Al Past's Blog

 IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Distant Cousin books have been reissued in new editions under new titles, and reorganized (with shorter chapters, for one thing, as well as minor changes to fit as YA stories), at the same low price. New readers and rereaders will find them as exciting and cheerful as ever, and doubly so during these parlous pandemic times. Best wishes to us all!

In order:Moon Girl, Lost Girl, Ransom Girl, Danger Girl, Rescue Girl, Tricky Girl, Scandal...

 IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Distant Cousin books have been reissued in new editions under new titles, and reorganized (with shorter chapters, for one thing, as well as minor changes to fit as YA stories), at the same low price. New readers and rereaders will find them as exciting and cheerful as ever, and doubly so during these parlous pandemic times. Best wishes to us all!

In order:Moon Girl, Lost Girl, Ransom Girl, Danger Girl, Rescue Girl, Tricky Girl, Scandal Girl, and Spriti Girl.

Four of the Distant Cousin books are currently free on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited!

This seems a particularly good time for a series about which one reader wrote "What a nice surprise 'Distant Cousin' was - quite unique.  It has humor, moves along at a pleasant pace, and the main characters have realistic flaws and faults that I could identify with.  ...I found myself smiling the entire time I was reading it.  There is a subtle wisdom and numerous life philosophies throughout this...

Visitors to this blog have enjoyed many of the poems extraterrestrial Ana Darcy loves. Her preferences are not as sophisticated as, say, an English professor's, but she's a sensitive, tender-hearted person and enjoys less abstract poems in English as deeply as native speakers do. This blog must contain links to two dozen or more of her favorites.

But now we owe Ana's readers an apology. To reproduce copyrighted poems here without permission is not fair, not to mention illegal. Instead, we give...

The Distant Cousin stories, while contemporary--set in today's world, more or less--are not meant to be predictive. Yet because they do deal with and around current affairs, sometimes they might seem predictive. This blog has already collected over eight such examples, and later several more.  Now there is another. The scene excerpted below comes from Distant Cousin Two Worlds Daughter, first published in 2014.

In it, Ana is attending the Davos Conference in Davos, Switzerland, where...

Announcing an original composition for Ana Darcy, a five movement suite for harpsichord (or piano), with each movement based on the style of a different baroque composer: Partita on Simple Gifts, by Larry Wallach, of Simon's Rock College of Bard.

Bruce Adolphe, the creator of hundreds of Piano Puzzlers for NPR, has called this piece one of the best such puzzlers he has heard. Ana's editor thinks the second one is in the style of J. S. Bach, but Mr. Adolphe says the third closely imitates anoth...

Hollywood is still working out the business of the Distant Cousin series--after all, if each book took a year to be written, how long will a TV series of five of the seven books take? So here's a slight change of pace, just for fun.

Earlier we mentioned the first book that Ana's editor published was a book of over 40 baroque duets, arranged from works of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and others. It was intended to address the sad lack of challenging, fun music for two players. If there are are musici...

May 9, 2017
Just in, a terrific deal from Amazon: the entire seven Distant Cousin volumes to date, in one neat, highly affordable set!

Only Amazon knows how long it will be offered, but for entertainment value as well as convenience, right now it's hard to beat this offer from Amazon. It's a summer reading bonanza!


Why all the fuss about Ana Darcy?
You mean, Distant Cousin could become a miniseries?
(Yes, it could, in fact. Episodes have been scripted and seasons laid out. Watch this space for fut...

Once again, something in today's headlines was foreseen in the world of Ana Darcy's Distant Cousin chronicles. Ana admitted, in her 2005 debut in Distant Cousin Arrival, that she had had her genes slightly modified before she was born, and she went on to explain the main two differences that set her apart from most of her fellows. Today, in a story on NPR's Morning Edition (Swedish Scientist Seeks To Edit DNA Of Healthy Human Embryos) we learn that our own scientists, for better or worse (hop...

The extraterrestrial sweetheart, ranch wife, and star of the Distant Cousin stories, Ana Darcy, lives with her family near Mesilla, in southern New Mexico just south of Las Cruces (and about forty miles north of El Paso, Texas). A narrow width of highly productive farmland lies along the Rio Grande River, with harsh desert close on either side. The entire area can easily be seen from the air, in this post and below:


Several satellite photos of the same area may be seen here as well....