On February 3, 2012, I celebrated my 60th birthday. The day itself I spent quietly, but the next day I had a party. My friend Andrew Case, accompanied by Kristina Hutchison, played a living room concert, so the evening was filled with music, good friends, and a fabulous chocolate cake courtesy of Karen.
Often excerpts from my book The Mystery of Marriage are read at weddings. Recently my friend Ron Reed was asked to do this, and for the occasion he organized my prose into lines of poetry. The result is quite nice:
It’s here! At long last! A book I wrote fifteen years ago has finally hit the press.
Well, not exactly the press. Fact is, I’ve just launched my first self-published ebook. Having sent my manuscript to some 30 publishers over the years, I finally decided that this thing needs to see the light of day.
Great reviews are starting to trickle in for my new novel The Violet Flash!
From Carrie Padgett of Author’s Choice: “Mike Mason’s story will take its proper place next to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and other speculative fiction that points the reader to God and expounds on the nature of good, evil, creation, and redemption.”
“Well, here we are at Porter’s, the store that has inspired two famous novels!”
So began my talk at the launch party for my new fantasy novel The Violet Flash, sequel to The Blue Umbrella. For all of you who couldn’t be there, here’s a link to a VIDEO of the event. It’s 34″ long, so at any point feel free to fast forward to the Q&A session at 20:42, which went pretty well, I think. Many thanks to Arthur Doerksen for producing the video, and to Ron Koyanagi for providing the music.
A Mysterious Disappearance
(Spoiler Alert! for those who have not read The Blue Umbrella)
Chesterton Cholmondeley poked the bridge of his tortoiseshell glasses with one finger, a gesture he performed a few hundred times a day. Having recovered the years that the evil Dada had stolen from him, Ches was now a lithe, darkly handsome boy of twelve. Yet inside, as if shadowed by a double identity, he still felt old beyond his years.
“My eleven-year-old granddaughter, Bailey, had her school picture taken holding a copy of The Blue Umbrella. That says it all. She reads everything she gets her hands on so for her to choose your book was a huge statement. She and her friends concur that it is on a par with Harry Potter but better because of the very clear spiritual message.” -Char Stucki (Bailey’s photograph is on the left)
For all of my readers who couldn’t be at the book launch of my new fantasy novel The Blue Umbrella, I want to give you a taste of my remarks that evening to a packed crowd in the real Porter’s Store (featured in the novel) in Langley, British Columbia:
In January, 2011, I addressed a group of doctors on the topic of “Doctors, Writers, & Stories: The Ointment of the Healer.” The next morning, my father died. Listen to my 35-minute talk. (79 MB mp3)
Here begins a seven-part series from a book-in-progress whose provisional title is Want What You Have: A Guide to Contentment. I liked my original title better, but my wife nixed it, saying neither she nor anyone else would buy it. That original title was How To Fail Successfully. On the internet I looked up the phrase “how to fail” and was not very surprised to find not a single book bearing this title. By contrast, the three words “how to succeed” are featured in hundreds of titles.