out the serialized novel at the link above: The try before you buy concept is a lovely move on this author’s part!

Eddie has been a maintenance guy at a fairground all his life. He had aspirations, but things happened, and that’s where he grew up and eventually died. His own opinion of himself is that he never mattered, and that he didn’t deserve to be in heaven…which is where he wakes up.

Albom’s vision of heaven has nothing to do with clouds, angel wings and harps. In fact, it reminds me more of the pagan concept of the Summerland, where you rest between lifetimes and learn about your

life and what it meant to your soul. In this case, though, the lifetimes are different stages of heaven; in the first stage, you meet five people whose presence in your life changed it in ways you only understand as you hear them out. I found the book strangely comforting. It makes sense to me that after death is a time to recap and learn, and thus progress to the next thing. It makes sense to me on some deep gut level that death is only an end to life as we know it, and that even the smallest ripples made by a person whose life touches us makes a difference. We are interconnected, but we don’t always see the way these connections string together.

I recommend this sweet, simple book to anybody who has ever lost a loved one, or has ever asked a question about what comes next.

Ethan Ford wanders into the local bar one day, and falls in love with Jorie. They marry, and now have a twelve year old son. Ethan is a model citizen, coaching kids in the sports teams, helping out, being a volunteer firefighter and saving lives. Thirteen years later they are still head over heels in love, but one day Ethan’s image shows up on a criminals-wanted show, he is recognized by a 12-year old girl Kat, and she calls it in. We pick up the story just as Ethan is arrested, throwing the entire community into painful disarray.

In life, the only thing one can expect is change, and sometimes that change is traumatic. It’s what you do with it that counts. Some of the characters are shaken up enough to strive for the things they wanted all their lives. Others are torn apart by what’s happened, being lied to thirteen years, and let themselves be dragged down by it. The complex emotions and thoughts of these people are beautifully shown, and their choices and actions are realistic. While the subject of the book is on the surface depressing, the end result is uplifting, positive, and real. This is a true “slice of life” novel that highlights the events of a specific period in time, and all the varied human responses to it. I will definitely be on the lookout for this author.

We have the what, and now we need the why. The majority of this book tells the story of how Cassie meets Alex Rivers, an up and coming movie actor and heartthrob du jour (think Orlando Blum), and of how they come to marry and be in a relationship together. It seems like a fairytale kind of thing, but it turns out not to be. That, of course, is how she comes to lose her memory.

As her memory returns, Cassie pieces together what is going on, she asks the policemant to help her, and he brings her back to the reservation until she can sort out her life. Thus begins an equally unlikely relationship, but at least this is seasoned with interesting snippets of life on a Lakota reservation.

I’ll probably give this author another try, because there was a glimmering of promise at the beginning and the end, and it was an early book. But I found myself irritated with the characters and plot in this one, enough that I never really sank down into the story. Oh well.

On the surface, this is a novel about a place where absolutely nothing happens other than people trying to get into other people’s pants. You can leave (escape, really) if you join the military, but the horrible stasis of this life is captured in the Larry McMurtry’s classic writing. But there are undercurrents. Supposedly decent people are not decent at all. There is a hatred and fear of people that are different, or supposedly different.

Following the fortunes of several of the townsfolk and the situations they get themselves into, one gets the sense of a way of life slipping slowly away, never to return. With stasis comes innocence, a painful unwillingness to change, and yet change comes anyway. The book was described as humorous, but I didn’t find it so. There’s nothing much light about this story, and it’s actually quite depressing. Fortunately, it’s so well written and its characters so real that you can connect to them, and watch the demise of that time as surely as the old movie theater closes.

It’s 50% the Dummies books’ fault that I am a webmistress today, by the way. I like Dummies books. (The other 50% is Don’s fault for sending me home from my first visit with a bag crammed full of the books–four, as I recall.) You can pre-order this one on Amazon. I dream of the day there’s a Markeroni for Dummies. ;)

What I find hardest to comprehend is how the physicists involved could figure it out in the first place. You cannot see quantas, gluons (lovely, lovely word) or all the other little bits and pieces that make up the dit-dit-dits of quantum theory. You can’t even measure them, because a measuring device changes the result. It’s like looking at stars; you can only see some of them if you look at them out of the corner of your eye. A direct glance makes them vanish. So to me, quantum theory is just plain weird.

Of course, I gather that to other people, it’s just plain weird, as well. So I guess that’s okay.

I bought John Polkinghome’s Quantum Theory – A Very Short Introduction to stretch my mind, and it did. Science is not my thing, period, and it took me two attempts to get through. I enjoyed the history part.I enjoyed the philosophical discussions at the end and also learned about some of the inventions that had come about because of quantum. There were certain things that I’d heard of before (Schrödinger’s cat, which was a cruel experiment) that I didn’t know were part of quantum experimentation. And I do wish I could find the quotation about a messy desk, which made me smile.

I got the basic ideas but not all the details. Fortunately, a book like this refrains from bogging down in the details. There are some mathematical forumulae tucked away at the back which the author says can be safely ignored. I safely ignored them. Other mathematical formulae pop up here and there in the book and dragged up things like matrices and vectors from my secondary education, mpfl pmpf years ago. Those were okay. I understood them at sixteen and can dust them off now. Other bits were far beyond me, and that’s okay. I stopped wanting to be an astronaut when I grew up as soon as I figured out that one had to be good at math and science. ;)