Mindstorm: Parlay at Ologo: A review

Today Adventurers I'll be reviewing a book called Mindstorm: Parlay at Ologo by Cindy Koepp. From the beginning this book played out like an old school Anime movie in my mind (and I love Anime so this is great.) It deals with the tough issue of bigotry using an interesting take on the idea of the telepath and what it looks like to fight with and heel with psychic abilities. Calla is a woman who is born with a genetic anomaly that weakens her telepathic abilities. Thomas is a man who's past with drug use (trying to suppress his own abilities) has left him with a hatred of those with Calla's condition. When these two are forced together to negotiate peace on the war ravaged planet of Ologo will Thomas be able to put that aside for the mission? And what secret does Calla know that could affect Thomas? find out in this wonderful book. I give Mindstorm: Parlay at Ologo a 5 out of 5 gears    

A message From the Author

Hello Adventurers. I'm so thankful you've all been such loyal readers and today I'm so thrilled to announce the release of my 5th book. It's called The Art of Facts. It's a steampunk cozy mystery set in the world of archaeology. It's got romance, ancient treasures, and murder. what more could you ask for from a great cozy?

Dr. Maxine Hadison can't figure out why her father would send her an ancient jewel. The mystery only deepens when he's found dead in a hotel room. She has no idea how deep she'll have to go to solve it. She follows the trail into a world of Smugglers, out and out thieves, and those out to steal credit for other's discoveries. Maxine has to find out who would kill for a secret lost to time before she becomes the next victim.

You can find The Art of Facts here on Amazon.com

Interview With an Author: Cindy Koepp

Welcome Adventurers! Today I have a special treat for you. I have guest blogger and fellow author Cindy Koepp.

Well, hello! So good to be seeing you.
Today I’ve brought Mindstorm: Parley at Ologo to share with you. Mindstorm was published by Grace Bridges at Splashdown Books on Spookday in 2014.

Tell my adventurers about the world you created.

Mindstorm: Parley at Ologo takes place in the future on a space station and a planet. Interstellar travel is possible, and humans have gone forth and established colonies and business interests all over the place including on a planet that has had an on again, off again war among the two sentient races that are native: the arboreal Gotrians and the amphibious Olvians.



Earth, itself, has had its own troubles. Geneticists monkeying around with human DNA have created an offshoot of humanity. This offshoot has enhanced psionic ability. They communicate telepathically and most of them can teleport even across interstellar distances. Mistreated by their human masters, the psionics rebelled, took over the Haidar Space Station, and called themselves Haidarians. Although mostly self-sufficient, they deal with other races using the only commodity they have on the space station: their people. Haidarians hire out their experts to other races to help them solve major problems.
As the war on Ologo escalates, a plague breaks out, and both the Olvians and the Gotrians assume the other is responsible for breaking the galactic ban on biological warfare. They hire the Haidarians to figure it out.
That’s when our two main characters join the fray.

What inspired you to write about these characters?

Dr. Calla Geisman is a fantastically smart psionic medicine specialist with a genetic quirk that limits her psionic ability to a fraction of the “normal” Haidarian. In exchange for the lower power level, she gained a resistance to chemicals and an eidetic memory, but many Haidarians consider her to be crippled. Some extremists think people with her genetic quirk should be eliminated to avoid contaminating the gene pool.



I identify with Calla because I have a pretty good (but not nearly eidetic) memory and a disability that carries a stigma even into the modern era when people are supposed to be enlightened and tolerant of differences. Writing about Calla was a way for me to explore some of the difficulties being disabled but capable while being perceived as useless by certain parts of society.



On the other hand, nothing’s ever that clear cut. To provide a bit of balance to the tale, I wrote Thomas McCrady. His complicated past has led him to hate people like Calla. Although he has cause to be extremely cautious, he struggles with what he knows to be intellectually correct and what he feels as a result of a prior encounter with someone else who had the same genetic quirk as Calla.

How long has this character been in your thoughts?

Um… Calla? IIRC, the character started poking around about the time I started teaching, so about 20 years ago. I had to fight a major university to finish my teaching degree because my disability freaked them out. A not-so-highly-regarded movie that I actually enjoyed rather a lot came out about that time, and between the event and my brain going “what if” with the movie plotline, the story that eventually mutated into Mindstorm came into being.
Thomas came a year or two later when I realized she needed a foil to make this more interesting.

What is the one trait you wished you shared with your main character?

I wish I had Calla’s eidetic memory. My memory is pretty solid, but not half as good as hers. I often have trouble recalling the names of things and people. I can list off characteristics of the thing I’m thinking about, picture it in my head, and come up with obscure details … but the name? Pfff… Having Calla’s memory would be much less frustrating.
I also wish I had Thomas’s teleportation ability. I hate traveling. Teleportation would make doing so much less annoying.


Thanks for letting me come play today!

I'm so glad you could come.

Cindy Koepp

After hatching years ago in a land very far away, Cindy tried to hide under a secret identity, but she finally gave that up and started openly telling people she was an alien capable of adopting many forms. To her surprise, with the exception of one class of elementary students, no one believed her. They assumed she was joking, thereby giving her the perfect cover story.

She spent 14 years mutating the minds of four-footers – that’s height, not leg count – but gave that up to study the methodology needed to mutate the minds of adult humans. In her off time, she writes about her adventures under the guise of telling science fiction and fantasy stories, records her blog articles, and reads wonderful books in exchange for editing help.

Originally from Michigan, Cindy Koepp has a degree in Wildlife Sciences and teaching certification in Elementary Education from rival universities. After teaching for fourteen years, she pursued a master's degree in Adult Learning with a specialization in Training and Performance Improvement. Cindy has five published science fiction and fantasy novels, a serial published online, short stories in six anthologies, and a few self-published teacher resource books. When she isn't reading or writing, Cindy spends time whistling with a crazy African Grey. Cindy is currently working as a tech writer in Iowa and as an editor with Barking Rain Press.

The Counterfeit: A Review

Welcome Adventures. Today's book is by Nate Allen and it's called The Counterfeit. In this book the author takes a speculative look at the after life. The style of the book reminded me a lot of The Shack with it's vivid setting descriptions and colorful prose. While I found some instances a little graphic (what can I say I border on Hallmark level innocents on some of my reading) the over all story and flow was well written. I give The Counterfeit a 4 out of 5 gears.

Interview with an Author: Angie Grigaliunas

Welcome Adventurers! Today I have a special treat for you. I have guest blogger and fellow author Angie Grigaliunas.

Tell my adventurers the name of your book and about the world you created.

Hi! My book is Sowing (The Purification Era, Book One). It’s dystopian fantasy…so it’s basically a dystopian society in a fantasy world. Power belongs to the Hulcondans, a military regime (think Nazis in brutality and ideals). The Hulcondans profess to protect the other humans from a humanoid creature race called itzalin. Some people see the Hulcondans as the good guys, the saviors. Others see them as corrupt, ruthless soldiers who get away with pretty much anything and everything. It’s a dark, violent world; oppression is a daily occurrence (even if most people don’t recognize it as such), forced marriages are increasingly common throughout the nations, even the slightest hint of opposition is met with execution, and there seems to be little hope of any rebellion attempt lasting long enough to make a difference, let alone overthrow them. Yet those who refuse to live under totalitarian rule keep trying to fight back, which is kind of where the story starts: with a rebellion brewing in the city where my two main girls live.

The story switches perspectives between these sisters – Rabreah and Ariliah – who view the world in opposite lights. Rabreah is a rebel and committed to overthrowing the Hulcondans; unbeknownst to her sister’s involvement in fighting back, Ariliah trusts the Hulcondans and thinks their presence keeps everyone safe. Through the two of them, we start to see that things might not be as black and white as it may seem…and the enemy may not be the ones we expect.

What inspired you to write about this character?

For this, I’ll talk about Rabreah, because she truly started it all. There’s this song, “Under a Killing Moon,” by Thrice. It gave me an image of a group of people killing someone – burning them – and someone else standing nearby in the darkness, watching, knowing that it was wrong, that the doomed person was innocent. But they also knew that if they spoke up to defend the doomed, they themselves would meet the same fate.

The murders became the Hulcondans while the watcher became the character of Rabreah: a girl who sees the wrongs happening in her society and desperately wants to stand up…but who also knows that it may cost her everything.

~How long has this character been in your thoughts?

Oh, goodness. This is going to be a long story, haha! Let’s see… I started the very first incarnation of this story 2003, but I forgot about it until late 2008. I think once I found it again, Rabreah was a pretty quick idea – though the original plan was that she was killed for her rebellion, and the story followed Ariliah as she dealt with the aftermath of seeing her sister die and not being able to save her. (It was so horrible. Ugh. So sad.)

In 2010, after struggling between this story and another, I switched my focus entirely to this one. So kind of from 2010, she was definitely there with her death as the inciting incident…but she also wasn’t really a character. She was dead from the start, so I didn’t know anything about her apart from her rebel involvement, her protectiveness over her sister (their mom is abusive), and her dying far before her time. I wrote what I thought was book one, but my editor advised me to start earlier in the story. In going back in time to write a new book one, I found that I needed to actually write some of Rabreah’s side of things. And in doing THAT…she decided she didn’t want to be dead anymore. Which changed almost everything.

Silly characters. How dare they take over?

So she’s been sort of floating around since 2008, but it was 2014 that she actually became a character in the story, gained her own voice, and put down the first real roots of what she’s become.

~What is the one trait you wished you shared with your main character?

Rabreah is, in my opinion, an amazing girl. She can be such a jerk, so mouthy, so distrustful and angry…but at the end of the day, she is such a selfless young woman. She puts herself between her sister and their terrible mom, she is willing to fight corruption and what she views as evil, and she’s willing to die for what she believes. For as frustrating as she can be sometimes, she is a fighter, and I love that about her. She doesn’t let anyone push her around, she doesn’t bow to pressure, and she wants nothing more than to see her sister and her people living in freedom. So…her heart, her selflessly brave heart…I would love to be more like that.

The Circular Staircase: A Review

Welcome Adventurers. Today I'll be reviewing The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I was first clued (see what I did there?) into the works of Miss Rinehart when I saw the Hallmark Channel movie Garage Sale Mystery: Novel Murders. This book is a thrilling mix of chilling suspense and a tricky mystery. When a middle aged spinster and her niece and nephew decide to rent a house in the country for the summer mysterious events start to happen. They begin with a shadowy presence on the front porch and a mysterious rattling in the night and culminate in the finding of a dead body at the base of the circular staircase. The opening line alone was enough to completely hook me and the story held me until the end. The Circular Staircase is well worth the read and I give it a 5 out of 5 gears.

An interview with a writer: Bokerah Brumley

Welcome Adventurers! Today I have a special treat for you. I have guest blogger and fellow author Bokerah Brumley.

Tell my adventurers the name of your book and about the world you created.

Goodness. Between all my shorts and my novels, I’ve created quite a few. On the fantasy side of things, I’m excited for everyone to meet Imani Chausiku from Imani Earns Her Cape. It’s a middle-grade fantasy world. Imani is a Fae incognito. She lives just outside of Washington, D.C., and her mom works as an ambassador to the President. As a part of growing up, her mom takes Imani back to the Fae world for a ritual test. Once they get there, Imani discovers all sorts of secrets from her mom’s past. It should be out around the first of the year from Clean Reads Press.

Right now, I think my favorite science fiction character is Sirocco Arioch. She’s the youngest of four siblings. Her father passed away under questionable circumstances, and her mother assumed command of the Arioch corporation—the universe’s leading exporter of duct tape. The novel is called Four Winds From a Tempest, but we’ll see whether the publisher keeps that or not. I expect that you’ll be able to meet Sirocco sometime next year. 

What inspired you to write about this character?

For Imani, I love the name. I love the idea of a Fae living in our world, being bullied, but choosing to rise above retaliation. I also loved building the Fae world. There’s a Mergone tree, a sentient tree, a rabbit-burro that pulls a rock man, and all sorts of fun things that I was able to create in the Fae world. Imani definitely earns her cape, and she meets family members that she never knew existed.

For Sirocco, I wanted to write a space opera about a family and the ties that remain no matter what. There’s a thread of romance, but it’s a subplot and not really something that has anything to do with Sirocco. Again, I loved the world building. I made up multiple planets and tried to give each one a different look. Sirocco is something of a rescuer, and she helps wherever she can. In the course of the novel, she changes many lives—sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

How long has this character been in your thoughts?

Imani has been a friend of mine since last year. She introduced herself last summer and then I wrote out her story. Sirocco’s been around longer. She (and her siblings) came ‘round in 2015. I’m only just now able to polish up her story, though, but I’m as excited about that as ever.

What is the one trait you wished you shared with your main character?

With Imani, I love who she wants to be. By the end, she learns to have confidence in who she is and what she’s capable of. She learns that she’s much more than what she thought, and she learns to fit in by being unique.

Sirocco learns that she doesn’t know as much as she thought she did, but she never turns away from someone that needs help. It gets her into trouble sometimes, but I love that about her. Her desire to help gives her an uncommon bravery and boldness.