Friday Memes

CMash January 28, 2011 23 Comments

From An Island Life:
In Hawaii, Aloha Friday is the day that we take it easy and look forward to the weekend. So I thought that on Fridays I would take it easy on posting, too. Therefore, I’ll ask a simple question for you to answer. Nothing that requires a lengthy response.
If you’d like to participate, visit An Island Life answer the question and then post your own question on your blog and leave your link below. Don’t forget to visit the other participants! It’s a great way to make new bloggy friends!

My Question:

Majority of time do you write with black or blue ink?

My Answer:

Black

Hosted by Java from Never Growing Old

From Java’s blog:
Are you a blogger over 40? Yeah, welcome to the club!

Hosted by Jennifer from CRAZY FOR BOOKS

In the spirit of the Twitter Friday Follow, the Book Blogger Hop is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and find new book-related blogs that we may be missing out on! This weekly BOOK PARTY is an awesome opportunity for book bloggers to connect with other book lovers, make new friends, support each other, and generally just share our love of books! It will also give blog readers a chance to find other book blogs that they may not know existed! So, grab the logo, post about the Hop on your blog, and start HOPPING through the list of blogs that are posted in the Linky list below!!
The Hop lasts Friday-Monday every week, so if you don’t have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun! This is a weekly event! And stop back throughout the weekend to see all the new blogs that are added! We get over 200 links every week!!
Your blog should have content related to books, including, but not limited to book reviews.
If you start following someone through the Hop, leave a comment on their blog to let them know! Stop back during the week to see other blogs that are added! And, most importantly, the idea is to HAVE FUN!!

Today’s Question:

“What book are you most looking forward to seeing published in 2011? Why are you anticipating that book?”

My answer:

Moonlight Rises by Vincent Zandri, sequel to Moonlight Falls. I was first introduced to this author in May of 2010 and have been hooked ever since. He writes just like James Patterson. Short, cliff hanging chapters, fast paced, can’t put down mysteries. Just finished his latest novel Godchild, which came out this week and it was phenomenal!!!!! Brilliant story teller!!!!!

Friday Memes

CMash January 28, 2011 23 Comments

Hosted by An Island Life

From An Island Life:
In Hawaii, Aloha Friday is the day that we take it easy and look forward to the weekend. So I thought that on Fridays I would take it easy on posting, too. Therefore, I’ll ask a simple question for you to answer. Nothing that requires a lengthy response.
If you’d like to participate, visit An Island Life answer the question and then post your own question on your blog and leave your link below. Don’t forget to visit the other participants! It’s a great way to make new bloggy friends!

My Question:

Majority of time do you write with black or blue ink?

My Answer:

Black

Hosted by Java from Never Growing Old

From Java’s blog:
Are you a blogger over 40? Yeah, welcome to the club!

Hosted by Jennifer from CRAZY FOR BOOKS

In the spirit of the Twitter Friday Follow, the Book Blogger Hop is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and find new book-related blogs that we may be missing out on! This weekly BOOK PARTY is an awesome opportunity for book bloggers to connect with other book lovers, make new friends, support each other, and generally just share our love of books! It will also give blog readers a chance to find other book blogs that they may not know existed! So, grab the logo, post about the Hop on your blog, and start HOPPING through the list of blogs that are posted in the Linky list below!!
The Hop lasts Friday-Monday every week, so if you don’t have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun! This is a weekly event! And stop back throughout the weekend to see all the new blogs that are added! We get over 200 links every week!!
Your blog should have content related to books, including, but not limited to book reviews.
If you start following someone through the Hop, leave a comment on their blog to let them know! Stop back during the week to see other blogs that are added! And, most importantly, the idea is to HAVE FUN!!

Today’s Question:

“What book are you most looking forward to seeing published in 2011? Why are you anticipating that book?”

My answer:

Moonlight Rises by Vincent Zandri, sequel to Moonlight Falls. I was first introduced to this author in May of 2010 and have been hooked ever since. He writes just like James Patterson. Short, cliff hanging chapters, fast paced, can’t put down mysteries. Just finished his latest novel Godchild, which came out this week and it was phenomenal!!!!! Brilliant story teller!!!!!

Book Giveaway, Guest Author

Guest Author and Giveaway Reid Rosenthal

CMash January 27, 2011 2 Comments

Today it is cold and snowing here in New England but it’s always a warm day at CMash Loves to Read when I get a request to host a special guest. And today is just that type of day. Rebecca from The Cadence Group contacted me, and asked if I would introduce Mr. Reid Rosenthal to all of you, and of course I said yes!!! I would be thrilled to. So grab your coffee and lets get right to so he can tell us all about his first book of a six-novel series. Please help me welcome Mr. Reid Rosenthal !!!

ABOUT REID ROSENTHAL

Reid is fourth generation land and cattle. His cowboy heart and poet’s pen captures the spirit of the western landscape and its influence on generations of its settlers. His long-standing devotion to wild and remote places and to the people—both past and present—who leave their legend and footprint upon America and the American West is the inspiration and descriptive underpinning of all of his writing.

FROM THE AUTHOR

Expression

I was musing the other day while taking a break from writing Maps of Fate, the second book of my Threads West, An American Saga series. I paced over to the window. Misty shadows of snow squalls clung to the mountains around the ranch house. I looked back at the desk. Threads West, the bestselling first book of the series nestled side by side with my camera. My eyes widened as an epiphany struck me. Each is a tool for expression in image or word, and has as a central theme the power of the land, and the primal role that energy plays in shaping passions, lives and spirits.

Since I began writing the series, I am always accompanied by a small dictation device. For forty years it has been rare that I ventured anywhere without a camera.

My poor photo gear has been rolled on by horses, accompanied me on various fishing expeditions and been forgotten and then retrieved on cold snowy ridges during elk season after long return hikes. A few unfortunate pieces have even taken a swim with me when I lost my footing and drifted and tumbled down some river somewhere in North or South America. My dictation tool has been similarly abused. The perils of equipment in the wild and remote!

The incredibly wide range of subjects and styles of authors intrigue me. I am also fascinated by the varying styles of different photographers and disparate aptitudes certain artists have for a range of subject matter.

I am a landscape photographer. The camera and Threads West side by side on the desk brought home sudden realization. I am also a landscape writer. The land is as much a character in my books as it is the predominate image of my photos. That flows, I suppose, from the affinity I have always felt with the energy that radiates from landscape. It is my touchstone.

I am fascinated by and simply love to photograph or write of the endless variety of light, shape, angle and seasons of the land. There is no second of any minute, of any hour, of any day of any millennium which is exactly the same in any terrain.

The season, sun aspect, clouds, weather, time of day, angle of shadow, and wind are all ingredients in the ever changing and never duplicated recipe of a landscape photograph. So too are they the critical elements in penning a descriptive scene. The instant in which the image is created can never be duplicated. It is the only recording of that particular millisecond of that scene from that specific vantage that carries into infinity.

I smiled as another parody struck me. Right on the front page of my website, www.ReidLRosenthal.com are not only discussions of my books but the precursor to the site’s landscape photos pages!

I became more excited as the full force of my discovery struck me. Papers flew everywhere as I pawed the cluttered desk surface for a copy of my “fiction author biography,” and some blogs I had posted on my website long prior to completion of Threads West. I found them finally and held one in each hand looking back and forth.

From the Photo Blog:

“This spring morning the land was particularly vibrant. Wildflowers dotted the southern flanks of gentle rolls of prairie. Grasses fluttered lightly in a soft breeze. They shimmered and danced like ripples of sea waves across the landscape. Along the base of a particularly beckoning series of low sandstone bluffs stretched a riparian ribbon of emerald slightly darker than the coming summer greening of the grass around it. Across the top of the miniature butte, a bright almost ethereal mist began to rise and form.

As I ascended a distinct game trail along the side of the tiny cliffs my eyes became level with the top surface of the butte. The density of mist had increased. It chugged and boiled slowly along the top of the stony surface. Each seductive billow and hollow created a visual incident which appeared, then disappeared, and then materialized again, ghostly, with prisms of color that trembled as the sun caught the movement of the vapors. A magical dance of ground rainbows.

Directly in front of me, my eyes still level with the surface of the top of the warming rocks was a cluster of foxtail. They were bathed in sunlight, their pine cone like tips bristled with soft feathery golden spires, a perfect foreground to the rainbows performing on the stage of earth just behind them.”

From My Fiction Author Biography:

“If your mind and spirit are seduced by images of windswept ridge tops, flutters of aspen leaves caressed by a canyon breeze, and the crimson tendrils of dying sun…if your fingers feel the silken pulse of a lover and your lips taste the deep kisses of building passion…if nostrils flare with the conjured scents of gunpowder and perfume, sage brush and pine, and your ears delight in the murmur of river current…if your heart pounds at the clash of good and evil and with each twist and turn of interwoven lives you feel a primal throb, then I have accomplished my mission.” ~Reid L. Rosenthal, author of Threads West, An American Saga.

I have found new purpose and energy (not that I have ever lacked either) in my prose and photographic expression now that I have become cognizant of their synergy. They are both of the land, the stage upon which we and the characters in my novels line dance in a fleeting moment of existence, to then be replaced by the shoulder taps of successive generations. The only character or image that survives all the previous and the entirety of chapters or photograph yet to come is the land itself.

The epic saga of Threads West begins in 1855 with the first of four richly-textured, complex generations of unforgettable characters. The separate lives of these driven men and independent women are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West. They are swept into the dangerous currents of the far-distant frontier by the mysterious rivers of fate, the power of the land and the American spirit. Their turbulent journeys are heartbreaking quests intertwined with romance and adversity, passions and pathos, despair and triumph.

This is not only their story. It is our story.

It is Threads West: An American Saga.
Like on FB:
http://www.facebook.com/search.php?q=threads%20west&init=quick&tas=0.9379701957178415#!/ThreadsWest?v=wall

ABOUT THE BOOK

SYNOPSIS (borrowed from B&N):

USA Book News National Best Book Awards … Threads West is a WINNER in the Fiction & Literature: Western category and FINALIST in the Fiction & Literature: Romance category.

The romance of America, her people, her spirit, and the West. The ongoing story of us. This first book and namesake of the six-novel series is being compared by reviewers and authors to Lonesome Dove and Centennial. The tale bursts with the adventure, romance and promise of historical America and the West. The epic saga of Threads West begins in 1855 with the first of four richly-textured, complex generations of unforgettable characters. The separate lives of these driven men and independent women are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West. They are swept into the dangerous currents of the far-distant frontier by the mysterious rivers of fate, the power of the land and the American spirit. Their turbulent journeys are heartbreaking quests intertwined with romance and adversity, passions and pathos, despair and triumph. This is not only their story. It is our story. It is Threads West, An American Saga.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU

TO THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE

DISCLAIMER

Giveaway copies are supplied and shipped to winners

via publisher, agent and/or author. This blog hosts

the giveaway on behalf of the above.

No items that I receive

are ever sold…they are kept by me,

or given to family and/or friends.

Giveaway

GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE "Threads West: An American Saga" 01/27 to 02/10 ENDED

CMash January 27, 2011 13 Comments

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THREADS WEST

by REID ROSENTHAL

January 27th to February 10th

SYNOPSIS (borrowed from B&N):

USA Book News National Best Book Awards … Threads West is a WINNER in the Fiction & Literature: Western category and FINALIST in the Fiction & Literature: Romance category.

The romance of America, her people, her spirit, and the West. The ongoing story of us. This first book and namesake of the six-novel series is being compared by reviewers and authors to Lonesome Dove and Centennial. The tale bursts with the adventure, romance and promise of historical America and the West. The epic saga of Threads West begins in 1855 with the first of four richly-textured, complex generations of unforgettable characters. The separate lives of these driven men and independent women are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West. They are swept into the dangerous currents of the far-distant frontier by the mysterious rivers of fate, the power of the land and the American spirit. Their turbulent journeys are heartbreaking quests intertwined with romance and adversity, passions and pathos, despair and triumph. This is not only their story. It is our story. It is Threads West, An American Saga.

THANKS TO REBECCA AND THE SUPER

PEOPLE AT THE CADENCE GROUP

I HAVE ONE (1) COPY OF THIS

GREAT BOOK TO GIVE AWAY.

HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO WIN.

*ALL COMMENTS TO BE SEPARATE*

AND INCLUDE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

DO THAT I CAN CONTACT YOU IF YOU WIN

* LEAVE COMMENT: WHY OR WHY NOT

WOULD YOU HAVE LIKED TO LIVE IN THAT ERA*

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PLACE IT ON YOUR BLOG’S SIDEBAR.

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*GIVEAWAY ENDS FEBRUARY 10th AT 6pm EST*

WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN BY RANDOM.ORG

AND NOTIFIED VIA EMAIL AND WILL HAVE

48 HOURS TO RESPOND OR ANOTHER

WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN.

DISCLAIMER /RULES

Giveaway copies are supplied and shipped to winners via publisher,
agent and/or author. This blog hosts the giveaway on behalf of the
above. No items that I receive are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends. I am not responsible for lost or
damaged books (books are shipped from agents).
I reserve the right to disqualify/delete any entries if
rules of giveaway are not followed

Winners

And the winner is……….

CMash January 27, 2011 2 Comments

………..for TICK TOCK by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

39

Timestamp: 2011-01-27 23:29:03 UTC

Bingo said… 39 I follow on Twitter as Bookinbingo …or at least asked permission to follow

An email has been sent an the winner has 48 hours to respond or another winner will be chosen.

Thursday Memes

CMash January 27, 2011 10 Comments

Before we get to today’s meme, I would like to extend an apology to all those that stopped by yesterday and left comments, which I do read and appreciate. However, due to a doctor’s appointment, personal issues regarding my mother and sister which I am the sole caretaker and responsible party for and timed posts that I am behind on, I was not able to find the time to visit and/or respond to all my fantastic and fabulous visitors. I am so sorry. It has been a bit overwhelming lately in the real world and it seems I just don’t have enough hours in the day. Please accept my apology and I promise once things settle down, I will be back to normal, well…if I was ever normal to begin with lol.

http://btt2.wordpress.com/

Today’s question:

What’s the largest, thickest, heaviest book you ever read? Was it because you had to? For pleasure? For school?

My answer:
It was the first college text book that I purchased titled Care of the Adult Patient. It was a little over $20. and I thought that was outrageous especially since I had so many other books to buy for that semester. But that was the first, thickest, heaviest and of course one that needed to be brought to class every day. I keep wanting to toss it thinking that the material is so outdated and if need be can be accessed online, but hubby quilts me into keeping in….why, I don’t know.

Hosted by Lori from Dollycas’s Thoughts

From Lori’s site:
It struck me recently how much time I spend on this computer every day, blogging, chatting or playing games on Facebook, emailing friends and relatives, making cards and calendars, etc. etc. etc.
We depend on each other for book reviews, giveaways, encouragement, friendship, but how well do we really know each other?
Questions:
1. What time do you usually wake up each morning?
It can range anywhere between 5-7am, depending on my back pain level which is usually what wakes me up.

2. What time do you usually go to sleep each night?
That also depends on when I get up in the morning or what kind of day I put in as far as pain. On days where the pain is on the high end of the scale, which takes a lot out of me, I can be in bed (or the recliner) by 7pm. But most nights its around 9-10pm

3. Standing at the foot of your bed, do you sleep on the right side of the bed, left side of the bed, or do you have the whole bed to yourself?
I am allowed 1/4 of the left side of the bed. Hubby is quite the restless sleeper so for safety reasons, I try to stay clear lol. Plus I can only sleep in certain positions so don’t need much room.