The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue (2025)
- A collision at a store entrance reverberates for 70 romantic years.
- Fleeing from danger, a man meets an old friend with a secret.
- A dragon settles in the backyard, vigilant and watching for – what?
- A cow, a moose and a gnome meet on a shelf and become fast friends.
- A man absent-mindedly crosses into a colorful, whimsical world.
The author of Ebenezer, Myke Phoenix, Dejah & Summer in the Time of Magic and The Imaginary Bomb presents this collection of short-short stories full of intrigue, love, action and, well, whimsy.
Here are 96 fragments of thought and bursts of creativity in this expanded edition of my earlier collection 24 flashes – four times as many tales, four times as much fun.
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A Declaration of Peace (2024)
As author Warren Bluhm’s wife lay dying, he read passages from the Bible to her as she had requested. After she passed, he saw that the last words he had spoken to her were from the gospel of Matthew: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
From that moment Bluhm began advocating a simple creed — Love your neighbor, and we are all neighbors — and an end to humanity’s declarations of war.
“Life, this precious fragile gift, should never be ended deliberately and violently, and how dare anyone inflict violent death on others and subject their loved ones to this deep grief?” he asks. “I truly believe I am not alone in these thoughts and that perhaps this book might encourage anyone who might be filled with despair that constant war is inevitable. People want peace, so we ought to be working together toward that goal.”
A Declaration of Peace is the latest in a series of books collecting posts from the warrenbluhm.com blog, also including A Bridge at Crossroads and Echoes of Freedom Past.
Dejah & Summer in The Time of Magic (2024)
On an otherwise normal October day, my two golden retrievers, Dejah and Summer, began talking with me. The next thing I knew, all sorts of other magical things were happening. I began making a number of new friends – an elfin being, a dragon, a convocation of eagles, and a great buck and his family – and it soon became clear that something extremely unpleasant was heading our way on Halloween morning.
It all came down to a great prophecy: “In the time of magic there will come a day when the dimensions merge and tongues are unlocked to a human. Be on watch against the Evil One on that day, lest it consume all in its path.”
October is the time of magic, growing in intensity until the last day of the month. Could Dejah, Summer, our new friends and I prevent the Evil One from doing his dastardly thing?
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Ebenezer (2023)
Edmund Filliput is a successful businessman, but he is living a dreary life on a dreary Christmas Eve. Then he meets a happy stranger who keeps Christmas in his heart year-round. Over a cup of coffee and a bowl of beef stew, the stranger offers to send three friends to Edmund who will show him the meaning of Christmas. Will the “friends” convince Edmund in time to salvage this Christmas and rescue his life?
People who are grumpy at Christmastime are often chided with, “Oh, don’t be such a Scrooge.” But Mr. Scrooge was a curmudgeon no longer when Charles Dicken’s immortal story concluded. This little tale endeavors to reclaim Mr. Scrooge not as he was before that fateful Christmas Eve — a silly old humbug — but as the good and generous man he was as he lived the rest of his days.
Refuse to be Afraid (2010, 2020)
Fear has become the motivating factor in this contemporary world of ours. Life is portrayed as a maelstrom of forces beyond the power of the individual to tame.
It’s a lie. You can tame the maelstrom, if you can tame your fear.
This short but powerful book is designed to help you plow through the nagging doubts and outright fears of various sizes and shapes that are keeping you from living your best life. Faced with a scary reality, it challenges you to navigate past the anxiety, refuse to be afraid, and free yourself to move on to your dreams.
“When this wonderful little book by Warren Bluhm first dropped into my hands a decade ago, I thought it was important. Today, I think it’s particularly vital.” — Wally Conger
Echoes of Freedom Past (2022, 2023)
History doesn’t repeat itself, but you can hear its echoes every day. The same wind that brings echoes of past foolishness also brings echoes of lost freedoms, echoes that are never quite stilled.
This is a little book about what used to be, what is, and what could be if we wish to reclaim it.
There is a section about freedom and the Bill of Rights. There is a section about what has been happening in the last several years, and how everything changed, almost in a blink. And there is a section of hope for the future, because most of us want to be free, want to be left alone to live our personal vision of our best life, and want to respect everyone’s right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, as long as they don’t infringe on other people’s equal rights to those things.
This collection of essays about freedom includes the poignant short story “Letters from Camp.”
A Bridge at Crossroads: 101 Encouragements (2019)
Life is better lived when you search for the light and not the dark. Here are 101 encouragements for when you’re about to embark on a new adventure, when you’re wrestling with doubt, when you could use a gentle push, or all of the above.
It’s Going to Be All Right (2022)
It has become almost a cliche to refer to these times with anxious adjectives: These challenging times, these trying times, these unprecedented times, these stressful times, these times, these times, these times.
For more than a decade now, the world has gotten angrier and meaner and more afraid. Log into your favorite “social media” site, anytime, and someone will alert you about some outrage, someone will warn you about some threat, and someone will be shouting down voices of reason and calm and peace.
This book has a simple but powerful message: Never mind that the world is scary and raging; if you reach inside to a calm place, you’ll find the most basic of truths: It’s going to be all right. Oh, change is inevitable, and tomorrow will not look like yesterday, but it’s going to be all right. READ THE EBOOK NOW … AND/OR ORDER THE PAPERBACK FROM YOUR FAVORITE STORE (LIKE BARNES & NOBLE).
FULL: Rockets, Bells & Poetry (2021)
“My God, I’m full of words.”
“The dance of the pen across the page is a deer prancing in the snow, kids racing through the grass, a performance car zipping across the flats so fast the videographer struggles to keep the machine in the frame.”
Here are notes, aphorisms and poems in three mini-collections: “The Creative Soul,” reflections on making art and the power of words; “Live Free Or Die,” thoughts about liberty, self-expression and emerging from dystopia; and “You Can Do This,” encouraging words of finding light in a darkening world.
24 flashes (2021)
If you only have a minute, this book is for you.
This little book contains 24 very short stories, most of them fewer than 1,000 words, which fits many people’s definition of flash fiction; hence the title.
You’ll find fantasy, romance, science fiction, horror, suspense, maybe even a thriller, all in the time it takes to read this blurb.
Buy it now. You’ve got the time.
CLOSEOUT SALE: 24 flashes will be discontinued by the end of 2024, to be replaced by the new and improved 96 flashes. Act now to obtain your copy of this ridiculously rare early edition!
Gladness is Infectious (2020)
Add to the beauty or add to the despair: Each of us has two choices every day.
The choice is there, every morning – to ride the light out of darkness and live in peace, striving for harmony against the discord.
How to Play a Blue Guitar (2020)
The Zero Aggression Principle states, “No one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor should anyone advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else.”
This quirky little book contains two dozen poems, short stories, prose poems and aphorisms around the theme of finding a way to live and let live in peace — to co-exist without forcing a way of life on people.
Because “The way you play a blue guitar is the same as the way you play any guitar … It’s built with the same workings, potential melodies and chords, hopes and dreams as any other color guitar. Kind of like people.”
Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes (2019)
From the pulse-pounding origin story to the fateful attack from beyond space and history that changed Astor City forever, it’s all here. For the first time ever, you can have all 16 novelettes and two short stories in the Myke Phoenix canon collected in one edition. Here is the entire saga from the moment a mysterious spirit living in an unusual piece of pottery selects Paul Phillips, to the final showdown with the megalomaniacal talking dinosaur Deinonychus, with a new introduction by the author.
The Imaginary Revolution (2012)
The people of Sirius 4 tried to overcome tyranny the old-fashioned way: by force. It turned out to be an imaginary revolution, replacing one violent regime with another. Raymond Douglas Kaliber suggested another way: that free people living by a spirit of non-aggression could live in peace and prosperity with one another. Before he could launch that bold experiment, however, he had to defeat the greatest tyrant of them all: his best friend.
A Scream of Consciousness (2011)
There has to be something more to life than moving through a haze. And every now and then, it gets to you. You just want to wake up, smile at God and the universe and shout: I’m alive! I’m here! I’m ready to make a difference! That’s a scream of consciousness. This book is about getting conscious and staying alive, moment by moment.
The Imaginary Bomb (2008)
So his ex is a terrorist. Now what?
It’s bad enough that government couriers have commandeered Bob’s space freighter to transport a secret cargo.
Now his ship has been hijacked again by polite thugs led by a masked woman whose voice sounds awfully familiar. She and her gang take the secret cargo.
The couriers say it’s a gang of thieves. But the government took his ship, so who are the thieves?
Bob has to figure out which side he’s on before something else goes horribly wrong, like the moon exploding. Wait, what?
You’ll love The Imaginary Bomb because everybody enjoys a fast-paced space opera with a love triangle.