Tag Archives: paranormal

Death’s Curses

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Today it is my pleasure to welcome authors Becca Fox & Martha Agundez and their urban fantasy/romance novel, Death’s Curses.

Author’s description

After one screw up too many, Esmeralda Barnes is shipped off to Seattle to start her first semester of college while living under the strict guardianship of her great aunt. She’s prepared to serve her time in simmering silence when she meets Charlie Campbell, the only person worth talking to at the tiny community college she’s being forced to attend. His efforts to scare her away don’t work, not even when he lefts it slip that he has a psychic twin sister who helps their uncle—a police detective—solve murders. As the former member of a gang, Esmer’s confident she’s tough enough to take anything he throws at her in stride.

Then she has a near death experience. And Charlie is the first person on the scene. It turns out, his sister isn’t psychic but she does have a special connection to Death. She and Charlie both. So maybe this friendship will take a little more work than Esmer originally thought. But hey, it’s better than the gang. Even after being pulled into a string of grisly murder investigations, running with people possessing supernatural abilities, and dealing with the very real presence of a minor goddess, Esmer’s pretty sure hanging with Charlie is better than being back with the gang. Yep, pretty damn sure.

About the Authors

Becca Fox is a socially awkward introvert who loves to read and write, binge watch crime-solving shows and anime, and play video games next to her gamer husband. She also loves to bake, and plan trips she hopes to one day take. She has a toddler and a crawler, which means that her house truly is as messy as you’re imagining.

Martha Agundez has a BA in English from Sacramento State University. She worked as a tutor at the Sacramento State University Writing Center for two semesters and was a journalist for The State Hornet Newspaper for one semester. She was also the Calaveras Station Literary Journal Fiction Section Editor for a semester. She has worked as a 916Ink manuscript copy editor for three years and counting, while also offering her editing services as a freelancer.

Find the Authors

Blog: https://fanofthefiction.wordpress.com/
Website: http://becca-fox.com/
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Becca-Fox/e/B076PTNPV9/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17274613.Becca_Fox
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bears_Goose1?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beccajfoxauthor/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/beccajayfox/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rjagundez.5/?hl=en

Buy the Book

Buy Link:  https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Curses-Becca-Fox-ebook/dp/B0949T79FL/

Yes, there is a giveaway

The authors will be awarding a custom made bookmark, a candle inspired by one of the characters in the book, and an eBook copy of the book, US only, to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Enter here to win.

This post is part of a tour sponsored by Goddess Fish. Check out all the other tour stops. If you drop by each of these and comment, you will greatly increase your chances of winning.

My Favorite Excerpt

Charles

It was probably juvenile but I told myself there were worse things I could be doing than supporting the local rage room. Responsible enough for Uncle Vic, no one had to get hurt, and I could work out every toxic thought in my head for forty-five dollars. Win, win, win.

Wiping the sweat from my brow, I made my way to the locker rooms to change out of all the protective gear they’d forced me to wear. I was standing in line at my favorite taco truck maybe twenty minutes later. A couple was arguing nearby. Ordinarily, I would’ve ignored the grown-ass adults making a scene on the street, but the female’s voice sounded oddly familiar.

“Just because you gave me a beer doesn’t mean you own me, asshole!”

I turned to see a girl with short red hair, switchblade open and pressed against the throat of a rail-thin guy who looked about ready to piss himself. She wore a gray hoodie sweatshirt which was probably too thin to offer any warmth, ripped black jeans that clung to her slender hips and exposed her pale knees, along with well-worn neon pink sneakers. All she needed were rough tattoos and she’d look like she belonged in a gang.

“S-Sorry,” the guy stammered, stepping back. “My bad.”

I rolled my eyes and paid for my tacos before stepping away from the truck. Of course. Of course it was Esmer.

Her scowl stayed fixed on the guy’s retreating form as he hightailed it down the street with what appeared to be a six pack under his arm. Well, it was a five pack now.

Some of the onlookers whooped and cheered.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Esmer snapped her knife closed with a flick of her wrist and shoved it into her back pocket.

Thank you!

Becca Fox & Martha Agundez — we appreciate your sharing your book Death’s Curses with us! Best of luck with sales, and with all of your future writing.

A Believer’s View of Telepathy

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Writing x0 took me down the path of researching telepathy and in October 2012, I posted about the skeptics point of view.  I offered the most compelling arguments I encountered against the existence of any sort of extra sensory perception.  I also pointed out that while writing x0 I had come to appreciate both the the desire for truth and the effort to help others avoid scams that appears to compel telepathy’s strongest detractors. The fact is that a wide variety experiments, conducted thousands of times over decades, have failed to produce convincing evidence that telepathy exists. And some of these folks have really looked.

From Crystalinks.com

From Crystalinks.com

And yet …… according to a 2005 Gallup Poll, about one third of Americans believe telepathy is real.  These believers are more or less evenly divided among age, gender, race, income, education and region of the country. Don’t believe me? Check it out here. This prompts me to wonder whether we are such a wishful species that some of us will accept an appealing idea as true even after multiple experiments appear to disprove it, or whether many of us choose to ignore massive amounts of data because our own experiences suggest a different truth. Websites such as Crystalinks suggest the latter.

Part of the problem, I think, is that tests for telepathy tend to center around conveying information.  What color of dot am I thinking of? What number between one and ten? Quick. Concentrate. Answer. Yet no one I am aware of claims to have ever had a mind to mind transfer of this kind of information. Rather, telepathy is a gentle nudge, an added awareness that involves feelings, not facts. It speaks in symbols, like dreams. It whispers of primal sensations, leaving you sure of the essential emotions, but vague about the rest.

So it did not surprise me to learn that the one test for telepathy that has shown statistically significant positiveganzfeld results is the “Ganzfeld” experiments in which one person is shown photos and film clips and tries to send a sense of the feelings behind these images to the receiver. The receiver has four choices, and after 6700 tests receivers made the right choice about 28% of the time.  This is instead of the 25% one would expect. Impressive? Frankly, no. Not to you or I.  But to a statistician, it is. In fact, if you assume, like the book x0 does, that everyone can project their feelings but only a telepath can receive them, these results suggest that about 3% of the population is somewhat telepathic.

But how? The human brain is a complex electrical and chemical device.  Companion book y1 discusses how  neurotransmitters travel through the brain carrying thoughts and feelings with a precession that is astounding. Might it not be possible for another brain to detect some of this activity? We smell each other. Our eyes can detect light from a star a billions of miles away.  Our ears hear a whisper that corresponds to a pressure variation of less than a billionth of the current atmospheric pressure. Are we so that sure we know of every type of sensory receptor that every one of us has?

How contagious is the fear felt around a campfire where ghost stories are being told? The anger of a mob, the exhilaration of sports fans, and the growing confidence of a group on the path to accomplishing something great all give testament to the idea that we catch feelings from one another.

From Wired

From Wired

A researcher in Sydney recently finished a five-year study monitoring brain activity during therapy sessions and used electrodes placed around the head to investigate how two people can become physiologically aligned. And  according to an article in Wired, the U.S. army is investigating ways to wire brains to communicate “pre-speech” thoughts. And in spite of the fact that we all know that we pick up countless tiny clues from each other that can be misconstrued as telepathy, sometimes the feeling that there is more to it than that is overwhelming.

Other work has suggested that after two people spend years together, their brain waves become more similar. It’s late, and I’m about to go curl up in bed with the man I have slept next to for the last three decades. I know him almost as well as I know myself, and as I drift off to sleep I sometimes have a sense of knowing how he is feeling.  Am I picking up some of those those tiny body language clues? Of course I am. Am I using my knowledge of him and of the kind day we have had? Certainly. Is there something more?  Maybe ….  just maybe.  I’m open to the idea, anyway.