Guest Post: Jennifer DeLucy, Author of the Light Series

Hello everyone! We have Jennifer with us here today, where she is going to briefly introduce to you about things you need to know on World of the Sentient. Sit back, relax, have some popcorns and enjoy the guest post! There will be a giveaway tomorrow where you can win both books in this series. All comments you posted here will be counted towards the giveaway.

Sentient: A human being with paranormal gifts. Sentients have evolved souls due to many successfully reincarnated lives. They are charged with the task of contending with paranormal phenomena/entities.

Entity: A supernatural life form.

Astral: A living energy, human or not, that derives its existence from the matter of the universe.

Dark Astral: A non-human Entity with a powerfully negative root. Dark Astrals are most often Energy Drainers.

Energy Drainers: Astrals that have spun into existence due to an environement of overabundant negativity, for example, prisons, mental institutions, and so on. Energy Drainers attach themselves to and manipulate their hosts to cause suffering and fear, the root of their existence.

Endowment: The formal term applied to a Sentient's particular gift.

Seer: A Sentient whose soul is ancient and has evolved tremendously over time. A Sentient who has attained Seer status need not return to the human form, as they have gathered sufficient wisdom over the course of many lifetimes.

Combatant: A Sentient gifted with a deadly psychic strength which extends to the physical. Combatants most often battle vampires.

Vampire: An animalistic being, once human, that craves the blood of humans due to its ability to temporarily replicate the sensation of having a soul.

Empath: A Sentient gifted with the ability to feel the emotions of others. Empaths can also sense the variances in human Lightlines.

Lightlines: The complex range of colors exuded from one's Aura and directly related to emotion.

Aura: The extension of the human spirit beyond its flesh-covering.

Pathcrosser: A Sentient gifted with the ability to speak and connect with the dead. A Pathcrosser can merge souls with a lost spirit and guide it to the next plane.

Soul Merge: A Soul Merge is a Pathcrosser's means of drawing a soul to the In Between, to the place where the Light of the Source can be seen and understood more readily.

The Source: Universal energy understood to be God, or the creative consciousness and animator of all life in the universe.

Emotions Endowment: Not to be mistaken for an Empath's ability, a Sentient with an Emotions Endowment is able to manipulate the the feelings of others based upon their own desires.

Energy Sensor: A Sentient gifted with the ability to locate other living energies at long range distances.

Memory Endowment: A Sentient possessing a Memory Endowment has gifts very similar to a photographic memory, or perfect psychic recall of information.

Intelligence Endowment: A Sentient possessing an Intelligence Endowment will display genius in not only human terms but in paranormal terms, as well. Sentients with an Intelligence Endowment
can quickly identify and understand concepts and psychic phenomena based upon subtler cues such as smell, sound, and air wave frequency.

Telekinetic: A Sentient with a Telekinetic Endowment can focus their energy in order to displace or move an object.

Healer: A Sentient with a rare Healing Endowment can use his/her own soul's energy to repair psychic or physical trauma in another living being.

Energy Catalyst: A Sentient with the ability to stimulate growth and reactions in nature and other life forms.

Conduit: A Seer's Endowment, or the ability to use one's own body to restore another's soul.

Turning: The process of becoming a vampire.

Repelling: The concentration of strong emotional energy, channeled and directed toward an enemy in an act of defense. When physical touch is too dangerous, such as with vampires, Sentients will use this tactic to disarm or knock an opponent down.

Enthralling: A vampire's mechanism for mental control of a victim.

Fated Blend: The term used to describe soul mates that have a close, repeated connection over many lifetimes.

Society (or WorldWide Society): The overall representative community of Sentients and Seers across the globe.

Council of Seers: A leadership of established Seers who are charged with the supervision of all Sentient groups throughout the world. The Council of Seers dispenses funding to all Sentient groups.

Guest Post: JL Bryan, Author of The Haunted E-Book

I am happy to welcome author JL Bryan on my blog again today! He is going to talk more about what he thinks the real meaning of creating and reading a book. Keep in mind that your comment on this post will count towards the grand prize for this blog tour as well as the giveaway that will be posted tomorrow!

For today's post on The Bibliophile's Journal, I wanted to explore something about books in general, since The Haunted E-book delves into those issues—what is it to write and create a book? What is it to read a book? What do these activities mean to us as human beings?

In The Haunted E-book, a nineteenth-century “tramp printer” creates a certain book, with some inspiration from a treatise on the manufacture of black magic spell books. When anyone finds and reads this book, they find themselves stalked by his ghost. He threatens anyone who tries to stop reading the book without finishing it.

Reading the book awakens his ghost, bringing it back to “life.” He draws his strength psychically from the reader. When nobody's reading the book, his ghost becomes dormant until he gets another reader.

This is similar to what happens when we read a book by any deceased author. Reading Milton or Shakespeare or Mark Twain—or, lamentably, Kurt Vonnegut—brings a portion of that author's mind back to life. The reader's mind animates the recorded thoughts, ideas and imagination of the writer, a kind of mini-resurrection.

When the reader stops reading, it all becomes dormant again. When a book has been read for the last time, either because no remaining copies exist, or simply because nobody new ever chooses to read it, then this last bit of the author has finally died.

Reading a book can be a lot like getting possessed by a ghost. For a while we turn our mind and imagination over to another person, and let them shape our experience. The ghost of the writer might be thousands of years old, and from an entirely different part of the world.

In the comments, you might mention some of your favorite authors who are deceased, or books that have given you a window onto other times and places that you wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

Guest Post: JL Bryan, author of Jenny Pox

I am utterly excited to welcome JL Bryan, the author of Jenny Pox to my site today. As you well know, I absolutely enjoyed reading Jenny Pox (read my review here). However, he is here today not mainly to talk about Jenny Pox, but to discuss why the length of books might be significant to a person but not to the other. Leave your comment on this post to share with us your preference and gain an extra entry for Jenny Pox Giveaway! Without further hesitation on my part, Jeff:

What does length tell us about a story?  Why do we often seem to want stories that go on and on without end?

Stephen King mentions (in On Writing, I think) that most fans say The Stand is their favorite book of King's.  It's also his longest.  He jokes about how it feels when most of your fans agree that your best work is decades behind you. I think people like The Stand because it's a grand epic, a world in which the reader can go deep and get lost among all the drama and world-shaping storylines.

Successful books often turn into long series.  Readers and authors alike develop relationships with the characters and want to continue that connection.  There's something in certain fictional worlds that keeps bringing us back for more.

That "something" may be different for each person.  I once had an interesting religion class where the professor talked about stories and "sacred time." An example might be Christmas, and the whole Christmas season.  Sacred time is marked by a return to long-established stories, stories that we've known since childhood.  With Christmas, there's the story of the Nativity, and there's also the story of Santa Claus.  There are the stories of Rudolph, Frosty, and Ralphie's quest for a Red Ryder BB gun.  An entire fabric of stories is woven together into the complex cultural event called "Christmas." 

"Sacred time" is not linear but circular.  The same events happen again and again, the same stories are told, the same rituals carried out.  It exists outside of regular time, in the mythical realm of gods and dreams. The repeating of stories is how we build structure in our lives and define who we are.  We tell stories from our past as a way of explaining our identity.  (Of course, sometimes people make up stories about themselves, or tell the same stories to the same audience too often and becomes bores!)

My religion professor believed movies were the new sacred stories in our pluralistic society.  Movies could be a shared experience, and they could help you transcend time for a moment.  Watching the old animated Rudolph doesn't just bring back the story of a couple of North Pole misfits.  It brings back Christmas memories from my childhood, the excitement of the decorations and shopping, seeing relatives who lived far away, and of course rushing down to the tree at the first sign of light on Christmas morning. 

It's all there, woven into the story of Rudolph, lost memories waiting to emerge again each holiday season. I think this has something to do with why we like long stories, whether it's an epic tome or an ongoing series.  We step out of the stream of our own lives and into another dream world, one that's familiar and welcoming to us.  We revisit with old characters like lost friends. And we share them with each other, whether it's watching a movie that we've all seen before, or discussing books we enjoy.  Because stories aren't just about escaping.  They're also about connecting with each other by way of the dream world. 

A large book lets us share a deep, long dream with each other.  An ongoing series helps us return again and again in the company of others, and even take part in affecting the course of the story, by giving out feedback that the author might read.

I've never written a sequel to any of my books, but people keep asking for a sequel to Jenny Pox.  It means my readers and I have gone someplace special together, and they want me to take them there again.  The idea of going back to that world and dealing with the aftermath of the first book seems daunting, but strangely appealing.  I want to see how Jenny and the other characters deal with what lies ahead.

Miss Shy asked me to write about the length of books and series and what length might signify.  I think it signifies a desire to stay in that other world, and to repeat the experience of that particular world at different times in our lives.  The world of that big epic or that long book series we love becomes one of the threads composing our own inner world, while connecting us to the inner world of other people.