You may recognize my name from the adventures of Samuel McCord and that scamp, Victor Standish.
History has me drowned upon this date in 1850 aged forty.
In 1853, when Captain Samuel McCord met me aboard the cursed DEMETER, I was still all too alive.
Shortly thereafter, I became a unique form of undead. But then, I have always been unique -- alive or undead.
My beliefs (feminist and Transcendentalist), accomplishments and fervent personality put me in the spotlight throughout my life,
but my "last" years, spent in Rome supporting the short-lived Roman Republic, reached an operatic level of passion and poignancy.
As foreign correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune,
I argued the cause of the Italian revolutionists in the dispatches sent home. In Rome, I assisted on the Republican ramparts and in their field hospitals.
I also married an Italian nobleman who was prominent in the Republican cause, and had a son by him.
With the ramparts fallen and my husband in jeopardy, I reluctantly decided to return to America,
despite premonitions of disaster and warnings from Emerson and other Concord friends
that my socialist leanings and doubtful marriage would provoke public disfavor.
As if I have ever cared what the rabble thought.
When my boat ran aground just off the New York coast, I chose to stay with my husband, who could not swim.
Both of us were washed to sea and never found, (so history reports).
But Henry (David Thoreau) found me washed upon the shore not far from my young boy’s body.
The memorial to me put up by my family reads,
“Born a child of New England, / By adoption a citizen of Rome, / By genius belonging to the World.”
My genius has never been in question.
Edgar Allan Poe thought me such. He believed that the fallacy in my lobby for women's rights was that
"She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth."
Poe’s evaluation is echoed in comments by Emerson and Hawthorne —
though they let slip that their attraction might be more than intellectual (as it was) when they both referred to me in print as “Margaret Fuller, the Sexy Muse.”
I now know all the people worth knowing in America,
and I find no intellect comparable to my own except for dear Ada (Byron, Lady Loveless -
author of the first computer language a 100 years before the invention of the computer itself.)
McCord has his moments, but he is restrained by his Victorian ideals and code that he will not cast aside. I love him for his nobility.
It will be the death of him.
What will be the death of you?
I wager your friends know even if you do not. I leave you with a bit of my own verse :
“Let me gather from the Earth, one full grown fragrant flower, Let it bloom within my bosom through its one fragile hour….”
Of my past, I neither rejoice nor grieve, for bad or good, I acted out my character.
The West never learns and we find ourselves facing another Hitler invading not Poland but the Ukraine.
We write our novels, but are we Neo Nero's fiddling while the world burns in the start of WWIII?
WhenPresident Obama took office, he promised a re-set in Russian Policy and a radical approach in ‘soft diplomacy.’ It is a tragic mistake many make in dealing with other cultures, putting your ethic in the minds of those of another mind-set. The Westerners who showed compassion to the Indian thought the warriors should respond in kind. The warriors merely believed their Medicine was strong, and the White Men were weak. European politicians tried to placate Hitler and millions died. Now, we are going down a similar tragic path. "Oh, but you do not know Putin," I hear many wail.
Do you?
Many consider Vladimir Putin to be roughly a cross between Joseph Stalin and Sauron. I jest but it is only because the man is truly scary: Putin's parents lived through the siege of Leningrad in World War II, his father was probably a KGB agent, and none of their neighbors remembers little Vladimir even existing as a child younger than about seven or eight years old, so there is some speculation that his very existence began with theft, when his "parents" stole him from his real parents. These are the type of things that can happen in a country ruled by Josef Stalin. But whether he was kidnapped or sold or honestly born, Putin had a deceitful streak from a very early age, as any good son of the KGB should. Those who claim to remember what he was like as a child (including himself) will tell you that he was a tough kid, he ran with a bad crowd and was often the leader of it, and he would stop at nothing to punish anyone who crossed him. As he matured, he got his act together just enough to become a KGB agent. Russians in the 1990s were looking at an exciting but confusing new world. MARCH, 1997: Vladimir Putin is plucked from obscurity out of the St. Petersburg local government apparatus by President Boris Yeltsin and named Deputy Chief of Staff. In June, he defends his PhD dissertation in “strategic planning” at St. Petersburg’s Mining Institute. Later, this document proves to have been plagiarized from a KGB translation of work by U.S. professors published many years earlier (as if nobody would notice, and in fact for quite a while nobody did). JULY, 1998: In a second inexplicable move, Yeltsin names Putin head of the KGB (now called the FSB). NOVEMBER, 1998: Less than four months after Putin takes over at the KGB, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, the most prominent pro-democracy Kremlin critic in the nation, is murdered at her apartment building in St. Petersburg. Four months after that, Putin will play a key role in silencing the Russian Attorney General, YurySkuratov, who was investigating high-level corruption in the Kremlin, by airing an illicit sex video involving Skuratov on national TV. Four months after the dust settles in the Skuratov affair, Putin will be named Prime Minister. AUGUST, 1999: Completing a hat trick of bizarre spontaneous promotions, proud KGB spy Putin is named by Yeltsin Prime Minister of Russia. Almost immediately, Putin orders a massive bombing campaign against the tiny, defenseless breakaway republic of Chechnya, apparently seeing the reassertion of Russian power there as key to overall resurgence of Russia’s military and state security apparatus, his primary political objective. On August 26th, he’s forced to acknowledge the horrific consequences of the bombing. Hundreds of civilians are killed and tens of thousands are left homeless as civilian targets are attacked. NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1999: Boris Yeltsin resigns the presidency of Russia, handing the office to Putin in order to allow him to run as an incumbent three months later. [Between April 2000 and March 2002, Russia plunges into a nightmarish conflict in Chechnya eerily similar to what America now faces in Iraq. Opposition journalists, especially those who dare to report on what it going on in Chechnya, suddenly start dying. In 2000 alone, reporters Igor Domnikov, SergeyNovikov, IskandarKhatloni, SergeyIvanov and Adam Tepsurgayev are murdered -- not by hostile fire in Chechnya but in blatant assassinations at home in Russia.] APRIL, 2003: Sergei Yushenkov, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party, is gunned down at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block. Yushenkov had been serving as the vice chair of the group known as the “Kovalev Commission” which was formed to informally investigate charges that Putin’s KGB had planted the Pechatniki and Kashirskoye apartment bombs
to whip up support for the Putin’s war in Chechnya after the formal legislative investigation turned out to be impossible. Another member of the Commission,Yuri Shchekochikhinwill perish of poisoning, a third will be severely beaten by thugs, and two other members will lose their seats in the Duma. The Commission’s lawyer, Mikhail Trepashkin will be jailed after a secret trial on espionage charges. Today, virtually none of the members of the Commission are left whole, and it is silent. JUNE, 2004: Nikolai Girenko, a prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation is shot dead in his home in St Petersburg. JULY, 2004: Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition Forbes magazine, is shot and killed in Moscow. Forbes has reported that at the time of his death, Paul was believed to have been investigating a complex web of money laundering involving a Chechen reconstruction fund, reaching into the centers of power in the Kremlin and involving elements of organized crime and the FSB (the former KGB). The murders of Putin's opponents keep piling up year after year after year after year ... JULY, 2009: On July 14, 2009, leading Russian human rights journalist and activist Natalia Estemirova, a single mother of a teenaged daughter, was abducted in front of her home in Grozny, Chechnya, spirited across the border into Ingushetia, shot and dumped in a roadside gutter. 2014: The shooting down of a passenger jet over Ukraine – with the loss of nearly 300 lives – is a human tragedy and a moral abomination. Part of the outrage is that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is trying to avoid culpability. His hands are bloody, or should we say bloodier. Russia started this confrontation with Ukraine and armed pro-Russian separatists with surface-to-air missiles that almost certainly brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Putin and his minions can’t now disavow the horrible consequences if trigger-happy separatists mistook the Boeing 777 for a Ukrainian military plane on Thursday. This is a conflict of polar opposites. On one side of the terrifying crisis blowing up on the borders of Russia and Ukraine stands Vladimir Putin, the ruthless former KGB officer, focused with deadly intent on rebuilding the Soviet empire. On the other are the frivolous, dithering politicians of the West, high-fiving each other at summits and conveying their condolences, after a monstrous atrocity, on the teenagers’ medium of Twitter.
THE PRESENT:
You already know the horror of a 40 mile convoy of invading Russian troops ...
and the threat of nuclear retaliance against the West.
And the world has given him billions to finance this travesty.
Profits over Morality.
It is Hitler and the dithering politicians of the West once again ...
but this time the weapons of war are truly monstrous.
Dreamer. Writer. Believer in the worth of each soul I meet.
It is not so bad a thing to have been born with the gift of laughter and the knowledge that the world is mad.
Book 4: Victor Standish risks all reality to bring back from the dead those he loves.
WOLF HOWL HAS HIS OWN BLOG!
VISIT IF YOU DARE
THE LAST SHAMAN AUDIO BOOK!
Mankind's time is nearly up. Can the last Lakota shaman save the soul of the assassin he loves before the end?
McCorkle Creations!
Let Heather McCorkle design covers and promo materials for you. You will be amazed.
ONLY $4.86!
Sometimes it is death, not life, that brings us love
A GHOSTLY WRITING MANUAL
Twain, Hemingway, Lovecraft & More!
An Age Is Ending & Ancient Evil Returning
Like PENNY DREADFUL? This is for you.
A SUPERNATURAL LONGMIRE
In Egypt, the dead never rest easy
NO ONE HEARS THE SCREAMS IN SILENT FILMS
An isolated Hollywood film crew is hunted by Nightmare
A SAMPLER OF MY HEROES
Mysteries Explained, Secrets Exposed
The Origin of Toomey Starks!
Hellhounds were never this much fun! Only $4!
VOODOO & LOVE IN THE FRENCH QUARTER
Now available in PRINT!
FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE AUDIO BOOK!
The supernatural predators come out after Katrina. Can two undead legends stop them?
AFTER KATRINA, THERE IS NONE BUT TWO TO STOP THE UNDEAD
ONLY $1.99 WHEN YOU BUY THE KINDLE BOOK!
LISTEN to GHOST OF A CHANCE
Can an author be drawn into his own fictional world and killed by his own characters?
HIBBS HAS FOUND HIS VOICE!
A tale of enchantment
Souls At The Crossroads
Where do you need to be?
THE DEADLIEST ENEMY IS WITHIN
What if Stephen King wrote of the life of a blood courier?
Listen to this haunting tale of horror and love
It is 1853. An undead Texas Ranger is on board a cursed ship in search of a murderer who is wearing the face of her last victim as a mask.
Listen to the LAST FAE
When the world is mad, there is little else to do but show them what true insanity is!
Can a man marry both the moon and the sun?
In the eclipse of myth, he can
What Defense is an innocent soul against the Powers of Darkness?
Let Hibbs, the cub with no clue, show you
Before Indiana Jones or Allan Quartermain
There was Sam McCord and his doomed love for Meilori Shinseen
Alice and Victor in 1834 New Orleans
Do a review and have a 1 in 13 chance to win a Johnny Depp autograph!
Buy_FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE
Hurricane Katrina has cast New Orleans into darkness. Predators, living and undead, close in on the helpless survivors. Can Samuel McCord and a vampire priest keep the French Quarter from being drowned in blood?
Buy_LET THE WIND BLOW THROUGH YOU
Enter the dangerous world of a Native American Noir thriller where forbidden love clashes with the politics of crime
You will never see the end coming
In his beginning is his end
My 1st SERIAL TRILOGY continues
There are none so lost as those who refuse to see
The 1st SERIAL TRILOGY!
In the dark, we are all orphans
In Memoriam - Maukie my cyber friend
RITES OF PASSAGE link
The earliest Samuel McCord adventure: Dare to board a fantasy Titanic as it sails into the Bermuda Triangle
VICTOR'S HERE!
BOOK 1: No one talks openly of the misty figures seen walking along New Orleans' iron-laced terraces, casting no shadow. Of the shapes seen rising from sewer grates. And no one willingly visits the crypt of Marie Laveau at midnight. Into this strange world arrives the street orphan, Victor Standish, from Charon's Greyhound. Charon has to keep up with the times ... the End Times. And the teen destined to be called the "Ulysses of the French Quarter" has come just in time for Hurricane Katrina, the End of All Things ... and the deadly love of the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth.
VICTOR AND ALICE ARE BACK!
BOOK 2: Victor's a street kid. Alice is a Victorian ghoul Their love breaks the chain of reason. Their new adventures bring the French Quarter back from the brink of nightmare.
THE RIVAL
BOOK 3: Victor & Alice are in the French Quarter of 1834. Voodoo. Demigods. Revenants. And the hilarious Menage a Trois of Death! Oh, and someone we love dies at the end.
END OF DAYS is here!
St. Marrok's. The most eerie high school in which you will ever die. Its curriculum? The End of Days. Alice Wentworth plans to get an A+.
ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM link
SEQUEL to RITES OF PASSAGE: Come aboard the doomed DEMETER with undead Texas Ranger, Sam McCord, and sail with her into the depths of madness in ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM.
Buy_CREOLE KNIGHTS
SEQUEL to FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE: The dead rise. Elder Beings strain to enter our world through Katrina devastated New Orleans. And the Angel of Death is kidnapped to clear their way. Can Sam McCord stem the tide of madness in time?
Buy_THE LAST FAE
Once there was an age undreamed where legends walked this earth … and nightmares, too. Terrible were the battles, tragic the outcome of the wars. Until finally there were only two survivors : the nightmare and one bruised legend. These are the legend’s stories, each one a different facet of the same priceless gem – a jewel that has come to believe herself worthless. So come. Listen to her. Listen to THE LAST FAE.
GHOST OF A CHANCE
What if what you wrote became real?
BURNT OFFERINGS
When dreams are sacrificed, it is the soul that burns.
CHECK OUT THE FUN!
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Buy_THE LAST SHAMAN
Journey with the last Lakota shaman, Wolf Howl. The white govenments call him Drew August. Those who hunt him call him Death. The last day of Man has dawned. Watch as Wolf Howl turns to meet his human hunters. Shadow, the love of his life, returns to aid his hunters. Then, Mankind's death descends. Can he save Shadow before the world's time runs out?
BRING ME THE HEAD OF McCORD!
Only 99 cents. C'mon. Take a chance.
GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY
LEARN TO WRITE BETTER AND LAUGH ALONG THE WAY
LAST EXIT TO BABYLON
At the dawn of the End of All Things, the Last Fae finds there is no hope ... but love.
IT'S HERE TO BUY!!
The trilogy concludes. Not even the eclipse of myth is forever. But love is. And eclipses return. Listen. The voice of Blake, son of Man, is calling across the night skies.
Buy THE PATH BACK TO DAWN
Only in the eclipse of myth can a young man find himself with both the Moon and the Sun as his brides. Can he survive what follows?
Buy_LOVE LIKE DEATH
From the pages of THE LAST FAE springs this paranormal romance/thriller. Fallen, the last fae, discovers the name of the young teenager to whom she lost her heart : Blake Adamson.But she also discovers what happens when you believe your fears over your love : heartache and loss. And so Blake Adamson finds himself torn between two loves : one fae, the other an alien drinker of souls. Their love is deadly, but love, like death, will have its way.
THE BEAR WITH 2 SHAD0WS link
Based on the stories my Lakota mother told me as a child when I was deathly ill in a freezing Detroit basement apartment. Think a Native American LORD OF THE RINGS.
FROM THE GREAT BEYOND HOP!
You dare not miss it!!
ZOMBIE PREPAREDNESS!
LISTEN TO THE CDC
Thanks, Alex!
THE WORLDS OF ROLAND YEOMANS
Donna Hole astonishes with her insights on my linked worlds
FANTASTIC REVIEW OF THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH
Michael Di Gesu does a masterful review. I am honored by his friendship
LIFE LESSONS taught me by GYPSY
Dedicated to GYPSY
PAPYRUS PRODUCTIONS
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HELP THE HURTING
100% of the profits for ALL my books this FEBRUARY are going to THE SALVATION ARMY. My Valentine's gift to the hurting.
Buy_BLOOD WILL TELL
One lone telepath finds himself a helpless spectator as the race of Man is subjugated into mindless drones by the very blood within their bodies.When the war is over, and he finds himself totally alone ... How can he go on and why?
CALL ME TOMBS
The last Lakota Heyoka faces voodoo and ultimate evil in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania with his Hellhound, Puppy
CATCH FIRE!
BLOG TOUR FOR ALEX J, CAVANAUGH'S NEWEST NOVEL
SIV'S BLOGFEST!
The Norse Gods Are Watching You!
NERDY IS THE NEW SEXY!
BECOME A JEDI KNIGHT FOR TEENS
THE SECRET OF SPRUCE KNOLL
Help save the endangered species of Earth by buying THE SECRET OF SPRUCE KNOLL!
AMAZON KEEPS SELLING OUT!
Written by the author who could very well turn out to be the new William Faulkner, Elliot Grace
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