Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Beauty Way, A Novel, is published


It is a changeable set of feelings when your book comes out of production and your publisher informs you that it has gone to press.
The change probably started just as I was reviewing the final text proofs and I realized that I was reading a real live book and not just a Word manuscript. It felt different and the book read like, well, a real book. It came to life, the characters felt real, the deserts and mountains were palpable. Nothing in the book had ever been revised and yet it moved, it was exciting and I too was excited!

It is now on pre-order from Sunstone Press, Barnes&Noble and Amazon.com and every day it seems to lurch forward on its own energy. One morning I wake up and see it is featured on Sunstone's New Releases. The next morning, Calvin Tatsey, the owner of The Red Nation Society, emails all 3500 members, urging them to buy the book. A day later, I receive an email from Sassafras who is a member of my medicine group. She tells me that she has put "Beauty Way" out in the ethernet, on her own Native community, Native Quotations and Brilliances and Pinterest. Then Alex Cigale and Kelvin Robertson and others share with all their Facebook friends which number in the thousands, and so it keeps continuing.

My tribal friends, the ones I do not want to hurt in any way with this book, are backing me and getting it around to the Native sites. They believe in me, in the truths that I am trying to get out, and this is vital to me. They are the reason I have written this novel. Yes, there is adventure and rockhounding and life among the Navajo, but behind it all is the urgent necessity of a return to the "old ways" to the medicine ways, to the Beauty Way.

Please check out my novel in the "New and Upcoming" section at www.sunstonepress.com.
It was a long labor of love for me and my most significant life project.

Thank you, Jim Clois Smith, Jr., publisher at Sunstone for believing in me and in "Beauty Way!

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