Saturday 28 January 2017

Guest Author Michael Marcondes of New England, USA


I’ve always enjoyed writing but you may be amazed to learn, I’m not so much of a reader. I used to skip parts of high school reading assignments because reading would put me to sleep. I started writing when I was a teenager on a sci-fi time story but couldn’t finish because of my lack in knowledge about government affairs in cold war time. Once I stopped I got busy with jobs I held and life in general until 2006/7 when I wrote a totally new sci-fi book of science fiction and real time science mix together in a time traveler adventure story, The Traveler the beginning, which is out now.



My writing schedule is sporadic. Unfortunately, with my almost always weekly changing work schedule I have no structured writing schedule so I can go weeks and months without doing a single thing and then I get a weekend or week of down time and, wham, I may write entire chapters all at once.

Publication has been a long, sometimes tedious and unfulfilling road with a lot of disappointment -much of it was caused by my former publisher. Looking back, after I spent around a year of researching what I needed to know about Indie publication vs. publishers vs. using agents I still didn’t know nearly enough. While I was searching for a publisher and found a Christian based place whom I called. We made a deal and arrangements for the books but over time I started to see a trend at the publisher who really wasn’t helping much since the books went public. A year and a half into it I fought to market myself and do mostly everything including foot huge multi-thousand dollar bills to get known while trying to balance life, several family tragedies and an ever-changing monthly career schedule. It’s taught me a lot, which I believe as a Charismatic Christian and author I probably needed as part of a great future that is still being written! Because of the hard road I was forced to take I believe I will be able to offer my reading fans someone awesome surprises in the future – which I am currently in progress of now. Hint, hint!

I have two other books in progress right now – a Christian fiction and another sci-fi. With God’s help I plan to complete these very soon. I’ve already done the leg work to lower my EBook prices from where the publisher had them and I am dedicated to the readers to make them more easily attainable by everyone worldwide. There’s also a new website coming February 2017!

My future plan is to commit to writing full time and get myself out of the eighteen-year computer and networking career that I am currently working in.

One favorite thing I enjoy is doing the book autograph signing events. It’s that excitement of seeing the person’s face after we’ve talked some about their lives, the book and about me. Second, I think once I’ve finally written the book as well and completely as I can before it goes to someone to edit and I see how the entire story has run its course - that makes the time and effort worthwhile.

When I’m not working or writing, I like to watch the Sci-Fi channel, documentaries or science shows on T.V. and attending family get-togethers like cookouts and birthday parties and other events.




There are two books currently out in EBook format. I am pleased to include a brief few paragraphs from them both here thanks to my interview host.  My inspired non-fiction Christian book “Life Explained a Journey to Selfless Love”;
 
 

 
 

Chapter 1 Love—Real Selfless Love


I was a little unsure where to begin and how to open this book in a way that would grab the reader’s attention, so as I wrote this sentence, I just placed it into the hands of the Lord, that He would write it for me and through me. I wanted to allow him to be in control without taking a chance that my limited human knowledge and abilities would ruin the content of the subject matter of these very important chapters.

Health and longevity of life ties to quality of life, and that’s something we all need and many of us feel we are deserving of. The Bible references long life and quality of life as being tied together and tied to keeping of the Old Testament and New Testament scripture readings. Some of you are saying, “This is absolutely true and for real,” and you have seen firsthand accounts of it and the results of keeping up with it consistently. Now there’s the other half of you who are partially or even totally against it. Keep reading on. I personally have seen the results, speaking as a person who was raised Catholic and a churchgoer but who would waver or fall away, as they say, because I would allow life, work schedules, and my laziness to interfere and draw me away. Many fall prey to that because we are submerged in a lifestyle of desiring things that are pulling us in multiple directions daily.

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad the leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few that find it.” (Matt. 7:13–15, nasb)

The path is selfless love and commitment to the God, who is love itself.

By the time I reached my late forties, life had taken a toll on me, as it does to us all, causing us to harden ourselves to survive; even if we remain good people, after decades on this planet, we lose our true selves. We lose part of the humanity the Lord designed for us to have. I took time to help people, tried not to break the law, and obeyed my parents, for the most part, and all those things that supposedly make us nice people. Like many of you, I worked hard and remained vigilant to my beliefs and responsibilities to myself, family, friends, job, and other life-related things. One night as I was going to bed, I knelt beside the bed and cried out to the Lord, “I give up! I can’t do this anymore. It’s too hard. Like a broken record, life problems and struggles keep coming back over and over again. I need help. Lord, I need your help. I will put you first above everyone and everything— over work, family, friends, everything—and never stop!” …
 
 
 
 

And for “The Traveler the Beginning” the sci-fi time traveler adventure story;

THE BEGINNING


I sit alone in my home, shielded from the outside world, abandoned by many of my people and hounded by many others. I can hear the sounds of militant forces encroaching into my personal living space. They are in need of answers to questions they are not yet prepared to deal with. I am an outlaw in their eyes, cut off by my own actions. The innocent actions that began a journey of wonder and enlightenment have now forced me into my seclusion. The sounds of helicopters fade in and out as they swoop in, checking the perimeter of my yard, my confines, in hopes of my capture. In the far distance, across my long yard, television and radio crews line the street beyond the boundaries of my property line in either direction. The once-tranquil neighborhood where I live has turned into a form of a battle zone, a mockery of my achievements and significant contributions to mankind’s continuation. It’s still here, an almost deafening silence resounding through the back of my mind while I sit and watch their unrelenting advancements. Outside troops mass on the lawn. Jeeps, men, and tanks tear up my gardens. Bullhorns and walkie-talkies echo orders from commanding officers to penetrate my home and bring me out by force. I am not a criminal and thus will fight to the end for my freedom. The shields are impenetrable to their efforts to reach me, shy of digging deep into my grass and tunneling under the protective barricade I have erected around my home. Over and over they call for me to come out. It’s been going on now for several hours. The year is 2052.

I believe I need take you to the start of my adventures to give you a better perspective of why this is.

The pages you are about to read are taken from my memoirs. An extraordinary event has unfolded itself onto me as part of my own undertaking, an event that captured the minds and hearts of a tiny planet located in a solar system just as small in proportion. I have been time traveling now for a total of 1,500 years, though I am now only sixty-five years old. Much of this time was spent in various centuries living new lives and learning new cultures. I speak over forty languages and fifteen different dialects from this planet alone. In my adventures of time traveling, I have been to the future and to the past. I have been through many dangerous and terrible times, seen so much beauty and glory—more than my words can begin to describe— and beings the like of which my imagination couldn’t begin to fathom…
 
 
 
Thank you Michael for being our guest this week.
 
Please check the links below to discover more about Michael and his writing.
 
 
 
 


Thank you Dear Reader for visiting the Scribbler. As always, you're the reason for our blog. I hope you enjoyed your visit. We would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below.



Saturday 21 January 2017

Returning Guest Author Tina Frisco.

The Scribbler is happy to have Tina Frisco return as a guest this week. She lives in California and is a very generous participant, not only in sharing her thoughts about her own writing as well as advice on being an author. She is a relentless promoter of other authors as well.


This is Tina's second visit to SBS. She talks about her latest work and shares an excerpt from her novel, Vampyrie. Her first visit can be seen here.

Her links are below.





First let me say that Vampyrie is not your typical vampire novel. It’s based in science and brings the myth of the vampire into the realm of possibility. Although Vampyrie is not part of a series, two primary characters from my first novel, Plateau, play major roles. In this excerpt, Phoebe, the protagonist in Vampyrie, has just met one of these characters in the catacombs. W’Hyani has told Phoebe that she’s there looking for her mate who didn’t return home to their village after his vision quest. Phoebe is in the catacombs searching for two of her friends who went missing. She’s sure they were abducted and brought to this infernal domain. Coming from two different cultures, Phoebe and W’Hyani had a bit of an awkward introduction; but the gifts they exchanged and their common goal quickly united them.  



Abyss of Doom


 

Phoebe and W’Hyani walked stealthily side by side, each keeping close to the tunnel wall and holding her torch in her outer hand. It seemed they’d been walking forever with no end in sight.

“It can’t be much farther,” Phoebe whispered.

“Look; a forked tongue.” W’Hyani pointed up ahead. “We have been walking in a circle.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am certain. Follow me and I will show you.” They hadn’t walked five yards when she extended her torch to the right. “Do you see? It is the other side of the passage.”

Hoping W’Hyani was wrong, Phoebe walked a few more yards and stepped into the same large open area from where she’d started. “Damn it!” She clamped her hand over her mouth. Cursing doesn’t lend itself to whispering. 

“We have taken the wrong path. We must now walk into the wind.”

Feeling a cool breeze blowing from the west arm of the main tunnel, Phoebe assumed it was the direction to which W’Hyani referred. It also was the direction she should have taken instead of diverting to the smaller passage.

W’Hyani laid her torch on the ground and turned toward Phoebe.

“Give to me the feather. You must wear it. It will give you much strength.”

She took a piece of sinew from her pouch, secured it around the feather’s calamus, and tied it to several strands of Phoebe’s hair above her left ear. She placed her hands on Phoebe’s shoulders and touched her forehead to her own. Then she drew an arrow from her quiver and readied her bow. Phoebe noticed the arrowheads were carved from raw silver instead of stone.

“Now we are ready.” W’Hyani kicked her torch to the wall. “I cannot carry the lalaque when I shoot the arrow. The fire from yours will give us light.” She put her hand on Phoebe’s shoulder and looked her in the eye. “When you kick and punch, aim for the heart. That is where they are weak.”

“How do you know this?” Although inclined to trust her new friend, Phoebe had to be sure W’Hyani knew what she was talking about.

“The kind woman who spoke of the underground told to me, ‘If he is in the tunnels, beware. The beings that live there are evil and difficult to fight. You must aim for the heart.’ I do not know who she was or for what reason she said this, but I know it is a truth.”

Maybe it was the confidence in W’Hyani’s voice. Maybe it was the fact they had nothing to lose by making a plan – any plan – of attack. Whatever it was, Phoebe trusted W’Hyani’s words.

“Okay; what else?”

“If they have not yet feasted, a blow to the heart will knock them down. Then you jump on the chest with both feet and pierce the heart with the ribs. I do not know if this will kill them, but it will stop them and I will have a target that does not move. And you must remember: They are very fast.”

 
Phoebe understood. They’d work as a team. She’d knock the rogues down and W’Hyani would shoot an arrow through their heart. As she wondered how this would work if a lot of rogues attacked at once, W’Hyani answered the question.

“If they attack in a clan, you dodge and weave and fly low between their legs. Quickly turn on your back and kick with two legs together. Move your body round and round and keep kicking. I will shoot as fast as I can. But we must keep apart, one from the other. This way, we confuse them. We give them two targets to fight.”

Phoebe nodded in acknowledgement. Then she and W’Hyani crept forward, hugging the wall opposite one another. They advanced no more than a few yards when the torch was snatched from Phoebe’s hand and both young women were yanked backward. A strong hand covered each of their mouths; a strong arm forced each of them to keep still. 
 
 
 
 



Thanks Tina for being our guest this week, it's always a treat to have you participate.





Learn more about Tina and her writing by following these links.

Website ~ http://tinafrisco.com
Amazon ~
http://hyperurl.co/3vme2a
Facebook ~
https://www.facebook.com/TinaFrisco.Author
Twitter ~ http://bit.ly/14VXY49
LinkedIn ~ http://linkd.in/1aAGwXl
Goodreads ~
http://bit.ly/165vmVp
Google+ ~
http://bit.ly/1Fc1Uzn
About Me ~
https://about.me/tina_frisco





Dear reader, thank you so much for visiting. Take a minute and leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you.




Saturday 14 January 2017

Guest Author Seumas Gallacher of Abu Dhabi


SEUMAS GALLACHER escaped from the world of finance seven years ago, after a career spanning three continents and five decades.  

As the self-professed 'oldest computer Jurassic on the planet’, his headlong immersion into the dizzy world of eBook publishing opened his eyes, mind, and pleasure to the joys of self-publishing. As a former businessman, he rapidly understood the concept of a writer's need to 'build the platform', and from a standing start began to develop a social networking outreach, which now tops 30,000 direct contacts.  

His 'Jack Calder' crime thriller series, THE VIOLIN MAN'S LEGACY, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK, SAVAGE PAYBACK and KILLER CITY have blown his mind with more than 90,000 e-link downloads to date. His fifth, DEADLY IMPASSE was launched in late 2016.

He started a humorous, informative, self-publishers blog three years ago, never having heard of a 'blog' prior to that, was voted 'Blogger of the Year 2013' and now has a loyal blog following on his networks. He says the novels contain his 'Author's Voice', while the blog carries his 'Author's Brand'. And he's LUVVIN IT!
 
 
 
 
 
                          Links are listed below.



 

…the loneliness of the long-distance scribbler…




 
…even the shyest of people need company from time to time… hermits, real hermits, measure less than 0.00000648 percent of the WURLD’s population… cloistered monks and sisters of the cloth in their monkeries and sisteries at least have the presence of their own ilk round them on a constant basis… the brooding G. Garbo and H. Hughes had lots of M. Money around them to alleviate their solitary exclusion of the rest of the planet… which makes it apparent to me, Mabel, it is abnormal to ‘want to be alone’… yet, hundreds of thousands of quill-scraper Lads and Lassies of Blog Land choose just such a devoted pathway… yes, yeez can point to the Web, and all its SOSYAL NETWURKIN trappings… where at the click of yer mouse, yeez can be in touch with twenty-five trillion people simultaneously… but, and it’s a big ‘but’... it’s not the same as being with people in the flesh… the myriad virtual candlelit garrets wherein the scribing successes of the future literary generation reside hold their own special importance… being a writer is lonely… no-one else can sculpt the characters, plots, nuances of yer own story-telling… it’s unique to each and every one of yeez… I know I bang on occasionally here about the real WURK starting after yeez’ve finished yer masterpiece, in getting it accepted in the Big Bad WURLD out there… that doesn’t detract from the beauty and the adrenaline rush of actually typing ‘THE END’… yeez can try to share that feeling with others … but it’s impossible for them to feel what yeez feel yerself at that precise moment of conclusion… and all the heartache, all the pain, all the angst, all the suffered loneliness of the long-distance Author, all the alls… are worth every nano-second of this peculiar labour of love… and then, fools that yeez are (me included), what do yeez do then?… yeez start another one!… here’s a wee bit of this ol’ Scots Jurassic’s journey on that solitary trail… eight years ago in Abu
Dhabi, where I was living and working, it struck me that it was just ‘time for that book we all have in us’ to emerge from what’s left of my wee grey cells… and of course I had a full story and narrative ready to leap onto virgin pages, right?… wrong!... not a hint of it!... I decided to go walking for an hour and a half, ten evenings in succession, along the water’s edge of the Corniche in that excellent city, thinking of what kinda masterpiece I should produce… after the first couple of nights, an ending crystallized… it gave me a target toward which to write… and that’s how I’ve done all of my books since… the expected route to that ending changed several times as, first, a main plot theme, and then a secondary, and a tertiary began to interweave and push themselves into the frame… being the oldest self-confessed computer Jurassic on the planet, I purchased my first ever laptop at the age of sixty (my age, not the laptop’s), and perfected the one-finger-from-each-hand typing technique… it hardly encourages smoke trails from the keyboard at that speed, but hey, it does give me time to mull what I’m typing as I go along… positivity in everything, Mabel!... in a few months, THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY was ready to breach birth into the heady universe of publishing… in due expectation of a million-dollar contract by return post, I packed off forty solicitations to agents in the UK, and sat back, envisioning the Ferrari salesmen, and Caribbean vacations that this soon-to-be iconic author would have to indulge…

 
 

 
 
 
...however, with that twisted sense of humour and perfect balance that the Literary Gods seem to possess, back came precisely forty rejection slips… it mattered not a jot to my ego… because by that time, the second book, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK was marching its way across the laptop… around the same time, a friend suggested as a self-publishing option, I should consider the Amazon Kindle channel… I instantly responded, ‘Great… but, what’s Kindle?’… I hadn’t a clue… but learned very quickly the how and what of becoming an indie author… and for emb’dy reading this who’s just starting on this wunnerful mystery tour, let me tell yeez, if this ol’ fella can do it, emb’dy can… go for it… as it happened, by the time the second novel was ready to launch, the first baby already had attracted 8,000 downloads… and that just blew my mind… now, how did that happen?... by the best coincidence, I was following then nouveau indie authoress Rachel
Abbott’s blog in which she advised to treat the writing as a ‘business’… recognizing the scribbling as the comparatively easy part… the rest of the ‘business’ entailed marketing and promotion, budgeting time and whatever money yeez wanted to invest in it, cover art, proofreading, editing, and the whole nine yards… as a businessman, all of that made superb sense to me, and I embraced the philosophy with both hands… I began to ‘build the platform’ of relationships to support the ‘business’… being present on the SOSYAL NETWURKS is mandatory for modern authors in my not-so-‘umble opinion… but harvesting such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ ‘followers ‘ and ‘friends’ who relate to the writing, reading and related publishing fields… and not just acquiring these links for the sake of numbers… my links totalled a mere 400 when I started to develop that ‘platform’… they now exceed 30,000… the next epiphany was the value of having a blog… I write a regular blog which was basically the mumbled sharings of a new writer, bumbling and stumbling his way into the industry… it branched out to cover other light-hearted elements… I’ve found that the blog posts of others which I enjoy are those which entertain, educate, enlighten and often empathize with me… I loosely modelled my own blog after those… and here’s the real beauty of that… all of my blog posts are automatically linked to every one of my SOSYAL NETWURKS, meaning that each post is sent out to more than 30,000 potential readers… the blog is also a marvelous way of inviting Guest Blog Posts from others, be they writers, or otherwise… and an absolute tenet is to help other authors wherever I can… giving back some of the unbelievable support and love that has been unconditionally shown to me… so, in that sense, mingling, even in the Webosphere, offsets the solitary trudge of most of we penspeople… however the creative Muse operates best for me in that isolated environment of my own virtual candlelit garret… pass me my candelabrum, Mabel, I’ve my next masterpiece to write … see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!
 






 




Please drop by Seumas' website here 


The links where you can purchase Seumas' novels;

THE VIOLIN MANS LEGACY
myBook.to/theviolinmanslegacy
 
VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
myBook.to/vengeancewearsblack
 
SAVAGE PAYBACK
 
KILLER CITY
 
DEADLY IMPASSE
 




Thank you Seumas for being our guest this week.





Dear Readers, please leave a comment below, love to hear from you!

Saturday 7 January 2017

Guest Author Beth Powning of Markhamville, NB

Good news!

One of my favored authors is the guest this week on the Scribbler. So excited to have Beth Powning answer questions for the 4Q Interview.







Beth  was born in 1949. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, where she majored in creative writing, studying with novelist E.L.Doctorow. She immigrated to Canada in 1972 with her artist husband, Peter Powning. Since then, she and Peter have lived on a farm in Markhamville, New Brunswick, where they grow much of their own food in organic gardens. They have one son, Jake Powning, who lives nearby with his wife, Sara, and two granddaughters. Beth Powning photographed two gardening books before publishing her own first book in 1995, Seeds of
Another Summer (Penguin) published in the US as Home – Chronicle of a North Country Life (writing and photograpy), recently re-released by Goose Lane Editions.  She went on to write Shadow Child (Penguin Canada - subsequently re-issued by Knopf Canada, short-listed for the Edna Staebler Award for Literary Non-fiction); The Hatbox Letters (Knopf Canada, a best-seller and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award);  Edge Seasons (Knopf, a Globe and Mail Best Book) and The Sea Captain’s Wife (best-selling novel, long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and short-listed for the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award). This novel was published in French in 2014 by Editions Perce Neige. Her latest novel, A Measure of Light, Knopf Canada, March 2015, was a
Globe and Mail Best Book, was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award and won the N.B. Award for Fiction. Her work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she has made many appearances across Canada and in the U.S., Ireland and Great Britain. She was the recipient of New Brunswick’s 2010 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for English Literary Arts, and in 2014 received an honorary Doctorate of Letters degree from the University of New Brunswick. She is active in her community, serving on boards and committees. Her newsletters and photography can be seen at www.powning.com/beth.






 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
4Q: I’m a big fan of your novels and it is a real treat to have you as a guest Beth. Your attention to detail and place is a true art. When an idea for a story comes along, what are your writing habits?  Do you outline or just sit and write?
 
 



   
 
 
 
 
 
 
    Usually I explore and discard two or three ideas before finally finding the one that is going to work. Sometimes I will write 40-50 pages of something and then know that it’s not going anywhere. I go back to dreaming, scribbling ideas in my journal, keeping my mind open, waiting for that unmistakable prickle of excitement.  The idea that finally becomes a book is usually something that I have written many pages about in my journal, describing the project to myself. My next step will be to study— in the case of my last two novels, at least a full year. When I am ready to write, I know it because I am thoroughly sick of the research and long to enter the story. I simply begin. The novelist E. L. Doctorow, my beloved teacher and mentor, said to his writing students— “You don’t need to begin at the beginning. Start anywhere.” The place I begin writing seldom becomes the actual first sentence of the book. I know that the first draft will be subject to many revisions, so I dive in, flailing about. I don’t know how the book is going to develop; I never have a plot line. If I wrote from an outline, I would not feel as if I were on a quest, a journey. I need to be surprised by what happens. A novel to me is like a question to which I don’t know the answer. I write to find out the answer, I write to take the journey, I write to live in the world that I’m creating.


4Q: There’s been a lot of attention and praise for your latest novel, A Measure of Light and I truly enjoyed the book but my favorite is The Sea Captain’s Wife, both of which are historical. Is this a favorite genre for you?





I was asked this question by someone else, recently, and it made me realize the extent to which I was influenced by E. L. Doctorow. All of his novels are fictions built around actual historical events. I grew with houses built in the 18th  and 19th  centuries, my own childhood house as well as the houses of my grandparents. They were filled with rope-strung beds, creaky floorboards, musty linens. I was surrounded by tangible evidence of the past, so it’s not surprising that history crept into my first novel, hatboxes filled with letters that land in Kate’s living room, whose unexpected stories help her to move forward after her husband’s death. The next two novels were complete surprises to me, and came after stumbling on facts that astonished me and made me aware of my own ignorance and desire to learn. I didn’t know that women went to sea with their captain husbands. I had never heard of Mary Dyer nor knew that people had been coldly hanged for their religious beliefs in New England. These facts inhabited compelling stories, stories that I felt needed to be told. Doctorow was one of the first novelists to blur the line between historical fiction and literary fiction. These days, many novels blend history and fiction. I love history, I love learning about history by reading novels. I consider my novels to be literary fiction.

 

 




 
4Q: Some of your earlier works have been inspired by memories. I especially enjoyed Edge Seasons – A Mid-Life year. Please share a childhood memory or anecdote.





   
 
 
 
 
    My memories are vivid and visceral. I remember the iridescent blur of wasps’ wings, sluggish on the sundrenched windowsills of my childhood home. And the sound of the six o-clock bedtime train—the improbable clackety-clack of its wheels as it snaked, hidden, through the dense valley trees. In 1958, when I was nine, most of my friends had televisions, but my parents refused to buy one. I created places to read, like the alternate worlds that I now inhabit when I write. One was a place of many blankets, chair-draped, with a table lamp and pillows, created over the hot-air register, in winter. Another was a tree-house, built by me and my brother (we had several), a platform of boards wedged across branches. One was on what we called “The Indian Rock,” a massive boulder in our horse pasture with a smooth and mysterious oval bowl which we thought had been made by hand-grinding corn. One unfortunate one was built on the ground behind the vegetable garden out of hay bales, where I left a pile of library books in a rainstorm. And under the oak tree that I wrote about in Home was a shipping crate in which my grandparents had sent home all their belongings when they sold their home in Bermuda; its drafty plywood walls enclosed me and my beloved books and the worlds inside them. I carried on a third-person dialogue inside my head, a constant internal monologue that described me to me. “It was getting late, so she started home across the fields.” Only after I spent a two-week vacation with a friend did I lose this habit, and then I mourned it.


 
 
 
 
4Q: What’s next for Beth Powning the author?

 

    I’ve just finished the first draft of a new novel. It takes place in New Brunswick, time-present, with (of course!) a historical thread wound through it. I am just now working through it, editing, so that it reads smoothly enough for me to show to my agent, Jackie Kaiser. Jackie is always my first reader. I usually don’t offer the manuscript to my publishers until I have written three drafts, all of which she reads and comments on. I’m very, very fortunate to have her. Gerard Collins and I have formed a literary committee for our new arts and culture centre here in Sussex. I’ll be doing a lot of work on that in the next year.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                              Posing with Beth are authors Gerard Collins, Janie Simpson and Jane Tims.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Thank you Beth for taking the time to be our
guest. 
 
Please drop by Beth's web site to discover more about her. I highly recommend her stories.
 
 
Read The Globe and Mail review of The Sea Captain's Wife here .
 
 
All comments welcome.