Midwest Great Lakes Road Trip – Part 2

Posted on August 22, 2021 by kerrylreis

The first part of my road trip journey around the Midwest Great Lakes had been more about driving, re-adjusting, and re-planning on the go, but now I woke up at four in the morning in my Duluth hotel to prepare and set off to my first scheduled destination, Isle Royale National Park. Because of the early start, I was going to have to miss the included hotel breakfast amenity, but my lunch was already set. Before starting on journey, I had made and wrapped in plastic bags five sandwiches, which I placed in a small ice chest with five apples and diet sodas. I put the ice chest in the trunk with a small tote bag filled with five cookie packs, providing me with five simple lunches to save time and money on the trip. On the first two days of my journey, a rest area stop and a fuel stop were the locations of my first two lunches, but now I realized, after going over the boat schedule for the Isle Royale visit, that I had inadvertently and properly prepared the only option I would have for lunch on the island. I started driving up a state route to Grand Portage, the boat departure location to the national park.

Grand Portage was a small town, and the boat was docked against a singular short wooden pier next to a small wooden office cabin and extending from a small grass and gravel lakefront lot with ill-defined parking strips. The cars of my fellow passengers pretty much filled the small lot, and the captain with his two crew members gave us a short safety presentation before checking us on board. I took a seat on the outside of the cabin, holding my lunch tote bag and camera tightly in preparation of a rolling journey. After an hour and a half on the water, the boat came up along the southwest corner of the island where the captain pointed out a hundreds-of-years old ancient tree that had survived on the tight rocky coast. The island’s forest stretched tightly against the shoreline, barely providing any sort of beach area. The boat then headed into the Washington Harbor inlet within the island’s southwest tip to a short pier next to the visitor check-in center named Windigo. After covering my entrance fee and getting input from one of the park rangers, I decided to hike a small trail up to an overlook on the southern part of the island. I only had a few hours to explore before the boat return check-in, so it seemed to be the best choice. Even though the island has a decent population of moose and wolves, I did not come across any of these creatures, perhaps luckily. However, the trail was tight within the vibrant forest, forcing me into a balancing act of a walk in many sections. The colorful assortment of small red, white, and blue berries gave a natural American tone to the flora. At the overlook, I could just barely see over the trees a small pond on a small open grass field. I enjoyed my lunch, stashed the trash in my tote bag, and hiked back down the trail to the visitor center, taking some beautiful camera shots. Because of the isolation of the island, the rangers requested that visitors avoid using waste receptacles near the visitor center, taking trash back to the mainland for disposal, due to the meager schedule of waste pickup service at the island from the mainland. I made it back in time for the boat departure check-in, and I and my fellow passenger were given a close view of the lighthouse just beyond the harbor on our way back to Grand Portage.

Isle Royale National Park montage

As we were informed, Isle Royale National Park is the least visited national park in the lower forty-eight states, but it was very obvious why. With only a few low passenger boat transportation options to the island and a very short summer visitation season, Isle Royale is one of the hardest national parks to visit. The only other option a potential park visitor has beyond the small commercial group of transportation boats is some type of personal access to a lake boat or sea plane to take one to the island. I truly lucked out in getting that last seat available on the commercial transport to be able to visit a remarkable national park.

Once I made it back to my hotel in Duluth, I realized that I would need to find another hotel for the next night after I made my trip to Voyageurs National Park. I went online in my hotel room and lucked out again as a motel just a few blocks away had one open room available for the following night. At the same time, due to nearly missing out on Isle Royale, I went online to check out the boat tour schedule two days away for Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and was able to book one of the last remaining seats on the second Grand Tour boat. The next morning, I finally enjoyed the breakfast amenity I had missed the day before and then checked out of the hotel before heading northwest towards Voyageurs National Park.

My original idea was to head to the Kabetogama Lake Visitor Center around the southwest corner of the park for the possibility of a lake boat tour, but I had just discovered that this option was not currently available, so I headed to the Ash River entrance and visitor center along the south central side of the park. This location provided several hiking trails and overlook spots at its location along a tight section of Kabetogama Lake. The park ranger at the visitor center gave me the best trail options in the area and suggested I also check out the lake overlook behind the visitor center. In a calming moment, when I walked up to the overlook, I found five young woman stretched out on the rocky overlook, reading in their relaxed state, while a few motor and sail boats enjoyed the waters below. It was a relaxing state for me as well. On one of the other trails recommended to me, I reached an overlook viewing a large pond created by dams made by beavers in the park. Basically, my visits to Voyageurs and Isle Royale had provided me with a new perspective on the forest and lake environment of the Midwest. I enjoyed my next tote bag lunch on the last trail head, and then headed back to Duluth to check in to the second hotel, so I could plan for the next phase of my trip, after which I could claim that I have been in all fifty states in the US.

Voyageurs National Park montage

To be continued…

Midwest Great Lakes Road Trip – Part 1

Posted on August 18, 2021 by kerrylreis

A year ago, I had planned to take the major road trip that would officially allow me to claim having been able to experience all fifty states in the USA. However, the COVID pandemic forced me to delay this trip as travel restrictions rose up to fight the virus. Two years ago, I had viewed this trip in a simple format by flying to Chicago and renting a car to drive around Lake Michigan to experience the two states I had never visited, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the last state where I had only visited by changing planes in an airport, Minnesota. Yet, with travel restrictions creating new barriers even as they slowly started to lift, I realized this trip will need to be taken solely by car on a major road trip. I mapped out a path where I would drive from Colorado through Nebraska to Iowa, before turning north toward Minnesota. I noticed during my planning that Iowa had a small national monument along the Mississippi, Effigy Mounds, and decided to put this side trip into the schedule. In Minnesota, the goal was to visit its lake-based national park, Voyageurs, and then head over to a town in the northeast point of Minnesota, where I could catch a boat ride in Lake Superior over to Michigan’s lone national park, Isle Royale, which just happens to be closer to Minnesota and Canada than Michigan. After this boat visit, I next planned to head around Lake Superior into Wisconsin in order to take a boat cruise around the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore at the tip of a small Wisconsin peninsula. After this cruise, I would then drive across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to get to the Mackinac Bridge, the one connection over to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. When I described my trip’s plans to a friend, he recommended that I take the time before crossing over the bridge to take a ferry over to Mackinac Island, where the small town on the island has no automotive transportation, only horse buggies to take visitors through the town. I added it to the schedule, and then plotted my path into the Lower Peninsula, planning a stop at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan. On my initial planning, I had not included Indiana Dunes, but when it was recently re-designated as a national park from a national lakeshore, I added it to my national park bucket list. After this final stop, I plotted my road journey to loop back up into Wisconsin to get a perspective of its farming and urban areas before heading back home. After getting fully vaccinated from COVID, dealing with a family issue, HOA concerns, the passing of a dear neighbor in my community, and the medical issues of a close friend, I finally prepared and set off on my journey in the middle of a hot summer, but I was about to discover that even with all of my planning, this was a trip where I was going to have to adjust and adapt more than with any other road trip I had undertaken.

My first day of the journey was basically a long drive through the heart of Nebraska into Iowa, where my destination was a small hotel just north of Des Moines, which I had booked online the night before. This has become the foundation of handling a modern road trip, using hotel Wi-Fi and my laptop to judge the next day’s schedule and book the next night’s hotel at each stop’s journey along the way. However, I was going to discover that this trip was going to need a bit more adapting in this process. Per my initial plan, the next day I would check out Effigy Mounds and then head to a hotel just outside of Voyageurs, but I quickly discovered online that there were no hotel availability near Voyageurs. I also confirmed that there were no hotel availability near the boat departure point to Isle Royale. The closest hotel opening for either location was in Duluth at the western tip of Lake Superior, centrally located about over two hours away from both destinations, as well as just a bit west of Apostle Islands, my next destination after the two national parks. The hotel was available for the next two nights, but was fully booked for the third night following, so I booked both nights to cover the three destinations and started to plan the schedule. As I thought it over, I felt it might be best to try and see Voyageurs before checking in to the Duluth hotel, which would be difficult with the side trip to Effigy Mounds, so I made the decision to drop Effigy Mounds from the schedule for the next day. The next day, I headed straight up the interstate into Minnesota, heading through the St. Paul side of the twin cities, but it still took longer than I had hoped as I approached the Duluth area. I began to realize that I would not reach Voyageurs until around late afternoon, which would not be the best time to experience the park, so I went to the hotel I booked in Duluth and checked in early.

Once I was in my room, I logged in to the Wi-Fi on my laptop and checked on basic information for Voyageurs for the next day. After checking on Voyageurs, I went over to the Isle Royale page on the nps.gov site to check on the boat schedules at the departure point for the following day. There was only one boat handling two trips to the island from the Minnesota departure point, and seating was fully booked. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get a chance to explore Isle Royale and check it off my national park bucket list. Suddenly, I decided to check on the boat schedule for the day I had planned for Voyageurs and found the boat had one last available seat available for its morning trip. I immediately booked the open seat, and swapped the schedule to visit Isle Royale before Voyageurs. I also realized that I would need to get up at four in the morning in order to make the boat check-in at the departure point around nine. Since, I was now delaying Voyageurs for another day, I also realized that I would need to find a third hotel night in Duluth for the Apostle Islands visit. This trip was fast becoming the most complicated road trip I had ever taken on. I could hardly wait to finally get to my first schedule designation on this trip.

To be continued…

A Year of Reviewing Indie Books 2020

Posted on January 10, 2021 by kerrylreis

What more can be said about a year as historically disruptive as 2020. With a COVID pandemic that inflamed divisions within and among countries, the norms of exploration, economical developments, and the social aspects of gathering with friends and family were upended. It disrupted the standard marketing opportunities for me to promote my two self-published works, pushed back on my grander travel exploration plans, and upended the processes for my HOA board of which I am the current president to help maintain and improve the community. One would think that I would have more time to read and review more of my fellow indie author works during these homebound times, and I did read a few more than the previous year, but I feel the uncertainties of the past year reduced connections with other fellow authors, which is one of the reasons that I was only able to read and review fifteen books for the year. I did rate one novel at 5 stars and had rated two novels at the 2 star level, putting most of the books in the 3 to 4 star level. Basically, it was an enjoyable year for reading.

Now to reiterate my review standards from the past years postings, I had to be open to all genres and not let a genre type affect the rating and review of a work. My focus was on whether the story was told well, the characters were relatable, the plot functional and understandable, and the pieces fit together. If I could follow an enjoyable tale while pushing aside the typos, grammatical errors, and historical or cultural anomalies, the book landed within the 3 star zone. If I could feel more emotional attachments to the characters and find myself drawn into the plot action with less distractions from errors, then the book was landing into the 4 star zone. When character and plot all came together nearly perfectly within the genre I was reading, and editing was well-done, it was a 5 star effort.

The Silver Horn Echoes: A Song of Roland, the one novel that reached that 5 star effort last year was an interesting historical fiction based on an eleventh century epic poem about an heroic figure in a battle during the conflict between Charlemagne’s empire and the Muslim realm in Spain. The skill in fleshing out the characters and building up strong storylines leading up to the main battle actually led to the book being mentioned in the final paragraph of the Wikipedia article about the original classic poem on which the novel is based.

Five of the novels landed in the 4 star zone, including the second book in Doug J Cooper’s time dimension series, Bump Time Meridian. When he reached out to me in 2019 to beta read the opening book in the series, I informed him that I was tougher with time travel stories due to the basic time travel conundrums that are difficult to gloss over. Doug continues to prove excellent writing skills with interesting story lines and entrancing characters. However, dealing with the time travel mythology added a bit more complexity in the reading, but the suspense and thrills were still enough to entice sci-fi action readers.

Three of the other four star novels land within the mystery genre, with two of them set in earlier historical times. One focuses on an investigative reporter in 1926 New Orleans looking into the murder of a wealthy businessman, adding a touch of the roaring 20s creole in the mystery. The other historical mystery brings a dark civil rights view in the 1960s Deep South, as a few parties seeks the truth behind the murder of a black musician and fellow band member, as the white mayor and police chief tries to brush the case aside with a false story. The third mystery is set in current day with a member of a police consulting firm being asked to help out the local police with a murder case while doing undercover work in a local bakery. The last four star novel is a romantic drama set during the Vietnam War when a pair of lovers is separated by one being drafted in the army and then going MIA after an ambush on his unit, another strong tale set back in recent history.

The seven works that landed at the 3 star level were in multiple genres. Three were mysteries, one under a police murder investigation that develops a conflict of resolution, while the other two focuses on main private eye characters. Two fell under the medieval fantasy fiction with a Game of Thrones persona. One was another sci-fi time travel story that focuses on a hidden human race within modern culture with the secret ability to time and space shift within their life spans, while the last work was a short story collection in the horror genre.

The two works that fell short in the two star range dealt with struggling characters, one battling hidden shadows and the other dealing with personal demons from alcohol to the death of a friend which he caused. In both works, a complicated plot structure and the difficulty in finding empathy within the characters made the stories difficult for me.

It basically was a good and enjoyable year for reading. With my two self-published works, I hope readers feel they live up to the standards I have used to judge the works of my fellow indie authors. If avid readers do check out Legacy Discovered and Disappeared and Found and decide to purchase and read either or both of them, I hope they decide to let me know if they liked it and why through Amazon, Goodreads, and other book sharing sites. Good honest reviews are an indie author’s best friend.

My reviews can be found on my Goodreads Author page at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6491046.Kerry_Reis.

2020 Emmy Voting

Posted on September 5, 2020 by kerrylreis

This year has affected a lot of us, health-wise, financially, socially, and politically. For me, my plans and ideas to promote my new novel have been disrupted, as well as my hopes to have a few more exploratory road trips. However, I know that I have still been in a better position than many others on this planet. As a member of the Public Relations Peer Group of the Television Academy, I have been more aware of how much this year has affected the entertainment industry, upending television production for new broadcast and streaming shows during a time when people are looking for comfort in isolation. It also slightly affected the process and timeline for the nomination and voting for the 2020 Emmy Awards. The announcement of this year’s official nominations came out in late July and the online viewing platform for the nominated programs opened up in mid-August, creating a tighter timeline for viewing and voting, since the voting deadline was August 31. The rules for voting require Academy members to view all nominees in a category before voting, but for series or limited series nominees, members only needed to view one episode of the six provided of each nominee in order to vote. In the end, I had time to view and vote for the top four categories.

In the Outstanding Television Movie category, there were five nominees this year, all of them basically within the 90 minute to 2 hour range that I feel fit within a standard television movie length. HBO’s only nominee was Bad Education, a historical drama based on the true story of an embezzlement scandal of taxpayer money in a Long Island school system in the early 2000s. The other four nominees were all from Netflix with two of the nominees being post series wrap-ups, with El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie providing a rough escape thriller from the AMC drama series, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend providing the comedy series with a comic wedding and rescue fun ending. Netflix’s third nominee, Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings: These Old Bones, was another country-style heart-tugger in the same style of previous Dolly Parton network special stories. The final Netflix nominee, American Son, was an interesting adaption of a play which takes place in one location in a basically extended single scene, a police station waiting area late at night where a recently separated mixed race couple is desperate to find out about the event in which their eighteen-year-old son was involved during a police interaction. Even as the agonizing argumentative interaction between the characters and eventual surprising unveiling of truth provide a much more complex grey perspective, the story’s theme still touches on the current social conflict on policing and race, which encouraged me to give this nominee my vote.

The Outstanding Limited Series category also had five nominees this year from Hulu, Netflix, FX Networks, and HBO. The two Netflix series both centered on a young woman within an unequal power situation. In Unbelievable, a young teenage girl is unfairly pressured by police and friends to admit that her claim of being raped was a lie. In Unorthodox, a young woman seeks to escape the Hassidic Jewish culture and a forced marriage in New York City, secretly flying off to Berlin. In both series, the thematic perspective is subtly presented. In Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere, the complex perspectives of trying to resolve racial and wealth inequality subtly powers the story line. In a more historical tale, FX Networks’ Mrs. America delves into Phyllis Schlafly and her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s. All four of these nominees have very important themes and issues behind their storylines, but HBO’s Watchmen with its DC comic universe background to present its racial and political conflict perspective more powerfully attracts its audience, encouraging me to give it my vote.

Eight nominees landed in the Outstanding Comedy Series category, but NBC’s The Good Place was the only broadcast network series to get a nomination, a continuing sign of the way that streaming era has upended the electronic video entertainment universe. Even more telling is this was the final season of The Good Place which gained this nomination. Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek was also nominated for its final season, while FX Networks’ What We Do In The Shadows also provided a boost to basic cable programming. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and Insecure demonstrated how premium cable programming seeks to produce comedy without sexual or language restrictions, making it edgier. Netflix’s Dead To Me and The Kominsky Method provided more balance to its comic storytelling, but once again, Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was still stronger in providing a more balanced positive view of comic perception, which is why it received my vote.

For the Outstanding Drama Series, there were also eight nominees, but only one was new to the nominee list, Disney+’s The Mandalorian, a series that impressively brought Star Wars action and thrills, even though each episode was only a half hour long. Dark themes continued to play within AMC’s Better Call Saul, BBC America’s Killing Eve, HBO’s Succession, and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, whereas Netflix’s three nominees found a little better balance: The Crown with its strong historical perspective, Ozark with a slightly lighter touch in its criminal theme, and Stranger Things which continued to maintain its sci-fi fantasy balance with its young protagonists in the retro 80s, even with its darker end to its third season. Stranger Things pulled in my vote for this year.

It has definitely been a trying time for the entertainment industry this year, so it will be interesting to see how my votes match up with my fellow Television Academy members this year, when the Primetime Emmy recipients are announced at a more pandemic virtual Emmy Awards Show airing on ABC, Sunday, September 20.

Update: It was an interesting pandemic awards ceremony on ABC, Sunday, September 20, with host Jimmy Kimmel standing alone in the main theater while nominees and other guests connected in from home or other locations, a most interesting virtual show. The awards for three of the categories I voted in were presented during this show, while another category award was presented on the last night of five Creative Emmy Awards shows, which aired on FXX on Saturday, September 19. The Outstanding Television Movie Emmy, presented during the Creative Emmy Awards show, went to Bad Education. During the main Emmy Awards Show, the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy went to Schitt’s Creek, and the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy went to Succession. The only Emmy Award winner that matched my vote was in the Outstanding Limited Series category, in which the Emmy went to Watchmen.

Big Bend Road Trip during a Pandemic Time

Posted on March 31, 2020 by kerrylreis

Last year was a busy year, but also a frugal year as I held off taking a vacation road trip like in previous years. The major road trip that I postponed was a Midwest road trip around Lake Michigan in order to visit the two states I have never visited and the one state left in which I had only visited by changing planes in a major airport within the state. When I had created my initial plan for this trip, there was also two national parks included in the trip, but since then, a national lakeshore had been re-designated as a national park, adding it to the travel plan. I currently have this trip planned for the summer, but since I missed taking a trip last year, I decided to check out doing a quick spring break trip to another national park still on my list to visit, Big Bend National Park.

Five years ago, I had planned to visit Big Bend with five other national parks on a road trip from Los Angeles to Colorado, a trip I wrote about in an earlier post on my site. Unfortunately, Big Bend was just too far off the path for me to visit on my limited timeline, so it became an outlier for any potential future trips. When I considered adding a second trip for this year, I researched whether I could do a quick trip covering Big Bend with a visit to the Alamo in San Antonio and a quick tour of Louisiana, a state I had driven through once with no stops. However, it became obvious that it would take longer to travel to all three of these locations in just a week, so I pared down the trip to just Big Bend National Park. As a road trip, I determined that it would take two days to drive down to a location near the park, one day to visit the park, and two days to drive back home. In my planning, I noted the potential to stop in Roswell, New Mexico, to check out the UFO sites on my way down and to possibly visit Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe, New Mexico, on my way back. However, as I looked to finalize my plans, the specter of the current COVID-19 outbreak began to rise up.

When spring break week arrived, the coronavirus information was just recommendations of social distancing. I considered that since I would be driving alone within my car and traveling to a more remote section of the country, I should be fine. I went online and discovered that motel options in Marathon, a small town nearest to Big Bend, were booked up, but I found a motel in another close-by town, Alpine, to the west that had a direct road connecting it to the western entrance to the park. I booked a room for the two nights, then booked a room in Roswell for a night on the way down to Alpine. The next morning, I took off.

I reached Roswell by late afternoon, which gave me time to check out the International UFO Museum in the downtown area. The admission price was inexpensive, and the museum was an interesting display of photos, artwork, and presentations in a large hallway. It didn’t take long to experience the displays, which were interesting, regardless of one’s opinions regarding extraterrestrial visitation. My motel also took advantage of the ET reputation, projecting a space alien welcoming all earthlings. I enjoyed my night, but woke up to find the area surrounded by fog. I wondered if I had uncovered an omen.

I drove south out of the fog and made it to Alpine by mid-afternoon. I was alerted by the motel manager about potential closures at Big Bend, so I went online to check the conditions of the park. All visitor centers were being closed, but the park entrances were still open. The next day, I headed down to Big Bend. When I got down to the entrance, I discovered that rangers were not manning the gates, meaning that my annual pass was unnecessary, as entry was now free for all visitors.

Mule Ears Formation, Big Bend NP

Big Bend was a wonderful southwest ecosystem of desert and mountains with flat areas of cacti and yucca around buttes and rock formations. My exploration took me down the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive to where the Rio Grande exits out of the St. Elena Canyon. It gave me a chance to walk down to the edge the Rio Grande and look across to the cliff wall on the Mexico side of the river. Viewing the park during the opening of spring proved to be a most comfortable time as the outside temperature was in the comfortable 70s, which is probably why this was the park’s prime visitation period, since people would want to avoid the desert hot days of summer. It was a good day to discover this bend region of Texas.

Rio Grande at St. Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP

When I got back to my motel after my day in Big Bend, I stopped in for dinner at a nearby diner where I had enjoyed dinner and breakfast earlier before going into the park, only I noticed that now every other stool at the bar had been covered to create distancing between guests. Concern that the diner would have to close in a couple of days was prevalent between the cook and waitress. Back at the motel room, I went online and booked a room in Santa Fe for the next night. I drove up the next day and discovered that I was just one of a few guests in the Santa Fe hotel. The hotel had to close their small dining room and was supplying the booking’s promised morning breakfast as a grab and go bag. Restaurants in the city had already closed down per government distancing rules, forcing me to get dinner through a fast food drive-thru. I also discovered that nearby Bandelier National Monument was now closed, so this stop was now dropped from the trip. The next day as I finished the drive home, I discovered that gas station marts along the way had needed to close their public restrooms as visitors had been stealing soap. I also noticed attendants at the gas stations were taking time to go out and spray disinfectant cleaner onto the gas pumps. I made it home from a very enjoyable quickie road trip to deal with stay at home orders and depleted grocery shelves. I hope to survive this pandemic concern and get an opportunity to take my bigger Midwest road trip in the summer.

2019 – A Year of Reviewing Indie Books

Posted on January 13, 2020 by kerrylreis

With the ringing in of the New Year, a calendar decade has ended and a new one has begun. Last year was a busy year for me, as I continued on in my position of president of my HOA board which dealt with many resignations during the year. At the same time, I completed my second novel and selected Outskirts Press to handle the self-publishing process. Disappeared and Found was officially published and released in November. In addition, the length of time that my first novel, Legacy Discovered, has been available as a solo published work has led to more decreasing connections with fellow indie authors on social media. It is probably for this reason that I only read and reviewed twelve indie books this past year. None of the books I read was rated at 5 stars, but most of them were rated at 4 stars, and only one had a rating of 2 stars. I enjoyed the group of books I read this year.

My main method of selecting the books that I review come from the fellow indie authors who retweet my key tweets promoting my book, but last year two of the books I read were direct requests from two fellow indie authors asking me to be a beta reader for their new works. One of these works, Bump Time, was a start of a new series from Doug J Cooper, who wrote the marvelous 5 star four novel sci-fi Crystal series. When he informed me that the new series was a multi-universe time travel series, I warned him that I am tougher with time travel concepts. His plot was very innovative and imaginative, backed by his excellent writing skills, but I was not distracted enough to avoid seeing the basic time travel contradictions, so I gave it 4 stars. He did inform me that he will address the contradictions in the second book of the series.

The second book I was asked to beta read was from another indie author that I had provided high reviews for a couple of his previous books. However, this book was a different genre from the previous works, so he was publishing it under another name. I noted and commented on some plot issues in his suspense action thriller, issues that I found that he had addressed when I purchased the published version later. The hyper action in this political thriller does walk the line at times which is why I only gave it 4 stars, but it was still a very entertaining and suspenseful tale.

The other five books that received 4 stars from me included a post-WW1 historical fiction action thriller, a very graphic abusive relationship drama at the high school age level, a dark young adult horror tale, and two action detective mysteries with one having a psychic element. All were very engaging with only minor issues that held them back from the 5 star level.

Only one novel fell to a 2 star level in my opinion, as the sci-fi tale of a complicated relationship between a woman celebrity and a couple of males from an extraterrestrial alien refugee community on earth had just a few too many complex contradictions in the character mythos to overcome in the tightly written thriller.

The four works that landed in between with 3 stars dealt with an erotic romance thriller of Greek gods in modern day culture, a relationship road journey in the hippie generation 1970s, a serial murder mystery with a psychic consultant, and a very short 40 page novella of a prison drama that mainly plays out as an introduction to a potential series.

It was a light year of reading, but still a good year. I now have two self-published novels, and I hope readers feel they live up to the standards I have used to judge the works of my fellow indie authors. If avid readers do check out Legacy Discovered and Disappeared and Found and decide to purchase and read either or both of them, I hope they decide to let me know if they liked it and why through Amazon, Goodreads, and other book sharing sites. Good honest reviews are an indie author’s best friend.

My reviews can be found on my Goodreads Author page at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6491046.Kerry_Reis.

Disappeared and Found: A New Novel

Posted on October 30, 2019 by kerrylreis

Over seven years ago, I took a story idea and wrote my first novel, using the new process of self-publishing to put it out to reading community. Legacy Discovered received wonderful support from my friends and family, and generated a fair amount of good reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. However, as an independently published work, it has been a tough road to market this work among the millions of books that have been self-published during this time. Yet, I will not give up in promoting this act of creativity, which is why a close friend recently challenged me to try again by writing a new book. Soon after his challenge, I was watching a couple of new episodes from two cable reality docuseries that I enjoy when I had a creative story idea that arose by the combination of these shows’ premises. I wrote up an outline, got input from several friends, and then started out writing a new fiction novel. This new creative journey is about to cross the finish line as independent self-publisher, Outskirts Press, is within days of releasing it for sale through available outlets. The new novel is called Disappeared and Found.

The story is about a young woman, Dorothy, who inadvertently discovers that parents that raised her could not be her biological parents, which leads her to overhear her father tell a neighbor about his fear of her finding out that she was adopted. Dorothy had already faced dealing with the death of the mother who had raise her several years back, so when she faces her father, he tells her that they kept the adoption a secret from her in order to keep her love toward them as real parents, especially as his wife dealt with the cancer that led to her death. Dorothy tries to deal with the confession, but she wants to understand why and who had put her up for adoption, so she reaches out on her own to a cable reality show whose hosts help adopted individuals and biological parents to reconnect. The DNA test the show has Dorothy take seems to match closely with another person in the database, a potentially biological brother close match. The host reaches out by phone to this brother match for confirmation. Yet the young man, Scott, who answers the phone tells the host shockingly that he did not have a sister who was put up for adoption, but rather his mother took his sister out for a walk nineteen years earlier and disappeared, a cold case that is still open. In fact, Scott had just finished an interview with another investigative reality show that focuses on mysterious missing person cases, and the potential break in the case energizes their current production, as well as the local and federal agencies involved. What is the truth about how a missing baby girl wound up being raised by another couple in another state, and what happened to the missing mother?

The story is a much more direct mystery, a genre that I have a long love for. Yet, I am also drawn to the inner conflicts over family and uncovered hidden lies that the main character, Dorothy, has to struggle through. As I wrote the story, I had to empathize deeply with the dark mixed feelings all of our characters were feeling, and I hope that readers can feel and work their way through these conflicts while uncovering the answers to the mystery in a satisfactory way. I hope readers are intrigued to read it and find an enjoyable read in the journey.

2019 Emmy Voting

Posted on September 2, 2019 by kerrylreis

Wow, another year has passed, and voting for this year’s Emmy Awards has just ended. As a member of the Public Relations Peer Group of the Television Academy, once again it was an honor for me to be able to vote in certain categories for the 2019 Emmy Awards for outstanding television programming. The online viewing site for the nominated programs opened up at the beginning of August, and online voting opened up during the last weeks of August, closing down on the last Thursday of August. The rules for voting require Academy members to view all nominees in a category before voting, but for series or limited series nominees, members only needed to view one episode of the six provided of each nominee in order to vote. Despite some HOA issues and a special project which I will be announcing shortly, this year I was able to set aside one week to view and vote for nominees for six categories.

In the Structured Reality Program category, there were six nominees of programs which provide an informed host or production to guide common folks or known celebrities on a specific issue or journey. Among the six, Antiques Roadshow on PBS is a standard bearer that has been airing for decades, although the last time I had actually seen an episode before this year, I recalled that the antique experts were set up in a single plain studio room to provide background and value to the antiques brought into the show. I was impressed, although not surprised, to see current technology provided a broader range of outdoor and indoor onsite background locations for the experts to interact with the antique owners. The two Netflix nominees, Queer Eye and Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, were focused on a home and personal life expert or group of experts providing assistance to an individual needing it. Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins And Dives featured a foodie expert introducing the viewing audience to fantastic small restaurants across the United States. ABC’s Shark Tank was presenting another season of hopeful startup entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to a small group of competing investors. However, TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are? featured a celebrity taking a journey to discover ancestry and history of the family tree. Even though the focus was on a known celebrity, the understanding of the history that was uncovered brought about a broader perspective to the viewing audience, which is why I voted for this nominee.

For the Outstanding Reality Competition category, five of the six nominees were re-nominations from last year’s list, The Amazing Race, American Ninja Warrior, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Top Chef, and The Voice. John Legend was a new competing judge and coach on The Voice this year, but this was the only variation among the five series from last year. The new nominee for this year was Netflix’s Nailed It!, which was more of a satirical cooking competition as the competitors were more incompetent with their cooking skills. In the end, The Amazing Race is still an admitted favorite of mine, providing a global cultural lesson and perspective to the viewing audience, and therefore receiving my vote.

For Outstanding Television Movie, there were only five nominees again this year, including another NetFlix Black Mirror episode, Bandersnatch. At least this year, the Black Mirror episode was longer, coming closer to the hour and a half normal television movie length. The theme of Bandersnatch was more personally internal as an early 80s computer game programmer runs across several yes/no options in the course of a day and the viewer is shown in computer game style the consequences of both options in parallel time. Amazon Prime Video nominee, King Lear, was interesting in presenting Shakespeare’s tragedy in a modern setting; however, the dialogue is still from Shakespeare which doesn’t match with army tanks and urban alleys for the average viewer. HBO nabbed three nominees with Deadwood, My Dinner With Hervé, and Brexit. The one fictional nominee of the three, Deadwood, was a return to the HBO drama series with a dark Western genre flair in a late 1800s South Dakota town. The other two were non-fictional accounts, one about a reporter’s interview dinner and night with the Fantasy Island celeb days before he committed suicide, and the other a behind-the-scenes view of the opposing campaigns leading up to the British referendum on Great Britain exiting the EU. The personal celeb tragedy was dark and very introspective, but I was deeply intrigued by the historical lessons behind the rise of Brexit, which won my vote.

In the Outstanding Limited Series category, only one of the five nominees, HBO’s Sharp Objects, was adapted from fiction, as Amy Adams is a reporter who is sent back to her hometown to cover a murder case, while she has her own personal demons to deal with. The other four nominees are based on actual events. FX’s Fosse/Verdon delves into the historical life of classic power entertainment couple Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. HBO’s other nominee, Chernobyl, looks into what caused the nuclear disaster event and its consequences. Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora unveils the underpinnings that lead to a notorious prison escape. However, Netflix’s When They See Us, which was directed by Ava DuVernay, really affected me deeply with the actions of injustice and coercion towards a group of boys called The Central Park Five, which is why it got my vote.

For the Outstanding Comedy Series, only two of the seven nominees, HBO’s Barry and Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, are repeat nominees from last year, but this is only because the nominee with the most previous wins across all categories, Veep, took a year off last year. NBC’s The Good Place also has received a nomination in a previous year, but does not have a win. Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek has been around for a few seasons and has received comments that it should have been nominated in earlier years, but this season is the first time it has been nominated. The two new series that received nominations were Amazon Prime Video’s Fleabag and Netflix’s Russian Doll. Most of the nominees appear to try and find its comic elements in darker areas and characters, from Barry’s murder for hire main character seeking to become an actor and Veep’s backroom tales of political manipulations, to Fleabag’s non empathetic family members and Russian Doll’s main character’s foul language response to her odd time loop situation. I prefer a more balanced positive view of comic perception, which I find a bit more in the wacky characters of Schitt’s Creek and the odd redemptive purgatory of The Good Place, but is still stronger in the journey of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which received my vote again.

In the Outstanding Drama Series, only two of the eight nominees, HBO’s Game of Thrones and NBC’s This Is Us, are repeat nominees from last year, but AMC’s Better Call Saul has been nominated in a previous year. Even though two series, BBC America’s Killing Eve and Netflix’s Ozark has had nominations in specific categories in previous seasons, this is the first year they have received the main drama category. The last three nominees, Netflix’s Bodyguard, FX’s Pose, and HBO’s Succession, are in their first season, which makes their nominations impressive. However, many of these nominees work within a theme of competition between power characters. The acting in all of these series are powerful, but despite my past concern about the reality stretch of This Is Us, it was the one series this year that was more introspective with more empathetically normal characters, so it received my vote this year.

Last year, one of the nominees in the four categories for which I voted wound up winning the Emmy, so it will be interesting to see how well I match up with my fellow Television Academy members this year. The winners will be announced this year on Sunday, September 22 at the awards ceremony, airing 9pm ET on FOX.

Update: As announced at the 71st Emmy Awards that aired September 22 on Fox, the following Emmy Awards were presented: Structured Reality Program was awarded to Queer Eye, Reality Competition Program was awarded to RuPaul’s Drag Race, Outstanding Television Movie was awarded to Bandersnatch (Black Mirror), Outstanding Limited Series was awarded to Chernobyl, Outstanding Comedy Series was awarded to Fleabag, and Outstanding Drama Series was awarded to Game of Thrones. None of my votes matched with the eventual winners this year.

The Politics of a Homeowners Association

Posted on August 9, 2019 by kerrylreis

This has been a most interesting year so far. I had planned on it being a low key year, and in some ways, it has been as I have had to postpone my scheduled road trip for this year to next year. However, my responsibilities have increased. I realize that it has been over seven months since I posted on my website blog, but in the opening paragraph of that previous post, I noted that an interesting event had occurred in the previous year, having the position of president of the board of my homeowners association being dropped into my lap. The responsibility has been an interesting learning curve.

The concept of a homeowners association can be varied due to the type and number of homes in a neighborhood where an association can be formed. A homeowners association formed among a group of single family homes on individual lots is more of a collective oversight of the general neighborhood with more individual responsibility of private property. However, when the homes are townhomes or condominiums sharing one or more buildings in the community, more responsibility is placed on the legally controlled association to maintain the community, and individual homeowners are required to provide a monthly fee to cover the oversight and maintenance of the shared areas of the community. A covenant limited board of owners from the full group of homeowners are formed to handle the oversight. When I lived in Los Angeles, I owned a townhome in a building of six units, a small number that basically put every owner on the board. Under this situation, our association was more like a tight knit clique that handled the management of our building simply on our own. Yet, my current townhome is one of over one hundred units spread within a small neighborhood community which requires a professional property management company to handle the maintenance of building exteriors, landscape areas, and roadways, as well as the enforcement of the rules from board decisions and oversight of the association founding covenants. Due to the small size of the community, being on the board as an elected representative of the community is basically a volunteer duty, mainly consisting of attending a once-a-month meeting to handle community decisions. However, good board members realize that the responsibility of members are not limited to just the monthly meeting.

Community issues rise up quite often, which require the property management company to seek input from the board members. Some property management companies try to respond to individual owner complaints and requests on their own with very little reporting back to the board members, but other property management companies seek to maintain transparency with the board by keeping them informed of the communications as they come in. The property management company in my association falls into the latter category, which helps the board make more informed decisions when needed. In a way, it also helps the board members to get to know their fellow owners and neighbors, especially in regards to their concerns and needs. It is amazing how this fast-paced digital-oriented modern society has disconnected people from others living next door within communities. However, it is also amazing how this disconnect has created separate perspectives that have formed splits in the views within the community, a smaller version of what is visible in the political discord within and between countries on a global scale. In my position on the board, I have a front row perspective of this subtle division.

The main issue is basically in trying to find and understand the balance, dividing line, and responsibilities between the individual and society. In our situation, the individual is the person, family, or other legal entity that purchased the defined unit within the group community. Under the concept of ownership, the individual should be free to make decisions on how to enjoy and benefit from the property purchased, but is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property. However, on the social concept of an association, the interconnection of the units and the common property which they all share put a group responsibility on the general maintenance of the buildings and land. The constant question is where the line between social and individual responsibility and ownership lie. Unfortunately, that line is not absolute, but individual perspectives always seek to find that absolute line.

The basic argument is mainly conformity versus individuality. On one side, exterior design should be standard throughout the neighborhood, whereas on the other side, an individual should be free to express themselves within the borders of their property. With townhome associations, since units are interconnected, it is understandable to have the association determine the general color and maintenance of the exterior walls, but it is amazing to see the argument regarding window design conformity. Windows are a pathway from exterior to interior, so the responsibility of maintenance and upgrading is left to the individual owner. However, since windows have an exterior side, there is a sense of design conformity that many feel the association has a right to impose on the individual owner, not just with frame color, but also with design style. Should an owner be forced to have side sliding windows over up and down sliding windows? For some, association conformity rules over individual choice, although for many, the association conformity usually must conform to their own personal view.

Another area of conflict is with landscaping. For one side, the association is there to handle plant and grass maintenance, so they have no reason to get involved with it unless the plants begin to die, which is when they send complaints to the association board about landscape contractor incompetence. However, the other side has an innate avid gardener persona that wants to create and maintain their own exterior garden area. These owners seek a space where individual flower and shrub design is created and controlled by their own views. Over-avid owners seek to impose their design views on common areas beyond their unit in order to assign their own sense of conformity throughout the community, regardless of the cost.

In the end, I see the role in which I have been placed as president of the homeowners association board is to fiscally find the best balance between these sides by listening and guiding owners to find a good level of individual freedom and social acceptance, but I am aware that this level will always change and it will never find full acceptance by all. Still, it is better than accepting one side over the other and encouraging division, something I see on a larger scale in this country and globally.

2018 – A Year in Reviewing Indie Books

Posted on January 7, 2019 by kerrylreis

2019 is here, which means that I survived 2018. Last year was an interesting year. A rash of resignations on my HOA board led to me landing in the president position on the board, taking a bit more of my time. I also had fewer connects from fellow indie authors through my social media campaign. At the same time, I developed another idea for a new book that I outlined and have started to write. All of this led to a lower number of books that I read last year from previous years, only 21 novels and novellas. Going over my reviews for the year, the quality range was quite broad with most ranking at 4 stars, but an equal number of books hitting the high range of 5 stars to the number of books landing in the middle range of 3 stars. A couple of books landed at 3½ stars which stayed at that rank on LibraryThing, but rounded up into the 4 star range on GoodReads and Amazon. Then, there were three books that slid down to the 2 star range. It was an interesting mixture of reads over the past year.

Of the four novels that landed in the top 5 star ratings, three of them were from two indie authors whose works I had previously reviewed. Doug J. Cooper’s Crystal Escape completed the four novel sci-fi series with the same level of storytelling as the first three, pushing me to gladly recommend the full series for sci-fi adventure fans. Western historical fiction expert John Rose Putnam’s Face of the Devil and Hang Billy Mulligan engaged me into the late nineteenth century historical adventure of the northern California gold rush days. The one 5 star novel from a new author was Beneath the Silver Rose by T.S. Adrian, which fully engaged the adventure of a medieval fantasy tale, even if it was adult-only erotica.

At the other end of the scale, the three novels that landed in the 2 star zone were basically stories that overplayed their hand, stretching plot devices and missing character connections, from a multi-year future history space fleet sci-fi tale to a couple of psychological horror stories, one with a seemingly unstoppable stalker and the other with a missing child case that upends a couple’s life.

In the 3 star range, three of the four novels were based in the sci-fi and medieval fantasy genres, showing some of the challenges in constructing a solid mythology to back up and support the plot and characters of these highly imaginative worlds, especially when erotic elements are added. The erotic element also interfered in the complicated love story of soulmates finding each other in the fourth 3 star novel. The two 3½ star novels take a step up in finding their base stories, one in a near-future zombie apocalyptic opening tale of a series and the other in an archeological high-adventure story.

The larger 4 star body of works I read had some very entertaining works, from a basic police mystery, a psychological drama of abuse, a sci-fi space flight fantasy adventure, and a graphic superhero team adventure to a family curse paranormal adventure, a 70’s English spy thriller, and a dramatic rebuilding of a shattered romance. The eighth 4 star work was actually a nonfiction how-to book for self-publishing, a book I bought directly from the author at a local book fair in Denver.

It was a good year of reading, and I hope that this year will be just as good. I will also be striving to complete this new dramatic mystery that will live up to the standards I have used to judge the works of my fellow indie authors. At the same time, I hope avid readers will check out the novels I read in 2018 and also check out my self-published novel, Legacy Discovered, and if they purchase and read it, let me know if they liked it and why through Amazon, Goodreads, and other book sharing sites. Good honest reviews are an indie author’s best friend.

My reviews can be found on my Goodreads Author page at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6491046.Kerry_Reis.