Featured Book: December 11

Dollhouse Syndrome Vol.1

An intriguing and innovative Young Adult novel by Lan Hsu

From the Introduction:

The World. In the not too distant future

“Nowadays, the world is different to how it used to be. We have split the earth into the Seven Rooms, each room never to interfere with the private affairs of another room. Everyone and anyone can travel freely between the Seven Rooms. We have employed the White Uniform to ensure the safety and well-being of our citizens.”

We will never be free. We will always be their little “Dolls.”

“We live in a perfect world, one purely of creativity and love. After the War of Peace, we have rebuilt the world to be perfect. There is now a 98.79% rate of happiness, and the average life expectancy has been raised to over one hundred. The rate of suicide is below 0.0001% of all recent deaths. Crime rates have been demolished. It is next to non-existent. I believe we have indeed built a great empire, one to last millennia.”

This place is fake. We must fix it. They will continue to play with us unless we fix it.

Of the novel, the author comments:

Hey guys!!! Thanks for buying my very first project, Dollhouse Syndrome. I’m planning to make this into a series of short novels, so I hope that you can support me all the way through the characters’ journeys.

Lots of love, LH

Some fun facts about this book:

-The story contains 20,133 words

-I wrote 3 completely different stories for the title ‘Dollhouse Syndrome’

Fourteen-year-old Lan Hsu illustrated and designed the book. She lives in England and has planted Easter eggs throughout the book and invites readers to find them.

More information about Dollhouse Syndrome, Vol.1 is available on Thrive Global

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Featured Book: November 18

This month, I’m featuring the latest book from one of my favorite writers! I’ve featured many of Linton Robinson’s books in the past, so I’m pleased to feature Raptor’s Golden Hits:

When the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…. There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me… It’s only rock and roll but I like it… When I had no ears to hear, you sang to me… The ever popular tortured artist effect… The beat goes on… The beat goes on… Is Raptor the only band that can take over the consciousness of it’s listeners? And who took over Raptor in the first place? And what’s their game plan for, basically, the human race? A diverse group of people coming together in the Fremont area of Seattle… back before Adobe and Amazon and grunge… and moving out on the world. More about Raptor here: RaptorsGoldenHits The most entertaining member: JaxiSez And the screenplay the book sprang from, with character pics, synopsis, and shooting script.

But wait! There’s more to this book…

 

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Featured Book: October 19

Shu Wei’s Revenge

In his role as Town Scribe in 1898, seventeen-year-old Shu Wei is part of an incident which causes his family to emigrate from their village in China to San Francisco’s Chinatown. The intrigue, mystery, and tension that follow grow deeper as he tries to assimilate into a hostile world. Shu Wei ends up working for a local newspaper while he juggles the need to get his stories while dealing with the scurrilous demands and death threats by Tong members. In this coming-of-age saga, the restoration of his self-confidence and his family’s honor is at stake. Jack London and Mark Twain lend timely support.

About the Author (Full Text)

“I have had the good fortune during my career as an architect to travel and experience different cultures and environs. Working on large-scale projects in such places as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and England has not only been satisfying from a creative standpoint but has also allowed me to take away impressions that last a lifetime. Some of those impressions eventually became the seeds of my new novel. While at Columbia I was fortunate enough to receive a summer scholarship to travel and study throughout Europe. Writing a report on this trip in addition to my Master’s thesis in Urban Planning confirmed my deep-seated interest in writing. While working for the Mayor’s Office of Lower Manhattan Development in New York I published a book, To Preserve a Heritage-a book on landmarks in Lower Manhattan. By that time the motivation to research and to write-particularly historical pieces-was in my blood. My original research began some twelve years ago, but several hiatuses caused an interruption in my writing, specifically creating audio walking tours for the Financial District in San Francisco and artwork (etchings) for five of those years. … My book, Shu Wei’s Revenge, was a Semi-Finalist in the 2015 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.” 

Purchase information on the author’s website.

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Featured Book: August 31

My good friend and colleague from Avalon Books has recently published a new book, An Uncertain Path.

Here are a few word about the book from Sandra Carey Cody’s own writer’s blog, Birth of a Novel, also on WordPress.

A tragic accident links the lives of two young women, unrelated, unknown to one another, causing each to question things she thought were certain, and setting each on a path neither could have imagined.

Peace Morrow, abandoned as an infant, is about to meet the birth family she’s always longed to know. Raised as a Pennsylvania Quaker, she wonders what her Virginia aristocrat family will think of her. What happens when a careless action by one of them takes the family to the brink of disaster?

Rachel Woodard, longing to break out of the safe world she’s always known, takes a drastic step that results in the death of a young man and sets off a chain of events that swirls outward like a pebble dropped in a pool. Can she live a lie to preserve her own life and save everyone she loves from heartbreak?

An Uncertain Path is available on Amazon.

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Release Day for Pavane for Miss Marcher

1871. The war has been over for six years but Rupe Smith still fights his demons. Ten years have passed since he left his Maine village. His Wyoming ranch is the one place he wants to be and the last place he can be. There is no escape from the guilt of his parents’ grief or his longing for the girl whose one letter kept him alive, without knowing she is beyond his reach, married and raising a family.

Cathryn Marcher is not the giddy, giggling girl with high ideals she was before the war. The woman who waited for Rupert Smith’s safe return has no doubt she isn’t the reason he has finally come home. The haunted expression on his handsome face reminds her of the outcome, the horror and suffering of war she saw close at hand, all those years ago, in the faces of soldiers she nursed in Boston.

Captain Smith and Miss Marcher share a love of music but Cathryn must hide her disappointment when Rupert chooses to sing in harmony with the widow, Mrs. Miller, whom the residents of Oslo Hill believe will be his bride.

Susan Miller’s disdain for her voice teacher, her rival for Rupert’s love, is matched by Colonel Jericho Colson’s loathing for his fellow Union Army officer, his rival for Cathryn’s heart.

Available in print on CreateSpace, as an ebook on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon

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Featured Book: Review

CJ Verburg’s Another Number for the Road  has all you could ever want from a murder mystery set in two iconic periods of American history: the 1960s: Free Speech, Free Love, Stop the War, Civil Rights and sex, drugs, rock and roll; and 1980s: Reaganomics, Cold War Collapse, Punk Rock, big hair and bigger shoulders.

Rock journo cum detective, Cory Goodwin (who has as many names as identities) goes on a “Magical Mystery Tour,” and then some, to recover her true inner self which has been consumed and subsumed by the demands of her multimillionaire son-of-the-founder-of-a-cosmetics-conglomerate husband’s boardroom betrayal of all they meant to each other as writing romantics who eloped in creative Paris and crashed in corporate necessity in Boston.

Cordelia Goodwin Thorne had many years of protest activism and rock star groupie antics to keep her from sinking into the paradox of her journo daydreams and her cosmetic charity dinner reality.

She joins the “Magical Mystery Tour” when she learns that The Rind is the mystery band—a group she interviewed for a magazine as a teenager. She aims to rekindle her past admiration for the much-maligned strongman of the band, the appropriately named, Dan Quasi, who, after the brutal murder of his friend and co-band member, Mickey Ascher, takes a runner and hides out for the twenty year hiatus, having lost his wife and his French bit to aforementioned co-band member.

Did this Quasi musician kill his best friend? Or was it the French bit? Or possibly her jilted lover and third band member, also appropriately named, Roach? Or has the mild-mannered Terry, fourth band member, been hiding a violent temper all these years?

The process of discovery is further energized by the author’s experience as a playwright and director. CJ Verburg makes use of the theatrical technique of juxtaposing two scenes on stage at once: flashbacks, backstory, supposition and real time, one upon the other, while skillfully  juggling a cast of characters that would daunt Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffiths.

Another Number for the Road  will satisfy all fans of complex, convoluted whodunits who remember the Sixties with longing and survived the Eighties, Nineties and are in deep with the Twentieth Century.

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Featured Book – April 3

Humor-Social Commentary/Contemporary

As you’ve probably guessed, Linton Robinson is one of my favorite go-to authors for humor, particularly male humor. Call me whatever you like but Lin’s humor makes me laugh. It’s ironic, twisted, often self-deprecating and always ROFL funny. My favorite line is “Have they ruled out suicide?” (You’ll have to read Sweet Spot to get that one.)

This week I’m featuring The Way of the Weekend Warrior, a sardonic look at the world of the wayward journalist, gone rogue and a whole lot of other things.

I am enthralled by Lin’s humor, caustic wit, sarcasm, insights and social commentary. He sees the world for what it is, full of people who have no business pretending they are anything other than—well, you be the judge. But remember, we’re in the same boat.

The Way of the Weekend Warrior is available on Amazon, in Kindle or Paperback.

 

 

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Featured Book – March 25

Sci-Fi/Fantasy Romance

Size Matters, By J. L. Salter

 

Size does matter, when you’re only a foot tall.

  

Concept:

Accidentally swallowing a mysterious pill from her eccentric scientist cousin, Emma Hobby shrinks to under a foot tall. When she resumes normal size, she must track down her cousin, who’s obviously in trouble (based on those unsettling messages he left). Can those sci-fi miniaturization pills help find him? How about Logan Stride, the attorney who wants to handle more of Emma than her case? 

 

Blurb:

Emma Hobby mistakenly takes a pill from a bottle mailed her by her eccentric/brilliant cousin — and it reduces her to eleven inches tall. Now she’s eye to eye with the Cyndi dolls she lovingly collects and sells in her shop.

Nobody – not even her best friend – believes her, so Emma takes another pill to see if it happens again. It DOES! This time she has a witness (Vickilee), who records things as they happen… and establishes a partial timetable.

Now that she thinks she knows what happens and when, can Emma use these pills somehow to help rescue her cousin, who left those unsettling messages? And will that handsome attorney she’s almost dating help her efforts? Or will Logan Stride just get in her way?

 Size Matters. Novel, $1.99. Size Matters

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The Return of Pomegranate!

Those of you who’ve been following EverWriting for a while may remember my blogs about growing and nurturing a pomegranate plant which I related to the process of writing Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls.

I’m back at it.

I actually had not eaten a pomegranate for years and years! When I was a girl, my first taste of this wonderful fruit (some believe to be the original ‘forbidden fruit’ of the Garden of Eden variety) gave me hives! As the ruby fruit was the only oddity in our daily composition at the time, pomegranate got the blame. I stayed away until I was well into adulthood.

My next encounter was after I had three children with no untoward results at all. Since I had already had good luck with growing apple trees from seeds germinated from the Braeburn variety and oaks from acorns my children had gathered at school, I threw some pomegranate seeds in potting soil and behold, I was the proud horticulturalist of a plant usually only grown in mediterranean climes.

This year, I bought and ate my first pomegranate after another long long dry spell and, though I have only a balcony and a few potted plants, I attempted to repeat my previous effort. As far as I know my first pomegranate is still growing in my daughter-in-law’s care but having one of my own again felt right. I have a number of lemon bushes from seed and a pomegranate was a natural step.

Of the twenty or so seeds I planted, three sprouted and one survived and the secondary leaves have sprouted.

In many ways, at least in my quirky mind, there are similarities between storycraft and horticulture/gardening. If we think of an idea for a story, we often think of it as a seed. We nurture the idea/seed with effort in the way of research in the process of germinating the story, as the seedling has germinated from its pod and thrown out roots below and first leaves above. Those first leaves and roots provide the nourishment to grow in the same way our stories grow from experience (roots) and imagine (leaves).

My previous experience with pomegranates coincided with the writing and successful publishing my multicultural, interracial novel Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls.

This tiny plant coincides with my first American history novel, Pavane for Miss Marcher, which examines the aftereffects of the American Civil War on those who fought, those left behind and process of healing the divisive wounds.

 

 

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Featured Book – March 18

Historical Inspirational

Borrowed Light by Carla Kelly

This book was among seven nominated for the RWA’s Rita Award in 2012. I’m including Borrowed Light in my featured books because I so often recall characters and scenes from the book.  For instance, Paul Otto, the hero of the story, is the son of a settler’s orphaned daughter and a warrior of the tribe that rescues her. Julia Darling, the heroine, is a graduate of  Fannie Farmer’s Cooking School. Mr. Otto, as he is known throughout the book, is a Wyoming rancher in need of a good cook for his cowboys.

Another character in the book is inanimate and, though I am not a cook, fascinated me as much as the four ranch hands: the Queen Atlantic stove which attracts Julia to the isolated ranch in the first place. Drawing Mr. Otto and Julia together is their shared faith. Kelly does justice to her own faith, the Church of Latter Day Saints, with clarity and simplicity for non-LDS readers.

Borrowed Light is published by Bonneville Books (cedarfort.com).

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