The Bayousavage.com is up and reborn. We tried to keep up as much as we could from the old website with a few new twists (check out the music tab) Thanks to all of you for your support. Music, wine, and good story telling is a great combination.
Here is the link to the new website: https://bayousavage.com/
Chase Walker is a kick-ass friend. He has always understood my writing style and made it coherent with color and details I never imagined. He is my co-author on the Bayou series. We have a good writing and personal relationship. After being in Minneapolis for years and moving back to Waynesville NC has been a pleasure. Details in the books, the mountains are real, Waynesville and Asheville are real towns. The beauty is real. The characters are real to us.
We both have been doing other projects the last two years and been busy with life, not getting to the Bayou series.
We got together Thursday night and had a Bayou Savage discussion that had been long overdue. We discussed the 2002 beginning and the 2004 publication of “The Resurrection of Bayou Savage, Guitar Ghost Fighter.” We discussed book II “The Ghost Wars.” and we both knew exactly what happened on book III, “Attack on the Institute” and why it never was finished.
I kept adding elements and it grew too complex. I had read that adding romance was the way to go for big time ratings and profits. The problem is that it (in our small focus groups) we found that the romance took away from the other two books as paranormal action themes. As we discussed the not finished book III, I remembered my two favorite scenes in the book. Chase said he didn’t remember those scenes as he had been doing his mojo on the first half of the book. My scenes were at the end of the book. Curious if I had imagined writing those scenes I came home, pulled up the original manuscript, reread what I written years ago. It was there, yeahhh, I hadn’t imagined it, I copied and sent it to him.
But as I reread the ending it made me cry. It was the finale that I had written the book for. For me that’s not unusual. In my mind books I and II were one big book. Book III, I had the ending in mind when I started.
Last night, I had a glass of wine and thinking about that ending I wanted to finish up a few stray thoughts I had. Going into the zone, I started writing. Book IV started forming. Tentatively called “Bloodstone Moonshine or the Bloodstone Chronicles or something else… This time I took the ending from the not published book III and wrote 7 straight pages, picking up where book III left off. Probably didn’t help that I was watching John Wick 2 in the background with the wine. Somewhere between the two I found my muse and it kicked in. I have a rough outline in my mind how the book should go. Mist now has the Bloodstone and grown more powerful, Bayou is a now older, wiser guitar ghost fighter, Quirk has gone through a big change and organizing some big adjustments. Steve Johnson is a freshly minted guitar ghost fighter, and his wife Jade is there also.
So for any friends/fans of the Bayou series, if book III every gets finished, understand I am now working on book IV, lol. Its all good. Don’t know about other authors but for me if felt good getting back in touch with the characters we created. The characters have been friends for years.
ps: If any of you had not done the series, the best way to do it is to listen to the audio book. Chase does the reading with his gravely voice and the music is cool. Here is the link we posted on YouTube to give you a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkjUsI6L1I
great blog
As light faded, a century dissolved, and I heard ghosts. No ectoplasm or voices, just a powerful presence of the past, heightened by the potential consequences of my own folly in being there.
So, think about ghosts. If we visit the original place, or we hold the artifact in our hand, and, if we find the right frame of mind, then something happens. Combine knowledge of the past with the physical object, and we can get much more than the sum of two parts. If the circumstances are right, we share something with those who once touched — or who saw — what we now touch or see.
We find history transcending dates and facts. We join the past by sensing its unique texture. We hear what it’s telling us. The same thing happened to me when a Polish friend took me to see Auschwitz on a rainy weekday — a day when we, and the ghosts, were the only beings in that desolate place.
But, put aside slaughter and genocide. Happier ghosts dwell in, say, old books. Look at marginalia in books from other centuries — in books that’ve changed lives. As we read what readers have left in the margins, their ghosts reveal the transforming power of the written word in other ages. Or walk through old houses, for all houses are haunted in the sense that I offer the word.
And I leave you with this claim. It is, simply, that we never fully know any history until we quiet our minds, and listen to the people who once lived it.
From a John Lienhard blog post at the University of Houston
North Carolina’s mountains are full of phantoms, spooks, haunts, haints, weird creatures and crazy happenings. The hills are filled with classic ghost stories, and with places to go to seek out the unusual and paranormal. We’ve got demon dogs, haunted hot springs, mysterious lights, stories and songs to keep folk singers and storytellers busy forever.
Posted in Big Foot, evil, Ghost Fighters, Ghost Hunters, ghostbusters, ghosts, Hauntings, Paranormal, real ghostbusting, scary, solo guitar
Looking at the DSM 5. Look you’ll. Let’s look at hormones and could they influence a ghost hunt, Bigfoot hunt, paranormal investigation?
For this blog we are just looking at one hormone. DOPAMINE!
What is dopamine
Dopamine is one of the brain’s neurotransmitters – a chemical transmitting messages between neurons.
Why is it important?
Dopamine is often referred to as a “reward chemical.” “Reinforcement” would be a better term. Dopamine reinforces and orients attention and motivation. When dopamine gets activated in our brains by a particular stimulus or action, it is nature’s way of telling us that something is important for us. It is nature’s way of telling us to focus on particular stimulus.
How does it relate to paranormal investigations?
When we detect more “signal” than relative to “noise”, then we identify more patterns. This is called “patternicity,” the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
New research suggests that dopamine plays an important role in error detection, helping to determine whether a perception meets expectations or predictions. When there is a discrepancy or error between expectations and perceptions (say a signal of the paranormal) then dopamine release might mark the event as important, novel and warranting attention. If the perception exceeds expectation, it may be experience as rewarding or pleasurable and the person will want to repeat the experience.
It gets worse!
The most common type of delusion is called a “referential” delusion. Everything happens for a reason. The environment is somehow being manipulated. With patternicity the detection of hidden messages and signs are not coincidences.
Dopamine over-activity may erroneously reinforce the learning or pairing of associations between what would otherwise be unrelated, or coincidental events to be attributed to the paranormal.
As I have said many times, I want to believe, but also want my science training to kick in and verify and validate my conclusions. A dopamine release in a ghost hunt could influence the reality of what is happening.
Jus saying….
Keep smiling and thinking!
Dean Russell
Posted in Blue Guitar, comic books, evil, fender guitars, Ghost Fighters, Ghost Hunters, ghostbusters, ghosts, Guitar Ghost, guitar ghosts, Hauntings, horror, Life, Paranormal, real ghostbusting, scary, Sci Fi, solo guitar, superhero, time management
Tagged ghost hunt, paranormal investigation, paranormal investigations
From the Vital Smarts newsletter: “Throwing someone under the bus—all in the name of fun.”
In these situations, silence isn’t golden. It’s agreement. When we don’t speak up, we show our support for the people doing the badmouthing. We’re helping to throw the person under the bus.
It’s this kind of poisonous conversation that causes bad morale to spread across a team or organization. It begins with a seemingly innocuous joke, which is really the leading edge of an attack. Instead of saying something like, “I see it differently,” others in the conversation remain silent or add to the wisecrack, amplifying the attack.
The group is creating a villain story at someone’s expense, without stopping to question the story’s truth or giving the person a chance to respond. As the story is repeated and grows unchallenged, it becomes full of what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” It may be several steps away from the facts, but it feels true. And it poisons the workplace.
Ghost Hunting Clutter Starts Long Before It Shows Up In Your Hunt
Before the chaos shows up in your ghost hunt, it has to start somewhere…and where it starts is not in your car or haunt site. So trying to “fix it” at the level of that level without looking at the real source isn’t going to change anything.
I believe clutter starts inside of you. Your outer environment is simply a reflection of what’s going inside you, inside your mind, in your thoughts and beliefs, and consciousness. What do you think?
When you look up at the skies at night and look at the stars, you see more than the light, you see a million clocks.
The one thing that determines all of our deaths….. is the passage of time. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our lives are a blink in time. We have countful moments, not countless.
We all die. Death is the birth of ghosts.
If there are ghosts, it would be interesting how they crossed over the time barrier. How they see time, use time, do they know the past, the future? Do they run out of time?
Time, the connections are deeper than my limited intuition can understand. A ghost is an effect, an effect that deters our normal entropy, atrophy, apathy systems.
"Bayou Savage" Guitar Ghost Fighter 