Tarotsphere by Jeffery X Martin

I use my blog for many things. Book reviews, my insatiable, odd interests, writing about monsters, and also to help other writers by promoting their work, to name a few. This post is dedicated to the latter. My very good friend, Mr. Jeffery X Martin, has a fabulous new book release titled, Tarotsphere, which is an in-depth study of the Tarot, written in his infamous and entertaining style of prose. And did I mention there's a CONTEST? Read on to find out more about the man, the myth, the X...



-->

Hello.

I am not Amber. My name is X. However, if you would like to call me Amber, that will be an extra five dollars.

The Real Amber (whose real name is not Amber, but oddly enough, is also X) has let me commandeer her blog for a little minute so that I may tell you a little about myself and my new book, Tarotsphere. There’s a contest, too, so make sure you’ve got your decoder rings ready!

You can buy the book here.

Tarotsphere is a storybook for adults, an absurdist look at the Tarot deck people are familiar with, in which I’ve given every single card its own back story. You’ll meet characters like Tremulous, the Barber and Kimmy, the High Priestess. It’s all in good fun, of course, but it isn’t disrespectful. There’s still enough insight into the inherent wisdom of the cards themselves that you could interpret a Tarot reading using the book. You’ll have to use your imagination. A gallon of cheap red wine helps, too.

Right now, Tarotsphere is available in electronic form only. You can read it on your Kindle or your Nook. You can download a free app from either Amazon or Barnes and Noble to read it on your PC! We’ll think about physical copies if the demand for them is great enough.

Oh, the contest? Right. The contest. I’m giving away three Tarot readings to be done over video Skype. All the details are over at my blog, which I’m thinking about letting Amber run for me. You’ve got until Halloween at midnight to enter.

What else do I do? Well, I run a movie and music site and I write scary stories. I’m currently working on a horror script for Bluetrane Productions and developing a project that I can’t talk about yet. Except to say it’s awesome.

So now that you know a little about me, I know you would like nothing better than to become one of my internet stalkers. Let me give you the information to do precisely that.  You’ve already got my website addresses… oh. Here’s my Amazon author page. You can buy my stuff from there. If you want to do it all for the Nook, here’s the link for that. You might as well follow me on Twitter, too. I’m there a lot and I’ll talk to you if you follow me and talk to me, unless you’re an asshole. Find me: @X_the_Unknown.

Buy my books! Be my Twitter friend! Become a fan now, while interest rates are low and you can still get in on the ground level!

Ugh. Amber wants her blog back now. Fine. Whatever. Anyway, thanks for your time and attention. I’m gonna go do some stuff. Important stuff. Like, play Bejeweled or something. For research.

-X-

If you have any questions for X about the book or his writing, please use the comments below. Thank you for visiting!

Guest Post by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

I would like to welcome guest and fellow horror author, Kathryn Meyer Griffith. She has a little tale to share, one of a Halloween from years passed. This is the perfect time of the year to snuggle up near a fire with a steaming mug of hot chocolate or apple cider and listen to ghost stories. Kathryn has just the tale for us. It's one of a Halloween from years passed. Without further ado, I give you Kathryn.

Halloween Memories
Treat or Treat, Robots and Candy Corn
By author Kathryn Meyer Griffith

I believe I’m lucky. I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Halloween was so different back then. Simpler. More innocent. Exciting. A true holiday for children. And I have memories I’ll cherish my whole life.
My family was large. I had six siblings, three sisters and three brothers, and we never had much money. My dad was a salesman and my mother, like a lot of women during that time, didn’t work outside the home…she was busy enough raising seven children. We were the poor family down the street with too many kids living in the shabby two-story spooky looking house. Our neighbors shunned us or felt sorry for us. But I didn’t care, I had my family to love me. I had Grandmother Fehrt, my mother’s mother, to fill our bellies with food when the table was a little too bare. I had my ambitions and dreams, science fiction and scary library books to read and pictures to draw (I wanted to be an artist from the age of nine). I frolicked in the empty fields riddled with deep gullies beside our house with my brothers and sisters or ran the dark streets and woods playing hide-and-go-seek. Sang to the moon on our rusty swing set in the backyard with my brother, Jim. Or, on a black and white TV set, watched Zorro, the Twilight Zone or The Lone Ranger on swelteringly hot nights in a house with no air-conditioning. Sweet days and nights. Poignant memories now that many of my family are gone.
Halloween was my favorite holiday, next to Christmas. I remember one, when I was about ten or so, vividly. It was cold and raining, but nothing stopped us four older children (the rest were too young that year) from going out into the neighborhood and collecting big brown bags of free candy. No, not when candy was so rare for us. My parents could hardly keep enough food in the house, much less buy us sweets. So Halloween meant a windfall of treats. Nothing kept us home on that night. We’d quickly eat the bowls of chili Mom would insist we eat as the sun went down. Another tradition. So we had some real food in our stomachs before the glut of candy came.
My mother, money being sparse as always, dressed us two girls up as gypsies, using her old costume jewelry and tying bright scarfs around our heads and waists. My younger brother Jon, wore an old sheet with cut out eye slots. A ghost. My other brother, Jim, had outdone himself that year and, out of two cardboard boxes and paint, had fashioned himself a robot. Wasn’t bad for an eight year old, either. Made it hard for him to walk, though. He stumbled a lot.
That night we traipsed through the wet woods, a short cut, to the rich subdivision down the road that – oh, my – gave out those huge candy bars at each door, enormous homemade popcorn balls or bags of candy corn, my favorite. My grandmother had taught Jim and I a catchy song…G-i-n-g-a, G-i-n-g-a, G-i-n-g-a…Ginga was his name. Never understood that song but I think it was about a pet dog or something. Jim and I got so much good feedback, so many treats for belting it out, though, that at Christmas we were performing The Little Drummer Boy for anyone we could corner and sing to. The beginning of our later singing folk duo (so big in the 60’s) and then my short (my brother kept singing out as I began writing my novels) singing career, no doubt.
We had a great haul that night. Cold and rainy as it was. Frozen as our faces and fingers became. Maybe got even more goodies because it was so inclement. We went to all the houses, collected our booty, and ecstatic at our bulging bags, at the end of the night, ran through the trees toward home. Trying to beat the rain, which had become a deluge, worst of the night. With noisy thunder, and spectacular lightning. It was sooo spooky. In the spirit of the night, we were sure something bad was following us. We ran faster. Our paper bags getting soaked as we cradled them against our shivering bodies.
Then, clumsy in his robot disguise (he kept bumping into trees because he couldn’t see) Jim fell over a tree limb and spilled his candy everywhere. As he cried, we scurried around trying to salvage what we could. Didn’t do much good. Too dark. The rain was too heavy. So the three of us promised to share our booty with him and we led him home.
As we were drying off and warming up, Mom and Dad smiled at our stories of singing for our candy and all the strange ghouls and monsters we’d met on the way; laughed over Jim’s mishap and gave us hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows to drink.
Then there was a knock at the front door and when we looked, there was Grandma Fehrt, dressed as a wicked witch, complete with tall black hat and long dress, cackling at us. Trying to fool us. But we all knew it was her. She dressed up every year and knocked at our door. Always a witch.
We kids hugged her and laughed, then sat at the table counting out (and oohing and aahing with glee) over our candy haul. We shared it with Jim, of course.
To this day I remember that Halloween with a wistful smile. Such good times from so long ago. I see my brothers and sisters young faces through the mists of time, remember the thrill of singing with my brother for the first time and the delight of the people giving us the candy in exchange for the song. I remember my parents and the love in that drafty old house we scampered back to. I remember my grandmother with her smiling witch eyes and painted face. Remember going to bed with a stomach ache because I’d eaten too much candy. Heck, I always did. And I remember those no longer with us. My father, my mother, one of my brothers and all of my grandparents.
My childhood, when I think of nights like that, is just a moment away. The dead are with me again. Ah, I’d give anything to go back in time and be with all of them once more. The way we were. Young and hopeful and with our lives ahead of us. Enjoying each other’s company…and all that good candy.
Anything.
***************************************************************************

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

About Kathryn Meyer Griffith...
Since childhood I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had sixteen (nine romantic horror, two romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense, one romantic time travel and two murder mysteries) previous novels and eight short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press, Damnation Books and Eternal Press.
I’ve been married to Russell for thirty-four years; have a son, James, and two grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis, Mo. We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too), and the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I’ve been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably write stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.
All Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s Books available at Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kathryn+Meyer+Griffith

           
Novels and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:
Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, 2012)
The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s Revised Edition 2010) Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615722327http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615722327
Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2012)
Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615724253http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615724253
The Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2010) Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615722075http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615722075
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZU77j_q4S8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZU77j_q4S8
Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615723553
The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011) Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615723201
The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615725007
Scraps of Paper (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003…soon to be an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006…soon an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)  Eternal Press buy link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615724437  My self-made
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogCNYKzPqc
Winter’s Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615724604)
You Tube Book Trailer address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZYCs2DVhHg
The Ice Bridge (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615725182
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HZqu-my1g
Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella & bonus short story: In This House (2008; ghostly romantic short story out; Eternal Press 2012)
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3q9rZryFMo
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/people.php?author=422
BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons (Damnation Books 2010)
Damnation Books buy link: httphttp://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615721313
You Tube self-made Book trailer with original song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0-U9c2Lwfo
The Woman in Crimson (Damnation Books 2010)
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615721979
You Tube Book Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcRBvDI5G4Y
The Complete Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)
Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)
4 SPOOKY SHORT STORIES (Amazon Kindle 2012)

My Websites:
http://www.myspace.com/kathrynmeyergriffith (to see all my book trailers with original music by my singer/songwriter brother JS Meyer)
http://www.bebo.com/kathrynmeyerG
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1019954486
http://www.authorsden.com/kathrynmeyergriffith
http://www.goodreads.com/profile/kathrynmeyergriffith