This Memorial Day

We remember.

In the Author Spotlight: Annette Snyder

This month in the Author Spotlight, please welcome
Annette Snyder.








Thank you Linda, for letting me slide over to your corner of the world to brag about my latest news.
Respectable Affair, the third release in my World War II series, is out this month and I’m pretty excited to say, it’s a good one. An inspiration started out as one story based on my grandmother’s life with Viveka’s War and continued with a novel defending the morals of a character in Eureka Springs, now has a final chapter. Respectable Affair tells the story of matriarch, Virgie Seidle, and her life protecting those closest to her and a community where she found solace.

Here’s a blurb of Respectable Affair:

Between Virginia Seidle’s terrible jaunt with men and Nolan Vickers’s upheld honor toward his institutionalized wife, no one in town openly faulted the pair for banding together to raise Nolan’s son, John. When love blossoms, would people be as accepting?

Can Nolan and Virgie put their clouded pasts behind and keep their affair respectable?

If that isn’t enough, here’s a snippet:

“Rebecca? Audrey? What is going on?” John looked at the two women. He’d known them all his life. They were Virgie’s best friends. They’d gone to college together and remained constant in each other’s lives.

Audrey lived and worked in Eureka Springs and their family gatherings were always intertwined.

Rebecca married Virgie’s brother Truman and, though she lived in Nebraska, weekly phone calls closed the distance.

It seemed so strange that neither woman mentioned the reason he and Ruth had to fly in for a formal visit and even stranger that Barbara was present and Audrey said nothing about a trip. The most bizarre? The way the two friends seemed to fumble about as if no one knew what to say next. “Okay, ladies. What in the world did you call us up here for? I’m sure it wasn’t to let us sit around and stare at each other.”

Rebecca put her hands in her lap and glanced from Audrey to the other three. “Audrey and I have something to tell you. A story.”

Audrey took a deep breath and reached to stroke Barbara’s arm before resting her hands on the arms of the chair. “We thought the best thing was to have you all together and say it just once.”

Rebecca bit her lip before she spoke. “What we did was the right thing to do. We did it for Virgie. We did it for Elizabeth and Nolan. We did it for all of you.”

“We knew the only way to protect you was to keep the secret but now we feel it’s time to tell the truth.”

To John, when Audrey spoke, it looked as if she’d rehearsed her words a thousand times. “What truth?” he asked.

And Rebecca began. “Our dear friend Virgie was always so full of love and life and she loved without reason. Follow where your heart leads…that’s what she always said.”

You can go to http://www.whiskeycreekpress.com/ and read the first chapter before you add Respectable Affair and its two preceding novels, or any of my other stories to your shopping cart.

Follow this link to my website http://annettesnyder.atspace.com/ and you’ll learn all about me, my work and why I find myself writing instead of cleaning house. There, you’ll also find a link to my innovative blog, Fifty Authors from Fifty States. Connect to that and discover other talented writing professionals and the parts of the USA that inspires them and again, please thank Linda for her support with this opportunity to connect with you.

Memories for Mother's Day

This Mother's Day as we turn our thoughts and memories toward the women who gave us life, I want to take a moment to remember my mom, Kay Rettstatt (Anna Catherine Hennessey Rettstatt).

During a recent visit with my sister, we got a glimpse of some old 8 mm family movies. (My paternal grandfather was something of a Cecil B. DeMille wanna be. No one was safe from his camera.) I say glimpse because the old projecter gave out. But we got to watch Mom at play--with a hula hoop, her hair pinned up in bobby pins. My Mom had a great sense of humor and fun. I like to think I inherited this from her. She was a stay-at-home Mom when that was the fashion, in the fifties and sixties. And she seemed to be content, though in the later sixties, she did take a part-time job, once my sister and I were both in high school. I think she enjoyed being out in the workforce for a bit and loved to tell stories about her day at the office.

She claimed to hate having animals in the house, but repeatedly took pity on stray dogs, luring them inside, bathing and feeding them, and--if no one claimed them--making them the new family pet.

She loved her family, playing cards and laughing with friends, dancing at Christmas time after her one singular drink (it only took one and, sadly, I inherited that, too). I remember the last birthday I spent with her. I went home for the day and took her out to visit family and then to dinner. She didn't want to go to any fancy restaurant, but chose a small, local bar and restaurant because they had great fried chicken strips. We had a nice day together--at that stage where mother and daughter begin to become equals, adult friends.

She was taken far too soon, just six weeks later, at the age of sixty-four.

Here's to you, Mom. I hope they have hula hoops in heaven. If not, I'm sure you're creating your own fun. You always did.

Linda

An Elegantly Written Work

I don't typically review books here on my blog (but I may start). Every so often a book comes along that, at once, leaves me speechless and yet with much to say. Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons is one such book. As a reader, this story grabbed me and held me fast. I picked it up in audio because I listen to books during my long drive to and from work each day. I found myself eager to get into the car in the morning to get back to the story. At the same time, I mourned the nearing end of the book as I popped in the last CD.

Ms. Siddons' writing has always engaged and inspired me. But Burnt Mountain is no doubt the most exquisitely written book I've ever read. Her writing style is positively lyrical. She pulls you deeply into Thayer Wentworth's life--her joy, sorrow, challenges and triumphs. And she does so with incredible artistry.

As a writer, I am in awe. This is the kind of writing to which every writer should aspire. By the end of this book, I felt as if I'd had a private master class with a true master--Anne Rivers Siddons.

Give yourself a treat this summer. Read a book by Anne Rivers Siddons. Of course, my first recommendation would be Burnt Mountain.

Happy reading!

Linda

Recipes From The Writer's Vineyard

Now available in ebook--FREE--Recipes from The Writer's Vineyard.

Get your copy today to enjoy recipes from your favorite Champagne Books authors.

Just click on the cover to get your FREE copy today.

And be sure to check out The Writer's Vineyard blog at

http://thewritersvineyard.com/

Author Spotlight: Toni V. Sweeney

 

Please help me welcome Toni V. Sweeney into the Author Spotlight.

 

 

 

Thinking Outside the Box and into Editing Trouble

There’s one thing more than any other that’s influenced the way my books are constructed, something people have come to call my “style.” I suppose I’m a child of my time…and my time was the early 50’s, when moving pictures were the most popular form of entertainment before the Boob Tube usurped it.

In those days, there were not only dramas and westerns but sweeping epics of adventure, costume tales of pirates, Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, rogues and rascals, and villains. Nowadays, you rarely see those, except for an occasional Indiana Jones rip-off or something ike Game of Thrones, or if Cinemax steps in with The Borgias. It was the time of Frank Yerby, Samuel Shellabarger, Rafael Sabatini…men who wrote what would probably be termed the picaresque novel, tales of heroes conquering mountains and nations, and discovering new worlds simply because they were there, between bedding every viable female in sight. Their stories were made into Technicolor sagas enthralling this little viewer for hours (in those days, you could pay your money and stay in the theatre the entire day if you wished.) And when I began to write, I unconsciously patterned my stories after theirs.

One series—The Adventures of Sinbad—seems to mirror those stories enough that several readers have told me they “absolutely adore” my main character. I admit it’s easy to see him swinging across the deck of a ship, with dagger between his teeth while he hangs onto the heroine with one hand and a rope with the other, a la The Crimson Pirate. In fact, I think I had him do something almost like that in one story…

Other novels open with an incident leading to a flashback. In fact, one novel is simply one extended flashback, returning to the present only in the last chapter. Others are more linear, with cuts to other points of view showing things happening at the same time in other places, the dialogue interspersed with stage direction-like movement. That gets me in trouble with my editor because my mind is seeing a movie screen with close-ups of various characters’ expressing their thoughts as a voice-over tells us what they’re thinking. Putting that and those thoughts into print ends up with the “talking heads”, multiple POVs phenomenon. It doesn’t bother me because I see it as a natural part of the “script”, but it gives my editors fits.

In telling my tales of adventure, romance, violence, danger, and—on occasion—lust, I harken back to those days in those darkened theatres as I shoveled in the popcorn while my eyes were glued to that silver-beaded screen. Good or bad, that’s just the way my mine works, and so far, it’s successful, except for the POVS, and I’m working on that. The results are, in several reviewers’ opinions, “readable and enjoyable tales…outside the box”…which I owe to two things: my imagination and those childhood entertainments.

And then television came along…and opened the box even wider…

BIO

Toni V. Sweeney was born after the War Between the States and before the Gulf War. A native Georgian, she has lived on both coasts, thirty years in the Midwest and is now trying for thirty more in Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1989 and she currently has 27 novels in publication. Her lastest novels The Earthman’s Bride, written under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone, and Exile, Book 2 of the kan Ingan Archives, were released in April of this year, and another novel, The Rose and The Dragon, is scheduled for June, to be released by Class Act Books in August, 2011.

BUY LINKS: The Earthman’s Bride: http://www.classactbooks.com/The-Earthmans-Bride-by-Icy-Snow-Blackstone-Trade-_p_343.html

Exile: http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-947-4

Website: http://www.tonivsweeney.com/

http://www.icysnowblackstone.com/

Twitter: @tonivsweeney

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tvsweeney

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/tvsweeney

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/tvsweeney





Meet Author Jacqueline Paige

This month in the

Author Spotlight

I am pleased to

welcome author

Jacqueline Paige

Please tell us a little about yourself.

My short ‘official’ bio reads like this: Jacqueline Paige Is a world class multi-tasker being a mother to five adventurous and unpredictable children, a cafe manager and having a colossal imagination that allows her to step outside of reality into a world of paranormal romance —with just a touch of suspense.

Jacqueline lives in Ontario, Canada and avoids the ever changing weather of the region she lives in by creating other worlds to fall into in her stories of all things paranormal.

Or simply put I really need someone to create a time machine that would give me just a few more hours in a day to get everything done.

Every author I’ve met has their own unique story of how they found their way into writing. What path led you to become an author?

I have always been scribbling in a notebook telling a tale for as far back as I can remember and I did try to go somewhere with it when I got older but life kept getting in the way each time I started down that road. The last time I tried seriously was before internet and ebooks —and before word processing programs. I did manage to get a few neatly type written short stories out there but wasn’t able to devote the time needed to take it any further.

In 2006 my friend was abandoning me to go away for a month. I was going to be lost without her at that point in my life and when I asked her what I was supposed to do left to entertain myself for that long, she told me to write a book. She was joking, but I was determined to have the last word so I sat down and started writing.

When she returned a month later there was a book waiting for her in her email. I was actually half way through the second book at this point. Both of us were shocked that it was good. Good enough to publish. The book was From Beltane Magic.

What aspect of the writing process to you enjoy the most? What part of the process do you dread?

I think I enjoy that initial moment when a story idea comes to me the most. I love sitting down and just seeing where I can take it. Sometimes it doesn’t go in the direction I want it to, so I move on to the next and save the other one for another time. It’s like discovering a new world most of the time though and I’m always surprised that I thought of it.

The part I dread would definitely have to be writing the synopsis. I wait until the book is finished to do this and it’s the probably the most frustrating task ever! I can write an entire book in a month if the plot runs for me, but to sit down and write 3-5 pages of summary feels like torture for me.

Are you a plotter or a pantser in terms of your writing style? Describe your writing space.

I would definitely be a pantser. I have tried to sit down and plot out a story and for the basic outline it works out for me, but then my imagination, my muse and characters take over and quite often I’m sitting there reading what I wrote and have no idea how the plot got there. A few times I’ve had to sit down and try to figure out where exactly to go next, but for the most part it’s an adventure and I love not knowing the ending until the last word is typed.

Which author has most influenced or inspired you?

Oh my, there are so many. I read anything and everything really. There is no such thing as too many books or reading too much in my world. (We just moved recently and my boys would have preferred to carry the refrigerator up and down the stairs ten times than to move all the boxes of books.) If I had to pin point the authors that have driven me to write what was meandering around in my imagination I would lean toward the dark-fanatasy-paranormal authors like Christine Feehan, Laurel K Hamilton, Sherrilyn Kenyon ( and twenty others) because they took the risks and let their stories go to new places and that’s what I wanted to do.

Would you tell us a little about your latest book?


I’d love to! That book I wrote as a joke in 2006 turned into a series and I stuck with it while working on other plots and adventures. The first one From Beltane Magic was released in January and The Solstice Heat was just released in March.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

The Solstice Heat – Magic and passion that burns.

Step into a world of magic and passions....

Take a dash of spice, heat it

Add a flash of magic and watch the sparks fly

Toss in a killer that's targeting women

Add a handful of witches from all paths to stir it all together...

Separated by two different life styles yet their passion and magic ignite sparks hotter than the Solstice heat.

Can they work out a way to be together as they try to stop a killer from striking again?

Kasey is a woman that exudes energy and brightness; she is as equally passionate when angry as she is when she’s happy. The energy she carries from life comes through in all her magical workings with spells and stones, giving them great magical strength. She is a dreamer and often wishes she could re-write her own story so that she was charming and sophisticated enough to be with a certain wealthy male lawyer she wants more than anything else.

Chris is a force of strength and experience that is carefully hidden behind the easy mannerism he has adapted so carefully. There is nothing he cannot do where magic is concerned and he has tried all manner of things, whether right or wrong. His fortune has left him wanting for nothing else in life, except the one thing money can’t buy him, the woman he feels too unclean to approach.

Separated by two different life styles yet their passion and magic ignite sparks hotter than the Solstice heat.

Can they work out a way to be together as they try to stop a killer from striking again?

What can readers expect in the coming months? What are you working on now?

The list is as long as I am tall and I’m sitting right at six feet.

In May the third book in the Magic Seasons will be released- Harvest Dreams.

The fourth book, Autumn Dance is presently sitting on the editors desk, but I don’t have a release date just yet for that one. The fifth and final (for now) book Winter Mist is in the tedious process of being proofed and corrected prior to submission.

I also have the second book in the Hidden Senses Trilogy coming out in July- Dream Visions. The final book in this trilogy- Inner Reflections is underway on my writing list but will be completed shortly just as long as the characters behave and do what they’re told. It’s been exciting to write about psychic abilities.

Undergoing some requested revisions presently there is the first book in my Animal Trilogy – Animal Heart. This is the first time I’ve wandered into the shifter trend and I have to say it’s very exciting to stretch my imagination in a new direction.

There are two other books that are going through the readers process (either pre or post submission) After the Silence and Cross Over Huntress. Both again are completely different areas of paranormal than my previous books.

I guess you can surmise that you will be seeing more books with my name on them.  Like I said at the beginning of this interview, I really need that time machine—soon!

Where can you be found on the web?

http://www.jacqpaige.webs.com/

http://jacqpaige.blogspot.ca/

twitter:  @JacqPaige
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Jacqueline-Paige/104846591960

Thanks so much for having me here!! 