I am writing to announce the publication of my novel, The Girl with the Face of the Moon. At this time, it is only available through Amazon Kindle, at this link: http://tinyurl.com/pycavup (NOTE: even if you don’t have a Kindle device, you can still read it on your computer—or other tablets, using the Kindle app - http://tinyurl.com/mg7s3qk )

Of course, I would love to see it in print as well, but that will only happen if it sells enough to get the interest of a publishing house. It came so close, actually, but the decision was made that the book, crossing too many genres (literary fiction, suspense, historical, horror), would not sell. I hope you would do your small part in proving them wrong, by purchasing the book, AND, if you find it of merit, either writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) or helping make it go viral by recommending it to those whom you think might enjoy it. It is astonishing to me that I actually began plotting out this small book about forty years ago. I wrote a first draft back in 1990, and the computer, with no back-up copy of the hard drive, was stolen. I abandoned it until about 2010, when I began writing again.

And for those amongst you who are martial arts friends, there is a fair amount of combat, and within that are techniques and esoteric training that you may recognize from some of your own training or things I’ve previously written about.

Here’s a brief description of the book:
A young woman of samurai lineage is raised in an impoverished mountain village by bitter parents, identical to the peasants among whom they live, but for their ancestry. Unloved and mistreated, she runs off with a Matagi, a man of a caste of hunters, who were outcast but nearly free from the rules that governed the rest of Japanese society. After a few years of happiness, their child is stolen by a being perhaps human, perhaps not. Bereft, the young woman will challenge death itself to recover her child.
The Girl with the Face of the Moon is set in Bakumatsu and Meiji Japan, a transitional period in the mid-1800's, when Japan went from Medieval to Modern in only a few years. This, however, is not a book about the privileged few; rather, this is a story of those on the fringes: a blind wandering masseuse, the abalone divers, the aboriginal mountain folk, a wild yojimbo (body guard and bar thug both), the hunters who worship bears, seeing them as the true power of the mountains, and a woman with no place in any of Japan's societies.
The Girl with the Face of the Moon is a combination of two of the oldest stories of humanity, the hero’s journey and the tale of revenge: a mother seeking to save her child from hell. The description of the hero’s training and that of her allies are based on historical figures and the actual training methods and techniques of archaic Japanese martial arts, something the author learned, first hand, for thirteen years in Japan. Threaded throughout is the terrible question how one can retain one’s humanity, and even further, what happens to love, in a world of pervasive terror.