Blog Archives
Annual Summer/Winter Sale: Get 50% Off Solitaire Parke’s Ebook Collection
Now is your best chance to find my entire eBook collection for 50% off at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! You can find all my on-sale books at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/solitaireparke
Choose books from my Dragomeir Series – a sci/fi series of 8 books with dragonriders and dragons for those who love adventure.
Between Two Worlds – time travel from a dystopian world to the past to save humanity
Vengeance of the Wolf – a horror/thriller
Tinker Smith & the Conspiracy of OZ – a group of ten genetically altered children are attempting to save the world from a technological, power hungry scientist, the self proclaimed Wizard of Oz
The Atrium – After a horrific car crash, a man finds himself trapped within an atrium that is lined with a series of framed pictures where he relives events from his life and faces self-confrontation and life or death decisions.
The Triple Threat – (How to Write a Novel and Stay Sane in the Process) – Teaches you how to write a novel from beginning to end
Tapestry – A book of medieval style poetry
These are also available in paperback at my website –
Have a great summer!
Accepting Being Imperfect
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery by joining pieces back together and filling cracks with lacquer mixed with gold. It highlights the flaws in the repaired item. In our world today there seems to be no end to the broken pieces of our society and we are all a part of it in some way. But these pieces can be put back together again and be made stronger than before with work on our part. I am reminded of this when I look at Kintsugi. It turns into a beautiful piece of art.
Accepting our flaws is a fundamental part of the writing process as well. No author writes a perfect first draft. It reminds me of one of my books written years ago that just never quite hit the mark. I ended up tearing it apart, section by section, and rewriting it at least three times. There was a point when I had almost given up on it altogether and considered scrapping it completely. It was very disheartening and left me wondering why I was even writing it at all.
I’m not one to quit easily, so I took it as a challenge, and reworked the entire story so that it became a cohesive plot filled with much more exciting actions and a richer storyline. As a result of fixing the flaws, it became a much fuller narrative that I was pleased to publish – Tinker Smith & the Conspiracy of OZ.
A group of ten genetically altered children are attempting to save the world
from a technological, power hungry scientist,
the self proclaimed Wizard of Oz,
who is determined to control the world with a computer virus.
Johnny and his father meet Tinker, one of the ten children
and together they forge ahead in the hope of survival
in a strange world of machination and espionage.
None of us are perfect, and in the artistic process of writing it sometimes means tearing apart our ideas, then putting them back together again to be stronger and more engaging.
It’s much like Kintsugi. From imperfect to amazing!
Happy Reading to everyone!
Solitaire
Who is Oscar Zoroaster??
Well it’s eminent; “Tinker Smith & the Conspiracy of OZ” is finished…sort of. As usual when the author says it’s done, it’s not actually done. However, the editing and proofreading is going well and the principle parties tell me…SOON! I am also told by the artist who is doing the cover that it will be finished at roughly the same time as the editing. Go team go!! I haven’t actually seen the cover yet, although I have seen the artist’s first rendering of the lead character, Tinker Smith, and I thought it was awesome! The bank of proof readers all had the same question…Who the heck is Oscar Zoroaster?! I’m sure that some of you out there already know the answer to this. If you do, please just bare with me.
Oscar Zoroaster was a snake oil salesman from Omaha, Nebraska. Through a series of misadventures, that he claims was no fault of his own, somehow magically made his way to the land of “OZ”. After he had made his way to the Emerald City, he performed the single greatest con act of his career…as you’ve probably already guessed; he convinced them he was a wizard. Now the real question here is…is Oscar Zoroaster a good guy or a bad guy? In the movie “The Wizard of OZ,” you really kinda have to wonder about this guy. After a couple of failed attempts at getting Dorothy and her friends killed, he finally and begrudgingly gives all of them what they apparently already had. In the novel, “Tinker Smith & the Conspiracy of OZ,” I have painted Oscar Zoroaster as not only a bad person, but the ultimate, the oober-criminal. It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. Now imagine Oscar as the world’s greatest geneticist with a real need to bring OZ to earth. Well there ya have it! As I mentioned in a previous blog, I once again designed all of the lead characters to mirror my family and friends. More on that later.
The first character I’m idealizing on, a genetically altered little boy fresh out of Oscar’s nightmares sets the stage for act one of this “OZ” odyssey. I’m hoping that other people out there in the hinter lands loved L. Frank Baum’s “OZ” books as much as I did. If nothing else, it’s one heck of a lot of fun! I have to go now; they’re expecting me in the Emerald City…an interview with the Scarecrow. You understand.
Solitaire Parke - Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books 