Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
Beltane is a sexy romance. Allie is marrying the man of her dreams, Paul Phillip. A buttoned-down lawyer, he may not be "exciting," but he makes Allie feel like a princess. Allie's twin sister, Zen, takes a chance on Allie and Paul Phillip's wedding caterer, Chris. Chris is more the hit 'em and quit 'em type, though. When Zen meets hip businessman Orlando, she thinks she's found what her sister has with Paul Phillip. Which sister will end up with her true love?
Happy 25th anniversary to the All Saints album Saints & Sinners! For the album's anniversary, the Britpop girl group has released a 25th anniversary edition with new tracks that include a remixed "Pure Shores" featuring electronic musician/dj Tourist (William Edward Phillips).
Do human beings need God in order to be good? This is the question M.M. (Mangasar Magurditch) Mangasarian answers in this 1905 book. Mangasarian believes there are many reasons to believe people can and will be moral in the absence of worshipping a deity.
Born to Armenian parents in Turkey while it was part of the Ottoman Empire in 1859, Mangasarian was an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church. During the United States' Progressive era, he resigned from his pulpit in Philadelphia and become an independent pastor and a rationalist. After 1900 he led the rationalist Independent Religious Society of Chicago.
Did Queen Elizabeth the First's friend and advisor John Dee know a man who talked to angels in their sacred language?
Could Germany's so-called Seeress of Prevorst really find objects that had been hidden by the dead?
These questions are explored, along with eight additional stories of history's celebrated (supposed) ghosts and what the author calls "human enigmas," in Historical Ghosts and Ghost Hunters.
Henry (H.) Addington Bruce (1874-1959) was a newspaper journalist whose career began in his native Toronto. He moved to the United States, where he worked for the American Press Association. His primary areas of interest were the psychology of the day and alleged psychical phenomena. A trustee of the American Society of Psychical Research, he tended to be skeptical of poltergeist claims but was open-minded on the questions of telepathy and other powers of the human mind.
I mentioned Heidi in this video because this lost movie, Dangerous Innocence, also has Jean Hersholt. Watch through to find out how to get a free audiobook.
And, of course, I can't wait for Halloween. I can never get enough Halloween. I don't want any Christmas this year; I only want to celebrate Halloween from now until New Year's Eve.
Check out these and hundreds of other deals for October Prime Day. It's also Banned Books Week, so support your local authors and protect your freedom to read!
October 1, 1941: 52-year-old Aline Murray Kilmer, herself a poet and also the widow of Joyce Kilmer, a poet killed in World War One, dies following three years of an unknown, but excruciatingly painful, illness.
October 1, 1951: Journalist Pauline Pfeiffer dies at age 56 of acute shock. She had a rare pheochromocytoma tumor on one of her adrenal glands. It appears that when Pauline’s transgender daughter Gloria was arrested for using a women’s bathroom and Gloria’s father Ernest Hemingway called his ex-wife Pauline to tell her, the news of Gloria’s arrest caused Pauline’s adrenal tumor to produce the hormones that caused the fatal state of physical shock.
October 2, 2018: Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, who resides in the U.S., is murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi’s writings were critical of the Saudi government, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is suspected of being involved in the assassination.
October 2, 2019: Guitarist Kim Shattuck, who played for groups including Pixies, the Muffs, and the Pandoras, dies of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of 56.
October 3, 1849: On this election day, Edgar Allan Poe is given alcohol and marched from polling place to polling place in an illegal voting scam that was popular at the time. It may have contributed to his death four days later.
October 4, 1951: Henrietta Lacks passes away from complications of cervical cancer. She had been treated with radiation therapy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. As a result of her cancer and/or the radiation, her organs failed. After her death and without her knowledge or consent, Lacks’ cancerous cells will be collected and used to start an “immortal” cell line that will be used in most of the major medical research of the 20th century.
October 4, 1970: Her road manager finds 27-year-old singer Janis Joplin dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. She has apparently died of a heroin overdose.
October 4, 1974: Poet Anne Sexton dies by suicide in her car, locked inside her garage, by carbon monoxide poisoning. She is 45 years old.
October 5, 1995: 50-year-old voice actor Linda Gary, who provided an impressive number of cartoon characters with their voices in American animation of the ‘70s and ‘80s, dies of brain cancer.
October 5, 2001: Robert Stevens, a photographer for the tabloid newspaper Sun in Boca Raton, Florida, dies of pulmonary anthrax. His death is the first in a series of anthrax terror attacks that killed Stevens and four other people and sickened 17 others.
Microbiologist Bruce Ivins is the lead suspect in the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks. He dies by suicide before he can be arrested and charged.
October 7, 1849: In Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe dies.
October 7, 1992: The last fluent speaker of the Ubykh language, Tevfik Esenç, dies at the age of 88. The Ubykh people are a subset of the Circassian people, who were the victims of ethnic cleansing by the Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries.
October 10, 1901: 23-year-old David Park Barnit, a poet of the Decadent school of poetry, dies suddenly of what newspapers describe as “an enlarged heart.” Some suspect this may be a cover story and that the young poet may have taken his own life.
October 10, 1963: 47-year-old French cabaret singer Édith Piaf dies of liver failure from liver cancer and cirrhosis after years of alcohol and drug addiction.
October 10, 1984: One employee and three customers are killed when a fire breaks out at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena, California. The youngest victim is two years old. The fire is determined to be arson by investigators who include John Leonard Orr. In 1992, Orr will be convicted of this and several other arson fires in the Los Angeles area.
October 12, 1943: Poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, best known as Robert Lowell or Robert Lowell, Jr., is sentenced to a year in prison for draft evasion for being a conscientious objector to service in World War II.
October 19, 1950: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, age 58, dies after apparently suffering a heart attack and falling down the stairs of her home.
October 19, 1977: A small fire breaks out aboard the charter plane used by members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. No one is hurt, but the fire makes Cassie Gaines hesitant to board the plane the next day.
October 20, 1728: The Copenhagen Fire of 1728 begins and burns through October 23rd. It destroys nearly a third of the city’s buildings, leaving approximately 20% of Copenhagen’s population homeless. The University of Copenhagen library loses approximately 35,000 texts.
October 20, 1977: Cassie Gaines, her brother Steve Gaines, Ronnie Van Zant, road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and pilots William Gray and Walter McCreary die when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s chartered plane runs out of fuel and crashes in the woods outside Gillsburg, Mississippi. Drummer Artimus Pyle, guitarist Gary Rossington, and keyboardist Billy Powell all survive with serious injuries.
October 20, 1990: Stunt performer Brian Jewell, portraying a hanged man at a New Jersey “haunted hayride” attraction, accidentally hangs himself in earnest.
October 21, 1966: “[On this date] a massive coal-tip slid down a mountainside and engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 persons, mostly school children. In response to an appeal the following week in a national newspaper, an English psychiatrist, J. Barker, obtained a large number of reports from respondents who felt they may have received paranormal information concerning this tragedy. After all claims were carefully checked out, thirty-five cases remained which Dr. Barker considered worthy of confidence. In twenty-four cases, the respondents had related the information to someone else before the landslide occurred. Dreams figures in twenty-five of these accounts. In one, the dreamer saw, spelled out in large, brilliant letters, the word ABERFAN, In another, a telephone operator from Brighton talked helplessly to a child, who walked toward her, followed by a billowing cloud of black dust or smoke.” - Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle
October 22, 2009: The county government of Zhenyuan, Gansu province, China, announces on social media that it has burned 65 “illegal publications” outside of a local library. It describes the books as either “religious” or displaying “leanings,” presumably leanings that tend to disagree with the Chinese government.
On the same day, in the United States, novelist/blogger Mac Tonnies dies at age 34 of a cardiac arrhythmia.
October 23, 1731: Fire breaks out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, England. The house holds the Cotton Library, a collection of books and historical documents gifted to the British Crown by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, a Member of Parliament who died in 1631. The fire destroys 13 manuscripts and damages 200 others. The Nowell Codex, the single manuscript on which the Epic of Beowulfis recorded, is among those damaged.
October 24, 2010: Pan Jin-yu dies at the age of 96 in Taiwan. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Pazeh language.
October 26, 1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to sing on the radio in the U.S. and the first African-American to win an Academy Award for acting, dies of breast cancer in Los Angeles. She’s 59 years old.
October 26, 1990: 15-year-old William Anthony Odom, setting up a gallows scene for a Halloween tableau in North Carolina, accidentally hangs himself when the rope he’s using tightens on him.
October 26, 2018: A bomb addressed to then-Senator Kamala Harris is intercepted by authorities in Sacramento, California. Cesar Altieri Sayoc, Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threat.
October 26, 2022: Food writer Julie Powell dies of cardiac arrest at age 49 after battling a COVID-19 infection.
October 28, 1991: The commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail is lost amid the so-called Perfect Storm weather event that began with Hurricane Grace, formed on October 26th. The boat sinks with six crew members aboard near Sable Island, Canada. Their bodies are never recovered. In all, the Perfect Storm claims 13 lives.
October 31, 1871: Emily and Mary Wilde, the older half-sisters of Oscar Wilde, attend a Halloween party at Drumacon House near Ulster, Ireland. During the last dance of the evening, Mary gets too close to a candlestick and catches her dress on fire. Emily, too, catches her dress on fire as she rushes to help her sister. Party host Andrew Reid leads the women outside in the hope that the snow would help them extinguish the flames, but both sisters die of their injuries, Mary (age 22) on November 9th and Emily (age 24) on November 21st.
Scenes from my visit to Shelbyville, Indiana, on Sept. 25, 2025, spiced up with a few Simpsons quotes about the fictional Shelbyville, Springfield's rival city.
This "Freckles" comic strip appeared on September 21, 1925.
These political cartoons from 100 years ago portray flappers, Rudolph Valentino, tariffs, and egg prices. But more than anything else, cartoonists were portraying the so-called "Scopes Monkey Trial."
This one-panel comic strip from September 22, 1925 is basically an extended pun on the phrase "Chinese Boxer Rebellion." Since that event had happened right around the turn of the century, the readers of the paper would have at least been familiar with the term, even if they didn't know the exact historical reference.
Here's a "Mutt and Jeff" strip from Sept. 23, 1925.
A look at a Wisconsin newspaper from Sept. 24, 1925 shows a man getting in trouble for surreptitiously selling moonshine out of his ice cream parlor during Prohibition. Political cartoons lampoon the senator from Wisconsin and, for some reason, the General Andrews that Andrews Air Force Base is named after. My local cartoon, Kin Hubbard, who lived in Irvington, Indianapolis, did that last one. It also makes passing reference to the flapper fad of knee painting, mentioned in "All That Jazz" in Chicago.
Finally, this newspaper from Winslow, Arizona features hundred-year-old ads from Levi jeans and J.C. Penney.
There is some shit up with which free Americans cannot and shall not put, and a crackdown on free speech is a stinking, leaking, overflowing silo of such.
Don't let them tell you what you can and can't say. Resist. Make them keep their damn hands off your natural human rights and intellectual freedoms. The Enlightenment genie is out of the bottle and no, we will not be putting it back in.
What does it mean for your future if you dream of cats, beans, knives, or an earthquake? This anonymous author knew back in 1894 and now all of their dramatic A to Z secrets can be revealed. Learn the meanings of dozens of dream-objects and how they can foretell the future, at least according to this old-timey "science."
Hear a short sample of the introduction on YouTube:
The other new book I published in audio format is The Deep Space Scrolls:
Robert Franklin Young (1915-1986) was a science fiction short story writer and novelist from New York State whose career spanned 50 years. In The Deep Space Scrolls, he imagined the voyage of the starship Camaraderie 17 as it encountered the mysterious Spaceship X. The circumstances of that mysterious craft cause pilot Colonel Greaves and the senator committee who interview him to question the nature of human history. It provides proof of the most unlikely story in the most unexpected place possible.
Don't forget, you can always check aeess.com for the latest audiobook releases. You can download the mp3 file, yours to own, directly from me. I get to keep all the royalties except the cut that the payment processor takes.
Back as a stand-alone ebook: Oakley is a lesbian, a vampire, and a stripper. She and her mortal lover Hollie have their issues, but Oakley's unlife is going well...so why does she find herself waking up chained to a chair in the basement of The Third Eye Gentleman's Club? Could it have something to do with her favorite pro basketball player, flamboyant, New Orleans-bred Johnny Lee Bayliss?
Are you looking for an audiobook you can listen to with the whole family? Do you want to introduce your children to classic literature, help them gain an appreciation for books, and improve their vocabulary?
Aesop, according to tradition, was a storyteller who lived in Ancient Greece. This volume collects ten of Aesop's fables:
The Young Crab and His Mother
Belling the Cat
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
The Fox and the Grapes
The Bundle of Sticks
The Lion and the Mouse
The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf
The Frogs Who Wished for a King
The Rat and the Elephant
The Crow and the Pitcher
These are all good lessons to learn at a young age, but not too challenging for kids to understand. Find this audiobook for 99 cents on the following platforms:
If you're in the market for something a little more adult to listen to and you enjoy nonfiction, maybe you'll prefer Northern Drinking.
Where did Anglo-Saxon drinking customs come from? To answer this question, John Ashton looked back at artifacts from Beowulf to drinking horns. The resulting drinking history is anything but dry.
"Northern Drinking" is a chapter excerpted by Ashton and James Mew's 1892 book Drinks of the World. You can find this audiobook for 99 cents from the following retailers:
In this episode of Overdue Podcast, hosts Andrew and Craig discuss O. Henry's short story collection The Four Million.
If you like listening to O. Henry short stories, you might enjoy Art and the Bronco.
Apparently, I've never mentioned Overdue Podcast on this blog before. I'm surprised, because I've been listening to this books podcast for years. A brief list of some of the many, many books they've covered since February 2013:
The Amityville Horror
Animal Farm
Bad Feminist
Bunnicula
Charlotte's Web
The Color Purple
The Da Vinci Code
Fifty Shades of Grey
Frankenstein
Gone Girl
Gone With the Wind
The Haunting of Hill House The History of Love
How to Win Friends and Influence People
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Little Women
Ready Player One
Rosemary's Baby
Till We Have Faces
To Kill a Mockingbird
Wuthering Heights
...You get it: A combination of classics and popular literature.
Jokingly, I say that I theorize that Andrew and Craig of Overdue are secretly Ghost Beach, the dj duo named after a Goosebumps book.
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