Check out Maggie Toussaint’s Book Launch of her new release: Rough Waters at https://www.facebook.com/NewReleaseParty today, Friday Aug 29 from 6pm to 9pm.
Monthly Archives: August 2014
BOOK REVIEW: Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
Review by Ryder Islington, Author of ULTIMATE JUSTICE, A Trey Fontaine Mystery
I love Anne Tyler’s writing so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed this book. It’s the story of Rebecca, a fifty-something year old woman who has three grown step-daughters, one daughter and in-laws as her family after her husband passed away six years before. Rebecca runs the business her husband ran before he died. She hosts parties and events at The Open Arms, an old Victorian home where she lives upstairs with her uncle by marriage, a man who will soon be a hundred years old.
I read the first line and knew I would really enjoy the story. Here, you give it a try:
Once upon a time there was s woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Isn’t that a great first line? For anyone out there who wants to know what a contemporary literary novel looks like, check out Back When We Were Grownups. The characterization is great. The story is compelling. The writing? Wonderful.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who likes literary works.
The Common Cold And The Creative Brain.
Posted by Ryder Islington, Author of ULTIMATE JUSTICE, A Trey Fontaine Mystery
Maybe the title should be more specific–based on This Creative Brain. I hate getting a cold, and in fact don’t think I’ve had even a sniffle in the last ten years. Until last week.
At the most inconvenient time, when I’m in the beginning stages of revision with my wonderful, and patient, editor, I was knocked for a loop by a virus that had me sneezing and hacking, unable to sleep, with a fever, a sore throat, and a bad attitude.
The first couple of days I couldn’t concentrate on anything. My brain was just too busy sending out warriors to fight the virus. It didn’t have time for creativity. In fact, it didn’t have time for understanding simple English. I said, “Huh?” to anyone who spoke.
By day three the fever was lower, and I was able to function on a simple level, but trying to revise the story and get it back to the editor just couldn’t happen. By Sunday, the fever and headache were gone, and my throat was only sore from a raspy cough. I began with page one of the revision, reading the editor’s comments, trying to make sense of what she wanted. The easiest fixes were manageable, but I still couldn’t create new content.
It’s Monday night. My sinuses are still not up to par, and I cough so hard on occasion that I think my lungs are coming up, but my brain is at least able to create. Now, if I could just understand what it is the editor wants me to create!
We all know that even a simple virus affects many of our abilities. We know the body and brain will ignore things that aren’t vital to survival while fighting off invaders. But I never realized how profoundly my thinking is altered by a simple cold.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to send an email to the editor and see if she can explain her comments to me, like I was a two year old.
BOOK COVER LAUNCH: The Bridges of Death by M.C.V. Egan
“M.C.V. Egan twists truth and fiction until you question your perceptions…it is a story of real love, triumph and search for self.” – Beckah Boyd @ The Truthful Tarot
On August 15th, 1939, an English passenger plane from British Airways Ltd. crashed in Danish waters between the towns of Nykøbing Falster and Vordingborg. There were five casualties reported and one survivor. Just two weeks before, Hitler invaded Poland. With the world at the brink of war, the manner in which this incident was investigated left much open to doubt. The jurisdiction battle between the two towns and the newly formed Danish secret police created an atmosphere of intrigue and distrust.
The Bridge of Deaths is a love story and a mystery. Fictional characters travel through the world of past life regressions and information acquired from psychics as well as archives and historical sources to solve “one of those mysteries that never get solved.”
Based on true events and real people, The Bridge of Deaths is the culmination of 18 years of sifting through conventional and unconventional sources in Denmark, England, Mexico and the United States. The story finds a way to help the reader feel that s/he is also sifting through data and forming their own conclusions.
Cross The Bridge of Deaths into 1939, and dive into cold Danish waters to uncover the secrets of the G-AESY.
Learn more about this book and the special 75th anniversary re-release at www.thebridgeofdeaths.com.
Join us as we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the crash of the G-AESY and the start of World War II with a month-long history-laden event that will entertain, educate, and enlighten you! As part of this event, a revised version of The Bridge of Deaths, this award-winning and highly-acclaimed account of the events of that fateful day in 1939, will be re-released.
If you would like to be a part of the month-long anniversary event from September 1 to September 30, please go here: http://bit.ly/TBOD75Event.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M.C.V. Egan is the pen name chosen by Maria Catalina Vergara Egan. Catalina was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1959, the sixth of eight children, in a traditional Catholic family. From a very young age, she became obsessed with the story of her maternal grandfather, Cesar Agustin Castillo–mostly the story of how he died. She spent her childhood in Mexico. When her father became an employee of The World Bank in Washington D.C. in the early 1970s, she moved with her entire family to the United States.
Catalina was already fluent in English, as she had spent one school year in the town of Pineville, Louisiana with her grandparents. There she won the English award, despite being the only one who had English as a second language in her class. In the D.C. suburbs she attended various private Catholic schools and graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland in 1977.
She attended Montgomery Community College, where she changed majors every semester. She also studied in Lyons, France, at the Catholic University for two years. In 1981, due to an impulsive young marriage to a Viking (the Swedish kind, not the football player kind), Catalina moved to Sweden where she resided for five years and taught at a language school for Swedish, Danish, and Finnish businesspeople. She then returned to the USA, where she has lived ever since. She is fluent in Spanish, English, French and Swedish.
Maria Catalina Vergara Egan is married and has one son who, together with their five-pound Chihuahua, makes her feel like a full-time mother. Although she would not call herself an astrologer she has taken many classes and taught a few beginner classes in the subject.
She celebrated her 52nd birthday on July 2nd, 2011, and gave herself self-publishing The Bridge of Deaths as a gift.
Find M.C.V. Egan and The Bridge of Deaths at www.thebridgeofdeaths.com.
Book Trailer
I am pretty proud of this. I used Adobe Voice on my iPad and created a kind of book trailer. I’m pleased with how it turned out for a zero budget/cost video. It was super easy to create – I actually was going to use this for a project at work but decided to try it out by doing the book trailer.
Pros – easy to create, you can use your own pictures or choose from hundreds of icons and pictures, music clips are easy to add (again, your own or theirs). Adobe Voice is a FREE app.
Cons – you can’t save it as a video file so I can’t upload it to my YouTube account. It resides in Adobe’s cloud so the only way to access it is with a link. Right now, Adobe Voice is only available for iPad.
All in all, I think the pros outweigh…
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GUEST POST: The 7 Ways to Become a Better Writer by Valerie Thomas
I met a charming up-and-comer last week and wanted to allow her the floor for a guest post. Enjoy the thoughts of Valerie Thomas.
The 7 Ways to Become a Better Writer
Please note, the ordering of this list is not random. There is a definite progression from the activities I find help me most with my writing, to the ones that help the least. With that in mind—and the caveat that this is only the opinion of one starving author (okay, well maybe not starving)—please enjoy.
- This is the most obvious one, so don’t neglect it. There isn’t any wax-on, wax-off for writing; you just do it (kudos if you recognize the reference).
- Read books in your genre. This is almost as important as writing. As Orson Scott Card argues in his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, the only way to gain familiarity with the clichés and nuances of your genre is to read as many related novels as you can get your hands on.
- Get critiques, whenever and wherever you can. Critiques from peers, not friends or family, are key. It’s easy to think a work is good when no one else has read it, or to think a piece is so perfect it wouldn’t bear any more editing—but trust me, critiquers will find problems and places to edit for you. Please note that you shouldn’t simply accept critiques as fact, however; consider the advice for yourself, decide whether it makes sense to you.
- Read nonfiction, and books outside your genre. My favorite nonfiction books are those on the topic of becoming a better writer, but at the very least a writer should be familiar with the names Strunk and White, and read a few books outside their comfort zone every year. The reason being, romance novels occasionally need an action scene, mysteries sometimes require romance, and science fiction often pulls from every other genre. Instead of emulating scenes written by authors whose skill lies elsewhere, the best answer is to go straight to the source.
- Go on an adventure.Writing becomes much easier if you base things, as much as you can, on your own life and experiences (this is why Ender’s Game is set in North Carolina and Pretty Little Liars is set in Pennsylvania). If you have some interesting memories to put down on paper, your novel ideas will be interesting as well. So go out and get some.
- Develop your empathy. Believable characters come from authors who understand people, and empathy is our way to reach an understanding. If you want somewhere to start, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the best books I’ve read.
- Work on your spatial awareness. There are some successful authors who can’t picture their own scenes, but to my knowledge they are very few. In order to recreate a scene in the reader’s head, an author must first be able to picture it themselves, which is why a developed spatial mind is important.
Please note that television and movie-watching are nowhere on this list. I suppose, if they were, I might place them at a very distant eight. I personally enjoy both forms of media, but have yet to notice any credible improvement in my writing from watching The Big Bang Theory.
Do you think this list is incomplete, or that I got the ordering wrong? Do you have a good book or relevant source to recommend? Please let me know in the comments below.
Valerie Thomas is a twenty year old college student in Colorado and author of The Clique. Her blog can be found at valeriethomasblog.wordpress.com” Something like that should be perfect.
A Little Promotion for Drue A. Hoffman
Just thought I’d Let Drue have the floor for a minute.
START THE SERIES FOR $0.99!!!
THE GROUNDBREAKING AND LAYING A FOUNDATION COMBO
THE GROUNDBREAKING AND LAYING A FOUNDATION COMBO
They’ve finally found the passion they’ve deserved, but will they live long enough to enjoy it? Tony and Nikki fought their way up from the bottom of despair to each other’s arms, but can an ecoterrorism group bent on destroying their world separate them forever? Book 1, now in a combo volume including the series prequel, The Groundbreaking, that introduces readers to the nine main characters in the four full-length novels of the series. Get started today – Book 4, Planning an Addition, comes out November 1st!!!
Readers agree – Laying a Foundation is the one and only romance read of its kind, full of white-hot sex and characters over 50 so real that you’ll forget you’re just reading. Get started with the combo volume before the last book in the series is released in November!
Amazon – http://tinyurl.com/nhhhhql
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All Romance eBooks – http://tinyurl.com/mvjdzs7
Drue A. Hoffman
Drue’s Random Chatter
Website: http://www.druesrandomchatter.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drueannsrandomchatter
Twitter: @Drueann
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/DruesRandomChatter
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BOOK REVIEW: STOLEN by Allison Brennan
Review by Ryder Islington, Author of ULTIMATE JUSTICE A Trey Fontaine Mystery
I don’t think I’ve read much Allison Brennan before. That’s going to change after reading this book. What a great suspense!
I love the characters. Lucy Kincaid, an FBI trainee who is crazy in love with Sean Rogan. But this is more than just a romance. In fact, the romance takes a back seat to the story of Sean and a new job, a temporary job,with an old friend. An old friend who does things that are illegal. A job that might get Sean killed. Throw in the dispute between Sean and his brother Duke, and you have three plots twined together like a thick rope, coiled like a snake.
Ms. Brennan knows how to draw the reader in. Her characters are real people, with real struggles. I’d recommend this book for every lover of mystery, suspense, or romance. Some readers of thrillers may enjoy it. I read all of those genres, and I loved it.
See a synopsis of STOLEN below, followed by Allison Brennan’s bio. You can find more info on this author and her books at: http://www.allisonbrennan.com
Nothing is more important to private investigator Sean Rogan than his relationship with FBI trainee Lucy Kincaid. But when his past catches up with him, Sean faces an ultimatum: clear his name and help the FBI take down a rogue agent, or go to prison and lose everything he holds dear. With only Agent Noah Armstrong as his back-up and forced to keep Lucy in the dark, Sean steps back into his old world. But the longer he’s undercover, the more dangerous the game becomes. More than Sean’s future with Lucy is at stake—so is his life.
Lucy can’t imagine Sean would keep secrets from her—until an FBI agent casts doubt about who he really is…and who he used to be. Why did Sean quit his job with his brother and move to New York? Why hasn’t he told her anything about his new job? With more questions than answers, Lucy doesn’t know who to believe or who she can trust. All she knows is that Sean is in grave danger, and this time, it’s personal.
New York Times and USA Today bestseller Allison Brennan is the author of twenty-three novels and several short stories. A former consultant in the California State Legislature, she lives in Northern California with her husband Dan and their five children.
Crime fiction, mysteries, and romantic suspense have always been Allison’s favorites, so it’s no surprise that her romantic thrillers have a dark suspense edge. Reviewers have called her books “terrifying,” “mesmerizing,” “fast-paced,” “pulse-pounding,” “wonderfully complex,” “layered,” and “a master of suspense – tops in the genre.” As Lisa Gardner says, “Brennan knows how to deliver.”
Writing three books a year is more than a full-time job, and so is raising five kids, but Allison believes life is too short to be bored. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, playing video games, watching old movies or new television shows, driving to or attending volleyball / basketball / football / soccer / baseball / softball games, and on occasion even makes it to the gym where she enjoys people-watching more than exercise.
Allison is currently writing the Lucy Kincaid series about an FBI recruit. The seventh book, COLD SNAP, is on sale now. DEAD HEAT will be out on June 3, 2014. Also, she’s thrilled to announce a new hardcover mystery/thriller series starring investigative reporter Maxine Revere that launches March 25, 2014 with NOTORIOUS.
SHOWCASE: The Jones Men by Vern E. Smith
The Jones Men: 40th Anniversary
Edition
by Vern E. Smith
Book Blast on August 4th, 2014
Book Details:
Genre: Crime
Published by: Rosarium Publishing
Publication Date: May 2014
Number of Pages: 264
ISBN: 978-0989141185
Purchase Links: 
Synopsis:
DETROIT, 1974
To become the King, you have to take the crown. It won’t be given up lightly. Heroin kingpin, Willis McDaniel, has been wearing that particular piece of jewelry for far too long, and youngblood, Lennie Jack, thinks it would look really good on his head. When a junkie tells Jack about a big delivery, the young Vietnam vet makes his move. Feeling his empire crumble, McDaniel puts the word out to find whoever’s responsible. The hunt is on, the battle is engaged, and the streets of Detroit run red with blood.
In 1974 Vern E. Smith took the crime fiction world by storm with his debut novel, The Jones Men. Heralded as “a large accomplishment in the art of fiction” by the New York Times, The Jones Men went on to be nominated for an Edgar Award and became a New York Times Notable Book. The art of crime fiction has never been the same since.
Read an excerpt:
For Bennie Lee Sims’ wake, Lennie Jack chose the sky-blue Fleetwood with the chromed-up bumpers and the bar-line running from the trunk to the dash, dispensing six different liquors with chaser.
Joe Red brought the car to a halt in front of Fraser’s Funeral Parlor on Madison Boulevard. He backed it in between a red El Dorado with a diamond-shaped rear window and a pink Lincoln with a leopard-skin roof.
Lennie Jack wore a medium-length Afro and had thick wide sideburns that grew neatly into the ends of a bushy moustache drooping over his top lip. He got out of the passenger seat in a manner that favored his left shoulder. He had on a cream-colored suede coat that stopped just below the knee, and a .38 in his waistband.
Joe Red was shorter and thinner and younger than Lennie Jack. He got his nickname for an extremely light complexion and a thick curly bush of reddish brown hair; it spilled from under the wide-brimmed black hat cocked low over his right ear. He had on the black leather midi with the red-stitched cape; he had a .45 automatic in his waistband.
They came briskly down the sidewalk and went up the six concrete steps to the entrance of Fraser’s.
An attendant in a somber gray suit and dark tie greeted them at the door.
“We’re here for Bennie Sims,” Joe Red said.
“Come this way,” the attendant said.
He guided them down a narrow hallway past a knot of elderly black women waiting to file into one of the viewing rooms flanking the hall on either side. The hallway reeked of death; the women wept.
They passed three more doors before the attendant led them left at the end of the hall and down a short flight of stairs. A single 60-watt bulb illuminated the lower level. The attendant went past the row of ebony- and silver-colored caskets stacked near the staircase and stopped at a door in the back of the room.
“They’re in there,” he said. He turned and headed back up the stairs. Lennie Jack rapped softly at the door. They stood a few feet back from the doorway to be recognizable in the dim light.
The door cracked.
“This Bennie Lee?” Lennie Jack said.
“Yeah, this it,” said a voice behind the crack.
A man with wavy black hair in a white mink jacket and red knicker boots let them in. He relocked the door.
The room smelled of cigarette smoke. A row of silver metal chairs had been stacked in a neat line on one side, but most of the people come to pay their respects were scattered in the back in tight little clusters, talking and laughing.
At the front of the long room, near a small table of champagne bottles, Bennie Lee Sims’ tuxedo-dad body lay in a silver-colored coffin with a bright satin lining.
His face was dusty with a fine white powder.
Lennie Jack walked over to the coffin. He dipped his fingers in the silver tray of cocaine on top and sprinkled it over Bennie Lee.
Joe Red stepped up behind him and tried to find a spot that wasn’t covered. He finally decided on the lips and scattered a handful of the fine white crystalline powder around Bennie Lee’s mouth and chin.
They moved through the crowd, shaking hands and greeting people. Almost everybody had come to see Bennie Lee off.
The Ware brothers were there: Willie, the oldest at twenty-four; Simmy, who was twenty; and June, who often swaggered as if he were the elder of the clan but still had the baby-smooth face and look of wide- eyed adolescence. He was seventeen.
Pretty Boy Sam was standing in one corner with his right foot resting on one of the metal chairs. He had smooth brown skin and almost girlish features, topped off by a pointed Van Dyke beard. His good looks masked a violent temper.
Pretty Boy Sam had worn his full-length brown mink and brought his woman to pay his respects to Bennie Lee Sims, who had two neat bullet holes right between the eyes and underneath all the cocaine on his face.
Slim Williams was there with his woman. He was a tall, thin dark-skinned man whose left eye had been destroyed by an errant shotgun blast. He now wore a variety of gaily colored eye patches the way he had heard Sammy Davis did when he lost his eye. He had on a patch of bright green and red plaid and stood conversing on one side of the room with Hooker, Woody Woods, and Mack Lee.
Willis McDaniel was not there, but then, he never came. He had probably never considered it, but it was a source of irritation to the others.
Joe Red said, “Hey Jack, he the man. He don’t hafta come see nobody off if he don’t wanta come. Ain’t none of these people thinkin’ bout makin’ him come. Who gon make him come?”
“Why he can’t come like the rest of the people?” Lennie Jack said. “Has anybody ever thought of that, you reckon? He too big now to bring his ass out here to see a dude off? He probably had him ripped anyway. I don’t understand how these chumps let an old man like that just get in there and rule.”
“Now we both know how he got it,” Joe Red said. “He took it. He say, ‘Look, I’m gon be the man on this side of town cause I got my thing together and I got plenty big shit behind me. Now what you motherfuckers say?’ Everybody say, ‘You the man, Mister McDaniel.’ That’s the way he did it.”
“That is the way to take it from him, too.” Lennie Jack said. “We gon get lucky pretty soon. I think he can be had and I know just the way to do it. I got some people working on it. The first thing they teach you in the war is to fight fire with fire, you know?”
He took the tiny gold spoon on the chain around his neck and scooped a pinch of cocaine off the tray Joe Red handed him. He brought the spoon up to his right nostril and sniffed deeply.
The crowd was beginning to drift to the corner of the room where Slim Williams was holding court. Slim was thirty-seven, and much older than most of his audience. Lennie Jack was twenty-six, and Joe Red had just turned twenty-one three days ago.
Slim Williams had diamond rings on three fingers of his left hand, and he was waving them around in a dazzling display and talking about Joe the Grind.
“Joe used to walk into a bar with his dudes with him–he always carried these two dudes with him everywhere he went. He’d walk into a place fulla people and say, ‘I’m Joe the Grind, set up the bar! All pimps and players step up to the bar and bring your whores with you.’”
Slim Williams chuckled. “Then Joe would talk about ‘em. He used to say, ‘You ain’t no pimp, nigger. What you doin’ up here? I ain’t buying no drinks for you. Sit down!’”
Slim Williams laughed; so did everybody else.
“Joe used to rayfield a chump bag dude too,” Slim Williams said. “He used to tell ‘em ‘Just cause you got eight or nine hundred dollars worth of business don’t mean you somebody.’ Then Joe would throw a roll down that’d choke a Goddamn mule and tell the chump: ‘Looka here boy, I just had my man sell forty-two thousand dollars worth of heh-rawn, and I got twenty more joints to hear from fore midnight. Gon sit down somewhere, you don’t belong up here with no big dope men.”
They laughed again and somebody passed the coke tray.
June Ware took his pinch and squared his toes in the eighty-dollar calfskin boots from Australia, via Perrin’s Men’s Shoppe on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“What happened to Joe, Slim?” June Ware said.
“Oh, somebody shot ‘im in the head in an after-hours joint,” Slim Williams said. “And lemme tell you, youall shoulda been there to see Joe’s wake. It put this thing to shame. Compared to Joe’s, this thing ain’t nothing. This light-weight. They say there was coke in the block wrapped in foil and pure heh-rawn set out on silver trays with diamonds in the sides.
“So they partied all night till twelve the next day, then they all went to Joe’s funeral. After the funeral was over, everybody got on the plane with his woman and went to Jamaica for two days.”
“Say what?” June Ware said.
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” Slim Williams said. “And you shoulda seen that funeral too. They say a broad came over from Chicago in a white-on-white El Dorado, and she was dressed in all white with a bad-ass mink round her shoulders. Then when she came out of the hotel the next day for Joe’s funeral, they say she was in all black. She went to the graveyard and threw one hundred roses on Joe. Then she got in her ride and split. Don’t nobody know who she was. When they had Joe’s funeral march, there was one hundred fifty big pieces lined up for blocks down Madison Boulevard. They pulled a brand new Brough-ham behind the hearse, and when the march was over they took the car out to the trash yard and crushed it.”
“Goddamn Slim!” June Ware said.
Mack Lee, who was twenty-two years old and decked out from the top of his big apple hat to the tip of his leather platforms in bright lavender, came their way with his woman on his arm.
The woman looked about nineteen; she wore diamond-studded earrings and a matching bracelet. She carried a tray of glasses and an unopened bottle of champagne.
“We oughta drink a toast to Bennie Lee,” Mack Lee said, “and ask the Lord how come he made him so stupid.”
The laughter rippled through the room; Mack Lee popped the cork in the champagne bottle and poured the rounds.
Trailer:
Author Bio:
A native of Natchez, Miss., Smith is a graduate of San Francisco State University, and the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He began his journalism career as a reporter for the Long Beach, Calif. Independent Press-Telegram.
From 1979 until 2002, Smith served as the Atlanta Bureau Chief and as a national correspondent for Newsweek.
Vern Smith’s work as a journalist, author and screenwriter spans four decades.
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