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Kellie Lane is a passionate communicator and orator of God’s Word with a great desire to motivate His people to reach their maximum potential in Jesus Christ. It is her heartfelt desire for all to connect with and experience God’s love and plan for their lives. She is a free lance writer, author, motivational speaker, prayer warrior, and minister of dance. Kellie graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Nursing with a Bachelor’s degree (2002) and Master’s degree (2006) in Nursing. She is currently completing her Doctor of Nursing Practice Degree at the University of Mississippi. She is happily married with six children. She is a spiritual mother to many more.
Connect with Kellie at these sites:
Writing and Reading:
Do you draw from personal experiences and/or current events?
Typically I draw from personal experiences as well as testimonies from others. Many chose to send their personal stories to me. Yet this is not always the case. At times something may grab my attention in the news and in turn I incorporate it into my writings.
Do you start with the conclusion and plot in reverse or start from the beginning and see where the story line brings you?
I start with the introduction. I sometimes spend weeks fine tuning it. Once I am satisfied with its flow I can then progress with the book. I never know exactly how the story will end. I leave that part up to God.
Your routine when writing?
When writing I only need three things: My Jesus, My laptop, and my noise maker to tune out sound.
Any idiosyncrasies?
I wait to hear a particular sound. It’s a bit difficult to explain but someone may be speaking or a song may be on the radio and then all of a sudden whatever has been spoken inspires me. I then know that this is what I am to write about next. Perhaps something said is my next book title or simply a chapter title for that matter. Yet, I cannot write until I hear a sound. I know what it is when it happens.
Is writing your full time job? If not, may I ask what you do by day?
Writing is not my full-time job yet. I am a family nurse practitioner serving veterans on the daily basis. I’ve been in nursing for over a decade. What I have learned spills over into my writing because caring for others is a part of me. It’s who I am. In addition, I am a life coach ( niche is weight loss and relationships ) and a motivational speaker. I thrive off of empowering others.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
The apostle Paul. His writings in the new testament are simply awesome. Next I would say Cindy Trimm, Joyce Meyer, and Bishop T.D. Jakes.
What are you reading now?
The ESV study Bible. I feel that in order to be most effective I must continuously feed off of the Word of God. With it we are a force to be reckoned with. Without it, we lack power and control.
Are you working on your next novel? Can you tell us a little about it?
Yes, my next release “Chosen: Know your Kingdom Assignment” will be released in Summer of 2014. This book guides the reader into discovering their unique task in the Earth realm assigned by God . Everyone has a purpose. God had a hope of what each of us would become. Chosen will help you get there.
In addition, my third book will be released in the Fall of 2014. It is titled “Internal Chaos: Battles of the Heart”. This book will serve as an eye opener and liberation tool for women who are or have been trapped in unfruitful relationships with men who make false claims to love them. This was my personal struggle for many years. I fell subject to spiritual manipulation and domestic misuse. Now the time has come to expose the tactics of the enemy. The reader will walk away empowered and equipped to be the virtuous woman spoken about in the book of Proverbs (31).
Fun questions:
Your novel will be a movie. Who would you cast?
Internal Chaos will be a movie. It will depict the lives of four different women each experiencing Hell in their current relationship or marriage. Somehow they will find their way to Salvation and restoration. I would love to have one of the lead roles played by Sanaa Lathan and another by Gabrielle Union. It wouldn’t hurt to have Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey as well.
Manuscript/Notes: hand written or keyboard?
Keyboard
Favorite leisure activity/hobby?
I love exercising, listening to music, writing! Spending time with my family, traveling, and shopping!
Favorite meal?
Tilapia or salmon with mixed veggies. I love asparagus and mushrooms. Quiche is my favorite breakfast meal with spinach. Yes I am a health fanatic. Fitness is essential for prosperity!
What do you do when you’ve prayed and prayed and there seems to be no answer?
Kellie Lane knows what it is like to feel as though you are holding a ticket for a ride that’s never going to arrive.
Through personal experience and Bible study she has learned how to hold on to heaven’s promises–for yourself or others–when it seems like all hell is breaking loose.
You will discover why you may be waiting, where God is in this difficult season, and what you can do to cooperate with His plans and purposes for you.
If it feels like the heavens have turned to brass, let prayer warrior Kellie Lane show you how to position yourself to receive the gold that is coming your way through the fire of refinement.
BOOK DETAILS:
Number of Pages: 112 pages
Publisher: Creation House
Publication Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN-10: 1621366774
ISBN-13: 978-1621366775PURCHASE LINKS:
YOUR JAVA SCRIPT MAY NEED TO BE UPDATED
IF YOU AR EXPERIENCING DIFFICULTY
USING THE RAFFLECOPTER ENTRY FORM
Jonathan Curelop is a graduate of the City College of New York’s Creative Writing Program. He has studied at Gotham Writer’s Workshop and the New York Writers Workshop. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in various publications, including Solstice, Amarillo Bay, Liquid Imagination, UMass Amherst Magazine, apt, Raging Face, The Melic Review, The American Book Review and Aura. Originally from Massachusetts, where he graduated from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst’s Theater department, he now lives in New York City with his wife, Pamela, and works as an editor and as a compliance officer at an international investment bank.
Connect with Jonathan at these sites:
Meet Jimmy LaPlante – sensitive, bookish, baseball obsessed – the neighborhood fat kid and easy prey for his bullying older brother. The story opens in Brockton, MA. It’s 1976. When Jimmy tries to stand up to Cliff, the verbal abuse turns physical and an accident occurs, sending Jimmy to the hospital with an injury that changes the trajectory of his life. TANKER 10 follows Jimmy during his pre-teen and teenage years as he struggles to understand the physical and psychological effects of his injury. Throughout this period, baseball is his outlet. By the time he begins high school, Jimmy is an up-and-coming right fielder on the freshman baseball team. Despite having no physical signs of his condition, he is so ill at ease with himself that he can’t help but feel like a freak. Jimmy spends his life grappling with what it means to be normal as he tries to find his place in his family, among his friends, and with his brother Cliff. TANKER 10 is a funny and heart-breaking story about self-acceptance in the wake of trauma. Readers will root for Jimmy as he struggles to understand that the key to becoming who you are is learning to get out of your own way.
BOOK DETAILS:
Genre: General Fiction, Sports
Number of Pages: 282 pages
Publisher: Book Case Engine
Publication Date: October 2, 2013
ISBN-10: 1628480327
ISBN-13: 978-1628480320PURCHASE LINKS:
YOUR JAVA SCRIPT MAY NEED TO BE UPDATED
IF YOU AR EXPERIENCING DIFFICULTY
USING THE RAFFLECOPTER ENTRY FORM
John K. Manos was a magazine editor in Chicago for 20 years. Since 2001 he has earned his living as a writer, editor, and occasional musician. He is a graduate of Knox College. Dialogues of a Crime is his first novel.
Connect with John at these sites:
Writing and Reading:
Do you draw from personal experiences and/or current events?
I tend to start with personal experience and then expand from there. I’ve found that with very few exceptions, truly autobiographical writing—my own included—is simply not very interesting. It’s like hearing about someone else’s dream—intriguing to the individual, but not to the audience. However, everything I write sparks from a personal experience or an event I happen to notice, perhaps in the news.
Do you start with the conclusion and plot in reverse or start from the beginning and see where the story line brings you?
It’s often a combination of both approaches. But most often, I know where the story is going to end and on occasion have even written the last line almost at the outset. However, even though I also know where the story begins, it unfolds according to its own reality as much as it unfolds according to an plot outline I have on paper or in my mind.
Your routine when writing? Any idiosyncrasies?
I treat writing as a job, albeit a job that can consume seven days a week. So I start writing once the dogs have been walked and I have a cup of coffee at hand. I take breaks but will work into the evening when I’m accomplishing something. But there’s nothing particularly idiosyncratic about my usual routine.
Is writing your full time job? If not, may I ask what you do by day?
If I can include editing other people’s work, then yes, I have done almost nothing other than writing to earn a living since 2001. Prior to then I was a magazine editor.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
This list is almost too long. The prose writers who immediately spring to mind are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, J.M. Coetzee, Pete Dexter, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Ann Patchett, Joseph Conrad, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison, but a recitation of my favorite authors could go on and on. I love many different authors and many different writing styles.
What are you reading now?
I read multiple books simultaneously. The ones that are underway at the moment are Bad Reputation by Matt Hader; House of Meetings by Martin Amis; Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead; TransAtlantic by Colum McCann; The Long Home by William Gay; Seeing by Jose Saramago; Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon; and Life by Richard Fortey.
Are you working on your next novel? Can you tell us a little about it?
Yes. It’s the story of a 35-year-old woman in 1960 who is in no way prepared to raise four children by herself. The novel follows the twists and turns of her efforts to make her way under what, for her, are nearly impossible circumstances.
Fun questions:
Your novel will be a movie. Who would you cast?
Ryan Gosling as Michael Pollitz; Kevin Dunn as Detective Klinger.
Manuscript/Notes: hand written or keyboard?
Both, but mostly keyboard.
Favorite leisure activity/hobby?
Playing guitar.
Favorite meal?
There are far too many to list—it would take dozens of pages just to compile the finalists. So here’s just one out of at least a thousand: A souvlaki dinner with Greek fries, slathered in white wine sauce and tzatziki, at The Athenian Room restaurant on Chicago’s north side.
(from Kirkus Reviews)
In Dialogues of a Crime, Michael Pollitz must decide whether to protect the mobster who has protected him.
When Mike, a college student in 1972 Illinois, is arrested on drug charges, his father insists he use a public defender. His childhood friend’s father, Dom Calabria, head of the Outfit in Chicago, wants to help Mike by providing a first-rate lawyer, but Mike goes with his father’s wishes. The outcome is a plea bargain for a short stay in Astoria Adult Correctional Facility—but after he’s brutally beaten and raped by three inmates, Mike spends most of his sentence in the infirmary. He doesn’t give up his assailants’ names but threatens their lives right before he’s set to be released. When Mike is picked up by the head of the mob, people notice.
Flash forward to 1994, when Detective Larry Klinger begins investigating the murders of two former Astoria inmates who were violently killed shortly after being released. An informant—the third man who beat Mike—tells Klinger that the murders were committed by Calabria, the kingpin whom Klinger would like to see taken down. Klinger investigates, coming in contact with Mike, and the two form a friendship. When Klinger realizes that Mike will never give up Calabria, he begins to wonder whether it’s even worth investigating the murders of such evil men.
From the top of the empty building the river cannot be seen, but its presence seeps through the air like a sense of winter on the northern wind. Blood swells around the wire binding the muscular man’s wrists, and his long blond hair is matted with more blood, just now coagulating in streaks across the duct tape sealing his mouth and muffling his periodic cries. Able to see little more than a red mist through his swollen eye sockets, he flinches away as something round and hard, a thick dowel perhaps, leaves stinging stripes across his back and thighs. Thick hands clutch at his shredded clothing. Not yet in shock and with his lungs straining to somehow split the tape he senses a void at the edge of his consciousness, pebbles on the brittle tar spraying and clattering as in agony he is forced to shuffle forward, shoeless but not feeling the frozen roof.
A pounding on the thin panels of the dormroom door invaded the young man’s sleep. He dreamt briefly of the caissons being driven for the Hancock Center construction when he and his father and older brother visited the site in Chicago in 1968, but the banging woke him in time to hear the door opening. What he saw first against the weak early-spring light from the windows was a tall, disheveled middle-aged man with short salt-and-pepper hair wearing an inexpensive suit. Cop? was his first thought. The man glanced around the messy room, then stared down at the student as another heavier officer moved through the entranceway, holding aside a burlap screen the young man’s roommate had hung between the room and the closets. Finally a remotely familiar short bald man with a beard entered quickly, looked down at the young man and said, “That’s him.” The bald man pivoted and disappeared. The young man thought he recognized the beard, but not the bald head or the tie.
“What?” the young man breathed as the heavier cop twitched away his blanket and with an air of perfunctory finality clutched his upper arm, pulled him upright, turned him toward the windows and clipped handcuffs around his wrists. Salt-and-pepper rummaged through the top drawer of his desk and pulled out his checkbook. The young man sat naked on the bed with his hands cuffed behind his hips.
The heavier cop stared down at him, then seemed to relent and said, “You’re under arrest.” An inane idea entered the young man’s mind—he thought it was an April Fool’s joke. The door to his room stood open, and he could hear activity down the hall, more pounding on doors.
Salt-and-pepper opened the checkbook and said, “Michael J. Pollitz. That you?”
“You don’t know who I am?” Michael felt a rush of sleepy terror. His narrow face reddened.
“We know,” said the heavy cop. Both men moved around the room, opening drawers in the desks and small dressers. They walked across his clothing. The heavy cop kicked aside some junk-food wrappers on the floor and used his foot to rearrange a pile of papers and books. Salt-and-pepper opened one of the closets, looked down at the pile of clothing, luggage, books and trash, and shut the door again. It occurred to Michael that they weren’t searching for anything, their indifferent examination a matter of going through the motions. Both seemed bored.
“Can I put on some clothes?” Michael asked. He was well muscled in a way that echoed high school athletics, but he was small and felt shriveled and unbearably vulnerable, nude and handcuffed. His nineteen-year-old mind flashed a brief homophobic panic, even though he knew he was dealing with police. The freeze-dried fantasy included a grisly murder. The heavy cop exchanged a look with salt-and-pepper, then nodded. Michael stood and turned, and the detective removed the cuffs. Michael self-consciously shifted his body as he grabbed a pair of threadbare blue and white striped bell bottom pants from the floor and pulled them on. He picked up a wrinkled blue work shirt and buttoned it, and he tied his tennis shoes without sitting. He combed his long hair away from his face with his fingers before he detective replaced the handcuffs, and Michael sat again.
“Feel better?” salt-and-pepper asked with an ironic smile. Then he left the room. The heavy cop positioned himself in the entrance, in front of the flimsy curtain, and stared impassively. Michael looked at the windows, brighter now as dawn filled the sky. Almost to himself, he said, “What is this?”
“You’re under arrest,” the detective repeated.
“Why?”
The detective didn’t answer, and Michael wasn’t able to endure his stare. He looked through the windows again. His room was at the end of a long hall on the top floor in one of the older dormitories on the small campus, a three-story building with just two floors of rooms, the building shaped like a T with a central staircase that led down to the Student Union. The noises from the hall had died down, but he could hear voices. Still bleary, he couldn’t sort out his thoughts. Why was he being arrested? He hadn’t done anything. It was something with the bald guy, but he couldn’t fill in the blanks.
His friend John Calabria’s father came into his mind. He was suddenly overcome with a desire to be sitting in the office at Dominick Calabria’s farm northwest of Chicago, untouchable, waiting for the man’s sharp smile to fade as he offered a serious solution. What would Dominick Calabria do? Nothing. He would say nothing at all and wait for his lawyer. Lawyers. An army of lawyers.
“Can’t you tell me what’s going on?” Michael asked, overcome by confusion and anxiety. The heavy detective’s expression didn’t change even as salt-and-pepper returned.
“Set?” the heavy detective asked.
“Yeah. Let’s go.” Both cops stepped to the bed and raised the young man by his arms.
As they walked down the hall, Michael said, “I need to piss,” nodding toward the common bathroom. Both cops followed him to the urinals, and the heavy detective removed the handcuffs. When Michael finished, they didn’t replace the restraint. The young man felt a childish flush of relief that was almost pride for the miniscule favor: He was trustworthy, they could see that. And this added an absurd hope that the arrest was a mistake that would soon be clarified.
Outside, a friend from the sophomore class, Pat Kinnealy, whose room was down the hall from Michael’s, stood in handcuffs near an unmarked car in the small parking area next to the dorm. It was brightening into a lovely day. Michael glanced up at the sky, then back toward the parking spaces. Behind the unmarked car were one local squad car and three state cruisers. State troopers stood near their cars. Strangers were seated in the backseats of two of the state vehicles. He could see another acquaintance, a man two years older who lived in an apartment in town, with another stranger in the backseat of the local car. Both sat with the awkward tilt of handcuffed prisoners. Two freshmen from the floor below Michael’s stood in the parking area, also with their hands manacled behind their backs, and a small comprehension formed: The two roommates sold reefer, LSD, mescaline and amphetamines in small quantities from their room—he had purchased from them. Michael suddenly felt conspicuous without handcuffs, caught somewhere in the hostile twilight between Us and Them.
He and Pat were ushered into the backseat of the unmarked car. The two freshmen were placed in one of the state cruisers. “Why aren’t you handcuffed?” Pat asked. Beneath a taut strain of somnolent shock, his pallid face was a mixture of relief and accusation.
“They took them off when I peed,” Michael said. “They didn’t put them back on.” The cops were talking outside the cars.
“Did you recognize the bald guy?” Pat asked.
“Not really.”
“I think I sold him some white cross last fall,” Pat said mournfully. “Dan brought him over with another guy,” nodding toward their friend in the local squad car. “I think he was wearing a stocking cap, but I recognize the beard.” Pat seemed on the verge of tears, the skin pale around his eyes.
“I never sold him anything,” the young man mused, feeling relieved and silently reassuring himself that a mistake was being made. His roommate had from time to time sold an ounce or two of excess grass; they must have intended to arrest him instead. A straw to grasp. He didn’t know about the strangers in the state cars, but even though the two freshmen usually had hallucinogens or speed to sell, they weren’t serious dealers, and he, Pat and Dan weren’t dealers at all. Not in the sense of buying quantities and selling again for a profit or even for a supply of free drugs. But he had an uneasy feeling. He thought he recognized the bearded bald man as well, and Pat confirmed it. He thought he had met him once, when Dan brought him to his room in search of drugs. Michael had shown him to the freshmen’s room several months earlier, before Thanksgiving. Could that be it? It seemed too inconsequential to be real.
Genre: Crime Fiction
Published by: Amika Press
Publication Date: July 26, 2013
Number of Pages: 300
ISBN: July 26, 2013
NOTE: Excessive strong language & Graphic violence
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