A Facebook Note from Our Friend Lacey Dearie

Cinderella's Enchanted Night by Amber Daulton

Annalise Gallagher wanted Elijah Burleigh. Plain and simple. She’d watched him from afar for months, her friends called her ‘his own personal stalker’, and then she made a wish on a magic pendant for a full-body makeover. Transformed into the gorgeous knockout she’d always wanted to be, she asked Elijah out on a date and wore a haute couture gown straight from Paris to his friend’s wedding. 
With just twenty-four hours on the clock, her enchanted night faded into the morning hours and everything crashed down around her. Annalise harbored a shameful secret and Elijah demanded the truth with the veil of magic gone. 
The truth, however, could destroy her fragile confidence and push him away forever. 

5.0 out of 5 stars The "Feel Good" Book of the Month June 9, 2015

By Carol Ann Kauffman

Format:Kindle Edition

I absolutely loved this story of learning to love oneself, Cinderella-style. I think most women see flaws, zits, giant pock-marks in the middle of their foreheads, whatever, when we look in the mirror. Over time we learn to accept those little flaws that make us our own unique, lovable person. This is a realization I wish more of our young women would make sooner rather than later in life on the journey toward self-worth and acceptance.
And, can I borrow your necklace?

Iona Morrison's NOT FOR SALE

 
A desperate young girl cries out for help as she hides in terror, hoping against hope that someone might hear her. Jessie Reynolds does and finds herself caught up in an equally desperate search for Abigail. She has escaped human traffickers, but has no idea where she is, and Jessie must find her in time. She joins forces with Matt, the chief of police, and they discover that Abigail is only one of several kidnapped children. Faced by a cold trail, they must rely on Jessie's ability to hear Abigail’s thoughts, backed up by a tracking bloodhound. But the children mean big money and that brings murder and a hit man to Blue Cove to clean up the mess. Matt and Jessie grow closer as they are forced to work side by side but will they find Abigail in time? And will they, themselves, survive? 

5 star review. 
"Morrison's book, Not for sale, is as good or better than her first novel, The Harvest Club. In this book, she wastes no time diving in head first into the plot, because she had familiarized the main characters in the first novel. Woven through the book is a great love story that grows through time. Morrison writes about important issues like child trafficking and the police work behind it in such a way that I found it intriguing and insightful. I recommend this book to anyone who loves a story with lots of twists and turns."

5 Star review 
"This story is wonderful, it grabs you in the first chapter and doesn't let go until the end. A romantic mystery, I think men as well as women will enjoy it." 

Dear Gentle Readers,
I LOVED Iona Morrison's first gripping novel, The Harvest Club, so I am anxious to jump into this one. Sounds fabulous. Join me?
Hugs,
Carol


Links: 
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sale-Iona-Morrison/dp/1509201556/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25579780-not-for-sale

http://www.wildrosepublishing.com/maincatalog_v151/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=191&products_id=6244

Interview with James M M Baldwin

James M M Baldwin

Omaha, Nebraska

Good morning, James, and welcome to Vision and Verse, the Place for Art and Authors. Tell us a little about what you've written.

Spencer Murdoch and the Portals of Erzandor is an apocalyptic fantasy novel concerning a family man and his struggle to deal with the events surrounding a global storm and his connection to an ancient prophecy.

Orion’s Arm is a collection of mostly science fiction short stories and Beyond the Visual Cortex is a horror compilation.

I am currently working on the final edits for the second Spencer Murdoch novel titled Spencer Murdoch and the Island of Magic.

What is your favorite genre to write?

I write speculative fiction encompassing fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

Favorite food.

I love pretty much anything that is considered “bad” for you. My favorite ingredients are fat, sugar, and salt.

Someone needs to write a cookbook with just fats, sugar, and salt food recipes. And maybe white flour. Add radishes. It could be a winner. Okay, back to you. Tea or coffee?

I’m a Saturday morning coffee drinker.

Pizza or ice cream?

Love both, but have not yet tried pizza a la mode.

Where would you like to visit?

Anyplace with a bike trail that includes any of the following; tall buildings, a jungle or forest, a mountain, or a beach.

Favorite musical artist.  Do you listen to music when you write?  What?

I love new rock. My favorite current artist is the Finnish symphonic metal band “Nightwish.” Some of my all-time favorites include Iron Maiden, Queen, and Triumph. When I write I listen to instrumental rock.

What makes you laugh?

Pretty much anything, even things that aren’t funny.

Favorite work of art or sculpture. 

As student of art and art history, and an artist myself, painting under the pseudonym Sergio de Companion, I find interest in almost any piece of art. Peter Max and Salvador Dali are a few of my favorites. I could gaze upon any Michelangelo work for hours. I love going to the museum with a pencil and tablet and drawing tidbits of interesting things I find.

How old were you when you started writing?

As the lead singer, bass player and songwriter for a metal band in the eighties, most of my work centered on song writing. It wasn’t until I reached my forties that I decided to tackle my first novel.

Describe your perfect evening. 

Other than spending an evening alone in a dark room with music and Diet Pepsi creating new worlds at my writing desk, I enjoy live music and long bicycle rides.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I have several hundred ideas rattling around in my head. All I have to do is reach inside and pull out the loudest voice or strongest image.

What do you do when you get a writer's block?

I have never had writers block, and with all the ideas of things I’d like to write, I don’t ever anticipate having it.

I have never had it either, but I fear it. Like anthrax. Who is your favorite author?

I enjoy Ted Dekker, C. S. Lewis, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and Madeleine L'Engle, but Ray Bradbury would probably top my list.

Best book you ever read.

The books top my favorites list. Ted Dekker’s“Black,” 

Madeleine L'Engle’s “A wrinkle in Time,” and Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Last book you read.

I just finished Aaron Loyd’s “Internship with a Vampire,” a wonderfully humorous novel. Next up, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka.

What would you do for a living if you weren’t a writer?

Either a rock star or a homeless person.

Hmmm...You are an interesting man, James M M Baldwin. Who is the one person who has influenced your personal life the most and why? Pope John Paul II has taught me to love humanity. Family is an important part of society. Everyone is part of the worldwide family and selfishness should be avoided.

If you could sit down and have a conversation with ONE person, living or dead, real or fictional, who would it be and why?

Among the dozens of people that could top my list, the obvious number one would be Jesus. If there is anyone who could help me achieve peace of mind/philosophical peace it would be him. He’s my hero. Second and third would be Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa.

What advice would you give someone who aspired to be a writer?

Learn as much about the craft as possible. Seek help from the smartest, most energetic people you can find. And write about what excites you.

The Art of Beatrice Offor

British painter Beatrice Offor 

was born to George and Emma 

Offor on March 21,1864 at Peak 

Hill Villa in Sydenham, Kent, one 

of ten children.  She attended 

the Slade School of Art, now part 

of the prestigious London 

University, studying fine art and 

fine art anatomy.  In 1892 she 

married William Farran Littler, an 

artist and a sculptor.  She is best known for her beautiful 

portraits.

Her paintings were shown 

regularly at the Royal Academy 

of Arts. She often used her 

sisters as muses, often painting 

brides and nude portraits of 

women.  She also painted 

portraits of the British members 

of parliament, Joseph Howard 

and Sir Ralph Littler.

At art school she befriended fellow artists Mona Bergsman 

and Annie Horniman.  The shared a studio on Fitzroy Road in 

London.

Beatrice came from a very strict Baptist family.  Her father 

lived to be well over 100 years old.

It was hard to find information on 

this artist.  Even wikipedia had 

very little.  I found an interview she 

did in 1907, where Beatrice is 

described as charming and witty. 

She stated she worked in the art 

field to make money and pay her 

bills.  She knew the business side 

of the art world well.  The interviewer shad she was a 

pleasure to be with, and practically interviewed herself.  Her 

favorite head to paint was a woman who I gathered was her 

nanny at one time, and was her father's nurse for fifty years 

at the time of the interview.  The woman seemed cheerful, 

pleasant, and intelligent.

Beatrice committed suicide in 

1920 by jumping out of a 

window.  


References:
my-museum-of-art.blogspot.com
beatriceoffor.com.au
E.annieoffer@hotmail.com

News from DB Jones, including BEYOND SECRETS

The NEW and Revised/Re-edited version of SUMMER HEAT is LIVE!
SUMMER HEAT by DB Jones 

http://amzn.to/1D8gWs6– A Seasons of Passion Mystery 

Summer St Clair's is thrust into a mystery that will surround her every move. Summer moves to your typical small town near the river to pursue her passion for painting, but she longs to travel the world with the love of her life. The problem is there is no love in Summer’s life…until she meets Martin Baines.
Now all she can think about is the first time she laid eyes on Martin. And how her body trembled at the sight of his perfectly built, dripping wet, nearly naked body, emerging from the river…until she finds, her life may be in peril.

NIGHTS OF AUTUMN – A Seasons of Passion Mystery by DB Jones

FREE on Kindle Unlimited

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L9HITNS

Unable to face friends or places that remind her of her dead fiancé, the once fun loving 25-year-old Autumn Burns moves away to a quiet little town in the mountains of Massachusetts to start over. Her self-imposed confinement goes according to plan . . . Until she witnesses a man tossing a body into the river. The killer turns towards her…and their eyes lock.
But there's more to this story as Autumn is surrounded by the spirits of those who lost their lives along the shores of the river. And they are desperately trying to tell her something that may save her life…if only she could hear them. 


     
             
STORMS OF WINTER- A SEASONS OF PASSION MYSTERY by DB Jones 

FREE ON Kindle Unlimited

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O581002 

Winter Hart cautiously walks up the crumbling steps leading to the massive hand-carved, ornate doors that once welcomed guests to lavished galas, but now the halls behind those doors, sit silently empty.
Winter is unwavering in her quest to find the answers of what happened so long ago. But she may find more than she bargained for...for the past holds many secrets, and there are those who will kill for them, and anyone who gets in their way…including Winter! 

***NEW RELEASE*** by DB Jones –A Madison Hart Mystery

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Secrets-Madison-Hart-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00UVO9HMC/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

The tenacious, young FBI Agent, Madison Hart returns to her hometown believing she is going to be investigating a missing person’s case. But little does she know the trail is leading her into the depths of someone’s dark obsession…and murder.
The leads are mounting as fast as the body count, and the closer Madison gets to the truth, the more her life is in danger.

SHARDS Blog Tour

Mina

Marian Kelly died in a one-car accident near her home in Turtle Lake, Montana, on August twentieth, at the age of forty-two.

Marian is predeceased by her parents, Rand and Millicent “Millie” Kelly, and her brother, Christopher.

Marian was born in Prospero, California, and studied Psychology at the University of California,–San Francisco. She held black belts in multiple martial arts and was an accomplished member of the Turtle Lake Hunting Club.

I skipped the details of Marian’s perfunctory funeral service, put the newspaper clipping back in the plain, unstamped envelope it had arrived in, and filed it out of sight; not that this did anything to clear the smudged print from my vision. Alone, it was unsettling. In a stack of six other recent obituaries of other Splinter hunters, in six other anonymous envelopes with my name stamped on the front, it sent a very clear message.

I’m no stranger to death threats. And at the time of Marian’s death, it had been less than a month since the Splinter who poses as my father told me to my face that if Ben or I fought back again, if we even tried to run, the humans would be wiped out of my infested little town of Prospero completely.

I’d fact-checked each obituary as it came in.

Every one of the hunters had died under circumstances that looked very much like suicide. Most of the obituaries didn’t say so, exactly, but after the few that did, omissions of the cause of death and euphemisms like “one-car accident” and “chemical overdose” were easy enough to decipher. Sometimes, when the deaths had been a little more bizarre or had occurred on slow news days, there were more details to be found when I looked up the rest of the news sources in the area.

These weren’t suicidal people. They weren’t quitters. Wondering how someone could possibly have made it appear as if Drake Tymon had slit his wrists and throat alone in an industrial freezer that was later found barricaded from the inside was filling my head quite effectively with distractingly disturbing scenarios.

But the thing bothering me most about the obituaries was the fact that all seven of their subjects were currently loitering around my bedroom.

Sometimes, if I stared directly at them for long enough, they seemed to remember that they were supposed to be dead and vanish accordingly, temporarily. Otherwise I could see them, silently and blankly watching me work, as clearly as I could see my bookshelves, my bed, and the stark beige walls and end tables that, until recently, had held my very large and very useless anti-Splinter amulet collection.

Nightmares are no more new to me than death threats. That’s not what these were. A hunter would die and join the rest of the hallucinations in my room the day after the obituary arrived, and then another one would die and join him without fail. If things carried on this way, my room was going to become unmanageably crowded quite soon.

It wasn’t even as if I were going to miss the hunters. A few of them, like Drake, I’d known pretty well years ago, but I’d stopped assuming they were still alive—never mind still human—long before they’d turned up dead. Others, like Marian, I only knew by reputation in the first place.

Not knowing them well only made it stranger that they were here, after everything I’d lived through and lost without having suffered from any sensory distortions before.

Ready? The text scrolled across my phone’s screen after Ben’s name.

Almost. I texted back.

I wasn’t looking forward to conducting the upcoming meeting for my entire Network, a roomful of people who had nothing in common other than their knowledge of Splinters and their confidence in my judgment and clarity of perception. Ben had insisted, though. A lot had changed, and people needed to be brought up to speed.

Billy was gone, lost to the Splinters, if we had ever even had him. Whatever had been passing for my absentminded ally had been using us to breach the peace, such as it was, for no one knew how long.

Ben hadn’t even met some of the others yet. Our discovery of portals to other parts of the world in the Splinter Warehouse had put an end to the Effectively Certain Non-Splinters list, or at least had reduced it to a uselessly small number of people. The only people in town I could really be effectively certain of anymore were myself and Haley, since we’d both recently been ripped directly out of replication pods. That wasn’t enough to work with, so I’d had to downgrade my entire Network to Extremely Probable Non-Splinters and start training myself to live with that because the alternative was not getting anything done at all.

Ben was still stubbornly under the impression that Haley’s presence on the list alone qualified her as a Network member. I disagreed.

Most important, we now knew more terms of the Splinter-Human treaty and exactly how precarious our position was. Two human-on-humanoid Splinter kills by the same human would mean all-out war, and Ben and I each had one strike already. And no matter how careful we were, Billy and any like-minded Splinters would find a way to incite that war sooner or later. We were counting on an unforeseen miracle to make the human side a significant power before then.

As someone who doesn’t believe in miracles, this wasn’t news I would enjoy delivering, even on my best day.

I finished up some new touches on the map over my desk—the new world map I’d posted under the map of Prospero to track probable Splinter activity at the other portals—and blinked hard, hoping the illusion of the hunters would fade out at the usual time. Their faces were already getting blurry around the edges, right on schedule.

That was something, at least. I was going to be able to function for another day. If my Network, the few humans still invested in finding or building that miracle, found out what was happening to me, it would probably be the end of what hope we had. They would give up on the one thing they all agreed on, my reliability, and maybe they’d be right to do it. I’d probably do the same in their position.

But even if I couldn’t see a difference between the walls and furniture that constituted my room and the dead people that my brain had decided to superimpose in front of them, at least I still knew the difference. I still knew what was rational and what wasn’t. Before the first hunter had appeared, the evidence of my senses had been the basis for almost everything I thought and did. It was going to be difficult to get used their new fallibility, just like the fallibility of the ECNS list. As long as the inner workings of my mind were still in order, it was worth at least trying to do my job.

At least, that’s what I told myself for the thirty-seventh time when I recognized Ben’s knock on the front door above.

Author Links:

TITCHENELL & CARTER—Author Information and Useful Links

Below are the links to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads listings. If you've reviewed the book, we welcome you to post your review/rating there:

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Shards-Prospero-Chronicles-F-Titchenell/dp/1631630180/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429987083&sr=1-1&keywords=shards+prospero

B&N:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shards-f-j-r-titchenell/1121794901?ean=9781631630187&isbn=9781631630187

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23359823-shards

You can find the authors online here:

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/FjrTitchenell?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/mattcarterauthor?fref=ts

Twitter:

@FJR_Titchenell

@MCarterAuthor

Blog:

mattcarterauthor.weebly.com

FJRTitchenell.weebly.com

Email:

fionatitchenell@yahoo.com

mattcarterauthor@gmail.com