Video Trailer: Silks and Sand

Racing horses and racing hearts; it’s all part of the Stoddard dynasty. Evan Stoddard inherited an ages-old farm in the heart of Kentucky horse country. He’s a winner in many respects: winning with horses, winning with love, and a winning smile. And he’s won a beautiful wife: Suzanne. But his winning ways will be upturned with the arrival of a new horse, War Monger; and a female jockey, who sends every man on the farm into a tailspin, and sends his marriage into a downward spiral.

Silks and Sand is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Amazon UK.

Don’t forget, you can cast your vote for trailer of the month on May 25, 2013 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Book Brief: My Name is Hardly

My Name Is Hardly
by Martin Crosbie
Genre: Thriller/Suspense, Literary Fiction
Word count: 73,000 words

A beautiful girl is missing, and may or may not want to be found, a soldier on his last and most dangerous mission, and a vow made to a dying friend. Northern Ireland, in 1996, was one of the most dangerous places in the world. The government called it a state of unrest, the people who lived through it called it the time of “The Troubles”.

Gerald “Hardly” McDougall is a forgotten man. He’s abused, bullied, and left behind. The only escape left is to join the British Army. At first, he’s a reluctant soldier, then everything changes when tensions in Northern Ireland escalate and the Army need a man with a particular set of characteristics. Hardly’s re-assigned and sent into the heart of the troubles, living in the same houses as the IRA soldiers he’s fighting against.

MY NAME IS HARDLY takes the reader on a twenty year journey through Hardly’s life–from the beginning, when he leaves Scotland and joins the Army, to the tragic final days when his time as a spy in Ireland has to come to an end.

Follow-up to the #1 Amazon Bestseller-MY TEMPORARY LIFE.

Please note-although this is book two of a trilogy, it is a stand-alone novel, and it’s not necessary to read the first book in the series in order to enjoy MY NAME IS HARDLY.

This book is available on Amazon. Continue reading

Tell us what you want, what you really, really want…

(…thank you, Scary, Posh, Baby, Ginger, and Sporty…)

It’s funny, isn’t it, how one sentence, just a few words, can stop you in your tracks and make you go…aaaargh!  Let me explain…

I review books; some of you may know this, some perhaps not. How did that happen?

I’ve had a Kindle for a couple of years now, and I was pretty much instantly hooked. I became a bookworm…or rather, an ebookworm. When some Facebook friends started their own reviewing blogs, I had a ‘Eureka’ moment and thought, gosh, what a good idea! In my case, this was a solution to the ‘closure’ I wanted after reading a book, and it was a nice neat way of recording all the ebooks I’d read on my can’t-leave-home-without-it Kindle—an anthology if you like. And if ‘virtual’ passers-by dropped in…well, even better. How nice!

So, armed with a few hints and tips from a couple of review sites for whom I’d reviewed some books, I mapped out what I thought would formulate a worthy review: something I’d be happy to look back at (and not cringe at with embarrassment). I decided long drawn-out reviews with endless analyses and explanations of the plots were just a big yawn…a short synopsis would suffice, I reckoned. Then again, one- or two-line reviews don’t satisfy me either. I’m clearly not clever enough for those punchy, concise, but all-embracing reviews I so admire (viz. Rich Meyer (a learned member of our team), Ed Drury (a frequent flash-fiction flyer—and winner!), so I knew I had to leave those to the smarty pants (Rich Meyer, Ed Drury). Continue reading

Sneak Peek: Grannies, Guns and Ghosts

Today we have a sneak peek from the new book by Madison Johns: Grannies, Guns and Ghosts.

In the sequel to Armed and Outrageous, Grannies, Guns and Ghosts, Agnes Barton and sidekick, Eleanor Mason, return. This time around there is a paranormal theme as East Tawas, Michigan, is overrun with ghost sightings. Even the death of a recent heir to the Butler fortune is blamed on a ghost.

Agnes’ flame, Andrew Hart, is nowhere to be found. That is until he is spotted with a mysterious woman. Who is she and what is going on with Eleanor’s flame known only as Mr. Wilson? It is enough to shake any senior aged woman’s belief in romance to the core.

This book is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords.

Here is an excerpt from Grannies, Guns and Ghosts

Continue reading

Is Anybody Staying On Your Facebook Page?

We all spend time posting things to our Facebook Pages and look with excitement at our Insights. Reach, Likes and Talking About This are tantalizing statistics that make us think that we are connecting with others.

The reality is, only about seven percent of your followers see your page on any given day. Continue reading

Flash Fiction Challenge: Oddobon Society

Photo by K.S. Brooks

It was difficult for Professor Breverton to contain his excitement. Actual shovelhead ravens had never been photographed

He was president of the local chapter of the Oddobon Society, an organization dedicated to the documentation and study of animals thought to be mythological.

As he stopped to take a photo of the three shovelheads, he thought it strange that they did not fly away. One turned to look at him with its beady black eyes. Evidently, the Professor was unaware of the feeding habits of shovelheads.

In 250 words or less, tell us a story incorporating the elements in the picture. The 250 word limit will be strictly enforced.

Please keep language and subject matter to a PG-13 level.

Use the comment section below to submit your entry. Entries will be accepted until Tuesday at 5:00 PM Pacific Time.

On Wednesday morning, we will open voting to the public with an online poll for the best writing entry accompanying the photo. Voting will be open until 5:00 PM Thursday.

On Friday morning, the winner will be recognized as we post the winning entry along with the picture as a feature. Best of luck to you all in your writing!

Entries only in the comment section. Other comments will be deleted. See HERE for additional information and terms.

Barnes & Noble Look at My Nook Fest

Barnes & Noble LogoRecently our Lynne Cantwell wrote a piece about the “new” Nook Press. If you missed that, you can read it here. Seems like they’re trying to make things better, so how about we show some love to our books on B&N?

This is how it works: If you are an author with a book listed on Barnes&Noble.com, in the comments below, write a SHORT one sentence blurb about ONE of your books, then paste in your link to that book below it. (If you post more than one book, to be fair to everyone else, we will delete all except for the top link, so please behave and post only ONE book link! And please do NOT paste your author page.) Make sure you show some love to the links in the comments above yours, and check back throughout the day to catch up.  If you’re a publisher, editor, or reader, please check out these book pages – you may see something you like!

[Don't forget, if you right-click the links, you can choose to have them open in a separate tab so you don't have to worry about navigating back and forth to pages.]

This should be fun and should generate a lot of likes for everyone’s books. Let’s get things moving – and here’s a book to get you started: http://tinyurl.com/UPGRADEtheNovel

To those with concerns about the ethical implications of “liking” a book you have not read, we regard  likes as more analogous to a “high five” than a rating or review. We do not support the idea of rating or reviewing a book you have never read.

PLEASE be sure to reciprocate by liking the other pages. This is give and take. If everyone plays by the golden rule, we all benefit.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Done

For the first time in months, my desk is clean. Not “clean” in the sense of “dusted,” mind you – let’s not get crazy here. But I’ve put away all the papers I used as reference material for writing my urban fantasy series: the pocket calendar; the Wikipedia printouts (some more accurate than others); the rough outline that I followed, more or less, for the last book; and so on. It’s all back in the file folder that I labeled “Notes for Book 5” back before I had a working title for book 5 and never bothered to change, even after I decided the book would be called Annealed.

It’s a curious feeling, to be done writing a series of novels. My original goal was to write an urban fantasy novel – just one! But then I thought, why not make it a series? And if I structured the series on the concept of a Native American medicine wheel, I would have five books: one for each cardinal direction, and one for the heart of the wheel. So that’s what I decided to do.

And now I’m done. Continue reading