Markus, is a character from the Harmon Sueno novel, United, who came to me when I heard about the Pentecostal snake handlers in the Appalachian mountains quoting this verse from the Gospel of Mark, Mark 16:17–18 ‘17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick …
My whakapapa on my father’s father’s side of the family goes back to Opunake, Te Atiawa (Taranaki Maori Iwi/tribe). I’ve felt that connection flowing through my veins like a persistent warmth for my entire existence in my body, but not as strong as when I came back to Te Ika a Maui in late 2002 from Vancouver, …
In my writing process, I will often take nights, days, and weeks away from a narrative of a novel so it can formulate for me. Holding down a very physical day job means that I’m reluctant to come home and write at night. I wrote Sanctum (2nd edition) in a blur of nights, over months of toiling away as it flowed …
The government’s enforced house arrest is all but over for me. My other job (when I’m not writing, researching, producing book trailers, doing voiceovers, editing, proofreading, and dealing with taxation departments and ebook platforms in the USA) is a trade, and I’m allowed to go work on the building site that me and builders, engineers, electricians, and …
I have just finished a small book of poetry writing with Iho Grace, whose poetic tones matched my own. The book is a reflection on my relationship of two years which ended in January of this year. My muse, my former paramour, Inge Laan. The book is called A Flickering light Called Fate, and it’s written in three parts. Rhapsody, Reconcile, and Rekindle. It’s the first …
Part of creating the Oho Ake Books publishing and the creative universe was to get as much exposure for the work as possible. Naturally, given the market for ebooks, I would want to find a platform on the internet that would allow me to have the largest distribution across the planet, with numerous retail sellers (not just Amazon …
Setting very strong boundaries has been an issue for me my entire life experience in this body. I grew up in a home where violence was a daily occurrence. My father was verbally and physically abusive, his raging anger and alcoholism had a better marriage than both his other two marital contracts ever did. As a consequence of this, …
When I first started to express my creativity via the written word I could hear the words rise in my head. Initially, the voices were those of the characters I was writing about. The young Inuit girl that followed the bird out into the arctic wilderness, and then perished, my friends when I wrote the …
I had finished work in the early afternoon of a late spring day and gone into the Flight Centre in Kilbernie Wellington, to talk about booking my flights, and create my travel itinerary. Attempting to get to Central/South American once before in 2001 from Vancouver, had failed (that’s a tale for my autobiography, and it’s …