On Another Planet

Okay, I have been away.  Between fighting a head cold... and self-editing...feel like I've been on another planet.  I have been doing a lot of thinking as I try to breathe, and listening to music from the Lord of the Rings movies.

As I think about Tolkien and his books, I see that a lot of truth about our world is in them.  I think that is part of the beauty of what he accomplished...

  If you have read all of his Middle Earth writings, you see an interesting pattern.  If you start with the first book he did, The Silmarillion, and try to go in his "historical order" you may find what I did--that it gets depressing after awhile.  The evil forces seem to keep on overpowering the elves, and then the men.  Galadriel (who has been around from almost the beginning of the First Age) calls it "The Long Defeat"...

And it seems a lot like what the world looks like these days.  Just one disaster and defeat after another. It's not surprising that he came up with a lot of this when he was in the World War I trenches...

And here we are still struggling in the Post-war world, after TWO wars that were supposed to end all wars...

BUT  if you read all the way to the end of The Return of the King, good finally triumphs at last!

I sure hope Tolkien is right!

I guess if I didn't have some of that hope myself, I would find it hard to keep on keepin' on.  And I guess this is also the hope that I want to portray in my books, too.  The first one, which is a trilogy (in emulation of Tolkien, of course) is called "The Peaks at the Edge of the World."  It is a religious/fantasy/sci-fi with a bit of romance thrown in.

Currently each of the three books are available on Kindle.  Soon I hope to have the whole trilogy for sale on Create Space.