During the period beginning on the first Friday in October until the second day of November, the veils separating spiritual realms are extremely sheer.

A History of Spirit Keeping

Spirit Keeping, in the sense of how you keep spirits today, is nothing as it was even 120 years ago. Modern-Day Spirit Keeping is the by-product of the marriage between spirit conjuration and para-technology. Spirit Keeping, in its origin, is quite different. While those who were considered sages, psychics, or medicine men, would contact spirits for information, they were often sought for counsel through specific rituals performed to gain information for a specific person, or for personal awareness. Often times the person who had the ability to conjure the spirit was the only one allowed to converse with the spirit. The person coming forward to ask for guidance, or to ask for…

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in search of …

By Natalie J. Case

Are you a book reviewer? A reader who loves books? I’m looking for folks who will provide honest reviews of my books. I can provide electronic ARCs if you are a book blogger or reviewer.

forever-complete_tcc-readers-favorite

I know my work isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but if you’re interested in vampire stories that go beyond the modern teenage love story, you might enjoy Forever, the story of Amara: born to a vampire mother and raised in a clan of killers, Amara finds herself at odds with her family and drawn toward the world of man.

Once Upon a Broken Dream is an anthology of short stories that all emerged from a single prompt. Two of my own stories are in there and I edited the overall anthology. The stories cover a broad spectrum of genres. My two offerings are an introduction to a sci-fi story I hope to introduce next year, Jericho Jordan and a fairy-tale fantasy called Red-Belly about a world once governed by dragons.

Through Shade and Shadow

Through Shade and Shadow is the opening salvo in a series filled with danger, secret government agencies, psychics, healers and shape-shifters and a world on the brink of war. Meet Mason Jerah, a Shade, who we meet as his world dies, goes from a backwoods, sheltered boy to government agent at the focal point of the coming civil war and Alaric Lambrecht, a Shadow who just wants to keep his people safe. When they finally come together, it could signal the beginning of the end.

In-Gathering-Shade-Main-File In Gathering Shade picks up where Through Shade and Shadow left off, joining Mason and Alaric on a daring escape and meeting a few new players. Raven Ivany is a government agent, working for the same agency as Mason. She too is a Shade, and while investigating what seems to be a Shade serial killer, she happens across Zero, a teenager with the abilities of a Sage and a Shadow, together with Evan Chayton, they find themselves caught up in the machinations of a Shadow who has been manipulating things from behind the scenes.

Anyone interested in reviewing any of these, please reach out to me at natalie@nataliejcase.com.

October Birthstones: Opal and Tourmaline

Good Witches Homestead

OPAL SYMBOLISM AND MEANING

Arabic legend attests that opals fell from the sky during lightning storms, while Australian aborigines thought the creator visited the earth in a rainbow and imparted opals as a colorful gift.

Nearly 100 B.C., a Roman scholar by the name of Pliny compared opal gemstones to volcanoes and colorful artwork, realizing that opals have the ability to reflect the hues of any gem. Because of these colorful reflective qualities, during the Middle Ages, it was thought that opals harnessed immense power and luck.

Throughout time, opals have been regarded as a gem full of good luck and fortune, especially for those with October birth months.

OPAL COLOR

Opals have a primary color of either white or black, and many people find both appealing. The opal’s most defining quality is its kaleidoscope character that radiates all the colors of the rainbow. Microscopic silica, a crucial component to…

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Ozark Encyclopedia – L – Lady’s Slipper

Ozark Encyclopedia – K – Knives

introducing Zero and a cover reveal

By Natalie J. Case

I meant to introduce you all to Zero last week, but I completely spaced it. I’ll blame it on the combination of pain and pain meds. So today, I want to do that, but yesterday my publisher emailed me with the cover for In Gathering Shade, and as an added bonus, he included the re-designed cover for Through Shade and Shadow.

Through Shade and Shadow It’s gorgeous, don’t you think? I’m in love with it!

Okay, let’s talk about Zero. I started writing Zero’s character originally thinking she was the start of something new. Then I discovered that she was a part of Shades and Shadows.

We first meet her as a prisoner of sorts, the subject of some mysterious experimentation. Zero is sixteen, the daughter of a Chinese Sage who was seduced and eventually controlled by an American Shadow with questionable ambitions.

Zero is something of an escape artist, an adept thief, and particularly good with glamors. She doesn’t trust easily, so when she throws in with Raven and Evan she’s also got one foot out the door, and her eye on all the exits.

Even she doesn’t fully know what the experiments did to her, but she knows she doesn’t want to wait to find out. She has seen first hand what the man behind her captivity could do to the minds of others and she’s scared that he might have done the same to her.

Zero is both Sage and Shadow, and no one knows the full extent of what she can do. In many ways, Zero is a broken glass held together with duct tape.

I know, I know…what you really want is to see the cover for In Gathering Shade, right?

With no further ado…This cover is beautiful! I can’t stop staring at the two of them together!

BLM National Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board meeting in Grand Junction, CO, on Oct. 17-19

Straight from the Horse's Heart

NOTE: The BLM hasn’t yet updated a photo of their National Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board yet (the old one on their website is shared below). The BLM must’ve been too busy taking photos of oil fields and mines for their main BLM website page. It’s like playing “Where’s Waldo?” to try to find anything on the new BLM website, and I can’t seem to find the names and bios of the members of its National Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board. Can you? While the BLM has busy erasing data from the internet and throwing out data that used to be easily available to the public, it has added useless youtube videos on the Wild Horse & Burro Program website pages. See the BLM’s website page on the National Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board HERE.