Fall-O-Rama! by Julie Christen

Fall-O-Rama!

I love my family!

Nearly twenty or so years ago, I got this great idea. I talked to my sister in Wisconsin and asked if she might like to pack up the girls and drive to Minnesota to play horses with me for the weekend. That's how it started. We had a simple autumn weekend. My nieces enjoyed pony rides at the place I boarded my horse, Holiday. It was a cold and drizzly weekend, but we plugged in a pot of hot cider in the tack area and hung out in the cozy barn. Enveloped in the warmth of hay bales, horses, barn cats, and each other, we created a core memory so vivid that I still remember it like it was yesterday. 

In the evening, at my tiny house, while the girls played with a vintage Johnny West Family on the living room floor, my sister and I made my special goulash and famous chocolate chip cookies. Covered up on the couch at night, we watched The Man from Snowy River. And we all went to sleep that night to dream of autumn colors and horses and hay and steamy mugs and purring cats and love. Lots of love. We would definitely have to do this again sometime.

So we did. Every year. From then on.

Over the years, the rest of my family joined us. Mom and Dad, all my brothers and sisters with their kids too, and even some of my husband's side. We have declared it a national holiday and deemed it FALLORAMA! It's come a long way from a day in the barn. We even have our own shared spreadsheet where we all sign up for food, accommodations, and entertainment responsibilities. It's kind of a big deal.

This year, I grew my own pumpkins! We piled on the hayride and let the old John Deere B putt-putt us down to the corn field and pumpkin patch. It was so cool watching the kids (young and old) hunting for and harvesting those bright orange treasures that I had started by seed in my classroom window back in February. 

    

These days, it's our old quarter horse, Tuff, and my not-so-little nieces who give the pony rides. I get to sit on the fence rail and watch, visit, and relax. I'll tell you, it is something to watch your nieces grow into beautiful, capable, strong, and kind women. It fills my heart right up to the top with so much good stuff, I can hardly stand it. 

There are always crafts set up in the garage. This year, we painted wooden candy corns. That's also where we painted and carved pumpkins. You would be amazed at all the fun things we can create when given a little free time, supplies, space, and ideas. 

I added two new things this year. One was a Falloram Coloring Book. I found an app that would take old digital pics from Falloramas past and cartoonify them into coloring book pictures. Whenever someone needed a little downtime, they grabbed the colored pencils and brought a picture to life. The other activity I added was "Tell Me A Story BINGO" where you had to find a person to tell you a story about a bunch of given topics under various types and tones. It was neat hearing the little kids go to all the adults all day long, asking them to tell them a story. But I also found it kind of hard to just spit out a specific story on the spot. It was good practice for everyone, the storytellers and the listeners.

Tell me a story about ...

Your favorite pet. Your favorite sports team. Your tattoo. A race you have run. A celebrity you have met. A different language you can speak. A concert you’ve been to. An instrument you play. Something your sibling did when you were little. The most dangerous thing you’ve ever done. An adventure you took. Your hidden talent. An award you have received. A trip you took to your favorite place. A favorite recipe you’ve made. A recipe you tried, but it flopped. A hairdo you regret. A hard thing you did once. A time with your grandparent. Your favorite restaurant. Your worst food experience. A favorite weather experience. A different city you have visited. A different country you have been to. A hobby you love.

So many stories for all of us to tell!

On Fallorama Sunday, we all head to Mom and Dad's place for the day. The Poker Walk is my dad's hit activity. It gets us all out hiking trails on the prairie, through the woods, and up and down hills. Perfect penance for Saturday's copious amounts of indulgent food and drink. We end with a bonfire where the trophy is bestowed upon the year's new Poker Walk champion. At this point, noses are pointed for home, and that lull after the storm settles over us. Of course, we already have ideas for next year, but we have plenty of time to flesh them out.

Though I have moved several times since its genesis, we have been die-hard committed to making Fallorama work every single year. It's one of those good things well worth the effort, no matter how busy life gets or what misfortunes befall. I love my family. I love seeing it grow. I love the new stories and the old ones. I love that this aspect of my life spills into my writing. I love that we have this good, good thing.

Henry and Great Grampa Don on the Poker Walk.

Click here to order one of my stories today!

Reflections on a writing life by donalee Moulton

 

Hi everyone. As the end of the year approaches, it’s an opportunity to reflect. I thought I’d share some of those reflections with you.

Writing has always been part of my life. Over the years, it has become a central part of my life. Growing up I wanted to be a lawyer. I started university prepared to be a lawyer. Then I was introduced to academia and research. I wanted to teach at a university and publish papers in esteemed journals. Then I had a scholarship to get a PhD. I was thrilled. I turned it down. I had a chance to go to Harvard to research perceptions of time. I was thrilled. I turned it down. Clearly something else was at play. I finally realized what I wanted to do with my life was write.

My mother taught me to love language – and to respect it. She cared about words and getting the words right. She was my greatest influence.

When I was about eight or nine, a next-door neighbor tossed me a Nancy Drew book. She thought I might like it. I sat on the curb between our two houses and read the entire book cover to cover. I loved the puzzle, figuring out who dunnit, and being propelled into a world outside my own.

That same year someone gifted me Charlotte’s Web, and my life was forever changed. Not only could words transport you to new worlds, they could become a part of your heart, change you in ways you could not have imagined. I wanted to do that.

     Take a peek here

My first mystery book Hung Out to Die was published in 2023. The main character is Riel Brava. Attractive. Razor-sharp. Ambitious. And something much more. Riel just wants to be left alone to do his job and one day run for president of the United States. He has a plan. Murder gets in his way. It isn’t easy being a psychopath.

Take a peek here

My second book, Conflagration, followed and relives the real-life trial of an enslaved Black woman accused of setting much of the town of Montreal on fire in 1734. Two other books were released this year, Bind and Melt, a new series featuring three women who meet doing a downward dog.

Take a peek here

As I hope you’ll discover, not everything that happens in a yoga studio is zen.

 

BWL Publishing New Releases November 2025

 

(4) Paul Grant | Facebook

A small city tackles big city problems. Murder and meth have come to Moose Jaw on the wave of a pandemic. While the police got after the killers, journalist Eleanor Bell digs into the deeper story of drugs, real estate and money laundering on a global scale.

edenmonroeauthor.com

It’s love at first sight for strong male lead, Pate Kavenagh, when he meets the bewitching redheaded beauty, Dinah Gladstone. But at what cost? Pate’s jilted girlfriend, Colleen Sullivan, is heartbroken and seeks payback in this historical love triangle where emotions run at boiling point.

And then calamity strikes this tall sexy breeder of fine horses, but the stakes have always been high during the Kavenagh family’s life and death struggles in 1879 New Brunswick.

A headstrong and handsome man, Pate never considered himself capable of murder until he met Dinah Gladstone. He also never believed such a woman could take him so close to the edge in this rollercoaster romantic suspense set in beautiful Eastern Canada.

EDITORIAL REVIEW by Victoria Chatham

Tomorrow at Daybreak by Eden Monroe

On the face of it, the story of Pate Kavanagh and Colleen Sullivan seems deceptively straightforward. In a rural area of late 1800s New Brunswick, this couple had been seeing each other over the course of two years. Although the Kavanaghs have a less-than-stellar reputation, everyone, especially Colleen, expects a wedding will happen. Sadly for her, Pate has his heart set on someone entirely different.

Throughout what follows, we see hopes rise and fall, dreams shatter, and learn much about Pate’s family background. Families come together to help support one another during the hot, dry days of summer. Caring for the animals comes first in the cool of the morning, followed by the dust and sweat of hay making. There is birth and death, loneliness resulting from misunderstandings, and despair in the face of finally emerging truths. There is dignity in the day-to-day lives of the people who inhabit the pages of this story, where love eventually finds its way.

In this book, I found echoes of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s writing, and I wish Eden Monroe every success.

Jessie Pyne (Author of The Banished World (The Dreamwing Trilogy #1) | Goodreads

When, blind attorney, Velvet Morgan sets out to fulfill a dying child’s wish to meet the infamous villain Red Cypher, she doesn't expect to uncover the rot beneath the Super Alliance’s polished image. As Velvet and Red Cypher work together to expose the truth, they become targets of the Alliance’s golden enforcer, Black Bullet. A hero with a deadly past tied to Velvet’s own. In a world where heroes kill in the shadows and villains hold tight to the last shreds of humanity, justice isn’t black or white; it’s red, black and blue.

Editorial Review by Nancy M. Bell

Review

Pyne has woven together a tale of superheroes and supervillains and mixed in a smattering of romance just to add spice. The problem is, it's hard to tell who is the villain and who is the hero, it keeps you guessing to the end.

Editor with BWL Publishing Inc

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Time is of the essence.  Japanese forces are inflicting death and destruction in the Pacific theater with superior arms, position, and equipment.  Their intelligence experts easily break American communication codes. Working with newly recruited marines, Luke Kayenta is training eager students in top secret work. Soon the first group of Navajo code talkers will be sent overseas.    

Fellow O.S.S. operative Kitty Charante arrives for a visit to the operation and Luke’s home and family.  When Navajo horses become frenzied amid chaotic gusts called whirlwinds, fear and mistrust ignites the community. Recruitment of code talkers dries up.  The whole experiment is now in jeopardy. 

Is witchcraft in the air? Yes, but not from an ancient source.  Commander Helmut Adler has landed off a U-Boat from off the Gulf of Mexico.  Well-versed in Navajo traditions, he’s using any means necessary to stop the code program before it can be used to aid the American war effort. 

Luke and Kitty have a home front terror on their hands. They must trap their persistent enemy.  

 

“Charbonneau’s writing makes poetry of glances between lovers and kin…” -–Kirkus Reviews 

“Many will read for adventure and romance, others will find deeper themes of prejudice and and revenge to ponder.…”—Booklist 

“The reader will be fascinated by the tale of love and sacrifice, but will also be learning a wealth of history…” —The Literary Times 

J. S. Marlo - Author/Auteure

The discovery of a century old Model T at the bottom of a northern lake sends shock waves across multiple communities. Buried secrets, hidden scandals, and forgotten tragedies resurface, unleashing deadly threats.

Hauk Ludwig leads the salvage operation. After losing one of his men, he is forced to hire a new diver, Star Fisher. Her investigative skills, feisty attitude, and tumultuous past stir up conflicting feelings and strange events that throw Hauk’s life, and the life of his crew, into chaos.

Disfigured by a violent attack and haunted by recurring nightmares, Star finds solace in the silent depths. The relics she discovers on the sandy bottom links the sunken wreck to the unsolved disappearance of a rich heiress.

Danger lurks above and below the surface. To protect their future, Star and Hauk must unearth the truth before they become victims of the past.

Editorial Review by Nancy M. Bell

Deep Beneath the Surface is a fast paced mystery/thriller with all the expected twists and turns. The setting of underwater salvage and the unsolved murder adds spice to the plot, then throw in a bit of romance and intrigue and voila!. You'll want to keep reading until the end. A hard book to put down.

Editor with BWL Publishing Inc.

Angel Revenge — Books We Love Publishing Inc.

Anila, peaceful warrior woman, trained all her life in the desert, at the monastery of the Celestial Gate, to take the vows of the mighty Protectors. That’s all she’s ever known, all she ever wanted. But a cloud of black wings haunts her nightmares.

When a barbarian horde invades from the north, Bayor Khan seems unstoppable, determined to destroy everything in his path. Rumors of his cruelty make the most powerful princes tremble in their stone fortresses.

Anila is pulled into the inevitable clash as a prophecy unfolds, blurring the lines between good and evil, testing her resolve. Nothing is as it seems… An ancient enemy rises in the shadows, and the falling darkness threatens to engulf Anila and everyone she loves.

Frankenstein's Algorithm

 

Halloween always conjures monsters in the mind. Be they crawling from a swamp or of a more spectral nature, we’ve (Western Civilization) built a foundational mythos for all that goes bump in the night and focused this investigation of the uncanny on the 31^st of October.

Now, in no way does this mean that all these fear-based fabrications are real in any tangible sense, but merely constructs spliced together from the darker corners of our own psyche and natures.  This was just the case with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We’re all familiar with the story, both in background and analysis, so I’ll not beat that to death here, but what I’d rather do is pose a new parallel: Just as Dr. Frankenstein pieced together a living, self-aware abomination for his own ends and with little regard to the potential fallout, so even now we are doing with Artificial General Intelligence, and nothing could be scarier.

 

As I write this, numberless start-ups, corporations, tech companies, defence contractors, and whole nations are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem of bringing to life a digital Frankenstein (yes, I know its “Frankenstein’s monster”, but for brevity here, lets go with the colloquial).  The upside will theoretically be that whoever can evolve this beast and chain it to their will is going to win. At everything. An entity that can become logarithmically smarter in microseconds and who will be for all intents and purposes omniscient will be able to surveil, analyze, and influence using current infrastructure every aspect of our existence, from defence to finance to communications and social engineering.

 

There’s a big ‘IF’ here: namely that such an entity, which we will suppose to be self aware, can be chained at all. I fear we’re just as ignorant as Victor Frankenstein himself when he said, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” How’d that work out for our ambitious Dr.? The problem being that when this rough beast slouches off into the digital night to do as it will, you’ll not be able to rally a posse of townsfolk with pitchforks and torches to do it in.

 

The hubris of our species will see that this shall come to pass. Maybe not on the hundredth, or the thousandth, or the ten thousandth instantiation, but eventually the right patchwork of salvaged algorithms and neural nets will yield new life.  How this being will respond to our band of violent and fearful apes is basically a coin toss.

 

Sleep tight, my friends, this Halloween night, and fear ye well the ghost in the machine!

 

The Editor

 

The Garden of the Gulf by Eden Monroe

 

https://www.bookswelove.com/shop/p/playtime?rq=paranormal

Imagine finding a creepy old toy that had been hidden in a wall for more than a hundred years.

 

 

That little toy dog’s name is Wheelie, pictured here.  He was found while carpenters were carrying out renovations to restore Yeo House to its current destination as a historic property.  So when I was asked to write a novel for The Paranormal Canadiana Collection, I decided Wheelie would be the perfect fit. I called it Playtime, and it’s set in the beautiful Canadian province of Prince Edward Island (PEI).

Before I go any further I’ll share a brief snapshot of Prince Edward Island, a small Maritime island known as the Garden of the Gulf  — surrounded as it is by the sparkling waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. PEI, as it’s most commonly known, is just under thirteen kilometres away from eastern New Brunswick, via the Northumberland Strait, within the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

PEI is a charming little Island with its red soil and rolling green farmlands and parks, and there are any number of highlights that will make a visit there unforgettable. From historic Charlottetown, the capital of the smallest province in Canada, to the much-celebrated Green Gables of Anne Shirley storybook fame, there are countless must-sees. According to https://www.journeysandjaunts.com/things-to-do-in-prince-edward-island/, some of the Island’s attractions may fall a bit under the radar, but absolutely shouldn’t be missed. Such as Island Hill Farm in Hampshire with the opportunity to “cuddle baby animals”, or popular Cavendish Beach at sunset. How about indulging your sweet tooth with a cone or two of COWS ice cream, or enjoying the unique experience of a Ceilidh:

“A cèilidh is a traditional Scottish or Irish social gathering. It usually involves fiddling, step dancing, singing, Celtic music and even story telling. It is an experience that will give you a glimpse of the culture and it’s really good fun at the same time.”

PEI was once only accessible by boat, but in 1997 the Island and the mainland of New Brunswick became attached by a pretty remarkable bridge.

Says https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/confederation-bridge: “The Confederation Bridge is the longest bridge in the world crossing ice-covered water. The toll bridge spans a 12.9 km stretch of the Northumberland Strait connecting Borden-Carleton, Prince Edward Island, to Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick.

“With the contract in place engineers now had to design a 13 km long structure that would have to withstand the harsh winters, ice flows and high winds of the Northumberland Strait. In addition, the contract with Ottawa stipulated the bridge would have to last 100 years — about two times longer than the average lifespan for bridges.”

 

 

During the winter this bridge sits in solid ice.

     It can be said there’s something for everyone on PEI, including well-documented paranormal activity. I had several options to choose from for Playtime, but ultimately decided on Yeo House in Port Hill (Tyne Valley). It’s a bit of a drive along the Island’s less-travelled western end, but well worth the trip.

Restored to its former glory, the Yeo mansion was originally built in 1865 by wealthy shipping magnate, James Yeo Jr.  Yeo House contains a wealth of beautiful and unusual artifacts. Wheelie is one of those recovered treasures, and there’s also a most off-putting heirloom known as a cooling casket. Made entirely of wicker, as the name suggests its purpose was to allow a dead body to cool off before being sent to the undertaker. The idea was to ensure that the dearly departed were actually … fully departed before they were buried. As if that weren’t macabre enough, it also served a more practical function, especially during warm weather, and that was to prevent flies from … well, nuff said.

Yeo House was the perfect backdrop for Playtime, and I share once again the back cover blurb to get you into the story:

“Darkness is often the playground of the supernatural … the eerily unexplained.

Yeo House is a haunted country home in Eastern Canada’s beautiful province of Prince Edward Island. The stately seaside mansion of a shipbuilding magnate and his family in the 1800’s, it was given new life in the twenty-first century. During renovations something unusual was found hidden in the walls — a little toy dog on wheels. Now freed from his wall prison, it seems he’s still being played with by the ghost of the child who once owned him.

When little Della Sayer and her parents visit the historic Yeo mansion to see the famous Wheelie, the little girl makes a strange and powerful connection with the antique toy. It is an unsettling paranormal knowing, a kindred ethereal awareness….

Life for the Sayers will never be the same again.”

In Playtime, Della’s mother, Jill Sayer, is a bona fide skeptic, determined to find a logical explanation for the unnatural phenomena on the Island. A playwright, she has decided to spoof these supposed hauntings until she is gradually overtaken by strange happenings and can no longer look the other way:

 “Descending the stairs, still absorbing the atmosphere, she hoped to find one of the guides to ask about the toy dog. And then she heard it, an otherworldly shriek! Upstairs from where she’d just come. It sounded as though it was in one of the bedrooms.  She felt the hair rise on her arms and the back of her neck. It was probably the wind blowing in the cupola, but she felt a strange presence. It was something that if she tried to describe it, she wouldn’t be able to. It was a feeling, a … presence…”

Most of the weird stuff, experienced by staff and visitors alike, happens on the second floor of the mansion. I know, I had my own creepy experience there which I shared in an earlier blog:

https://bwlauthors.blogspot.com/2025/08/playtime-paranormal-canadiana.html

Sooo … why don’t you go on up the stairs and see for yourself…

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https://books2read.com/Playtime-Paranormal-Canadiana