I would like to welcome Ann Gimpel to The Avid Reader today. Thanks for stopping by Ann. Please be sure and check out all three of Ann's novel's in the Transformation Series: Psyche's Prophecy book #1, Psyche's Search book #2 and Psyche's Promise book #3. Also today Ann will be talking with us about The Paranormal and Psychology.
Book Title: Psyche's Prophecy
Series: Book One of the Transformation Series
Author: Ann Gimpel
PURCHASE
Psyche's Prophecy
OFFICIAL TRAILER
Psyche's Prophecy
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Psyche's Prophecy
What if your psychotherapist could really see into your soul? Picture all those secrets lying hidden, perhaps squirming a bit, just out of view. Would you invite your analyst to take a peek behind that gossamer curtain? Read your aura? Scry your future…?
Classically trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Doctor Lara McInnis has a special gift that helps her with her patients. Born with "the sight" she can read auras, while flirting with a somewhat elusive ability to foretell the future. Lara becomes alarmed when several of her patients-and a student or two-tell her about the same cataclysmic dream.
Reaching out to the Institute for answers, Lara's paranormal ability sounds a sharp warning and she runs up hard against a dead end. Her search for assistance leads her to a Sidhe and ancient Celtic rituals blaze their way into her life. Complicating the picture is a deranged patient who's been hell bent on destroying Lara ever since she tried to help his abused wife, a boyfriend with a long-buried secret and a society that's crumbling to dust as shortages of everything from electricity to food escalate.
Book Title: Psyche's Search
Series: Book Two of the Transformation Series
Author: Ann Gimpel
PURCHASE
Psyche's Search
OFFICIAL TRAILER
Psyche's Search
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Psyche's Search
Born with the sight, Laura McInnis is ambivalent about her paranormal ability. Oh it's useful enough some of the time with her psychotherapy patients. But mostly it's an embarrassment and an inconvenience-especially when her visions drag her to other worlds. Or into Goblin dens. In spite of escalating violence, incipient food shortages and frequent power blackouts, Lara is still far too attached to the comfortable life she shares with her boyfriend, Trevor, a flight attendant who lost his job when aviation fuel got so expensive-and so scarce-his airline went out of business. Forced to seek assistance to hone her unusual abilities in Psyche's Prophecy, Book I of this series, Lara is still quite the neophyte in terms of either summoning or bending her magic to do much of anything.
Reluctantly roped into channeling her unpredictable psychic talents to help a detective who saved her from a psychopathic killer, Lara soon finds herself stranded in the murky underbelly of a world inhabited by demons. The Sidhe offer hope, but they are so high-handed Lara stubbornly resists their suggestions. Riots, death on all sides, a mysterious accident and one particular demon targeting her, push Lara to make some hard decisions. When all seems lost, the Dreaming, nestled in the heart of Celtic magic, calls out to her.
Book Title: Psyche's Promise
Series: Book Three of the Transformation Series
Author: Ann Gimpel
PURCHASE
Psyche's Promise
OFFICIAL TRAILER
Psyche's Promise
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Psyche's Promise
The Transformation Series is about finding out who we truly are when the chips are down. About what is real and what is illusory. About what matters and what doesn't. It's easy to show our best side when everything is going well. How about when the world is disintegrating around us? What happens then?
In this final book of the Transformation Series, Lara and Trevor's relationship undergoes stresses that threaten to annihilate them. Constantly hungry, besieged by dark forces, they need every resource they've developed as a couple to keep from ripping each other apart. With Lillian and Raven- two ancient Celtic Sidhe- off fighting their own war against Goblin hordes, Lara has only herself and her half-baked magic standing between survival and certain death for herself, her love and their child.
The remote location that was supposed to solve all Lara and Trevor's problems has done anything but. Though she works diligently, Lara's crash course in magic proves woefully inadequate. When Trevor is captured by demons, Lara curses her decision to leave Seattle. "If only I'd known," she cries, convinced she can't go back. Or can she?
GUEST BLOG
The Paranormal and Psychology
Wikipedia defines Paranormal as "a general term (coined ca. 1915-1920) that designates experiences that lie outside the range of normal experience or scientific explanation or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure." In this rather hard core definition, werewolves, vampires and other mythical creatures do not meet criteria to be considered paranormal. Paranormal refers to one's experience of unusual phenomenon, rather than the unusual phenomena themselves. I found that out firsthand when I submitted a werewolf short story to a paranormal magazine. They loved the story, but informed me the topic didn't fit the paranormal genre.
Psychology is the study of the mind. Because the mind is capable of a great deal, including madness, it's a pretty broad field. The two come together in a highly specialized field called parapsychology. Those of you who are old enough might remember a television show called The Sixth Sense. It starred Dr. Michael Rhodes, parapsychologist. A university researcher, he was always hanging about in graveyards, crypts and other spooky places doing parapsychological research and solving mysteries. The series only ran for a couple of seasons. I think Night Gallery might have bought it for reruns.
I bet if we were all together in a room and I asked how many of you have had paranormal experiences, between a third and half would raise your hands. These types of things are really fairly common. Interestingly, children have far more in the way of inexplicable experiences than adults. This is because, by the time we've grown up, most of the magic's been drummed right out of us. I'm always grateful whenever I go to a science fiction and fantasy convention and see hordes of adults dressed up like their favorite SF/F characters. It gives me hope that imagination is still alive. At Norwescon last year, I had dinner next to a Klingon family. Mom, Dad and two children all dressed to the gills, including blacked out faces and pointy ears.
Aside from Dr. Rhodes, what is the nexus where the paranormal and psychology come together? To address that, we need one more definition. The psychotherapy relationship is one place where clients can experience unconditional positive regard. No topic is off limits. Nothing is too bizarre. I've told clients for years that it's their hour. They can bring up whatever they'd like. If they want to tell me about their dead Aunt Sara and her nightly visits, that's just fine. If they almost got into an automobile wreck at exactly the same moment a dear friend died, that, too, is fair game. Part of what psychology does is help people put life experiences into some sort of perspective.
The depth psychologists, like Jung, were intensely metaphysical. He wouldn't accept anyone as a patient who hadn't had their astrological chart done. Jung would study their chart, looking for points of concordance between the potential client's planets and his own. Keep in mind, Jung was an MD. He graduated in 1900 and went to work in an insane asylum long before we had decent medications to quell the severely mentally ill. The only weapon in his arsenal was talk therapy and he had lots of extremely ill patients who got better. In his later years, as his reputation for dream analysis grew, he was able to focus exclusively on private patients and left the asylum behind.
In recent years, psychology has moved away from the paranormal. As third party payor systems (e.g. your insurance company) have proliferated, no one wants to pay for extended depth-oriented analysis. What insurance wants is a highly-structured, time-limited, cognitive-behavioral approach, which works fine for a certain type of client with a particular type of problem. Unfortunately, no one approach works for everyone. We are all individuals. Some of us are more metaphysically oriented than others. Some of us lead with our feelings. Some with our minds. What used to be an intimate relationship between therapist and client has morphed into a ménage á trois: you, me, and your insurance company. Probably time to move on before someone kicks the soapbox out from under my feet!
Circling back to the title of this blog post, psychology is the study of the mind. Paranormal refers to something unusual perceived by the mind. Looking at it that way, the two fit together nicely. I've found my psychology background incredibly useful writing science fiction and fantasy. I was the kind of kid who thought monsters lurked in the closet. Now they hang out under the bed. Nothing like the dead of night to stoke one's imagination.
Tell me your paranormal experiences. I'd love to hear about them.
- AUTHOR BIO
Ann Gimpel is a mountaineer at heart. Recently retired from a long career as a psychologist, she remembers many hours at her desk where her body may have been stuck inside four walls, but her soul was planning yet one more trip to the backcountry. Around the turn of the last century (that would be 2000, not 1900!), she managed to finagle moving to the Eastern Sierra, a mecca for those in love with the mountains. It was during long backcountry treks that Ann's writing evolved. Unlike some who see the backcountry as an excuse to drag friends and relatives along, Ann prefers her solitude. Stories always ran around in her head on those journeys, sometimes as a hedge against abject terror when challenging conditions made her fear for her life, sometimes for company. Eventually, she returned from a trip and sat down at the computer. Three months later, a five hundred page novel emerged. Oh, it wasn't very good, but it was a beginning. And she learned a lot between writing that novel and its sequel.
Around that time, a friend of hers suggested she try her hand at short stories. It didn't take long before that first story found its way into print and they've been accepted pretty regularly since then. A trilogy, the Transformation Series released by Gypsy Shadow Publishing, features Psyche's Prophecy, Psyche's Search and Psyche's Promise. One of Ann's passions has always been ecology, so her tales often have a green twist and the Transformation Series is no exception.
In addition to writing, Ann enjoys wilderness photography. Part of her website is devoted to photos of her beloved Sierra. And she lugs pounds of camera equipment in her backpack to distant locales every year. A standing joke is that over ten percent of her pack weight is camera gear which means someone else has to carry the food! That someone else is her husband. They've shared a life together for a very long time. Children, grandchildren and three wolf hybrids round out their family.
- ONLINE LINKS
Be sure and check out all the other stops on the tour.
TOUR SCHEDULE
December 17 Interview and Review My Home Away From Home
December 19 Guest Post Books, Books the Magical Fruit
December 23 Review Sapphyria's Steamy Book Reviews
December 27 Guest Post The Avid Reader
December 31 Guest Blog Books & Tales
January 2 Guest Blog and Review Readaholic's Reviews
January 4 Guest Blog Writing from Corsets to Bustiers
January 7 Guest Blog Reginamayross's Blog
January 8 Guest Blog and Review Shelly Munro
January 9 Review Books, Books, and More Books
January 10 Review Books & Other Spells.
January 11 Interview and Review For The Love of Reading
January 14 Promo Reginamayross's Blog
January 15 Guest Blog Tynga's Reviews
January 16 Character Interview Butterfly-o-Meter Books
January 17 Guest Blog TBQ'S Book Palace
January 21 Guest Blog P.W. Creighton
January 22 Guest Blog Reading Between the Wines
January 23 Promo All I Want and More.
January 24 Promo Blooding Book Reviews
Jan 24 Interview Paranormal Book Club
January 25 Interview Vivi Dumas
January 28 Spotlight Victoria Danann
January 29 Guest Blog and Review Romance Book Junkies
January 29 Review BeLoved books
January 30 Review Starry Night Book reviews
March 4-8 Guest Blog Kay Dee
2 comments:
Thanks so much for hosting me today! What a lovely write up. And your blog is just wonderful. You have a good artistic sense.
Thank you, Ann. I am so very glad that you dropped by. I have enjoyed having you at The Avid Reader today. Thank you for being here.
Post a Comment