• New

    It’s Official: ‘Killer Instinct: A Marshall James Thriller’ Set for Release in Spring, 2024

  • New

    Mark McNease On Topic (Substack)

    Subscribe to Mark McNease On Topic HERE

    Tis the season for stockings full of crap

    Who doesn’t want to end the year with a Trump-ordered impeachment of President Biden, the man who kicked his ass once and will kick it again?

    Who doesn’t want to see Ukraine abandoned in the manger while Jesus, Mary, and the Republican House head off for selfies and sleigh bells?

    Who doesn’t look forward to a continuation of all-Trump-all-the-time media coverage of the only man whose obituary I long every day to read?

    Who takes comfort in knowing even monsters die?

    Me! Me! Me!

    Can we stop calling them ‘Supreme’?

    Unsurprising, to say the least. The Republican justices (for that’s what they are, not “conservative”) are political hacks through and through. They lie and deceive and live lavish, kingly lives bought and paid for. We can’t do anything about their unaccountable power at this point, but we can stop pretending they deserve the least bit of respect, no matter how they decide. America is so broken, in so many ways. It all appears to have been a very long-lasting fiction that is now threadbare and exposed as the corrupt-from-to-to-bottom smoke and mirrors it always was.

    From Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

    “With each new peek behind the curtain, this fantasy becomes more difficult to buy into, even for those desperate to believe. It turns out that the justices—at least five of them on the right—are functionally indistinguishable from cynical partisan lawmakers making deals in the Senate cloakroom. It turns out that abortion rights vanished in America because five conservatives barely tried to hide the fact that they could do that, simply because they could do that. And it turns out that they’re increasingly bad at covering their tracks.”

  • New

    Cover Reveal for ‘Dreamshaping: On Shaping Reality and Living Our Dreams’

    UPDATE: IT’S PUBLISHED!

    The eBook is up now at Amazon, with the paperback coming out very soon.

    I’ve been working on this longer than any book I will ever write. It first came to me about 18 years ago when I was sitting on a beach on Long Island. One of my goals for 2023 was to finally finish it. Almost there …

    “It’s understandable that we can react with fear to what we think our bodies are telling us. Who doesn’t assume a grave prognosis when we go to the doctor looking for answers? It’s as natural as gasping for that first breath, terrified there will not be enough air left for another, and another, and another until we take our last. But denying our body’s messages, or pretending they’re not speaking to us at all when in fact they may be shouting, is an invitation to harm and frustration.

    Begin to hear your body. Be quiet with it and let yourself learn its language. You are its first and truest friend. You are the one it longs to communicate with. And when it asks you to pay attention, let nothing be more important than understanding what it has told you. When we become the best interpreter of our body’s language, we begin to live in partnership with it, and to trust it will never lead us astray. We may not always like what it has to say, and sometimes what it tells us will be devastating, but we will listen carefully. The answers are there, and in those answers is the opportunity for peace, acceptance and change.”

    From When the Body Speaks, Listen (Chapter 15) 

    Discover this and many other ways we inhabit the dreams we call our lives, how we create them day by day, and how we can begin to experience them as the ultimate lucid dream. No supernatural assistance is required, no surrender to powers outside ourselves.

    Dreamshaping is not wishful thinking: it is wishful doing. In this simple guide, this dreamshaper’s manual, you’ll find chapter after chapter of simple insights: how the body speaks to us, how we make choices that determine our experiences, how we act, often unknowingly, as the architect, landscaper, set designer and director of our own existence.

    Keep reading, and see what simple reflection and observation can reveal about the lives we live, and the lives we create, in which we’re both the dreamer and the dream.”

     

  • New

    Mark McNease On Topic (Substack)

    My Medicare kicked in yesterday, October 1. It’s oddly exciting, and depressing at the same time. I can finally enjoy national healthcare, but I had to live 65 years to get it (okay, almost 65 years— my birthday is October 28).

    We had dinner with some friends last night who were hosting their friends from Germany. After giddily announcing I was finally on Medicare, I had to explain to them what the excitement was about. Like the rest of the developed world, they have national healthcare. Americans are unique in our effusive celebrations of a Medicare card arriving in the mail. It sorts of says, “Congratulations! You’ll be dead soon.” And boy, do I plan on using it. My first of several October doctors’ appointments is today!