Booking Through Thursday

CMash June 28, 2012 6 Comments

http://btt2.wordpress.com

Today’s question:
A while ago, I interviewed my readers for a change, and my final question was, “What question have I NOT asked at BTT that you’d love me to ask?” I got some great responses and will be picking out some of the questions from time to time to ask the rest of you. Like now.
Margaret asks:
Who taught you to read?

My answer:
Since , with me, it was many years ago, I can’t exactly recall. However, I would assume it was my Mother and Grandmother. My mother used to relate stories as to how she would always give me books while in my playpen, while potty training, etc. She was not an avid reader nor do I remember ever seeing her or my Dad reading a book for pleasure when I was young. I do remember, as a young child, helping my grandmother cook, and she would let me read the recipes. I do have vivid memories of always being with a book when I was in 2nd grade as my teacher, Mrs. Chervarini, encouraged reading and would give books as prizes for different tasks. Example, one month she created a collage of many sites, buildings, etc in our state. In our spare time, we could try to name each picture and the one with the most right would win. My parents used to take many day trips around the state so I was able to recognize many pictures in the collage and I won, which I received the book, PT 109 by John Kennedy.

What about you? Who taught you to read?

Giveaway, Winners

And the winners are…..

CMash June 27, 2012 2 Comments

…….of Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

103 Melissa D Leave a Blog Post Comment

2nd and 3rd PLACE WINNERS

53 Karen Gervasi Leave a Blog Post Comment

47 Erica Haspiel Szlosek Follow @CherylMash on Twitter

An email has been sent to the winners and they have 48 hours to respond with their mailing address or another winner will be chosen. Thank you to all that entered.

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.

Giveaway, Winners

And the winners are……..

CMash June 26, 2012 2 Comments

……..of Goodbye For Now by Laurie Frankel

33 Erica Haspiel Szlosek Be a Public Follower of ‘CMASH Loves to Read

40 Diana Stanhope Be a Public Follower of ‘CMASH Loves to Read’

44 Carolyn Daley Leave a Blog Post Comment

An email has been sent to the winners and they have 48 hours to respond with their mailing address or another winner will be chosen. Thank you to the many that entered. More giveaways to be posted !!!

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

Author, Giveaway, Tribute Books

EBOOK GIVEAWAY PAGE “BLACK WINGS” by Kathleen Toomey Jabs ENDED

CMash June 26, 2012 6 Comments

JUNE 26th to JULY 10th, 2012

BLACK WINGS
by KATHLEEN TOOMEY JABS

SYNOPSIS:

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.

THANKS TO AUTHOR, KATHLEEN TOOMEY JABS

I HAVE ONE ( 1 ) EBOOK EDITION

OF THIS BOOK TO GIVE AWAY.
HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO WIN.

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PLEASE NOTIFY ME IF YOU HAVE
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DISCLAIMER / RULES

Giveaway copies are supplied and shipped to winners via publisher,
the giveaway on behalf of the
above. 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.

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Meme, Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday

CMash June 26, 2012 4 Comments

Hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

*Grab your current read

*Open to a random page

*Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

*BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

*Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

As I searched for something to say, I worried that if I waited much longer you’d begin slamming your face with your own palms, martyring yourself on your bed, not just to punish me but to punish the world for making you be alive in it.

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page 85

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.

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