The introduction had me cracking up. Michaelbrent Collings writes some fantastic horror stories and he has a rapier wit. I love his twisted sense of humor.
I love the twisted ‘Ground Hog Day’ type story.
Could make you question technology. Love the references to current times. May have you asking yourself, who am I? What if your characters came to life, coming to you for answers.
Khonra…oh man, I love that ending!
Who would do a better job of running the world, men or women?
The Button Man is thought provoking.
The novella, The Stranger Inside was what I was really excited about, though I love anything Michaelbrent Collings writes. I have read his Legion series, with the Stranger as the star, and I am excited to see how he came to be.
‘God’s chosen his vessel, anointed by blood and fear to purge men and women of their sins.’
The tools of the trade: some electronics and pharmaceuticals, some rope and a knife. He is very hands on. If that doesn’t tell you there is some evil coming someone’s way, I don’t know what will. It was…..grrrrreat for me. LOL
I love all the personal tidbits Michaelbrent Collings shared about himself. I love that he can make be laugh, gasp, shiver, and feel like tI want to puke, all in the same story. He lets his characters be real….making mistakes, paying for them, and they are able to redeem themselves…if he chooses to let them live. LOL
I voluntarily reviewed a free copy of Future Tense by Michaelbrent Collings.
4 Stars
GOODREADS
Worldwide bestseller and master of terror Michaelbrent Collings invites you to peer into the future, to uncover things long hidden, and to experience worlds of a Future Tense…
A world where suicide is illegal – unless you agree to kill yourself over and over again…
A place where childhood games turn back the clock – and bring with them monsters long forgotten…
A home where secrets abound – until the killing begins…
A reality where a writer’s dreams can make her rich – if she’s willing to sacrifice the universe…
All these, and more: stories of darkness and of light. Stories of despair, and lingering hope.
Stories
of a future unknown, where ignorance feeds our souls, and where the
only hope that remains in a world gone dim… resides in Tales of Apocalyptic Vision!
Michaelbrent Collings, a double Bram Stoker Award finalist and voted one of the Top 100 All-Time Greatest Horror Writers by Ranker, invites you to brave a future unlike any you have experienced. Because the future is what we make of it… and we have made a monster.
ABOUT MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS
Michaelbrent Collings is an internationally-bestselling novelist,
multiple Bram Stoker Award nominee, produced screenwriter, and one of
the top indie horror writers in the United States.
He hopes someday to develop superpowers, or, if that is out of the question, then at least to get a cool robot arm.
Michaelbrent
has a wife and several kids, all of whom are much better looking than
he is (though he admits that’s a low bar to set), and also cooler than
he is.
Michaelbrent also has a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/MichaelbrentC…
and can be followed on Twitter through his username @mbcollings.
Follow him for cool news, updates, and advance notice of sales. You
will also be kept safe when the Glorious Revolution begins!
I love book covers and I love the cover for Shelter From Our Secrets, Silence & Shame. I am delighted to have Rebecca Brown visiting fundinmental to share her own thoughts on the cover.
Topic: Discuss your cover — how it
came to be, what it represents, what you love or don’t love about it,
etc. Anything you’d like to share about it.
I’m excited to be part of this Fundinmental blog tour, and I love
that I can take this opportunity to talk about my book’s cover. I know
that we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but I wanted my book’s cover to
catch people’s attention and hopefully draw them to it and start reading.
I took the photograph myself in May 2021 when I was out in my
kayak on Lake Huron, where I am lucky to live and work as a mental health
clinician. I need to find ways to burn off and let go of the difficult
stories that I collect in my day. One of my favourite ways to release the
stress is to paddle into the sunset and feel the tension release from my
body. I begin my book with this prologue:
I am floating.
On the water
calm
clear
soft
quiet.
Dusk,
the sun is setting.
The sky will hold light
for another half an hour
or so.
The beauty is often just after the sun sinks into the water, then the colours are
spectacular.
Or just softer.
It’s been a long day;
hard
heavy
yet healing.
I have no words left in me.
I cannot talk
or listen anymore.
I need quiet
peace
calm
presence.
I have found the shelter that I seek today
on the open water.
My kayak is my shelter this day.
I will paddle until I physically feel the release in my
body.
I will watch the sun set until I find the peace in my soul.
I hope to sleep tonight.
Rebuild my resilience.
I will wake and do it all again.
I may need to seek shelter differently tomorrow
Or not.
Knowing that I must still seek shelter sometimes,
makes it safe for me to continue in this work that I love.
Later in the book, I share a chapter which digs further into why
this particular photograph means so much to me.
Chapter Fourteen: Spring 2021
I couldn’t wait to get my little yellow kayak
in the water. It had been three years since I moved to the shores of the Great
Lake Huron. We live in a home that has a story of its own (more on this to
come), and it was built to look out at the beautiful water, which is a gift we
cherish every day. The sunsets have been called among the most beautiful in the
world, and the water itself changes from day to day: from calm, like glass, to
rough and choppy. We’ve referred to it as both Lake Atlantic and the Pond
Lake, all within twenty-four hours. The soft sand and miles of beach are what
draw people from afar, but what makes it the most magnificent sight always is
its colour. The water looks almost tropical. It can resemble a Caribbean
turquoise blue, so soft that it takes your breath away. Looking at the colour
of this beautiful water is a moment of awe that I treasure every day.
We’ve had a warm, mild spring, and this year
feeling confined to the house, working from home, unable to see people in
person, I have been trying to spend even more time outdoors in nature and, as
often as possible, down at the water.
On May 17, our temperature rose to twenty
degrees Celsius (68 F), and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. After dinner, I pulled
my little yellow kayak out from under the deck where it had been stored all
winter. I hosed it off to get rid of any spiders and dirt that had been hiding
there all winter, and within half an hour had it in the water.
Due to the State of Emergency and lockdown in
our area, there was virtually no one in the cottages that dot the shoreline of
our secluded little bay. I was able to paddle in silence for an hour. The sun
was high in the blue sky when I started, and once I went as far as I needed to,
I let my paddles rest, pulled out my phone, and took a couple of photos to
celebrate the moment. I floated and rested and let the warmth of the sun sink
deep into my skin, and I meditated silently for a few minutes, noticing the
slightest movement of the calm water swaying my boat.
It was both a moment of
happiness and awe that I was so grateful for.
Then I turned my little yellow Pelican kayak
in the direction I had come and started to paddle slowly and rhythmically back
home. My cup of happiness was full.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of
my dog beside my bed telling me the sun was up. I went downstairs with her, my
other dog, and two cats, and while I let all the animals out into the back
yard, I poured myself a cup of coffee and cued up a guided mindfulness
meditation. I let the small herd back inside and then made my way to my comfy
chair in my office to practice ten minutes of mindfulness. The meditation I
listened to this day was on Headspace.com, one of my favourite mindfulness
apps. I easily slipped away with the narrator’s voice as she guided me through
a visualization about balance, using the visual of a blue sky as a focal point.
This image of a blue sky is often one used in
guided mindfulness meditations, and it’s a lovely image to think about. We can
visualize the blue sky as something we always have access to; it’s the clear,
calm, uncluttered mind, but it can be buried beneath our busy, racing thoughts,
or the clouds. If we visualize clearing away the thoughts/clouds by
intentionally focussing on our breath for a few minutes, the clouds gently float
away to reveal the beautiful, calm, blue sky that is always somewhere in the
background of our minds. The meditation suggested visualizing a photograph of a
beautiful blue sky to help enhance this visualization, so I instantly
visualized the beautiful blue sky I had experienced just the evening before
when I was out in my kayak.
I opened my phone and turned to the photo I
had taken just twelve hours earlier, out on the water on my kayak, with the
beautiful blue sky in the background.
I knew instantly that I this photograph held so much meaning, which is why I chose it for my book cover.
As
a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek
shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down,
stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and
savour her own shelter.
Rebecca’s personal
journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible
pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow
self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story
needing to be shared.
Dispelling the limiting
beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach
goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses,
Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don’t
listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.
Everyone has a story.
We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the
stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or
keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the
versions we have been telling ourselves?
Shelter provides
strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers
tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and
actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and
encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and
happiness.
Seeking and reading
Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca’s hope is that
it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read,
recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories
with those we love.
We may not have written
our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point
forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of
secrets, silence and shame.
EXCERPT
I give my talk.
The room erupts in applause.
A dozen people line up to thank me or say a few words at the
end of my session.
One man in particular stands out.
He is well over six feet tall and wearing a full Texas
sheriff uniform.
He has greying hair and is likely close to the end of his
career.
He pumps my hand as he shakes it, almost leaving it numb.
He thanks me for my talk. “Great stuff,” he says.
And then he hands me his business card.
But it’s not quite a business card.
It’s a photo card, like a baseball card, or a kid’s hockey
card, with the player’s name, position, and smiling face as they stand posed to
take a shot in their team uniform.
Only this is of a man on a black horse.
More precisely, it’s this man, a Texas sheriff on his
beautiful black police horse.
“I thought you’d like to have this,” he says. “My horse is
Canadian, like you.” And then he says something that has stayed with me,
because he couldn’t be more right: “Everyone in this business should have a
good horse!”
He meant the business of trauma.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
I still have his “business card.”
Two years later, I went back to Texas to teach a three-day
workshop on resilience to youth detention workers. I tried to look up my Texas
sheriff, but he had retired. I hope he’s finding more time to enjoy his good
horse. I’ve shared the story of our brief encounter and his photo card with
many police officers over the years. And every one of them agrees: horses can
heal humans. I’ve found shelter with horses. Sometimes in the saddle, but
mostly not. My story will get there. Eventually.
I finished my keynote address and spent the rest of the day
at the conference on Youth in the Justice System. People stopped me in the
halls of the hotel, telling me how much they enjoyed my talk. Later that
evening, I went for a run.
And then I drank a bottle of wine and went to bed.
AUTHOR Bio and Links
REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.
