Guest Author Gary Kassay

CMash July 6, 2012 Leave a Comment

If you are a regular follower of my blog, then you know that I love a great mystery. So when Amy from Sapphire Star Publishing contacted me regarding today’s guest and after reading the synopsis of his book, I wanted to hear more. Please join me in welcoming Gary Kassay to the CMash blog!!

GARY KASSAY

Gary Kassay, author of the Duke Becker Series, is a former member of the NYPD Transit K-9 Unit. Besides a career as a Police Officer, he has been the owner of a commercial photo company, an X-ray tech for humans and animals, and a TSA employee. He now resides in Casper, Wyoming with his wife Raella, three dogs, and one black cat.

When Gary is not working on the next installment of his Duke Becker series, he enjoys spending quiet times with his wife, reading, and when there isn’t snow on the ground, a good round of golf.

GUEST POST

First I would like to thank Cheryl Masciarelli for allowing me to do a guest blog. It is greatly appreciated and couldn’t have come at a better time. Yesterday was the release of the first in the Duke Becker Series, Murder in Silence. My publishing company, Sapphire Star Publishing has been fantastic and I hope that you will check out the book. Many of my ideas for plots and characters come from experiences and people that I have met. Then there is the other way.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe

I dream every night, nights when I fall into a deep sleep, which is rare, nights when I am aware that I am in bed sleeping and yet dreaming and nights when I lay awake, my mind still forming dreams. Sometimes they are very soothing, happy dreams of times past, people I have known and loved or so ridiculous that I actually laugh out loud, (as I have been told by my wife). These dreams are far and few between and they never lead to anything more than a smile and waking in a good mood.

It is the other dreams that visit upon me in the dark that affect me in many ways. Some are so disturbing that I wake from them in a cold sweat, my breath catching within my chest, fear sitting next to me in the dark. The worst of these are the dreams within a dream. I wake, upset and scared of something that my mind has conjured up, only to find that I am actually still within the dream world. Then upon waking, again, I lie in the dark trying to ascertain if I am finally really awake this time, or still in the clutches of my mind. Although quite frightening, these dreams sometimes give me inspiration on plot lines for future books.

Then there are the dreams that are so real, so descriptive in detail that even after waking I can remember most of them, even long into the day. These sometimes are frightening, sometimes pleasant, sometimes leaving me wondering about my sanity. There are times when the impossible happens…such as flying or defying other things in the real physical world. In any case these are my favorite dreams and the ones that give me the most ideas for future plots, characters and stories.

I wonder how many others, including the man whose quote appears at the top of this blog, have had their dreams lead them along, inspire them as well as frighten, or disappear upon waking like fog once the sun warms the air. In any case, I am very happy to dream and lucky to remember some of them. I look forward to my dreams, even the frightening ones because they lead me to places I would never have visited.

The world of Inspector Duke Becker, the detectives in his squad in the Special Investigations, Homicide unit, Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham and of course our murderer have come from a combination of dreams, experiences and people I have met. If you enjoy it then I will know that my dreams…even the scariest ones, are well worth it.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Two police officers have been brutally killed by having their throats ripped out, but the wound appears to have been done with surgical precision. With no witnesses, no forensic evidence, and two bizarre clues to follow, the case falls to Inspector Duke Becker, head of the high profile Special Investigations Unit, Homicide.

Becker and his squad must find the killer before more cops are murdered. The case will lead Becker on a wild chase through the streets of New York City, back over 15 years into the past and to a cover-up that will rock City Hall.

Along with his brash, wildly dressed young partner, Jimmy Nova, the beautiful Michelle Goldman, Augie “Doggie” Rivera, and the Mutt and Jeff team of Bobby Green and Joe Robinson, Becker will need to enlist his boyhood friend in charge of CSU, Manny Velez.

Add a ruthless newswoman known to the NYPD as “”Wicked Witch Wilson” and a new love interest for Becker in the gorgeous and brilliant Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham, Becker is about to embark on the most difficult and dangerous case in his 20 plus years. Will Becker and his squad be able to catch the killer before more cops die or will the killer have the last laugh?

THANKS TO AUTHOR, GARY KASSEY, AND AMY FROM
SAPPHIRE STAR PUBLISHING, I HAVE TWO (2) EBOOK
EDITIONS OF THIS BOOK TO GIVE AWAY. OPEN TO ALL.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.

Guest Author, Partners In Crime Tours, Showcase

Guest Author Joel Andre

CMash July 5, 2012 Leave a Comment

The name and face should be familiar. Joel has stopped by often, which means he is always busy writing and today he is sharing about his latest work, a short story, as he tours with Partners In Crime Tours. So please help me welcome back, author and friend of the CMash blog!!

JOEL ANDRE

Joel M. Andre was born January 13, 1981. At a young age he was fascinated with the written word. It was at fourteen that Poe blew his mind, and Andre began to dabble with darker poetry.

Between the years of 1999 and 2007 Joel was featured in various poetry anthologies and publications. In 2008 he released his first collection, Pray the Rain Never Ends.

Knowing there was something deeper and darker inside of his soul, Joel decided to take a stab at commercialism. Releasing the dark tongue in cheek, A Death at the North Pole, created a dark world among the death of Kris Kringle. Ultimately providing a tale of redemption.

October of 2008 saw Joel release his second book, Kill 4 Me. A tale in which a woman is haunted by a vengeful spirit through text messages and instant messaging.

Taking some time off and doing a lot of soul searching, Joel took things in a new direction and dabbled in the Fantasy Genre with, The Pentacle of Light. The tale dealing with five major races battling for control of Earth, and the acceptance of their God.

Finally, after missing his detective Lauren Bruni, he released the book The Return in October 2009, this time moving the action from the North Pole and placing it in the small Arizona community he was raised in.

Andre’s latest book is The Black Chronicles: Cry of the Fallen about a dead man who seeks revenge on the woman that tormented him in peaceful Northern Arizona.

Currently, he resides in Chandler, AZ.
You can connect with Joel at his website here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this dark, philosophical tale of horror, a man has the opportunity to sit down with Death. What he discovers is that the dying process is a little more complex than he imagined and that making a deal with the Grim Reaper comes with a price.
Read my review here.

Book Details:
Genre:Adult Suspense, Mystery, Thriller,Horror
Publisher: Darkcountry Publications
Publication Date: March 7,2012
Purchase: Amazon

THANKS TO AUTHOR, JOEL ANDRE, I HAVE TWO (2)
EBOOK EDITIONS TO GIVE AWAY. OPEN TO ALL.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
I received a copy of this book, at no charge to me,
in exchange for my honest review.
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.
ADDENDUM
I do not have any affiliation with Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble and/or any other retail/wholesale
outlets either online and/or elsewhere.
I am providing this link solely for visitors
that may be interested in purchasing this Book/EBook.
I do not receive any monetary compensation from any parties

Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, LLC, Guest Author, Showcase

Guest Author Rebecca Yount

CMash June 30, 2012 Leave a Comment

We are having company today! An old friend (not chronologically) is stopping by. Caitlin from Caitlin Hamilton Marketing and Publicity is visiting so that she can introduce us to one of her authors. So please hep me welcome them to the CMash blog.

REBECCA YOUNT

REBECCA YOUNT trained from childhood as a concert pianist, is a published poet, and worked in education reform, but she always nurtured a passion for storytelling which she has indulged only late in life. Coming from a family of writers, it wasn’t hard for her to put pen to paper, but it took an actual unsolved murder to give her the idea for her first novel. On a home exchange in England—something she and her husband regularly do—a villager told her about a local murder that remained unsolved, even by New Scotland Yard. Sitting under a tree in a fallow field one day, Rebecca began to imagine what might have happened. The result is A DEATH IN C MINOR.

In 2010, Rebecca underwent open heart surgery, which left her unable to write for two years. After this hiatus, she returned to writing, deciding to put the entire Mick Chandra series out herself as e-books. She is retired and lives in Virginia with her husband, writer David Yount.

Rebecca Yount is available for talks and presentations, and she is happy to meet with book clubs.

To schedule an appearance or to learn more about Rebecca Yount and her books, please visit www.rebeccayount.com.

GUEST POST

THE ONGOING STORY
How A One-Off Crime Novel Became A Series

I had originally planned to write a one-off crime novel based on the protagonist of my series, Detective Inspector Mick Chandra. But as I launched into terra incognita with A Death in C Minor, I realized that the story had become more expansive than originally conceived. In fact, the book had vastly outgrown its own author. By the time I had completed the first draft of the book, I realized that the process had become something like a new life form growing in a laboratory petri dish.

As I wove the plot and developed my four main characters — Mick; his American love interest, Jess; his partner, Elizabeth; and Jamie, his undercover agent — the story was no longer under my control. Like wading into a rushing river, I had to go with the current even as I risked drowning.

At the outset I had constructed the storyline around Jess, who stumbled upon a murder in the English village where she had taken refuge from her troubled life. As she became increasingly caught up in the murder of Peter Chandler, a neighbor, I planned to have her travel to Cambridge to meet with a professor of forensic science. That plot never materialized.

Instead, I introduced Mick in chapter two, sitting in his office in New Scotland Yard, attempting to master a trick from Blackwell’s Book of Magic and Illusion. This transition in the story surprised me. Even today I am not certain where I got the confidence to roll with it.

There was a real-life “Mick,” whom my husband and I had met during a home exchange on the English Channel. He was a forensic specialist on leave from Scotland Yard, attempting to recover from burnout. David and I soon became fast friends with our friendly neighbor. Still, after we returned home, Mick did not suggest himself as a character until I began writing the opening chapters of the book. Strange how our memories come back to haunt us.

So instead of a novel centered solely on Jess, I introduced the Mick character, establishing a scenario that promised a conflicted and passionate love story, as well as a complex murder investigation.

I found I had traversed Mount Olympus, where the ancient gods guided my hand over the page and I had no dominion over the text, inflated as that may sound. It was the most incredible rush!

For weeks I wrote like the proverbial bat out of hell, laboring for at least four hours in the afternoon, going to bed around 10 PM, then getting up at 3 AM to write until 5:30 AM. This brutal schedule continued until I had completed the first draft of A Death in C Minor.

After putting the book away for a short period of time, I rescued it from my desk drawer, then started all over again on rewrites, keeping the same punishing schedule. Finally, after four years, I had trimmed the book from 52 to 37 chapters. Since then there have been multiple rewrites.

My Mick Chandra series now consists of seven books. The second in the series, The Erlking, is due for publication as an e-book in early fall of 2012.

Rebecca Yount’s debut crime novel, A Death in C Minor: A Mick Chandra Mystery, will be published in e-book format on June 26 and available at Amazon.com; Apple iBookstore for iPad; Barnes and Noble for Nook; Sony Reader Store; Kobo; Copia; Baker and Taylor; eBookPie.

ABOUT THE BOOK

(June 26, 2012, Knoxville, TN) We are pleased to announce the publication of Rebecca Yount’s debut novel, A DEATH IN C MINOR: A Mick Chandra Mystery. This is the first title in a seven book series. The other six novels, which are already written, also will be published as e-books, with the second title in the series, THE ERLKING, scheduled for release in fall 2012.

A DEATH IN C MINOR follows young American concert pianist Jessica Beaumont. Determined to rebuild her life following the death of her young son, a bitter divorce and a suicide attempt, Jessica retreats to a 17th century cottage in rural England. But she soon learns that life in the village of Kenwick isn’t the idyll she imagined. A year earlier, Peter Chandler, a mysterious newcomer to the village, had been hacked to death in his manor house with his own kitchen cleaver. The case remains unsolved until it’s reopened by Detective Inspector Mick Chandra of New Scotland Yard.

Like Jess, Mick Chandra harbors a few ghosts of his own—a childhood spent on the mean streets of industrial Liverpool and a father murdered in a robbery. Welsh on his mother’s side and Kerala Indian on his father’s, Mick attributes his keen instincts as an investigator to his grandmother, who was a seer in her village in India. He has succeeded as an investigator despite the racial tensions that still divide England’s most elite police force.

As Mick begins to question the villagers, his list of suspects grows to include an adulterous vicar; an unscrupulous Cambridge don; a neglected, love-starved wife; a retired octogenarian army colonel; a loss-stricken daughter; and Adam Marr, a devastatingly handsome wealthy landowner with whom Jess had a brief affair when she first arrived in Kenwick.

Against the backdrop of Chandler’s violent murder, and though deeply wounded from failed marriages, Mick and Jess find themselves falling in love. Consequently Jess stirs the hostility of the villagers.

Under pressure from his superiors to close the case, Mick must find Peter Chandler’s murderer and bring him to justice. But who is the murderer: the local laird, the cheating vicar, or perhaps the wealthy commodities trader? Or does it take a village to commit a murder?

A DEATH IN C MINOR takes the reader on a journey fraught with danger, love, and intrigue, where the unexpected becomes the norm. The surprise ending will astonish even the most jaded readers of mystery fiction.

THANKS TO AUTHOR, REBECCA YOUNT AND CAITLIN, FROM
CAITLIN HAMILTON MARKETING AND PUBLICITY, I HAVE
ONE (1) EBOOK EDITION TO GIVE AWAY. OPEN TO ALL.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.

Guest Author, Showcase, The Book Trib/Media Muscle

ThrillerFest Blog Tour Guest Author Lee Child

CMash June 27, 2012 Leave a Comment

Now I know why they call it ThrillerFest !!! It’s a good thing I was sitting down at my computer when I received an email from McKenzie from Media Muscle/The Book Trib, inviting me to be part of this blog tour. What an honor!! And if that wasn’t enough, she then told me that I would be hosting the #1 New York Times Bestseller author, the Lee Child!!! So, without further ado, Mr. Lee Child.

LEE CHILD

Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age.” During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book,Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.

Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment.

Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar’s Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.

Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
Visit Lee Child at his website here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis (from Amazon): Everything starts somewhere. For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, way back in 1997.

A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A cover-up. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington.

Reacher is ordered undercover to find out everything he can and then to vanish. But when he gets to Carter Crossing, Reacher meets local sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux, who has a thirst for justice and an appetite for secrets. Uncertain they can trust each other, they reluctantly join forces. Finding unexpected layers to the case, Reacher works to uncover the truth, while others try to bury it forever. The conspiracy threatens to shatter his faith in his mission—and turn him into a man to be feared.

Read an excerpt:

CHAPTER THREE

There was no one waiting outside bay fifteen. No special crew. No one at all. The corridor was entirely empty, too, both ways, as far as the eye could see. I guessed everyone else was already where they wanted to be. Twelve o’clock meetings were in full swing.

Bay fifteen’s door was open. I knocked on it once, as a courtesy, as an announcement, as a warning, and then I stepped inside. Originally most of the Pentagon’s office space was open plan, boxed off by file cabinets and furniture into bays, hence the name, but over the years walls had gone up and private spaces had been created. Frazer’s billet in 3C315 was pretty typical. It was a small square space with a window without a view, with a metal DoD desk, and a chair with arms and two without, and a credenza and a double-wide storage unit.

And it was a small square space entirely empty of people, apart from Frazer himself in the chair behind the desk. He looked up at me and smiled and said, “Hello, Reacher.”

I looked left and right. No one there. No one at all. There was no private bathroom. No large closet. No other door of any kind. The corridor behind me was empty. The giant building was quiet.

Frazer said, “Sit down, if you like.”

I sat down.

Frazer said, “You’re late.”

“I apologize,” I said. “I got hung up.”

Frazer nodded. “This place is a nightmare at twelve o’clock. Lunch breaks, shift changes, you name it. It’s a zoo. I never plan to go anywhere at twelve o’clock. I just hunker down in here.” He was about five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds, wide in the shoulders, solid through the chest, red-faced, black-haired, in his middle forties. Plenty of old Scottish blood in his veins. He had been in Vietnam as a teenager and the Gulf as an older man. He had combat pips all over him like a rash. He was an old-fashioned warrior, but unfortunately for him he could talk and smile as well as he could fight, so he had been posted to Senate Liaison, because the guys with the purse strings were the real enemy.

He said, “So what have you got for me?”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.

He said, “Good news, I hope.”

“No news,” I said.

“Nothing?”

I nodded. “Nothing.”

“You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”

“I don’t have the name.”

“Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”

I paused a beat.

“It was a shortcut,” I said.

“In what way?”

“I put it around that I had the name. I wondered who might crawl out from under a rock, to shut me up.”

“And no one has?”

“Not so far. But ten minutes ago I thought it was a different story. There were four spare men in the lobby. In DPS uniforms. They followed me. I thought they were an arrest team.”

“Followed you where?”

“Around the E ring to the D. Then I lost them on the stairs.”

Frazer smiled again.

“You’re paranoid,” he said. “You didn’t lose them. I told you, there are shift changes at twelve o’clock. They come in on the Metro like everyone else, they shoot the shit for a minute or two, and then they head for their squad room. It’s on the B ring. They weren’t following you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “There are always groups of them hanging around. There are always groups of everyone hanging around. We’re seriously overmanned. Something is going to have to be done. It’s inevitable. That’s all I hear about, all day, every day. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We should all bear that in mind. People like you, especially.”

“Like me?” I said.

“There are lots of majors in this man’s army. Too many, probably.”

“Lots of colonels too,” I said.

“Fewer colonels than majors.”

I said nothing.

He asked, “Was I on your list of things that might crawl out from under a rock?”

You were the list, I thought.

He said, “Was I?”

“No,” I lied.

He smiled again. “Good answer. If I had a beef with you, I’d have you killed down there in Mississippi. Maybe I’d come on down and take care of it myself.”

I said nothing. He looked at me for a moment, and then a smile started on his face, and the smile turned into a laugh, which he tried very hard to suppress, but he couldn’t. It came out like a bark, like a sneeze, and he had to lean back and look up at the ceiling.

I said, “What?”

His gaze came back level. He was still smiling. He said, “I was thinking about that phrase people use. You know, they say, that guy? He couldn’t even get arrested.”

I said nothing.

He said, “You look terrible. There are barbershops here, you know. You should go use one.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to look like this.”
#

Eight days earlier my hair had been eight days shorter, but apparently still long enough to attract attention. Leon Garber, who at that point was once again my commanding officer, summoned me to his office, and because his message read in part without repeat without attending to any matters of personal grooming I figured he wanted to strike while the iron was hot and dress me down right then, while the evidence was still incontrovertibly in existence, right there on my head. And that was exactly how the meeting started out. He asked me, “Which army regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance?”

Which I thought was a pretty rich question, coming from him. Garber was without a doubt the scruffiest officer I had ever seen. He could take a brand new Class A coat from the quartermaster’s stores and an hour later it would look like he had fought two wars in it, then slept in it, then survived three bar fights in it.

I said, “I can’t remember which regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance.”

He said, “Neither can I. But I seem to recall that whichever, the hair and the fingernail standards and the grooming policies are in chapter one, section eight. I can picture it all quite clearly, right there on the page. Can you remember what it says?”

I said, “No.”

“It tells us that hair grooming standards are necessary to maintain uniformity within a military population.”

“Understood.”

“It mandates those standards. Do you know what they are?”

“I’ve been very busy,” I said. “I just got back from Korea.”

“I heard Japan.”

“That was just a stopover on the way.”

“How long?”

“Twelve hours.”

“Do they have barbers in Japan?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Do Japanese barbers take more than twelve hours to cut a man’s hair?”

“I’m sure they don’t.”

“Chapter one, section eight, paragraph two, says the hair on the top of the head must be neatly groomed, and that the length and the bulk of the hair may not be excessive or present a ragged, unkempt, or extreme appearance. It says that instead, the hair must present a tapered appearance.”

I said, “I’m not sure what that means.”

“It says a tapered appearance is one where the outline of the soldier’s hair conforms to the shape of his head, curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of his neck.”

I said, “I’ll get it taken care of.”

“These are mandates, you understand. Not suggestions.”

“OK,” I said.

“Section two says that when the hair is combed, it will not fall over the ears or the eyebrows, and it will not touch the collar.”

“OK,” I said again.

“Would you not describe your current hairstyle as ragged, unkempt, or extreme?”

“Compared to what?”

“And how are you doing in relation to the thing with the comb and the ears and the eyebrows and the collar?”

“I’ll get it taken care of,” I said again.

Then Garber smiled, and the tone of the meeting changed completely.

He asked, “How fast does your hair grow, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A normal kind of speed, I suppose. Same as anyone else, probably. Why?”

“We have a problem,” he said. “Down in Mississippi.”

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.

Guest Author, Showcase, Tribute Books

Guest Author Kathleen Toomey Jabs

CMash June 26, 2012 2 Comments

Nicole from Tribute Books is stopping by today to introduce us to a new author that she is touring with, Ms Kathleen Toomey Jabs. I am looking forward to hearing about her book as it sounds like a great summer read!! So please help me welcome them to the CMash blog!!

KATHLEEN TOOMEY JABS

Kathleen Toomey Jabs is a 1988 graduate of the United States Naval Academy. She served on active duty for six years and is currently a Captain in the Navy Reserve. She holds an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Her stories have been published in a number of literary journals and received several prizes, including selection in the National Public Radio Selected Shorts program. She lives with her husband and two children in Virginia.
Connect with Kathleen on Facebook and Goodreads.

GUEST POST

How did you draw from personal experience in writing your book?

I entered the Naval Academy in 1984, a member of the eighth class to accept women. I had no idea what I was getting into or what military life entailed. In Black Wings, Bridget Donovan experiences some of the same disorientation I did. I drew some of Bridget Donovan’s early adventures from my real life experiences. For example, Bridget is originally from Boston and she is not a particularly squared away plebe when she arrives at the Academy. I’m also from Boston and I certainly had my share of culture shocks, especially during the first summer.

I used some of the my own remembrances to inform those critical early scenes—unpacking the myriad of uniforms and issued equipment, trying to race to morning formation, sitting erect and attempting to eat and answer questions in King Hall (the dining hall), struggling to march and conduct rifle maneuvers as well as the sheer physical exertion of constant physical training (PT). There was a danger with drawing on my own experience though. Bridget’s character is different from mine. I needed to experience the scenes through her.

At one point, as I read over an early draft of a PT scene in Black Wings, I counted 8 pages for Bridget to do 2 push-ups. Every drop of sweat was (literally) a sentence! I had to ask myself: was I recreating memory or did I really believe this description of Bridget’s ordeal somehow furthered the plot? I eventually cut the push-ups to a paragraph. Plebe summer scenes with uniforms and rifles underwent similar revision as I separated my memories from Bridget’s world. I’m not as brave or as mouthy as Bridget nor as resolute as Audrey, but through their experiences I was able to do and say things I wished I had. It was incredibly freeing.

When I moved into the post-Academy worlds of Audrey and Bridget I relied less on personal experience. As an officer, Bridget is part of the public affairs community. I’m also a public affairs officer or PAO in the Navy reserve. I know that world so I could draw on it, but I wasn’t constrained by it.

It was helpful to be familiar with so many different settings. I visited the Naval Academy several times to refresh my senses and took notes while I was on duty in the Pentagon. I’d walked onto an aircraft carrier, spent time in Quantico and Pensacola, and lived in the Arlington/Alexandria metro area so I felt confident writing about them. I did research on things I wasn’t familiar with like flying a jet and attending flight school. Even so, with all the research and memories, I took a lot of liberties.

Writing Black Wings, I approached the keyboard with a sense of wonder rather than a list of memories or specifics. I walked the Naval Academy cemetery to capture the mood and some of the landmarks, but when I sat down I wrote about mausoleums that didn’t exist, honor boards that weren’t held. I continued on that way, blending real-life places and bits of memory with fabrications to create what I hoped was a true depiction of Naval Academy life in the early years of female integration. I did the same with Bridget; I set her free to experience and react to the world on her own terms.

ABOUT THE BOOK

LT Bridget Donovan suspects the worst when her former Naval Academy roommate, Audrey Richards, perishes in a botched take-off from an aircraft carrier. The Navy says it’s an accident, but facts don’t add up. Could it be suicide, or murder? Donovan’s unofficial investigation into what really happened, both during their past Academy days and in Richards’ final hours, forces her to examine the concepts of honor, justice and the role of loyalty in pursuit of those ideals.

Watch the trailer:

Book Details:
Price: $19.95 paperback, $9.99 ebook
ISBN: 9780984141272
Pages: 314
Release: December 2011
Purchase links: Amazon B&N

THANKS TO AUTHOR, KATHLEEN TOOMEY JABS, I
HAVE ONE (1) EBOOK EDITION TO GIVE AWAY.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.
ADDENDUM
I do not have any affiliation with Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble and/or any other retail/wholesale
outlets either online and/or elsewhere.
I am providing this link solely for visitors
that may be interested in purchasing this Book/EBook.
I do not receive any monetary compensation from any parties

Guest Author, Showcase, Tribute Books

Guest Author Molly Best TINSLEY

CMash June 25, 2012 4 Comments

Today Nicole from Tribute Books is stopping by to introduce us to an amazing, busy and talented author as she talks about her new memoir. So please help me welcome Ms. Molly Best!

ABOUT MOLLY BEST TINSLEY

Air Force brat Molly Best Tinsley taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. Author of My Life with Darwin (Houghton Mifflin) and Throwing Knives (Ohio State University Press), she also co-authored Satan’s Chamber (Fuze Publishing) and the textbook, The Creative Process (St. Martin’s). Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been read and produced nationwide. She lives in Oregon, where she divides her time between Ashland and Portland.
Connect with the author at: Fuze Publishing’s Facebook, Fuze Publishing’s Twitter, Fuze Publishing’s Website, Fuze Publishing’s Blog, Entering the Blue Stone Blog Tour Site, Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook

GUEST POST

Entering the Blue Stone is a memoir of my parents’ final years, when my father was afflicted with Parkinson’s, my mother with Alzheimers. My siblings and I had to move them from their home to an independent living apartment in a continuing care facility, then to the assisted living wing, and finally to the nursing home on the bottom floor. It’s a fairly common experience nowadays, but it feels extraordinary when it happens to you, a cross between a comedy of errors, a crusade for humane treatment, and, of course, a prolonged funeral. In order to maintain my sanity, I transcribed events almost as they were happening, including conversations verbatim. I was coping with the chaos by keeping notes—trying to contain it in words.

As the months passed, and their situation plummeted from difficult to impossible, the writing began to serve a purpose beyond my own mental health. I wanted to tell a cautionary tale so that other families might begin this end-of-life process with more information. Because our experience became so surreal, however, I chose an almost documentary tone recount it. No hysteria, no exclamatory outrage–just the facts. We felt as if the administrators in the continuing care facility had lost their minds while those with diagnosed dementia exemplified grace and a certain common sense. I had to make sure I didn’t sound like a crazy person myself—even if I felt that way sometimes!

At the same time, if the story was going to make an impact, it would have to bring the experience to life in a nuanced, three-dimensional world, creating our parents and their care-givers as characters, conveying the sensory texture of our struggle, and its ineluctable arc. The real information is in the concrete details, not in some sort of abstract power point presentation. So I didn’t spare them. Based on my notes, I painted the fullest picture I could of our search for a care facility and then our adaptation to one frustration after the next–the scenes, the dialogue, the unexpected sweet times, the inevitable bad. My book is an account of what-not-to-do, but maybe its portrayal of the challenges and struggles that come with being human will assure others in similar circumstances that they aren’t alone.

Entering the Blue Stone Summary

What happens when one’s larger-than-life military parents–disciplined, distinguished, exacting–begin sliding out of control? The General struggles to maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson’s disease; his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves of the perfect solution: an upscale retirement community. But as soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.

Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir, Entering the Blue Stone dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.

BOOK DETAILS
Price: $14.95 paperback, $9.99 ebook
ISBN: 9780984990818
Pages: 195
Release: May 2012

THANKS TO THE KINDNESS OF AUTHOR, MOLLY BEST TINSLEY,
I HAVE ONE (1) EBOOK EDITION OF HER MEMOIR TO GIVE AWAY.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

Guest Author, Showcase, Sparkpoint Studio, LLC

Guest Author David Klein

CMash June 23, 2012 1 Comment

Lisa from SparkPoint Studio contacted me regarding today’s guest and asked if I would read and review his book. But since I am behind AGAIN, I disappointingly had to pass at this time. Oh how I wish I was a speed reader. There are just too many books I want to read and today’s guest has written one of those books. It is definitely on my TBR list. Welcome David Klein!!

DAVID KLEIN

David Klein is the author of the novel Stash, also published by Broadway Books, and his short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines. He currently lives in upstate New York.
Visit David at his website, on Facebook and Twitter.

GUEST POST

For Better or Worse

There really are no gray areas when it comes to traditional wedding vows. ‘For better or worse’, ‘Richer or poorer’, ‘In sickness or in health’, ‘Until death do us part.’

There’s no mistaking the intent of those vows, or the range of blissful and brutal conditions, emotions, and situations under which you promise to stay married.

In writing my most recent novel, Clean Break, I spent a long time thinking about the language of traditional marriage vows, and how those vows applied to my main character, Celeste. When the novel opens, she’s been struggling for several years with the level of commitment she “owes” her husband. The problem for Celeste is that the first years of marriage were all on the better, richer, and healthy side of the scale. But then her husband, Adam, fell under the spell of gambling. He lost all of their assets, poisoned their marriage, and emotionally damaged their young son, Spencer. And he lost his temper.

Their marriage had gone from better to worse, from health to sickness, from richer to poorer. Does Celeste really need to stick around because she’d made that promise to her husband ten years ago? The difficult question for her is whether Adam is truly ill, or has developed a nasty, addictive habit and a mean streak. You wouldn’t leave your spouse who is suffering from a disease. But you might leave that same spouse if he won’t stop a destructive behavior.

When talking to his son, Adam tries to tell Spencer he has a disease, “like grandma’s cancer,” and that the doctors are treating him so he gets better. But Celeste tells Spencer that no one chooses to get cancer, no makes a decision to get sick, yet Adam chose to gamble. He placed his bets.

Behavioral problems among adults get a lot of attention these days. In many cases, they’re positioned as addictions: gambling addiction, sex addiction, Internet addiction—you name it. Health professionals often prescribe prescription drugs to help sufferers, which some people argue serves to “medicalize” human distress or a person’s lack of accountability.

Even the mental health profession struggles in this gray area. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is used by health professionals, researchers and policy makers to identify, classify and plan treatment for mental disorders. Proposed revisions would add “gambling disorder” to alcohol and drug problems as a “substance use and addictive disorder” that insurers and others would use to make decisions about treatment and coverage.

Better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—yes. But the gray areas that life presents? Hard to say. For Celeste, like many spouses who may be stuck in an awful situation, it’s hard to know where commitment ends and survival begins. What are your thoughts on this topic?

ABOUT THE BOOK

Can you make a clean break from a troubled past and start a new life?Four lives intersect when Celeste Vanek leaves her husband, Adam. His compulsive gambling and physical threats have poisoned their marriage and emotionally damaged their young son. Celeste moves to a small rental across town, works to gain financial security, and helps her son navigate his fantasy life.

But she quickly finds that starting over is not easy.

Adam demands his family back, and things get out of control. Jake, who witnesses a violent struggle between Celeste and her husband, becomes Celeste’s ally and friend, while struggling with his own emotional and ethical issues. Jake carries a history of failed relationships—one of them with Sara, a married and childless police detective who has a private agenda to pursue when a crime is committed that links these four characters together and changes their lives forever.
Amazon purchase link here.

THANKS TO LISA FROM SPARKPOINT STUDIO, I HAVE ONE (1)
PB COPY OF THIS BOOK TO GIVEAWAY. U.S. RESIDENTS ONLY.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

Guest Author, Showcase

Guest Author Dawn Tripp

CMash June 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

Today I have the honor to introduce you to an award winning author. Lisa, from Sparkpoint Studio LLC, contacted me and asked if I would read and review Game Of Secrets. Whenever I get a request, I always ask if the author would stop by and visit, and she agreed. Please help me welcome Ms. Dawn Tripp!!

DAWN TRIPP

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, Dawn Tripp’s fiction has earned praise from critics for her “thrilling” storytelling (People Magazine), her “haunting, ethereal” prose (Booklist), and her “marvelous characters” (Orlando Sentinel). She is the author of the novels, Moon Tide, The Season of Open Water, and Game of Secrets, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her essays have appeared on NPR and online at Psychology Today. She teaches workshops on structuring the arc of a novel out of fragments of fact and fiction. She graduated from Harvard College and lives in Massachusetts with her husband, sons, and 80-pound German Shepherd.
You can visit Dawn at her website and on Twitter.

GUEST POST

ON NOT KNOWING

As writers in the midst of a novel, we are often working to pin down what we know so far about our story: about a turn of events; about what’s going to happen next; about where it’s all heading and how it will end; we are working to figure out our characters—who they are, what makes them tick, what they have done, and why.

Faced with uncertainty, I admit, the impulse is often to nail it all down, map out that arc, make that outline. But I have found that the longer I resist that impulse to pin everything into place, the longer I kick around in what I do not yet know, the better the writing becomes. That doesn’t mean the arc of a story isn’t there. It doesn’t mean some dark underside of my mind hasn’t already figured it out. I put my faith in the fact that there is such an order. And then I write to discover it.

My novels start in pieces, on the page for months, bits of character, story, scene. Those pieces might feel intuitively linked; I might have glimpses of the overall structure. But I don’t have it all figured out. In the early stages of a book, I feel like I am writing into a story that already exists. I write what moves me, what I am impelled by. Sometimes I draft a sequence toward the opening, more often I will draft what I sense to be the ending first. There’s a certain opening of mind, a willingness to dwell in possibility. I don’t polish my drafts up too soon. I leave notes in the margins. I leave some passages entirely without punctuation. I leave things untidy, open to change. That openness, I feel, is critical. I find that when I can let myself stay open to what I may not yet have uncovered, when I can let myself be driven by what I do not yet know, the story often turns, deepens, in unexpected, revelatory ways.

As I was writing GAME OF SECRETS, I felt like I was continually being overturned. And I knew in my gut that I had to stay open to that. Again and again, I would discover some new twist that was not in my original vision for the novel, and often in consequence, the story would change, and I would have to let it change. I wrote what I thought was the ending of the story early on. I fell in love with it. It became that kind of horizon a strong ending can be that drives you, day in, day out, to create the 300 pages leading up to that moment. What I did not expect, and could not have foreseen, was that in fact that ending was not the climax. The most powerful revelation was something I was writing toward without even realizing it, until all at once, I did.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1957, Jane Weld was eleven years old when her father Luce, a petty thief, disappeared. His skiff was found drifting near the marsh, empty except for his hunting coat and a box of shot-gun shells. No one in his small New England town knew for sure what happened until, three years later, his skull rolled out of a gravel bank by the river, a bullet hole in the temple. There were rumors he had been murdered by the jealous husband of his mistress, Ada Varick. Now, half a century later, Jane is still searching for the truth of her father’s death, a mystery made more urgent by the unexpected romance that her willful daughter, Marne, has struck up with one of Ada’s sons. As their love affair intensifies, Jane and Ada meet for a casual Friday board game that soon transforms into a cat-and-mouse game of words long left unspoken, dark secrets best left untold.

PRAISE FOR GAMES OF SECRETS

“A combination of thriller, mystery, and literary fiction; the secrets of a murder are revealed through an intense Scrabble game…..An intelligent beach-read.” —The Boston Phoenix

“A gracefully told character study of three intelligent, forbidding women and the men who love them, wrapped up in a taut, suspenseful mystery, Tripp’s third novel builds to a surprising finish” —Booklist

“A page-turning thriller–a game of Scrabble helps two families spell out the history of a small-town murder.” —Better Homes and Gardens

“A brilliant metaphor is at play in the center of Game of Secrets, Dawn Tripp’s extraordinary new novel. In the ongoing play of a board game, in a surprising, hauntingly resonant plot, and in complex, compelling characters, she illuminates deep truths about the way we try to piece the world together into meaning, working with what we are given, struggling with family and fate and desire….This is a truly important work by one of our finest writers.” – Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain

“Lush, perfectly calibrated language that opens doors on every page through which the enchanted reader falls.” —Jenny White, author of The Winter Thief

“Fair warning: Don’t start Game of Secrets unless you’re prepared to finish it in one sitting….because once these characters get into your head they don’t let go.” —Kim Wright, author of Love in Mid-Air

THANKS TO LISA AT SPARKPOINT STUDIO, LLC,
I HAVE ONE (1) COPY OF THIS BOOK TO GIVE AWAY.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
I received a copy of this book, at no charge to me,
in exchange for my honest review.
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.