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Dream worlds, the lost continent, and lovely ladies.The fourth novel is about another type of journey. . . one that takes you to someplace very familiar and yet . . . very far away. It is a time-travel novel which sends our hero, Tyler Grant, reeling back to his past fourteen years ago. This is OF TIME AND THE DREAMER, a novel told from a male and a female third-person point of view (except for some notes and memoirs made by Estra Gudrun). With the help of a dream researcher and experimenter, Tyler volunteers to be sent through his own dream corridor to his own past. The first two journeys are successful, but the third is brought about by a car collision where someone apparently tries to kill him. His body is in a coma in an Atlanta hospital and his mind is floating free, connecting finally with his life as a graduate student at a southern Illinois university. The interesting thing is . . . he knows what is going to happen. . . he knows what everyone is going to say. What he does not realize is that he will soon not be alone in his own past. Others will join him from his own world in the present. Be prepared for the journey of your life.This novel unfolds inside your eyelids . . . in your psyche. We all have pasts . . . some less pleasant that others. Would you want to be trapped in your past and forced to re-live it . . . in a parallel dimension?The fifth journey is a different kind of adventure -- the discovery of an ancient village inside the earth that may be a remnant of the original destroyed civilization of Atlantis. What begins as a search for a missing British explorer turns out not only to be a violent struggle between members of two search parties but mainly the discovery of an extraterrestrial device that can act as a time machine. Sloan Abbott connects with this device and travels back to the original Atlantis, only to realize that he and others in the search party have connections there. He sees the actual lost civilization and as well as ancient versions of two of his colleague who are occupying ancient versions of themselves. In fact, he also has an antediluvian counterpart whose body he is inhabiting. The question is . . . can any of them survive the impending destruction of Atlantis? This e-book novel is titled FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS.For some reason, Tyler cannot give up traveling through time as he demonstrates in RACING AGAINST TIME, an ebook novel using a phrase that often shows up when descriptions for certain films use the phrase "races against time." Instead of going into the past and remaining for an alternate version of his own past, he opts for the future and ends up, in a post-apocalyptic world. He jumps two years at first; then he is helped to jump two more years until he finds the mysterious island that has a strange connection to an ancient Sumerian society influenced by the extra-terrestial Nifilim. He is searching for his Chinese ladyfriend Xianshu but ends up also finding women from this text-messaging past who are part of an elite populace that considers itself to be superior to humans who have earthly ancestors. In this story, you will learn never to look at text messages in the same way.
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All of the photos below were taken in China and in the Philippines. The first two were in taken in Liaocheng City. The photo of Holden, my ginger tabby cat, was taken in Anshan. Actually, a cat does appear as a character in the third novel in the trilogy, DARK JOURNEYS. The three lovely ladies have counterparts in CIRCLES AND REALMS, the sequel to OF TIME AND THE DREAMER titled RACING AGAINST TIME and THE DARK JOURNEYS TRILOGY plus one titled THE CURSE OF THE LAMIAE.
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Dark NeighborhoodsThe Dark Journeys Trilogy is now available on Amazon-Kindle.Anyway, the first novel, as you know by now, is the one shown on the right. It introduces Dr. Harper Paget and his friends from McAbee University back in Illinois (where Harper is from). In Atlanta, Georgia, to do research, he and friends believe that they have opened a gate to admit these dimension-traveling entities. However, they have been around since ancient Greece, taking the forms of mythological creatures, and have been able to re-appear in different times in history. As it turns out, they have been battling with Harper's family for generations, and now he must deal with them in the form of the hideous kuntilanak creatures from Indonesia. In murderous fashion, they strive to take over the funky, eclectic area of Atlanta known as Star Cross Corners. Their ultimate goal, Harper learns from research and an Indonesian lady, is to take over a world which humans have not taken care of.Star Cross Corners is a suitable Gothic setting for the creatures who descend upon the neighborhoods in and around this area. Unfortunately, Harper, like others, cannot be sure of what he is dealing with. People that he loves can be killed or made to appear as themselves when they are actually disguises for the shape-shifting entities.Dark CorridorsAfter Harper Paget loses his wife and his friends, including an Indonesian love interest who was killed by one of the creatures while traveling in China, he leaves Atlanta and flies first to Indonesia and then to China. He teaches for a short time in a university that has an exchange program with McAbee University back in Illinois. Not long after his arrival, he is attacked by an inter-dimensional female creature and bedridden for weeks. When he loses that teaching position because of two more attacks around him, he transfers to a different Chinese university located in a rural area and moves into a campus hotel. This soon becomes haunted by the mind-twisting, memory stealing vicious creatures. His friend Pierre offers sage advice and support in the war against the kunti, as Pierre calls them. The kunti are able to control a wormhole or Einstein-Rose bridge which not only allows them to travel from one dimension or one time to another, but to transport humans from the present to the past and from one country to another. When Harper's Chinese lady friend is transported to a town in Illinois where Harper grew up and at the time when he was a youth, a girl from that town is exchanged with her and materializes in China. The problem for us is that we don't always know if all of the characters are who they appear to be ... even Harper ... when we are trapped in the dark corridors of the haunted hotel.Dark JourneysWarrick, Illinois, is a small town on the banks of the Mississippi. On Main Street is a closed movie theatre owned by the family of Corey Braedon, film instructor at McAbee University. When a young couple disappear near the theatre building, he is called back to his home town by farmer and instructor at the nearby community college, Lawrence Reuter. Other apparitions at the theatre when Corey and Lawrence visit it one evening cause Corey to summon Dr. Harper Paget from China.Harper and Corey stay at the farmhouse owned by Lawrence and his younger wife Elaine. Elaine is the older sister of Gordon, the boy who has disappeared.Also involved in the mysterious events is Selena Herrmann, former high school teacher and former friend of the girl, Patty, who vanished along with Gordon. Inside the theatre which inexplicably opened for her, she was drawn into a vortex which took her to China. Trading places with her is Geraldine, Harper's former lady friend in China. She ends up, however, shifting her timeline to appear when Harper is a youth. Controlling this vortex are the insidious, dimension-traveling entities whose goal is to take over this town where their enemy, Harper, like Corey, grew up. They aim to do this by not only occupying the bodies of the hideous creatures called kuntilanak from Indonesia but residents of Warrick as well.Recently added to the DARK JOURNEYS TRILOGY is a fourth novel to extend the series, CURSE OF THE LAMIAE. This one finds Harper back in China again and in more danger than before. He keeps in contact with Elaine, the wife of a friend in Warrick, Illinois, USA. He has two new lady friends, one of whom is actually human. Krittika is a curvaceous former student that he now sleeps with and the other a deadly and illusive kuntilanak with whom he slept only in a created illusion. When was the last time that you exchanged SMS texts with an evil non-human?Dark TwilightIn this e-book novel, you learn that Harper Paget did not destroy them all. The lamiae, often disguised as the kuntilanak from Indonesia, can take the place of women he thinks he knows, including Christabel, the young woman he knew from his previous visit to P.R. China. The lamiae -- enemies of his ancestors who even caused one them, Jacquema Paget, to be burned as a witch -- can appear and disappear, endangering those around him, including his Canadian colleague Nolan and his former student and now girl friend Krittika. Krittika even makes a journey to Indonesia where the kuntilanak originated.Christabel supposedly visits Harper for some forthright sex, but no one remembers her visit, even the Chinese girl who goes to the train station with Harper to help him pick her up. Tiffany, a former student at the last university where he taught, tells him that she is sorry to learn that she did not make an appearance. Yet he still receives text messages from Christabel on his cellphone. He is also shocked to learn that an assistant he has seen and talked with in the Foreign Affairs Office, Xue Hong Bo, has never been seen by others.The dark journeys are not over, Harper. Did you really think they would end so easily? Question is . . . what are going to do when dealing with deadly creatures that can find you in your dreams and even in your past?Coming soon.
FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS
If a second journey were being made delving into the earth after an earthquake opened a passageway -- one that would take you to ancient ruins of a subterranean village that may have been originally part of Atlantis, would you go? And what if on a high ledge above that village you find a remnant of a time capsule from space that existed before the time of Atlantis, one that could take you back to that lost civilization, would you make the ultimate time journey?
CIRCLES AND REALMSThe novel is finally here . . . the story of extraterrestrials who occupy a small Illinois town. A crop circle is discovered in a corn field on a farm owned by Jerry and Helen. Helen's family is coming for a reunion, and she and her husband hope her two brothers, Cale (a college professor), and Paul (an astute businessman) can help them solve the riddle. It has strange effects on people -- causing them to see shadowy figures in town and causing duplicates of deceased and absent family members to appear. Eventually, cell phone and computers cease to work, and the town goes ballistic.
Cale and Paul are both drawn into a separate realm by the aliens where they experience moments of their lives in the future. They also discover that the small theatre in town, owned by their father but managed by Elliot Weiss, a high school friend of Cale's and owner of a local electronics store, and other prominent citizens have been using the theatre building as a channel for illegal immigrants. His wife, Virginia, learns of this and warns Cale, a person who has also been his friend since high school; she also knows of the scandal
involving him and a classmate. Apparently he has a reason for being uneasy about being back in town; however, Virginia has forgiven him and becomes involved in his search for answers.Cale encounters in various forms throughout his life a female form (at one time she is gigantic) whom he first remembers seeing during his high school play. He
thinks that she may have been one of the Anunnaki gods or aliens from ancient Sumer and speculates that he may have a genetic connection with her.Available now on Amazon Kindle, Smashwords distributors, and Draft2Digital distributors, including Nook.
For Amazon, check ASIN: B01KUNM1TY
And beware. You have been warned.
FORBIDDEN VOICESfollowed byFOREIGNERSAND EMPERORSIs that why you came to teach in China . . . to have an affair with a beautiful Chinese colleague?
www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chukkgarard
plus Amazon ASIN: B01N3L1YJKand Draft2Digital
When the southern college where Alex had taught for 16 years went belly up, he tried his luck teaching in several universities in China. While there, he learned several things:
He was the only foreign PhD teaching English.
Many of the Chinese teachers of English only had BA degrees.
Many Chinese teachers resented his being there.
Many of the other foreign teachers were really there as tourists and didn't consider teaching their priority.
He was expected by some of the Chinese to teach as they did. However, he told them that when they hired him, they hired American methods. His British colleague had made the same point about using British methods.
Falling in love with a beautiful Chinese teacher had its drawbacks as well as good points.
Some of his fellow foreign colleagues who had been teaching there for a while believed that they were in charge of new teachers.
He not only had to ask himself why he had come over here to teach in the first place . . . but why it was that he didn't really want to return to his own country.
FOREIGNERS AND EMPERORS"You can't come into a Chinese university and expect it to be like teaching back home in the US. That is not the way we teach here in China.""They didn't hire me to teach like the Chinese. When I come into the classroom, it becomes an American classroom."Alex never stopped being the foreigner and the boys continued to be the little emperors.When Alex returned for his second tour-of-duty as a professor of literature at universities in China, he encountered even more problems with Chinese teachers (they would even strike him in the back in public), with administrators back at the university in Indiana because of inept communications, and with students who thought he should teach like the Chinese teachers. Fortunately, he maintained text communications with a former colleague and an ex-girlfriend at the university where he taught in the past.He tried to explain that he was not hired to be like the Chinese teachers who were often intimidated by parents who believed that because they were paying tuition, their little emperors should pass all of the courses."This is not how our last teacher taught us.""Do I look like that teacher?" -
A scene from the time-travel e-book novelAn image of Estra’s father materialized in her mind. He was looking up at the New England night sky, pointing at a blank space between clusters of stars. She was a young girl, and she was looking too. They stood close to her mother’s clothesline, less than a hundred feet from the small back porch of their modest, white-frame house. Her father loved standing outside at night, talking about a universe that seemed boundless, endlessly repetitious.
On one such occasion, he mentioned the Old Norse belief that an immense ash tree called Yggdrasil supported the cosmos. A huge dragon gnawed at the roots of this tree, so one day the cosmos would come to an end. “Yet,” he said, “the old myths say that a nameless power will one day create a new world beyond the edge of time. But what I’m wondering is -- what’s beyond that edge of time? You know, that’s something we can’t grasp. What’s beyond the edge of the universe?”
“Another universe?” Estra had asked him. “Maybe a bigger one.”
This was one of those times when she was glad that she had no brother or sister -- particularly a brother. Her father would probably have been sharing his thoughts with him -– not with her.
“We don’t know,” he told her. “If there is an end, what’s beyond it? A big wall? What’s on the other side of the wall? A replication of this universe? Is there another me and you out there?”
Estra thought about a tropical fish swimming in an aquarium. He reached the plate glass at one end of the aquarium; his nose bumped against it and he turned. He could go no farther; that was the end of his universe. His universe was a controlled environment. He could not go beyond it and live, unless he was contained in something that included the temperature and salinity of the water in the aquarium, just as humans could not exist in space without the controlled environment matching what they had on earth. But what about the end of the universe: the space beyond the aquarium?
“What if there is an edge of time?” her father asked her. “Maybe we start over.”
All of this was before the popular theory of chaotic eternal inflation. The universe might continue stretching out forever.
Well, Dad? Estra thought. Maybe we’ve discovered the end of the universe and at least one of the duplicates. And if we stay here, we’ll time trip again and repeat what we did in still another universe. And if there is no end, if it winds around in time and doubles back on itself, there will be no edge, no beyond.
Whatever it was -- and whatever this passageway through time was that Tyler, with Craig’s help, had discovered -- it served as a bridge between universes, like the ivory bridge of the Mabinogian hero Maxim -– the personal symbol in his own private myth.
She found herself agreeing with what her father had said: It could drive her crazy if she thought about it too much.OF TIME AND THE DREAMER -
The means to reach us"Us" means ghost-hunters or collectors of the paranormal: actual non-explainable experiences (encounters with ghosts, etc.), reviews of paranormal or UFO books, reviews of horror and ghost films (including my list of favorite ghost movies of all time), and letters or comments. My paranormal blog site is http://www.virgostone.wordpress.com.Also check out THE HORROR EXPERIENCE hosted by my friend Bryan Hansen, HORROR HELLFIRE CLUB, FANS OF ALL THINGS HORROR, BRITISH HORROR WRITERS, ALONE WITH THE HORRORS: HORROR FICTION, etc.affiliated with Facebook. Some of these horror sites can become a little profane, so be warned. You will also find some excellent science-fiction sites, most of which I use for my time-travel e-books. There are also sites for writers in general, such as KINDLE PUBLISHERS, NOOK AND KINDLE READERS, AUTHORS PROMOTING AUTHORS, BOOK WORLD, CELEBRATING AUTHORS, ALL THINGS BOOKS, AUTHORS AND READERS SHARING POOL (which has an excellent policy for promoting your books), PROMOTE YOURSELF, PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS, THE LITERACY LOUNGE: AUTHORS, WRITERS, PUBLISHERS, AND ILLUSTRATORS.etc. Join one of more of the sites and have fun chatting with others who share your interests.New sites seem to crop up everyday. The horror groups are good places to join discussions about horror books and films. Recently there was, for example, a lengthy discussion thread about THE EVIL DEAD and Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING. Come and join in -- share your opinions. Even though I don't consider myself to be strictly a horror writer (more of a writer of the macabre, as Harlan Ellison, philosopher and author, states regarding his own work), it is a good place to start. I try to focus more on suspense with a few scares instead of splatter-gore and an abundance of four-letter words. I rely on psychological terror, even though the insidious entities from another dimension can be pretty nasty (see photos below).
She's coming after you, and she's evil. She was burned as a witch in
17th-century Britain. In Indonesia, she was a sorrowful creature whose
unborn infant had been ripped from her body. Even with this hole in her
back, she was known to seduce young men.If you are a male, she
will seduce you to death. If you are a female, she will eliminate you as
competition. Time means nothing to her. Dimensions are no barriers for
her. She can reach you in your dreams, in your memories of your own past, and wherever you are in the world.Good luck, Harper.
DARK
TWILIGHT
The mysterious woman that Cale encountered in his youth is still with him in the small rural community where a crop circle appears in his sister's field and where the family movie theatre, although closed, becomes a strange part of the agenda of alien visitors. So, you think you are safe living in a small town where extraterrestrials can affect your past memories as well as your present. Think again.Be careful when encountering theCIRCLES AND REALMS.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THE BATTLE WITH EVIL WAS FINISHED . . .When Harper Paget comes back to China from his small Illinois river town where he fought the time-traveling creatures on his own turf, he discovers that they are still here and are still determined to eliminate him and other threats like his Canadian colleague.Now he is not certain who is whom since the Lamiae can become those university employees and lady friends from other universities that he knew at other universities.Before he and his colleague can fight them, they have to be able to recognize them. Until then, they can only live in the DARK TWILIGHT.
Tyler Grant discovers that mysteries and dangers appear when he dares sending and receiving text messages from a lovely lady in the Philippines and one lady from the future. The question is, are they all merely text friends or much more. He discovers a major condrum when a young lady from his own time, Mina, is transported to the futuristic island ahead of him. There they meet an elite advanced human named Nin, apparently Mina's alter-ego but with unearthly ancestors. His original journey to Atlantis-Isle was to find his lost-in-time girlfriend, but he also finds Nin and problems from another woman whom he thought he knew only through text messages -- Anna or Inanna. Who is she exactly and what abiities does she have?RACING AGAINST TIME
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Time traveling to the past is nothing like being whisked away to two future worlds.You may never trust your texting experiences again. How do you know who is on the other end of your texts?What if you discover that one of the women you are flirting with in the Philippines has a connection with a future society and the other is texting you from two years in your future. You are being pulled to two time periods, and the second one is safer than the first. In the first, catastrophes render life on the planet an existence where scavengers are in control.In the second future world, you discover you have jumped to a world of islands in strange waters where people that you thought had died out centuries before the era described in the Bible are in control as an elite super-human society. They are the ancient Sumerians, and earth-born humans are little more than servants.You come here mainly to tract the time-traveling path of your girlfriend from your town time, but her safety turns out to be only one of your concerns if you wish to survive. You are, after all, RACING AGAINST TIME.
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The means to reach me:I am now on all sorts of sites -- as advised by other writers who self-publish. Find me on Goodreads (where I review other books), Facebook (where I review other books as well as post photos -- including the cats I had while in China), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google Plus, and a site for writers (www.writers-editors. com). If you are a serious writer of articles and looking for markets, join this organization and meet the helpful Dana Castell. You can also find her on LinkedIn. Yes, you can also be a writer of fiction, which is what I am these days.Free Kindle Cloud Reader (if you don't yet have a Kindle): http://amzn.to/ltmrpK8Check me out . . .www.smashwords.com/interview/chukkgarardwww.smashwords.com/profile/view/chukkgarardhttp://www.amazon.com/Charles-Justus-Garard/e/B00B6S8TUSRecently I joined a new publishing group called Draft2Digitalhttps://www.draft2digital.com/book/116371 OF TIME AND THE DREAMERhttps://www.draft2digital.com/book/92570 DARK NEIGHBORHOODS
https://www.draft2digital.com/book/93599 DARK CORRIDORS
https://www.draft2digital.com/book/115075 DARK JOURNEYS
https://www.draft2digital.com/book/92258 FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS
Pages for the new time-travel adventure novel From Here to Atlantis:
www.smashwords.com/books/view/535284
Watch here for further information in the future. Thank you for visiting my web site. I really appreciate your time and consideration.
Also . . . please see my blog at http://www.virgostone.me
Have fun there with reviews and outrageous ads for my ebook novels. If you have psychic or ghostly experiences to share, feel free to do so there.
Charles Garard phd atwww.facebook.com/charles.g.phdorwww.facebook.com/search/charlesgarardphd/(whatever works)Also please see my blog athttp://www.virgostone.meSign in there and have fun.
FORBIDDEN VOICES and FOREIGNERS AND EMPERORS are my only non-science-fiction and non-horror novels so far. Both will take readers inside the classrooms in Chinese universities.Alex tells the Little Emperors students with their smart-phones that he was not hired to teach like the Chinese, and when he enters the classroom it becomes an American classroom.
