RT Book Reviews recently reviewed The Oarsman, and gave it four stars. They will publish the review online and in their next magazine when it is available in mid Januaray, 2017. They gave me permission to excerpt the review below.
I’ve sent out the book to about twenty book blogs and review magazines, and it will be interesting to see the reviews come out over the next six months or so.
The Oarsman is a beautifully written book filled with inspirational situations and enlightening metaphors. This uplifting read combines adventure and fantasy, and will empower the reader to look back upon their own life and reflect on choices they’ve made. Beautiful words flow off the pages as a character known as “the Man” is granted understanding of his life’s journey.
SUMMARY: A mysterious Oarsman takes a dying man out on the river of life to revisit integral parts of his past. This eye-opening voyage takes the Man back to different parts of his life where he was a painter, a merchant and a warrior, and the Man begins to see the importance of these roles in his life and how they contributed to his place in the world. (BEYOND YOURSELF PUBLISHING, Nov., 205 pp., $9.95)
– RTBookReviews
The Ant That Found God: A Fable of Self-Discoveryis now available for pre-ordering on Amazon!
I’ve read through the book over the last couple of days and feel that it came out exactly how I had envisioned it, which is why I decided to upload it to Amazon so quickly.
I will make a couple more passes to trim and fix the cadence of sentences, and then get help with line-editing, all before the book is fully released on January 31st, 2016.
Already, ideas for another book are barging in whenever I hike or ride my bike. I am thinking about a story where a man is sentenced in the afterlife to be reincarnated as a tree. He meets a troubled boy and wants to help, but believes he is confined by the limitations of his form. It is tentatively titled I Became a Tree.
That book will complete this trilogy, where the main themes are nature, self-discovery, and spiritual lessons. Beyond that, I might try my hand at more mainstream genres.
This morning I finished the rough draft of The Ant That Found God!
It’s a great feeling to have gotten the story out of my system so quickly. It feels freeing.
For the past month I woke up early and wrote for one hour, in that special place between waking and fully awake, before the mind comes in too strongly to take charge. What poured out were all the scenes and characters that made it into this draft.
I would also plan out the book when ideas came to me, jotting them down on my tablet in the evening or into my phone during my morning hikes. As a result, this book felt a whole lot more effortless than The Oarsman. I didn’t fight with my writing as much, and I let the ideas mostly paint themselves.
While it may not be as epic as The Oarsman, I think its smaller story still has adventures, excitement, and lessons to it, and I look forward to releasing it in a few weeks.
IWIC (International Writers Inspiring Change) has posted their book review of The Oarsman, giving it five stars.
It is nice to begin getting positive feedback from strangers, beyond the friends and editor who had already expressed their love of the book.
Read the review here:
IWIC Book Review of THE OARSMAN by Zubin Mathai
Today was a playful hike, where the morning was cool enough that shady parts were tricksters that lingered too long, and the sunny patches were welcomed, making me slow to a crawl to relish their warmth.
I saw the usual birds scatter from trees when I neared, the panicked lizards zig-zagging across the trail, and I also saw a lot of people. Fridays are always a bit busier in Ojai, but I had hoped that with the cooler temperatures people would not hike so early in the morning.
After the first three groups of people passed, and we exchanged our hellos and head-nods, I felt a little mischievous. I didn’t mind the quietly happy dogs being walked, but wasn’t so much in the mood for the chattering humans. And so I decided to avoid all of them for the rest of the hike.
I went up to Fuelbreak road and had the choice to turn left or right. When I saw a cyclist racing down from the right, I turned left and picked up my pace. When I heard a woman talking on her phone as she walked her dog, I walked as fast as I could, just a shade under a run, and dove back down onto Fox Canyon. I went over to Pratt when I heard people further down on Fox, and I continued that way, until I made my way back to my car in treasured silence.
I giggled on the inside at the accomplishment, that I didn’t say hello to another person on that hike. I was okay with it for today, for I knew I had given my greetings over to the trail and to nature, and I knew it, in turn, would greet everyone who passed through its midst.