New Book, The Bold Trail. A Samuel Garrison Western

 
 

    Goodreads Book Giveaway
 

   

       
   

   

     

          The Bold Trail
     

     

          by L. R. Pendleton
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends August 31, 2018.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     

   

   

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A New Western Novel by L. R. Pendleton

 

The Bold Trail

A Samuel Garrison Western

In 1851, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California, gold hunters search for their riches, but Samuel Garrison is on an even more intense search.  He is on the trail of a dangerous and evil man, and he carries .44 caliber bullets in his Colt Dragoon with the man's name on them. In Columbia Township, Ohio, Garrison left behind a busy life as a farmer and horse rancher, and at times, he wishes he was still in Ohio, rather than in this wild and barely-civilized frontier; but he is in gold country because he made a promise, one he intends to keep, even if it means his death.  Garrison discovers his world changing dramatically as he faces anxiety, family secrets, denials, death, and grief.  Can Samuel Garrison meet the many challenges and terrors that he faces in this raw land, and will he be able to transform those fears into courage? 

  Sierra Pines Publishing

California

 Now at Kindle, and in Print.

A Meeting of the Minds: Don and Linda Pendleton

 

My article, "A Meeting of the Minds: Don and Linda Pendleton," is published in the latest issue, #101 of Paperback Parade, which just came out by Gryphon Books, Gary Lovisi.   I write about my late husband's long writing career, our books, our writing, paperback covers and lots more.  

A short look at author, Don Pendleton:

"Fifty years ago, in 1968, The Executioner, Mack Bolan was conceived in the mind of Don Pendleton.  It was an unsettling time in America with the Vietnam War, civil unrest on our city streets and college campuses, love and flower-power in the psychedelic streets of San Francisco's Height-Ashbury and Berkeley, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, while grief and disbelief had barely healed from the earlier assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the long and troubling iniquities of the Mafia and organized crime.

  "Don wrote the first novel in his Executioner series, War Against the Mafia out of his desire to express his discomfort with the reaction of many Americans to our soldiers who were dying for our country in the jungles of Vietnam and those coming home to outrageous verbal and physical abuse. So Mack Bolan became Don's symbolic statement. He also became every soldier's voice. Don created a heroic character in Bolan, a true hero who was dedicated to justice. The enemy that Bolan had to fight was no longer on the battlefields of Vietnam but right here on American soil, and that enemy was the Mafia.

     "With the March,1969 publication of the first paperback, War Against the Mafia, the response was great and not only was it the beginning of a long-lasting best-selling international series, The Executioner: Mack Bolan, but the launch of a new literary genre, Action/Adventure, a term Don Pendleton coined for the purpose of marketing his books."

-Linda 

 Don and Linda Pendleton

The Magazine for Western Fans: Head West! Summer 2018

My article, "Inherit the Genes," was published today in the first issue of Head West! Western Magazine, published in print by Piccadilly Publishing.   It is available in print at Lulu and I believe soon at Amazon.  The magazine for Western Fans Everywhere.  Piccadilly is the publisher of numerous Western Series and is bringing back into ebooks  some of the most popular and best-loved Western and action-adventure series fiction of the last forty years. 

I enjoyed writing my article on Westerns.  I'm currently writing a Western novel, my first Western, although I did an historical set in the Civil War period:  Corn Silk Days, Iowa, 1862.  The novel I'm working on is set in the California Gold Rush.  I'm looking to have it released early summer.  

 

 

 Thanks, Piccadilly.
-Linda
   

Emma

So powerful. 

Artist Gil Cohen Interview

Author Don Pendleton and Book Cover artist, Gil Cohen, 

1985.  Photo by Linda Pendleton

The original The Executioner: Mack Bolan series was created by Don Pendleton in 1969. It went on to become one of the most popular action/adventure franchises in history, selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.

In 1972, Gil Cohen began painting the covers for the Executioner books, and did so for many years.  His depiction of Mack Bolan was,  and still is, the "image" of Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan character for many readers of the books, now close to 900 books.

A few years ago, Gil Cohen left book cover illustration behind and focuses on his love for aviation.  He is an internationally known painter of aviation and military art.  

Read Gil's very interesting interview by Bob Deis.   There you will see some of Gil Cohen's Mack Bolan book covers. 

~Linda  

             

Interview of author Linda Pendleton by Ben Boulden

“Ultimately, all writers long for the opportunity to share their creation with the many. That is why most writers write. But we also write because we have to. We have to allow our creativity the avenue to find its proper place–expressed on the written page.” ~Linda Pendleton

My recent interview with Ben Boulden for his excellent blog, Gravetapping--Read my interview here

Thanks, Ben.  You might also want to check out Ben's latest book,  his second book in Stephen Mertz' Blaze! series of adult Westerns:  Spanish Gold.  

My latest novel, my third Catherine Winter Private Investigator Series, now in Print, Kindle, and Audio.    

Free UFO Book

Brothers In Space

I stand alone upon the night,

In awe to see the angel’s light;

The cosmos opens like a sea,

Enveloping, embracing me.

My heart beats fast to watch you fly,

A streaking brilliance through the sky,

But just a glimpse as you flash by;

You tip your hat—to say goodbye?

I hold my breath as you return,

Then see your lights, how bright they burn;

This time you slow, and let me see—

Our minds collide–eternity?

I feel the bond, I know the place,

No matter here or outer space;

I ask the question from my heart—

Is it too late?  Too late to start?

Within the beam of light I stand,

My soul leaps forward to expand;

I know my brother comes to find

A gift of love from all mankind.

~ Linda Pendleton

Crop Circles in the Fields, Objects in the Skies; and Creature in the Bedroom is a FREE book by Linda Pendleton. It is a collection of articles related to the idea that extraterrestrials do exist and periodically have made visits to earth, and continue to do so. As a result there appears to be evidence of their existence and has led to studies and research by scientific methods. A look at extraterrestrial contact, abduction, UFO crop circles, by professional researchers, including the late Harvard professor, psychiatrist John E. Mack, author of two books on abduction research, including his research into the sightings by 62 school children in 1994 in Ruwa, Zimbabwe; newspaper article written by Stephen Coan of The Witness Newspaper, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa about American filmmaker Randall Nickerson who is making a documentary on the Ruwa sighting; Nuclear physicist, UFO researcher and author, Stanton Friedman writing on the UFO challenge; crop circles researcher, and president of the BLT Research Team, Inc., Nancy Talbott, and her intensive research on crop circles in the Netherlands; Lucy Pringle, photographer, International authority on crop circles and pioneer researcher into effects of electromagnetic field on living systems; Contactee, Athena Demetrios, medium and author; Shawn Randall, crop circle researcher, medium and author; stories of personal UFO sightings by three authors, decades apart; and a look at the United States Space Policy, adopted 2006.

 

---

 Brothers In Space, Copyright 2000, Linda Pendleton.  Appeared in Whispers From the Soul by Don and Linda Pendleton, 2000.  

Download the FREE Book at my page at Smashwords

Enjoy! 

Reading Devices

I often smile at comments being made about ereader devices, mainly Kindle.  Some people are resistant to them, yet they will read on their cell phones constantly, whether it be an article or messages.  The point is, you do not need a Kindle or a Kindle Fire, to read an ebook.   You can download the Kindle FREE app to your devices.  I have Kindle app on my Kindle Fire, my phone, and my PC.  I read from my PC more than my other devices.   I suppose I like reading that way because I am so used to writing and reading my manuscript on my PC monitor.  I wonder if some are just stubborn in holding onto the idea that you cannot read a book without the tactile feel of paper. Maybe it's like using the Sears catalog instead of toilet paper. 😉  Wasn't there resistance when we went from vinyl record albums, 33 1/3, 78s, 45s, and left the turntable behind as we went to digital cassettes, CDs, MP3?  Some of you are too young to have used the turntable records, although I hear they are coming back.  So reading has changed, whether it be a newspaper for our daily news, or a book.  I tend to still want nonfiction books I purchase to be in print, especially ones for my research library.  I find it easier to research a print copy.  Maybe that goes back to doing research in volumes of encyclopedias.  As far as fiction, it, too, depends on the book, the author, or genre, if it is something I want on a real bookshelf.  After having to reduce the number of books in my home several times, it's nice not to add bookshelves, especially when downsizing or running out of wall space.  So the future is ebooks.  Just like music changed, so is reading.

~Linda 

Ray "Crash" Corrigan, film actor, stuntman, and owner of Corriganville Ranch.

Ray "Crash" Corrigan, film actor, stuntman, and owner of Corriganville Ranch, Simi Valley, CA.  Many Western films and TV series were filmed there beginning in 1938 into the 1960s.  I believe the first movie filmed there was The Drums of Fu Munchu serials; then Fort Apache (1948); The Long Ranger 1949-1957; Cisco Kid 1950-1956; Adventures of Kit Carson; Rin Tin Tin 1954-59; Have Gun Will Travel 1957-1963; Casey Jones 1957.   According to his own letter I read at his son Tom's restaurant website, Crash stated that more than 3,500 films and TV shows used his ranch at one time or another.   

From 1936-1938, Corrigan appeared in the first 24 Mesquiteers films (Republic made a total of 51 Mesquiteers films from 1936-1943)  Corrigan often got into his gorilla suit for film rolls.  He died in 1976 at the age of 74.    

Photo by my family on our visit there in 1953.  

Don Pendleton's The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series

A new interview of me by Brian Woodman Jr. concerning my late husband, Don Pendleton and his creation of The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series.  The series and spin-offs now number almost 900 books. 

You can find it HERE:  QA-The-classic-paperback-series-The-Executioner.  Thanks,Brian for the opportunity. 

Don Pendleton's original series, books 1-15 and 17-38, are avail;able as ebooks, and books one - three, War Against the Mafia, Death Squad, and Battle Mask, are also available in print.  

This is what one fan, James Smothers, had to say about Don Pendleton and the series. 

"Why do I like Mack Bolan? In May 2012 I was laid off from a job I worked for 9 years. Prior to this I hadn't read Bolan for 20 years. Read him from 1983 to 1991 with sporadic books but could never locate the first 38 books prior to internet. Since I had a summer off I decided to read Don's original books. Enmeshed myself in the beginnings of Bolan's quest. Don's writing was amazing. Read the first 7 books multiple times. Helped me forget all my troubles with lack of employment and sent me on a wonderful journey. Don empowered me to work on goal setting and never give up. With Satan's Sabbath (Don's last book) I realized how much of a genius he truly was. I felt like I accomplished a great thing as Don spoke to me from yellowed lost pages."

Thanks, James for sharing.   

~Linda  

Reference Books on Writing

Books on writing, among those I have on my bookshelves or Kindle.   

Stephen King: On Writing.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

Don Pendleton:  The Metaphysics of the Novel: The Inner Workings of a Novel and a Novelist.

Michael Newton: How to Write Action Adventure Novels.

Donald Maass: Writing the Breakout Novel.

Donald Maass:  The Fire in Fiction.

Donald Maass: The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

Richard Rhodes: How to Write.

Alexandra Sokoloff: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors.

Maren Elwood: Characters Make Your Story.

J. Michael Straczynski: The Complete Book of Script-Writing.

Scott Meredith:  Writing to Sell.

James Scott Bell:  Revision and Self Editing

Jack M. Bickham:  Scene and Structure. 

~Linda 

Phyllis A. Whitney, mystery writer

Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), was one of my favorite mystery/suspense writers. She published more than 70 novels. In 1988, she was recipient of the MWA Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. Her novels have been translated in 30 languages and sold in the millions. She was still writing into her 90s.
She ascribed her success as a writer to persistence and an abiding faith in her abilities. She wrote in her "Guide to Fiction Writing:" "Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those too). Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard.”

~Linda

Softly With Love, Spirit Guides and Angels

My new nonfiction book, print and Kindle: 

 

At Amazon. 

"Don't We Know Who We Are?"

"We are the sun, the moon, the planets and stars, the wind and the rain, the sands and the seas–we, the miracles of creation, are everything that has ever been.

"What's more, and what's more important, we are everything that ever shall be!

"We are atoms and empty space, molecules and living cells, a colony of sentient beings called together from the depths of time to re-experience the world!  We are consciousness and understanding, awareness and appreciation, sensation and cognition.  We are fragments upon which is written all the secrets of creation and existence–and in which is carried the seed of all that can ever be.  Don't we know who we are?" ~Don and Linda Pendleton, Whispers From the Soul

Print, Kindle, Audiobook

~Linda 

Don Pendleton, Father of Action Adventure, Comments on His Creation of Mack Bolan Novels.

Don Pendleton, the "father of the Action Adventure genre."

Don Pendleton was asked by his publisher in 1988, how he believed Action Adventure had developed since he created Mack Bolan twenty years earlier. His response:  "Bolan is the first of the modern action-adventure heroes, and need I say, the most durable.  His success serves as encouragement to breed others and has everybody looking for variations on that theme—essentially, one man against some personification of evil.  Almost any situation where people put their lives on the line in the service of an ideal became a legitimate excuse for clones of Mack Bolan—and I don't begrudge that.  The basic observation is that the field broadened a lot, and as the world changed, the genre kept pace by focusing on new issues.  International terrorism, for example."

"Publishing a book like WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA, was a courageous act for any publisher.  It seemed to amount to a glorification of violence, and things like that were done only in pulp fiction.  I was glad to get away from all the psychoanalysis and endless, helpless hand-wringing popular in literature at the time. Essential to the action adventure novel is the hero with ideals, a man who feels that his actions make a difference.  This conviction is his motivation for unfailingly risking his life again and again.  He feels he can change the world, which he sees without the surface layers of the illusions generated by society.  He faces a grim world bathed in the light of a harsh reality where good and evil do battle. It is the gritty realism, unrelenting and revealing, that distinguishes action adventure.  It shows us violence, too, because the word is violent, and depicts the world as deep down we know it to be but which we avoid thinking about just to mange to survive and get on with our lives."  

 

Available as Ebooks, 1-15 and 17-38

First three books also in print,

War Against the Mafia 

Death Squad

Battle Mask.

~Linda 

Sculptor, Vinnie Ream and Abraham Lincoln

A look back to 1864, to a woman whose hands left an imprint on history. Vinnie Ream (1847-1914), had sculpted a bust of Abraham Lincoln, which took her five months to complete, and it is said he sat for her.  After Lincoln's death, at the age of eighteen, Vinnie was commissioned by the U.S. Government to sculpt a full figure statue of Lincoln for the Capitol.  She was the first female and the youngest, to ever be commissioned, and in addition, she was one of the first women to be employed in the Dead Letter Office of the United States Postal Service (from 1862-1866).  The Abraham Lincoln statue was unveiled in 1871, when she was twenty-three years of age.  Later she was to sculpt two more statues, now part of the Statuary Hall Collection:  Iowa Governor during the Civil War, Samuel Kirkwood; and Sequoyah, Cherokee leader.

I took a photograph of the Lincoln statue on a visit to the Capitol, some years back.  I had no idea at that time the history behind the statue.

She wrote: “Congress appropriated money to erect a marble statue of the martyred President in the Capitol, it never occurred to me, with my youth and my inexperience, to compete for that great honor; but I was induced to place my likeness of him [Lincoln] before the committee having the matter under consideration, and, together with many other artists--competitors for this work--I was called before this committee. I shall never forget the fear that fell upon me, as the chairman (the Hon. John H. Rice, of Maine, who had a kind heart, but a very stern manner) looked up through his glasses, from his seat at the head of the table, and questioned and cross-questioned me until I was so frightened that I could hardly reply to his questions: "How long had I been studying art?'' and had I ever made a marble statue?'' My knees trembled and I shook like an aspen, and I had not enough presence of mind even to tell him that I had made the bust from sittings from life. Seeing my dire confusion, and not being able to hear my incoherent replies, he dismissed me with a wave of his hand, and a request to Judge Marshall, of Illinois, to kindly see the young artist home! Once there, in the privacy of my own room, I wept bitter tears that I had been such an idiot as to try to compete with men, and remembering the appearance before that stern committee as a terrible ordeal before unmerciful judges, I promised myself it should be my last experience of that kind."

"Judge then of my surprise and delight when I learned that, guided by the opinion of Judge David Davis, Senator Trumbull, Marshal Lamon, Sec. O. H. Browning, Judge Dickey, and many others of President Lincoln's old friends, that I had produced the most faithful likeness of him, they had awarded the commission to me-the little western sculptor. The Committee on Mines and Mining tendered me their room in the Capitol, in which to model my statue, because it was next to the room of Judge David Davis, and he could come in daily and aid me with his friendly criticisms. His comfortable chair was kept in readiness. He came daily, and suggesting ‘a little more here--a little on there--more inclining of the bended head--more angularity of the long limbs,’ he aided me in my sacred work by his encouraging words and generous sympathy.”

She wrote this after the unveiling of the Lincoln statue in January, 1871:  “This night when the Lincoln statue was unveiled in the rotunda of the Capitol was the supreme moment of my life. I had known and loved the man! My country had loved him and cherished his memory. In tears the people had parted with him. With shouts of joy and acclamations of affection they had received his image in the marble. Upon the very spot where a few years before they had gathered in sorrow to gaze upon his lifeless body lying there in state while a nation mourned, they had gathered again to unveil his statue. ‘The marble is the resurrection,’ say the old sculptors, and now the dead had arisen to live forever in the hearts of the people whom he loved so well.”

Her work included sculptures of other famous people, President Ulysses S. Grant, Senator John Sherman, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Frederick Douglas, but one I find especially beautiful, is her Sappho, Muse of Poetry, which is at the Smithsonian Museum.    

 Sappho, Greek Muse of Poetry, Smithsonian Museum

Catherine Winter, Private Investigator Series

Shifting Focus

Third Novel in the Catherine Winter Series

"Greed, power, and sex—that's all some strive for, all they desire. And eventually it destroys—or kills. Welcome to the world of entertainment, Hollywood style." -Catherine Winter, Private Investigator

 

The divorce of a gifted singer and songwriter leads Catherine Winter into the dark shadows of drugs, sex, and power.  Determined to find the killer of an entertainment attorney to Hollywood's elite, Catherine discovers the multifarious and convoluted connections between several people as she searches for truth and justice. 

Working closely with the Los Angeles Police Department, and teaming up with former cop and private investigator, Joe Copp, the hunt is on to find a killer.  Catherine Winter has seen it all in her many years as a Southern California private investigator, and now in her sixties, she's as determined and dedicated as ever.  

"Linda Pendleton's first private eye novel is a brilliant debut.  Shattered Lens is good enough I hope it becomes a series."  -Richard S. Prather, Author of the Shell Scott Mystery Series.

Shattered Lens, First book in the Series 

Fractured Image, Second book in the Series

Shifting Focus, Third book in the Series

Book One and Two in Print, Kindle, and Audio
Book Three in Print, Kindle, and soon in Audio

~Linda