Books for your journey through life
Find books here that will be your magic carpets for inspiration, entertainment, and discovery.
My Writing Journey
About Me
Welcome, dear reader! I am happy to meet you and pleased you want to know a little more about my books and me. Books have always been for me a magic carpet to whisk me away to other lands or times or experiences. Once I learned the magic of writing words, using the simple mechanism of symbols to bring whole worlds into being, I needed to write.
It was many years, however, before I gathered the courage to write a book. Now it is a rare day that I don't visit my computer. For more about my writing journey, read MORE ABOUT CAROLYN below. Meanwhile click on the BUY NOW buttons below to check out my books.
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Author Recommendations for Readers:
My favorite book in the Lady Nephele’s Devilry series is Book II – Rebellion. Many of the “stories within the story” in this book are very funny.
My favorite book in the Baba Chessy and Bianca Medieval Mysteries series is Volume Four. The story lines keep you hooked.
If you are looking for something thought-provoking, CODE 500 – Fatal Flaw may invite you to take a deeper dive into artificial intelligence.
Finding YOU and Living Your Own Story takes a short and compelling new look at the issue of female agency.
If you are wanting to check out a children’s picture book designed to spark the imagination and creativity of the curious child, where all the images are AI-generated, any of the Egg-Ro-Bots Adventures picture books are delightful.
If you want to laugh out loud when you read about the zany antics of Myrtle and Jo-Jo as they travel the world in the Road Rocking Grandmas series, any book in that series will have you laughing.
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Click books below to find them on Amazon
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
CODE 500 - Fatal Flaw
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
Fiinding you and living your own story
road rocking grandmas - myrtle and jo-jo go traveling
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume two
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca - medieval mysteries volume three
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
lady nephele's devilry - book i
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
lady nephele's devilry - book ii
baba chessy and bianca medieval mysteries volume four
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iv
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iv
lady nephele's devilry - book v
lady nephele's devilry - book iii
lady nephele's devilry - book iv
Click books below to find them on Amazon
ROAD ROCKING GRANDMAS - MYRTLE AND JO-JO IN MOROCCO
ROAD ROCKING GRANDMAS - MYRTLE AND JO-JO IN MOROCCO
Further Reading
More ABOUT CAROLYN
More ABOUT CAROLYN
Carolyn Gregov, Ph.D., is an author and educator. She entered the convent at age fourteen and left nine years later following a crisis of faith. It may be that her nine years in the convent infused her subsequent life with an urgency for engagement and intensity, or it may be that she was simply afraid of missing out on something that might be special. Whatever it was, she engaged in life with hungry zest and energy.
That paragraph is a great bio, right? But for those readers who enjoy lots of detail, as Carolyn seems to, read on.
She lost her Christian faith (in the convent); dabbled in other religions; married an immigrant; got hooked on other lands and cultures so that she eventually visited over 100 countries on all continents including one three-month stint riding in the back of a truck in Africa; raised five children while owning and operating a business with her husband; spent over 20 years of her life as a student, acquiring a B.S. in Philosophy from Columbia University in New York, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Kansas State University, 15 credit hours of post-doc education in Public Health from the University of South Florida while teaching health education to at-risk populations, and continuing education credits while pursuing a seventeen-year career with the State of Florida Department of Health and the University of Florida.
She was briefly celebrated at age 75 as the oldest person male or female to summit the tree-top adventure course she visited with her family.
Over the years, folders of ideas and plots for stories and books proliferated and gathered dust on her shelves until she took the plunge and wrote her first entire book in 1989. She sent wildly hopeful queries to twelve agents. None were interested, and she figured she was not cut out to be an author. She put away the manuscript and got on with her busy life. That did not stop the need to write. Just putting those magic symbols on a piece of paper as a grocery list or a to-do list or long letters to family and friends or essays and class assignments or whimsical whispers of imagination lent a needed solidity to her days.
Meanwhile, those folders of ideas and thoughts on her shelves continued to grow like happy little mushrooms with a life of their own. When she decided to gather up all the bits and pieces of errant writing lying in that dust on her shelves, she pounced on a writing career with passion, finding extreme satisfaction in the thrill of successful analytical deductions based on solid research to solve historical conundrums.
When her family suggested in 2014 that she write a family heritage cookbook, she did so and found the process immensely gratifying. That book propelled her into writing the compelling story of her husband, whose daring escape from his communist homeland and his subsequent life adjusting to a new homeland in America became four books and inspired her to write the story of her parents’ lives and her own life in the convent, all based on several years of research and genealogical sleuthing.
That undertaking in turn gave her the courage to begin the book she had promised to write while on her honeymoon 58 years earlier, a book telling the story of the courageous Elizabeth of Bosnia who became Queen of Hungary in 1353. Hours and hours of captivating and engrossing research then brought this young queen's story to life, referencing the forty-plus books Carolyn collected over the years, the piles of supplementary information, and hundreds of internet pages of research The period of writing the resulting series of five books that became Lady Nephele’s Devilry was one of the most profoundly satisfying periods of Carolyn's life, a time of depths of discovery she could not have imagined. She was not just bringing a story into being. she was bringing a whole world into being, the world of fourteenth-century Eastern Europe and the Balkans and how one courageous young queen left her mark and never gave up her quest for agency in a culture that denied that to women.
Those books in turn gave Carolyn the courage to take on the complex and fascinating story of her paternal grandmother who died of the Spanish flu in 1918, leaving four small children behind, Carolyn's father the oldest at age seven. Three years of research and writing and hours of help from many people brought the book This Was My World, Little Dear One - Mathilda's Scrapbook into being during the COVID years.
Meanwhile, she developed a website roadrockinggrandmas.com to share humorous travel stories designed to help make travel less intimidating for older single women. So far, she has completed 60 blog posts for her website and written three Road Rocking Grandmas books available on Amazon/Kindle.
She also wrote four volumes of medieval cozy mysteries in the Baba Chessy and Bianca Medieval Mysteries series featuring a midwife and her brilliant black cat Bianca, who become reluctant heroines and accidental detectives on an idyllic Dalmatian island.
When she learned about the first successful computer/brain interface, Carolyn took a deep dive into artificial intelligence and the coming world of synthetic humans, writing a fast-paced post-apocalyptic survival novel CODE 500 - Fatal Flaw, that will keep you turning the pages.
When she learned about an identity crisis in young females, she fired a small but explosive salvo against the patriarchy, always a hot button for her, in the book, Finding YOU and Living Your Own Story – Little Essays on Big Thoughts about Female Identity.
Since she isn’t yet dead, she continues to write Road Rocking Grandmas blog posts and books and cozy mysteries. Her epitaph will probably read, “She ran out of gas.” But I think she herself would sigh blissfully and say, “Goodbye for now, dear friends, I am going to take a nice, long, well-earned rest. Until I see you again, Happy Trails.” Meanwhile, that blank page is just begging for words.
More ABOUT CAROLYN
Click the Pioneer Travel - Road Rocking Grandmas link below to read the first few sections of THIS WAS MY WORLD, LITTLE DEAR ONE - MATHILDA'S SCRAPBOOK, the story of Carolyn's paternal grandmother, who lived oner one-hundred years ago.
To read the entire book, click the Home - Road Rocking Grandmas link below. and scroll to the bottom of that website and click on Pioneer Travel.
.Pioneer Travel - Road Rocking Grandmas
PREFACE
The book THIS WAS MY WORLD, LITTLE DEAR ONE – Mathilda’s Scrapbook is a story told in a grave. Attempting to distract and comfort my 8-year-old brother John who had just been laid to rest next to her after drowning in the Mississippi River, my paternal grandmother Mathilda Sabers Crubel, who had died at age 27 in the 1918 Spanish Flu, creates for him a scrapbook of her life and times at the turn of the 20th century, inviting his participation in the imaginary process of pulling down information from the Cloud of Information Data Bits. The book is by its nature intended to be viewed not as a genealogical record nor an historical account, nor any kind of scholarly publication, even though it has elements of all of those, but as an adventure back in time, an opportunity for the reader to enter the world my grandmother inhabited 100 years ago. The story was written to honor the 100th anniversary of her death on November 22, 1918, which was also her 8th wedding anniversary, and to honor the memory of my baby brother John.
The book has grown into a final form quite different from initial expectations. Over the course of its incubation and production, the book seemed to take on a life of its own, changing shape from a simple narrative story relating genealogy and family history, into a long, meandering chronicle of often maddening historical detail and complicated richness. Eventually I came to see this evolution as an advantage, not a deficit or weakness, because it mimics the nature of truth itself, that multifaceted, complex, slippery-slidey thing that is above all dependent on the powers, or lack thereof, of the mind that creates it and the data resources available to that mind at that moment in time. Nothing in life happens in a vacuum. The tiniest, most unimportant and unnoted changes may result ultimately in enormous social or environmental or mental shifts. Providing seemingly unimportant and irrelevant detail, an overload of richness, if you will, often provides the miasmic soup out of which the steam of truth rises gently, inviting us to breathe its elusive aroma.
Therefore you, the reader, are the primary component in bringing this story to life. That, in its essence, is the fundamental challenge of the digital age, to not only navigate the overwhelming, continually expanding and reorganizing oceans of data bits, but to select out of those teeming waters the nuggets of information that permit us to assemble our own truths to live by. Allowing a story to be a little ambivalent, messy, and out of control is usually the price we pay to bring us nearer the experience of the truth we seek. It is one thing to be told a story, to have your perceptions and ideas shaped and limited by the views and visions of an author, but it is another thing to construct the story for yourself. The first is comfortable and easy, without responsibility or guilt. The second asks you to jump into the pot and build your own story, your own truth. In this book you get a little of both.
In this digital age, history is being re-written at a dizzying pace. Long-accepted facts, doctrines and truisms are being questioned, icons are falling, heroes are toppling, information we thought true last year is now not so true as new data comes to light. I recognize that although I assembled for this book the best and most current information available to me in 2018, from the most credible sources - university publications, state or federal records, historical records departments and the archives of recognized commercial enterprises - the story in this book will never be “true.” New discoveries, along with human error, frailty and bias, including mine, cannot be avoided. However, understanding the limitations of our ability to tell a true story will in itself help us arrive at a story of greater truth. In the real world, the acceptance of this concept becomes the central paradox of the digital age and the source of the ever-growing dichotomy between those who genuinely seek truth and those who seek only to be right. Those who wield power, in all spheres, must be right; they cannot tolerate the ambiguities required by truth. Fortunately, our little story does not suffer under those heavy moral shackles. Our story exists only to entertain, enlighten, and, with a bit of luck, befuddle the reader.
THIS WAS MY WORLD, LITTLE DEAR ONE – Mathilda’s Scrapbook
CHAPTER ONE
Don’t cry, Little Dear One. Come here, come here, let me hold you. I know, they went off down the hill and left you here. I was heartbroken when I saw them bringing you up that hill, even while my arms were aching to hold you. Turn around, my little one. I am just to your right. Yes, I am here, right next to you, and I want you to know that I will always be here right next to you. Things will be different for you now, but they won’t be quite as bad here as you might expect. All of us here, or at least some of us, are very good at making Stories, and I am particularly good at that, so I think you and I will have some good times together. I always really enjoyed telling stories to my little ones and reading books to them.
What you will eventually discover, to your delight, I think, is that all of your life will be lived from now on in your mind. You have only to think something, and it will be there. It is sort of like that new cinematographic motion picture thing my friend saw in Madison back in 1916, about the war news, where all the things you would read about in a magazine or a newspaper or book were projected onto a big screen, with words and pictures that kept moving and flowing along with no sound. In your time people would call these movies. You have seen some at the theater in Lancaster, and the ones you saw had sound. Here you will make your own movies, only much better ones. With your quick mind, you will be able to do many magical things with pictures, words, sounds, even smells and tastes, the feel of things, and ever so much more. You can have some amazing adventures.
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Something to think about
EXCERPT FROM BOOK
Way back when all this started happening, we were assured that we were entering a new age of equality and just distribution of power and wealth. We believed that, because we had seen and were enjoying computerized capabilities of such magnitude that it often seemed that we were living science fiction.
If computers could give us communication tools that allowed us to be with anyone anywhere anytime, and inventions that took away all the drudgery of our lives and gave that to our personal bots, and such deep forays into outer space that scientists began talking about cracking the code for the origins of the universe, and such intimate looks at the interior of the earth and the deepest parts of our oceans that you almost felt like it was an invasion of the earth’s privacy, well, how could we not believe that computers would also give us what we had not been able to achieve before: peace among nations and people?
I guess it would be fair to say that that happy state of affairs has yet to be realized.
But my anxiety since returning and finding not only my husband and children gone but my means of supporting myself currently on hold, overrides all thoughts about the fairness or unfairness of this new age. Also, it is alarming to see how much more of my city is now underwater. How would I be able to move to a new Pod without a secure job?
Something to think about
EXCERPT FROM BOOK
Did you ever think about what we are called, the one half of the human race identified as female? Did you ever think about where those words came from that identify us, those words that define the non-males among humans?
What do people call us? What do we call ourselves? Why does it matter?
According to etymologists, the word female came from the Latin word femella, which originally meant a girl or young woman. In the 1300s, the word was changed ever so slightly: “ella” was changed to “ale” to make the useful new word “female.”
My, oh my! That went viral.
Those were the days, of course, when patriarchy truly did rule the social, political, and religious worlds. Women’s behavior and status were strictly controlled by laws, both secular and religious. Women were already considered property; now there was a new and convenient word to designate very clearly that they were indeed the property of the males in their lives. They were fe-Males.
Score one for the patriarchy.
What about the word “woman?” That one is even better. The etymology of the word woman is quite specific: “woman” is derived from “man.” Originally woman was “wifman,” as in “wife of man.”
This I can attest to personally. No, I am not quite 500 years old, even on my worst days, but I did a good bit of genealogy research back in 2014 and I found that in 1520 was born a woman who is identified in the records as Wife of her husband and Mother of her son, but with no name of her own. Her mother-in-law, her husband’s mother, was born in 1490 and married in 1515, and again her husband has a name and her son has a name, but she does not. She is my tenth-generation grandmother.
Something to think about
EXCERPT FROM BOOK
Months passed, and years passed, and nothing much ever did change in the village of Stari Kamen. The villagers continued to note with jealousy the state of Baba Chessy’s garden, what they could see of it in glimpses over the wall here and there. Her figs seemed larger and juicier. The clusters of grapes on her vines seemed bigger than anyone else’s. Her vegetables seemed healthier and her herbs more vibrant. And of course, that superior garlic. Always that superior garlic. “How is it that she can raise the best foods?” the villagers asked again and again. That question always gave them the opportunity to engage in their never-ending debate, the one that allowed them to feel the righteousness of effort.
“She must be a witch.”
“That must be why all her food is the best.”
“You don’t have to be a witch to grow good food, dummy. You just have to work at it. If you would spend as much time in your garden dirt as you do dishing dirt at the café, you could have good vegetables and fruits too. You know there were rocks in that garden before she took it over.”
“And how could one woman lift out all those rocks? I tell you, that is not normal.”
“And where does she get her water when our gardens are wilting?”
And so the merry-go-round would turn again.
There was one thing about which the villagers did agree, however, and that was how they coveted and were protective of that enviable chunk of garden land on which her hovel sat, so level, so free of rocks, so fertile. When wealthy merchants or lords or land agents from the city with large covetous eyes salivated over that parcel of land, so close to the center of town, “so level, so free of rocks, so fertile,” the villagers bristled.
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carolyngregov@gmail.com
