Blog – Page 2

C.S. Lewis book discussion series at Wheaton College’s Wade Center

August 11, 2017 by Clare T. Walker

Hey, Chicago area peeps! Did you know that we have, in our little old suburb of Wheaton, Illinois, one of the largest repositories of C.S. Lewis stuff in the world? It’s at the Wade Center on the campus of Wheaton College (corner of Washington St. and Lincoln Av. in Wheaton). This fall they are having a Saturday morning book discussion on The Letters of C.S. Lewis. Starts Sat. Sep 9 and goes through Sat. Nov 18. It’s FREE! Email the Wade Center at wade@wheaton.edu or call 630.752.5908 to RSVP.

And don’t forget to acquire a copy of the book!

review of Startling Figures appears in National Catholic Register

January 3, 2017 by Clare T. Walker

I got a pleasant surprise today when browsing the National Catholic Register–I came across an article called Familiar Names Appear Among Latest Literary Offerings, a review of books written by Register contributors. Couldn’t help noticing the cover of my short story collection in the image accompanying the piece:

Sarah Reinhard, author of the article, wrote:

Mostly, I had fun reading these books. They’re curl-up-on-the-couch good, though they’re definitely for adults (or older teens, though I’d recommend you preview them first). My older daughter has aspirations toward veterinary medicine, and I think Walker’s characters will likely appeal to her … but at almost-12, I’m not sure if the nature of these stories (and what I’ve read so far of Keys) is quite appropriate.

Reinhard’s take is spot on: Startling Figures and The Keys of Death are edgy, gritty, realistic, contemporary stories meant for adults and older teen readers. My bad guys are really bad and they do bad things! They say bad words! (Sometimes even the good guys say bad words…). Some situations are intense. Adult relationships are tastefully depicted (nothing explicit) but some parents may prefer that their children be a certain age before reading.

She concludes with this observation:

Walker has taken on suspense/thriller fiction from a Catholic perspective, without watering down the “real” aspect of things.

This is exactly what I was going for in both books. Well done, Sarah, and thanks for your kind assessment!

You can read more from Sarah Reinhard on her blog, Snoring Scholar and at the National Catholic Register.

Here are the URLs in case the links above are broken or go astray:

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/familiar-names-appear-among-latest-literary-offerings

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sarah-reinhard

http://www.snoringscholar.com/

http://www.ncregister.com

review of Learning to Love With the Saints

January 3, 2017 by Clare T. Walker

A new book review of mine is up at National Catholic Register:

It’s called Learning to Love With the Saints by Jean M. Heimann.

Here’s a pull-quote from the review:

What this book demonstrates so poignantly is how ineffective the spiritual formation turned out to be for many kids growing up Catholic in the ’50s and ’60s. Parents who depended upon parish catechetics, the Catholic school system and a family life of traditional devotional practices discovered to their dismay that it often wasn’t enough. The sexual revolution hit the post-Vatican II Catholic Church with a broadside for which it was totally unprepared, and the resulting confusion is still negatively impacting the Church today.

Failure to effectively explain the Church’s teachings and explicitly contrast them with the practices of the world, over-emphasis on mere catechesis without leading children to true conversion of heart, and assuming that an unshakable Catholic faith can be absorbed by mere osmosis — these are the things Catholic parents today must avoid if they hope their children’s faith will be strong enough to survive immersion in the messy world outside the cloister of our homes and parishes. [I recommend this book] as a cautionary tale that, by God’s grace, has a happy ending.

Here’s the URL of the review (just in case the link above is broken or goes astray):

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/returning-to-the-faith-with-the-help-of-the-saints

Enjoy!

read The Keys of Death and you’ll understand this photo!

November 30, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

What's Clare doing in this photo? Read The Keys of Death and you'll understand!

American veterinarian-author Clare T. Walker at Allerton Park, Monticello, IL

Here’s an excerpt from The Keys of Death that sort of explains the photo above:

David Brightman and his wife, Joanna, had made plans for the next day. They were going to Allerton Park in Monticello. It was October. The trees at Allerton would be gorgeous, and if the weather cooperated it was not likely to be cold.

It was an easy half hour drive from Champaign, south on Route 47, to the park’s main entrance. They’d divvy up snacks, water bottles, and a picnic lunch between two backpacks and set off for the formal gardens, where they would wander around and irreverently rename the statues and attractions. Poor, Lethargic Adam, The Garden of the Scary Blue Dogs, and the Not Lost Anymore Because We Found It Garden. There was an immaculately trimmed boxwood hedge feature that looked like it could have been a maze, but David had renamed it Not Really A Proper Maze Because You Can See Over The Top.

When they had amused one another enough, they would pick up the “yellow trail” (it was a yellow line on the park map) take it about a mile past the Creepy Little House in the Big Woods to the Headless Centaur, which wasn’t really headless but looked that way until you got up close, because the sculptor had, for some reason, positioned the centaur’s head at an incredibly acute angle to its shoulder. From there they would follow the “brown trail” for about a mile until it came to their favorite section of the park. It was a large, circular lawn surrounded by trees, with a concrete plinth in the center for the featured statue, a huge figure by Carl Milles called The Sun Singer. David and Joanna had come up with numerous names for it over the years: The Flasher, Look, Ma! No Privates, Bloody Great Immodest Git, Nothing to See Here—and so on.

Want more? The Keys of Death, a veterinary medical thriller, is available at amazon in Kindle and paperback editions, barnes&noble (Nook or paperback), and kobo.

happy 50th birthday, Star Trek!

September 8, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

Star Trek and I were born in the same year: 1966. Naturally, I missed the show in its original broadcast run on NBC from that year until it ceased production in 1969, but since the show was so successful in syndication in the 1970s and 80s, I grew up with it. My brothers and I could usually find an episode playing once or twice a week, maybe more, even though back then we could count our TV channels on one hand. For a while there we even had a Star Trek Saturday morning cartoon, and once the movies started coming out I went to all of them—one movie every two or three years from 1979 until 1991.

My appreciation of the show was avid but not excessive. I’d seen all the episodes several times and knew a fair amount of Star Trek trivia, but I wasn’t a Trekkie. I checked out Star Trek books from the library, but never wrote any fan fiction of my own. For some reason I had a Captain Kirk poster in my dorm room at college, but I never went to a Star Trek convention. By the time I finished grad school and embarked upon my adult life of family and work responsibilities, I had drifted away from TV almost entirely. I guess you could say I had “gotten a life.” I had “moved out of my parents’ basement and grown the hell up.”
Then, in 2006, both Star Trek and I turned 40. It occurred to me that my children were growing up in a world where the Starfleet communicator and Uhura’s earpiece had become essential personal accessories, where the sophistication of those little square computer tapes had been exceeded, and where you really could make entries into a notebook-size computer with a stylet pen. Allusions and references to the original series were commonplace.
The children were certainly old enough to enjoy and appreciate Star Trek, so why not? I went down to the library and checked out as many DVDs of the original series as they had available, plus my favorite of the six movies–Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And there we sat on mid-winter evenings, bundled on the couch in blankets, munching on popcorn, going where our little family had never gone before.
I suppose if this is the extent of my mid-life crisis—reliving my geeky childhood—I can count myself lucky.

I knew I was onto something when one of my kids, after flipping through the latest stack of library DVDs, said, “We’ve seen all these. Are there any more?” Or when my kids would sit at the kitchen table gnashing their teeth over their homework, muttering to themselves, “Study, study, study! Or bonk bonk, bad kids!” Or when Number One Daughter raises a Vulcan eyebrow and declares, “That is not logical.” Or, worse, when someone sings, “Ah-ah-ah-ah…scrambled eggs” to the tune of Spock’s horrible song in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”
Somehow, despite the dated, bongo-laden opening theme music, the low-tech special effects, and beehive hairdos of the original series, and amid the beeping and squawking of a CGI-savvy, handheld game system-playing bunch of children, the next generation of Star Trek fans was born. I think this is because the artistic and cultural achievement of Star Trek transcends its stylistic appearance and any technological limitations of the show’s production. The stories speak for themselves, they speak universally, and they stand up under scrutiny over time, which I believe are the criteria for a work of imagination to earn the title “classic.”
When I began introducing my children to Star Trek, I was actually reintroducing myself to it. I hadn’t seen an episode of the original series in probably 20 years and hadn’t seen a Star Trek movie since the theatrical release of Star Trek VI in 1991. I had only experienced Star Trek as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult.
At the age of 40 I came back to Star Trek with freshness, maturity, and a perspective formed by over twenty years as an adult. I saw and took note of things that had eluded me before. I discovered that the stories I had enjoyed so much as a child were even more appealing and entertaining to me now. Star Trek has universal appeal.

Now, in 2016, both Star Trek and I celebrate our 50th birthdays. Star Trek has rebooted and presents a fresh vision of itself. Geek culture has emerged from the basement and become synonymous with pop culture, and people are rediscovering the 80s. Case in point: my brothers and I are now playing Dungeons & Dragons with our offspring and our mom!
So, happy 50th birthday, Star Trek! See what you started?

1500 words of gold

April 8, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

Remember the pilot episode of ER? The one where Dr. Peter Benton–only a second-year surgery resident, hotshot, brash, against all the regs, but correct in his assessment–takes a guy with an aneurysm to surgery and keeps him alive until a board certified surgeon can get there? Saves his life. The surgeon congratulates him. He goes to the locker room and…

…epic fist pump.

That is me right now. Am 4800 words into the new novel (another veterinary medical thriller). Just read over the last 1500 words–they are fist pump worthy!

Tomorrow I may write crap, but today it’s gold!

“I am on FIRE!!”

book review: Exile by R.A. Salvatore

March 2, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

My Dungeons & Dragons geek-out continues with the second book in R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf trilogy, Exile.

As the book begins, Drizzt Do’Urden, the drow elf with a heart of gold, has been surviving in the wilds of the Underdark for ten years. Meanwhile, his evil family back in Menzobarranzan have not forgotten about him. In order to appease their evil spider goddess deity, they send out the reanimated corpse of Drizzt’s father to kill him.

Drizzt’s decade as a savage in the Underdark has been lonely: so lonely that eventually he journeys to the city of the deep gnomes and turns himself in, just to have some contact with other living beings. He knows there’s a good chance the deep gnomes will summarily execute him, since drow elves and deep gnomes are sworn enemies, but he believes that’s a fate preferable to what he sees happening to him: his exile in the Underdark has unleashed a primal, instinctive killing machine side of him that even he finds frightening. However, his friendship with Belwar, and their adventures together, reconnect him with other living beings and help him rediscover his true self.

Another thing I found interesting was how the author addressed the body/spirit dualism so common in modern science fiction and fantasy. This is the idea that the spirit of a person (sometimes called mind, or soul, or personality, or essence, or simply described as all the person’s knowledge and memory) exists within the body the way a computer program exists within a computer. The “memory banks” can be separated from the “hardware” and copied onto any other piece of hardware. Or, conversely, the “memory banks” of a person can be erased from the hardware and replaced with other “software.” You see this trope in Star Trek a lot, like the one about the three beings who live in those glowing globes and switch places with Kirk, Spock, and another crew member. There’s an episode of The X-Files where a character hooks herself up to a super-computer and uploads her “self” onto the Internet. (That episode was written, BTW, by William Gibson, originator of cyberpunk and coiner of the phrase “cyberspace.”) Zombies are another version of this, in which the soul is gone but the body still somehow functions physically.

The body/spirit issue comes up when Malice Do’Urden, Drizzt’s mother, conducts a diabolical rite to reanimate the dead body of Drizzt’s father and send him out into the Underdark as an assassin. It is under Malice’s complete control, and she uses it as a remote-controlled puppet to hunt down and kill her son. The body retains all its amazing sword skills but none of the father’s personality, memory, or emotions. Drizzt, however, believes that this is a load of hooey:

The physical powers of the body cannot be separated from the rationale of the mind and the emotions of the heart. They are one and the same, a compilation of a singular being. It is in the harmony of these three–body, mind, and heart–that we find spirit.

The spirit cannot be separated from the body. Not in life. And not in undeath.

Well said, Drizzt!!

I won’t spoil it for you, but the final confrontation between Drizzt and his zombified father is quite good!

Book I in the Dark Elf trilogy: Homeland

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Exile

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Sojourn

book review: Homeland by R.A. Salvatore

February 2, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

My brothers and I (all in our 40s) are reliving our geeky childhood by starting to play Dungeons & Dragons again — now with our offspring!

We’re really enjoying the 5th edition of D&D. It has a “back to basics” feel to it, more focused on the broader strokes of gameplay than the minutiae of movement, skirmishes, and what-not.

So, in order to catch up on what I’ve been missing for the almost 30 years that have elapsed since I last attempted a d20 saving throw, I started reading about the various “worlds” in the D&D “multiverse.” Little did I know it, but I started with a great one. I began Homeland, the first “Legend of Drizzt” novel, with a bit of skepticism, scoffing a bit to myself, “A Dungeons & Dragons novel? Really? I’ll give it a try, but if I feel like I’m reading a transcript of a D&D game session, I’ll put it aside.”

I was not just pleasantly surprised — I was really impressed. Salvatore is a good writer: smooth prose style, engaging characters, interesting plot, snappy pacing. This book is also a marvelous feat of world-building.* I was entranced. The culture of the drow elves is truly terrifying and oppressive, and from this dark world a believable hero arises.

Salvatore’s only misstep, in my opinion, is the name of the main character, or rather, the fact that it’s quite unclear how to pronounce his name. If there’s an audio version available, I’d like to hear it; it could be quite a challenge even to a professional voice performer!

This is a good “origin story” for the dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

*Note: I’m not sure how much of the world is original to Salvatore and how much derives from Ed Greenwood’s “Forgotten Realms” D&D campaign setting, so my praise for the world-building perhaps is as much for Greenwood as for Salvatore. As I said, I’ve only just now picked up D&D after 3 decades away from it, so I’m way behind in the development of the various worlds within the multiverse.

Book I in the Dark Elf trilogy: Homeland

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Exile

Book II in the Dark Elf trilogy: Sojourn

book review published: The Inklings

January 26, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

Just a quick heads up: here’s a book review of mine that appeared in the National Catholic Register:

“Inklings Introduced” http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/inklings-introduced (2/2/16)

Enjoy!

how Alan Rickman helped me finish my book

January 21, 2016 by Clare T. Walker

alan rickman photo for pancreatic cancer article

Alan Rickman Feb. 21, 1946 — Jan. 14, 2016

Most of us have by now heard the news that British actor Alan Rickman passed away on January 14, 2016 — a week ago today. He appeared in some wonderful plays & movies, portrayed many unforgettable and iconic roles, and will be greatly missed by fans of all ages. My favorite Alan Rickman movies/roles: Die Hard (1988), Truly Madly Deeply (1990), Sense & Sensibility (1995), Galaxy Quest (1999), Bottleshock (2008), and, of course, his portrayal of Prof. Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies (2001-2011). And who could forget his appearance in Victoria Wood’s BBC Christmas Special: “Plots & Proposals” (2000)?

His movie persona also helped me personally in a major writing project that I just finished. Back in 2008 I began writing a novel. The working title was the veterinary medical thriller. Later, the working title became Play Dead. It is now set to be published as The Keys of Death.

While I was working on it, I remembered some advice I heard somewhere about creating memorable characters: “Would a great actor want to play this role?”

Most of the time I do not have a specific person in mind when I build a character, but when writing The Keys of Death I based one character specifically on Alan Rickman. When I wrote this character’s dialogue and described his mannerisms, I vividly pictured Rickman in my mind acting the role and heard that one-of-a-kind voice in my head. As a fiction author, it really helped me to bring this character to life in my mind and hopefully on the page.

The character’s name is Dr. David Brightman. He makes his first appearance in Chapter 2 of The Keys of Death, which you can download and read by clicking this link:

Chapter 2 “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”

There’s another connection to Alan Rickman in The Keys of Death: a scene near the end of the book was “inspired” by Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of the Samuel Beckett stage production Play. The three characters in it were portrayed by Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson, and Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s a really odd piece, but here’s a link to it: Play (2001). When (if) you watch it, you will realize why I put the word inspired in quotes, above, since the scene in my book is a vision of Hell. (Really!)

The Keys of Death will be available for purchase this weekend on Amazon, then hopefully at other online venues once I make the file conversions.

I hope you enjoy the sample chapter! Now get out there and geek out about Alan Rickman with the collection of links below:

J.K. Rowling reveals ‘Harry Potter’ secret she told Alan Rickman by Kelly West, 1-20-16

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/01/20/jk-rowling-reveals-harry-potter-secret-told-alan-rickman/

This article is interesting, because I suspect Alan Rickman and possibly the other filmmakers knew something about Snape’s back story and true character as early as The Prisoner of Azkaban. Near the end of that movie, many of the characters are gathered around the base of the Whomping Willow and Lupin turns into a werewolf. The werewolf turns menacingly toward the three children and Snape. Snape shoves the children behind him and spreads out his arms to protect them. It’s a quick moment, subtly portrayed, but I’ve always loved it because it betrays that Snape’s “swooping about the castle like an overgrown bat” is his persona, but his true self is good and protective.