What, you may wonder, is the meaning of this outlandish title? Thirteen years ago my friend Chris Walton (pictured with antlers) spoke this word to me in the parking lot of Ricky’s All Day Grill, and we burst into gales of laughter. Find out why in this story, a selection from my new book published this week, Twenty-One Candles: Stories for Christmas.
(Incidentally, most of the stories in this book are fiction, but this one is true.)
Jacob wrestled with an angel. These days we wrestle with computers.
On Saturday morning I was locked in a mighty struggle with my iMac. Or rather, it was the iMac that was locked, and I was striving to unlock it. I had to repair my hard disk, but every time I tried to run the repair program, a big gray padlock appeared on the screen, demanding something called a “firmware password.”
For the life of me I could not recall the password, nor could I find it recorded anywhere. It was like being locked out of my own house. Just then a knock came at the door.
Those of you who have visited my website a few times will know that while I have a blog page, I’ve posted to it only occasionally. That is about to change. From now on I plan to post a new blog once a week. To explain why, I begin with a piece called “Death of a Luddite.”
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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.
“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: