Multiversal Musing -- Deborah Harmes, Ph.D. » publishing

Backlogs and Blessings

Deborah — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:54:40 +0000

First– to everyone who has sent e-mail notes of congratulations, questions, or requests for autographed copies of either Darkness Folding Inward or The Dreamkeeper Messages, please know that I am working my way through my packed e-mail box as quickly as I can. Your support and interest is most gratefully appreciated!

I am simply stunned by what has happened for the last two days as a result of the gracious online review of Darkness Folding Inward, Light Emerging by the wry and astute financial analyst George Ure at Urban Survival. In the hours since his review went live, I have had both robust sales and a flood of requests for additional information.

Thank you to George for expressing an interest in my book, taking the time to read it, and then sharing his thoughts about it online. You are a star, George!

Now — allow me to change the topic a bit and give some credit to someone ELSE who has been an essential part of this whole process.

Yes — I did the hard slog as the writer, but I am ever so aware of how a visual impact plays into people’s decision-making process about what to buy. I don’t think that the books would be having this splendid success if those people who made purchases hadn’t (1) first been piqued with curiosity by George Ure’s charming and generous review and (2) were then pleased with the appearance of the cover art.

The credit for the cover design sits squarely on the shoulders of a talented man named Greg Calvert. I found a graphic for the cover of Darkness Folding Inward and he implemented it beautifully — and in the case of the striking cover for The Dreamkeeper Messages, he created the entire image from scratch.

Every aspect of the beautiful layout on the front and back cover, every page and header of the internal workings of the book, all of this is the diligent labour of Greg Calvert who has been my friend and editor for many years now.

And thank heavens for the connectivity of the Internet! Although I live in Australia and Greg lives in Colorado, the collaboration has succeeded beautifully because we can send the documents and the graphics and the endless revisions back and forth to one another via broadband connections instead of the post.

Again — thank you for your patience as I get to your individual emails. The ongoing positive thoughts from my readers worldwide are greatly appreciated!

I Got A BRILLIANT Book Review!

Deborah — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:08:45 +0000

I’m so excited that I am tingling right now. I knew about this yesterday because the author of the review sent me an advanced copy, but I wanted to wait until it was actually online to share it.

You may or may not know who George Ure is. He writes a financial and social commentary site in the USA called Urban Survival that gets thousands of readers checking in from around the world daily. And he is also keenly interested in issues of consciousness studies, psychology, archaeology, predictive language, time anomalies, weather weirdness, and global oddities. Each week he publishes a small segment on those topics amongst his greater volume of information regarding the global financial situation.

Last week he had a snippet about something interesting and I sent him a few lines of comments and mentioned that it sounded a LOT like what I had written in my newly published book. He wrote back straight away, one thing led to another, and I sent him a review copy. But to say that I was stunned when I received the rough draft of today’s online posting at his site is a serious understatement. He has given the book the most marvelous review!

I am both pleased and very grateful for this splendid opportunity from Mr. Ure — so, in a very public way, let me say a hearty THANK YOU to this very kind man for his generous review.

I will be posting this in 3 places —
(1) at my blog at Multiversal Musing – http://www.multiversalmusing.com
(2) at my primary website for Deborah Harmes, Ph.D. at http://www.deborahharmes.com and
(3) at the old Dreamkeeper website at http://www.thedreamkeeper.com

His information scrolls off the page after a day or two, so you’ll have to go over there and catch it quickly! I’ll see if I can obtain a more permanent link from him in a few days since I know that he maintains an archive of the website in case he needs to reference the material in the months or years afterwards.

Scroll down to the header that reads —
Coping: With Those Signposts Up Ahead
http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm

In case you don’t get around to reading this post from me for several days and it is no longer on George’s site by then, the cut and paste is below. I have italicised the segment that references my book and placed it in bold.

And HERE is the review!

Coping: With Those Signposts Up Ahead
For about 40-some years now, since I started trying to ‘sneak up on the Truth’ of life after doing a stint as a ‘wunderkind’ for a military contractor, which I image is a fair label for a GS-15 equivalent and equivalent rank about major at age 19, I’ve been developing a theory that among people on honest and good hearts/souls there is no conflict; that it’s only a marketing game by a few in ‘power’ that divides us from one another to keep themselves phat and skimming off the top.

I think I’ve mentioned before my favorite analogy of religion: It’s like driving around Mount Rainer up in Washington State. One religion will view Universe (or God) from one promontory and declare theirs to be the only “correct” view of the mountain, while another group will declare with equal certainty – yet from another promontory on another side of the mountain that no, only their view of the mountain is correct.

As a result, near as I can figure, more people have died over this kind of ‘mountain-sight-seeing’ than even gold or food. It’s a condition of humans that I’ve studied enough to become deeply skeptical of those who pretend to lead the rest of us since without ‘leadership’ we might progress better as a species; if consensus-building, sharing, and unconditional relationships were more honored.

Such thoughts are foolish, of course, since we’re all marched at spear-point in some sense whether economically (which is what this site is about) or in a political or religious way. Going one’s own way through Life is distinctly frowned upon without so much tribute to Caesar, so much in tithing, and the biggest portion for “Call now, operators are standing by, this is a free call.”

The essence of such a personal expedition was neatly summed up in Rod Serling’s second season opening of The Twilight Zone:

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

Fact of the matter is -that upon closer inspection and a bit of thought – we are as humans not watching the show – we are the show itself. We’ve been divided – and conquered – in such manner as to erase the key memory that we’re all brothers and sisters, and as one religion notes “petals on one flower, drops of one ocean.”

All of which gets me around to a new book just out, “Darkness Folding Inward, light Emerging” by Deborah Harmes, PhD. At her web site, the book is available from Lulu as a hard copy or at Smashwords as an e-book.

Harmes is luckier than most of us, near as I can tell, in that she’s had a life-long relationship with a being she refers to as “The Dreamkeeper”. This is a being she actually physically saw until puberty, which then receded for a while (the visions, not puberty, you dolt!), but the ‘presence’ of whatever has returned in the form of automatic writing (some of which was included in her Masters thesis, and more recently as she’s worked with it, the ability to flip between her native mode of thinking and the more ‘connected mode’ seems to have evolved.

I won’t spoil the book for you by given you the George Notes version, except to make two other observations. One is that from her first best-selling book, she got a lot of questions about the nature of time and she states the same kind of thing that Cliff has found in predictive linguistics work:

“Time is not a fixed thing! It bends and flexes, contracts and expands, streams and spirals in never ending movement. Someone having a prophetic vision of the future as they sat by their fireside in Europe 400 years ago would have seen one potential date for an upcoming event or events. But the subsequent years would have produced many variations and movements that could not have been predicted by the seer in that long ago time period.”

The second note in passing is that somehow Cliff’s work and mention of UrbanSurvival ended up on pages 117 & 118…in a chapter (perhaps aptly) titled Enemies of the State. Although probably anyone who questions the ruling paradigms can wear the label, t’ain’t just us.

The visions in the book are pretty interesting, too, in terms of the look behind the time/space experiments that have apparently been going on for years…which may explain why people with Gen3 nightvision see all kinds of oddities in the skies.

My problem with the book – and it’s why I got nearly nothing done on Monday was because after reading it, I got into deep, deep, deep ponderings about where the boundaries are in language in how humans get information from ‘other than self’ sources.

My friend Cliff, for example, is an archetype ‘purist’. In other words, when he says archetype what he means is a collection of behaviors. However, there are a lot of people who go to various psychological associations (many Jungians) who hold that folks can work with their archetypes in a ‘guided meditative state, while still others go about it ‘unguided’ and more of less channel information.

Of course this starts setting off all kinds of ‘calls for research’ since purely ‘touching the stream’ (without an intermediary/guide/archetype [broadly as an avatar, not just a behavior collection] seems to yield some useful information although the ‘stream-touchers’ who go there directly (mano y mano, or whatever the female gendered equivalent of that trite phrase would be) note that Yogic teachings are quite specific that in [archetype meant as avatar or channeled] information, you can’t be as confident as personal (unmediated) contact with outer fringes of Universe directly.

Which is probably just as well, except that if 2012 comes along as there’s more to ‘colliding Universes’ and we really could suddenly materialize anything, fly, teleport, or whatever, then a high degrees of personal ethics would be needed and are we ready for that kind of world?

Anyway, I found Harmes book is very interesting material, especially her observation than people who believe in woo-woo seem to be just as pleased (or more so) to follow the ‘ones’ who are fraudulent even more so than ones with a decent ‘batting average’. Not a really long book, but sets off a lot more research…

All New Book is Now In Print!

Deborah — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:22:56 +0000

Such exciting news!!!

The PRINT version of my brand new book — Darkness Folding Inward, Light Emerging — is now available for purchase at Lulu.com.

This book has taken longer than expected to write and produce due to the challenging nature of some of the psychic visions within it, but I am very proud to be able to announce that it is finally launched into the world.

If you would like to read a brief summary of the contents, just go to my primary website, Deborah Harmes, Ph.D. at deborahharmes.com and you will find the description.

My books are now printed at several locations around the world, so you are no longer charged for shipping from the USA if you happen to live in Great Britain, Europe, or Australia. The books are printed locally and shipped locally.

For those interested in an e-book version, I have made sure that all formats currently available are at the SMASHWORDS website.

Finally, for my readers around the world who have waited SO patiently for this book to be completed, I thank you for your ongoing love and support over the years. It is greatly appreciated!

WHY I Changed One of My Book Covers

Deborah — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:44:41 +0000

Have a look at the fabulous NEW cover for the recent republication of the 3rd Edition of The Dreamkeeper Messages

You might wonder why we changed the cover art when the original lovely starry field and red nebula were quite stunning. Well, I felt that we HAD to change it because the image was from the NASA archives and could be used by other people.

I’ve had a particularly unpleasant situation to crop up lately over at Smashwords. They are lovely people to deal with and I have chatted with their CEO online several times. None of this was their fault at all — truly — none of it whatsoever.

Exactly one month from the time I published The Dreamkeeper Messages over there, some other writer created an exact duplicate of my cover and uploaded it with his own badly spelled, clearly unedited piece of ‘fiction’ with an almost identical name. In order that I don’t get sued, I will decline to name that person’s book or the writer.

Lovely friend and editor Greg noticed it first and when I lodged a formal complaint with the CEO of Smashwords last month, I was told that since the NASA image was in the public domain, I couldn’t do a darned thing even if that man DID ‘accidentally’ duplicate my cover. Perhaps it was just a ‘mistake’ by the other writer??? Aarrgghh!!!

So, the cover below (which is now on both Smashwords for the e-books AND at Lulu for the print version) is a completely original work of art which DOES HAVE a copyright! And Greg is responsible for creating this wonderful image that really captures what the Dreamkeeper looked like all of those years ago.

This kind of ‘borrowing’ of other people’s covers and other people’s book themes goes on ALL of the time in the writing and publishing world and it is one of the reasons why I don’t release the names of my books to the public until they are online, available, and have an ISBN attached to them with a copyright. The stories that I have read on writer’s forums would turn your hair white!!!

Interesting times we live in, eh?

The Dreamkeeper Messages in PRINT at LULU

When you order a copy of the book in print (and yes, they have finally fixed the broken link-up at Lulu and it is working just FINE now!), whether you order in the USA or Great Britain or Europe or Australia — the book will be printed locally to where you live and will be shipped at local mail rates, not overseas mail rates. I took a reduction in royalties to enable my readers around the world to not have to pay ridiculous overseas shipping rates.

Here is the Smashwords link.
The Dreamkeeper Messages in E-book at SMASHWORDS

Enjoy!

E-Book Version of NEW Book Online!

Deborah — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:52:39 +0000

I’m having an ongoing lesson in patience with the print book situation at Lulu.com (and I will keep everyone apprised!) — but at least I have one FABBO thing to report today and it is about my other publisher — Smashwords.

My NEW book, Darkness Folding Inward, Light Emerging is now live online at Smashwords and available for download in ALL e-book formats including Kindle.

Hooray!!!

This one is chock-full of psychic visions and contains some tantalising info on time travel in the past AND the present.

The print version should (fingers crossed!) be online at Lulu.com within a week or so.

Enjoy!