Bell Bridge Books

Are these fakes, or are they mermaid sightings?

by Deborah Smith

For centuries, people all over the world have claimed to see mermaids. Either the beautiful, Hollywood siren type, with flowing hair and bodacious bosoms, but more often an odd, ugly creature with a humanoid head and torso but the lower body of a fish, dolphin or seal.

There have been photos, and drawings, and presentations of weird skeletons found on remote beaches. But until recent  years there weren’t videos.

Now, there are.

The amateur photographer has a shaky grip. The video blurs in and out. Its  focus is on a large rock in the edge of the tide, far below the cliff where the camera owner and his friend stand.

“I don’t think that’s a seal, man.”

“I’m trying to zoom in. Where’s the zoom button? Ouch. There.”

The image closes in. A large, dark form with tail flukes like a dolphin’s is stretched out on the rock.

“Where’s the Zoology on this? That is NOT a seal, man!”

Suddenly, the creature twists toward the camera, looking directly at the two young guys on the cliff. It has a pale area where a face and torso would be. The details show little more, perhaps a hint of dark eyes?

The mysterious being whips around, propels itself over the edge of the rock using what are clearly a pair of human-like arms, and splashes into the surf.

A hoax? Great use of computer wizardy, with actors pretending to be two hikers who just happen to capture video of a mermaid sunning herself in an isolated spot along the coast of Israel?

Regardless, it will send goosebumps down your spine.

http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/mermaids/videos/mermaid-sighting-in-kiryat-yam/

And then there’s this video:

Two men sit in a deep-sea observation capsule several thousand feet below the ocean surface in the frigid  waters off the coast of Greenland. They’re marine experts who routinely go to those depths as they use sonar to map the ocean floor for oil and gas exploration.

But they’ve also grown curious about marine sounds they can’t identify. An ordinary listener would say the high-pitched whistles and piercing shrieks are just the songs of whales. But these two men have heard every kind of whale song there is, and this is very different.

They sit in the blue-black light of the tiny pod. A main camera films them and the view in front of the pod, which has big windows that allow the occupants to see almost entirely around them and above them. The pod’s headlights beam ghostly white light into the sheer darkness.

As they listen intently to the unknown song, one researcher points a small video camera  upward, hoping the mystery creature will swim past, above the pod. His back is turned to the pod’s front window and the white glow of its lights.

Suddenly, a ghost-white hand slaps the window, inches from his body. The loud thump can be heard. For a split second the hand splays on the surface.

A palm, four fingers and thumb. Human. But webbed.

The researchers jump in fear. They pivot toward the hand. It pulls away with a swishing motion. The creature—or human being—disappears below the pod, out of sight.

When they watch the video from the front-view camera, pausing it to study the image frame by frame, they see a pale, sunken face with distinctly human features, slender shoulders and arms.

The visitor gazes back at them before it swooshes away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ROaTfBILM8

An elaborate hoax for a television special on mermaids?

Most likely.

Because, as all of us who believe in merfolk will tell you, they’re far too smart to be caught on tape.

Discover merpeople for yourself with ALICE AT HEART a March Monthly 100 – on sale for only $1.99!

Today is National Cherry Pie Day! So to celebrate, we are giving you a delicious cherry pie recipe to create and share with family and friends today!

Ingredients
4 cups fresh or frozen tart cherries
1 to 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
4 tablespoons cornstarch
1/8 tablespoon almond extract (optional)
Pie crust or pie dough recipe for 2 crust pie
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, to dot
1 tablespoon granulated sugar, to sprinkle

Cook cherries in medium saucepan over low heat and cover. Remove the pan after the cherries have lost much of their juice. Mix the sugar and cornstarch into a small bowl, then pour the sugar and cornstarch into the pan of heated cherries and mix. (You can also add in the almond extract now if you would like). After mixing, put the pan back onto the burner and continue cooking over low heat, stirring frequently until the mixture has thickened. Take off the burner and let the mixture cool. If your mix is too thin, you may add more cornstarch; however, if it is too thick, you should add a little water to thin it.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Now time to prepare your crust. Cut your crust in half and flatten or roll each half into a piece that will be big enough to fit into a pan that is 8 to 9 inches. After preparing your crust,  pour your (now cool) cherry mixture inside of it. Use the butter to dot and to moisten the edge of your crust bottom. Now place your crust top on top and crimp your edges. Use a knife to make a cut into the middle of the top crust to let steam escape (and also for decoration ;)).  Sprinkle the pie with sugar and bake for 50 minutes before removing and letting it cool.

I recommend setting on top of a windowsill like they do in movies. Haha. 🙂

Also in honor of National Cherry Pie Day, we are putting Trish Jensen’s STUCK WITH YOU on promotion for only $0.99!! Just click the link and grab it now!

And while you’re there, make sure you grab the rest of Trish Jensen’s fabulous romances! 

And coming soon….

Brain, Be Mindful of What the Heart Knows

by: Kathleen Eagle

WHAT THE HEART KNOWS is dedicated to two men who helped me grow up.  One was my father.  The other was a fine student who represents all my students, for I have learned so much more from them than I could possibly have taught.  The book is about a man whose heart condition forced him to retire from his pro basketball career.  The story opens when his father’s mysterious death brings him home, where he runs into the woman he left behind.  Full circle.  Once we’ve grown up, full circle can be full of surprises.

How often do we find ourselves saying, “We (or I) have come full circle”?  The answer probably has a lot to do with how old we are, or maybe how introspective we’re feeling at a given moment, or how often we’re given to taking a step back from the moment in order to have a look at the big picture.  Having married into the Eagle clan, I’ve come to appreciate the Lakota view that life’s journey is not, as I once thought, linear—think time line—but rather it is circular, and at the center is the heart.

Picture a dance circle.  The step is simple—side to side—and the rhythm is the most natural beat we know.  Lub-dub, lub-dub.   I haven’t fully researched this claim, but I’m willing to bet that every culture, every human society has a traditional circle dance.  And every circle has a center.  When we speak of the center, we often say at the heart of.  Laughter, love, life—we say these things come from the heart.  When the heart stops beating, life “passes away.”  But we also say, “life goes on.”  Once again, picture the circle.  People holding hands and moving in unison.  They’re not marching in straight lines.  They’re moving side to side, bodies keeping time with the rhythm of life—lub-dub, lub-dub—and life goes on, passed parent to child, hand to hand.

My father died of a heart attack when he was 48.  He had become a teacher after he retired from the Air Force, and he was pleased with my decision to become a teacher.  Since Daddy was a stickler for good grammar and never hesitated to correct mine, I was probably destined to become an English teacher.  I have always loved basketball (Go Timberwolves!) but didn’t know until I was grown that Daddy’s high school basketball team from tiny Colonial Beach, VA won the state championship in the early 40’s.  I met the other four members of his team (they had no bench) at Daddy’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

Robert Eaglestaff was one of my students the first year I taught at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation.  I taught juniors and seniors that year, and the kids were quite patient with the new fresh-out-of-college teacher from the East. Oh! I was so young, and so naïve.  Bob was the star basketball player.  He went on to play college basketball, became a teacher, later a highly-respected principal.  He died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—a common cause of sudden death in young athletes—when he was in his early 40’s.  He was dancing at a powwow.

And now, here’s icing for the circular cake.  Among some pictures my cousin sent me was one of a basketball team that traveled around the country back in the 40’s playing exhibition games against high school teams.  The Sioux Travelers.  The picture was taken at Colonial Beach High School, probably by my uncle.  My brother-in-law told me that there was such a team from South Dakota that was organized by a man from Standing Rock in the 40’s and 50’s.

How’s that for full circle?

Visit Kathleen Eagle on Facebook and read an excerpt from WHAT THE HEART KNOWS and other Bell Bridge Books publications by Kathleen Eagle at www.kathleeneagle.com.

Make sure you grab WHAT THE HEART KNOWS from Amazon for only $1.99!!

Just click the link!

Living the Dreamy Dreamland of a (cray-cray) Writer

Kathryn Magendie

Oh, the joys of being a writer! Why, we see the world in ways unlike mere mortals. Yeah. We do. Of course we do. We walk about with our heads in the clouds, or huddle inside our little spaces with far away dreamy dreamland eyes that rarely blink. I think I once didn’t blink for a week—no! Really! When one of my eyeballs fell out, I thought, “Dang, woman! For gawd’s sake blink!” So I did, and believe you me, I make sure I blink every once and a while. It’s much better that way; take it from me, the voice of experience.

I’m more the reclusive kind of writer. There’s only rumor that I really actually do exist at all. No! Really! There’s no one actually to prove it—okay, there are some who have seen me, waiflike and ethereal, meandering in an otherworldly way with clouds hovering over my wittle head. I’m so incredibly cute!—um, in very very weirdly dangerous to myself way—but I promise I am absolutely not dangerous to others. No sirree. I don’t even see others most of the time to be of any danger to them. Yeah. I just think of really strange things because my characters are doing all this cool stuff and I want to do it along with them. I do! I want to have all that excitement, and mysterious happenings, and!, all that good hot sex. Woooowheee.

Yeah, while writing The Lightning Charmer, I was so in to that book, I actually considered running outside nekkid while calling out to the lightning to “Take me! Take me, lover! I want you! Oh yes yes yes YES!” And without one shameful bone in my little body. Yeah. I surely am telling you the truth. I mean, Laura, that’s the main character, bless her heart, got to have sex with a lightning bolt!—how hot is that, my friends? How dagum hot is that? And Ayron? He’s the love interest, and so much more (I have a crush on him to beat the band so I won’t gush on and on about his awesomeness while I sigh with breathy sighs *cue rising music that fills the chest with longing.*); well, Laura has Ayron, that big hot sexy man who calls down the lightning for her. Oh, to have me an Ayron calling me down some lightning, mm hmmm—why can’t I go find a secret place in the woods and a big hot sexy mysterious man who charms the lightning comes take me in his big ole arms . . . *Kat will return in a moment—she’s having a quick fantasy daydream . . . nothing to see here, move along.*

Welp, luckily I have good sense god gave a goose and won’t go outside nekkid calling to the lighting to give me some hot sex. Huhn. And if I go up in my woods looking for a man, well, I just may find one, but what if I find a Flem and he takes me off to his nasty old shack like he did Laura? Ewww. He was some nasty. Dang it.

Sometimes I think of chunking this writing life. I do! You don’t believe me? Well, buh-leeve me I do. Sometimes I think I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s such a strange business. One that sometimes is unforgiving, and lonely—*sobs quietly for a moment*—and as for money? Good lawd! Let’s don’t go down that sad road.

But then, if I didn’t do this, who would I be? What would my world be like? How would I think of all kinds of cool things I’d love to do, even if I really can’t do them. Even if I can’t sex it up with a lightning bolt or a sexy lightning charming man, my character can, and I can live vicariously through her, and the others I create (or are they creating me?—stop the existentialism, Kat!). And it’s fun. And exciting. While I’m writing it, I am living it, y’allses! I am!

And when I’m not writing it, I’m thinking about it. And when I’m not writing and thinking about writing, on the seventh day, I rest. Dang, that might sound blasphemous, and in the south and mountain south you just don’t DO that kind of thing. Even if you might not believe in God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t matter—you by gawd better respect it! So, let me rephrase that: I never rest. At all! Yeah, even a god will get to rest, but my brain is on electro-dynamic-zippity-do-dah-day seven days a week, even when I’m sleeping—you don’t EVEN want a peek inside my brain, or my dreams. No. No, you do not *shivers.*

Now. If you are a writer, then you might be nodding your head, or you just might be going, “This woman is cray-cray! Good lawd!” And if you are not a writer, you might be going, “This woman is cray-cray! Good Lawd!”

Later y’all! Oh! Before I go: thank you all. Thank you all for supporting us writers by reading our work and encouraging us and staying ten feet back from us when we stare up at lightning with a gleam in our eyes. Teehee. But I adore you all. I do!

(A big P.S. The Lightning Charmer is on promo for one day only! For $1.99—wooowheee! That’s pretty danged cheap, y’all!)

Make  sure you head over to Amazon today in order to get this great deal on THE LIGHTNING CHARMER!! Just click the link!