Ten rules authors know and should stick to based on Grey's Anatomy the musical episode.

According to me this is the sexiest male in Grey's Anatomy....le drool.  Oh yes and click on the pic to have a listen to How we operate

How we operate

Ok since Grey's Anatomy is one of my all time favorite shows, and since the music event still gets played over and over and over again in my house…. I figured I should use the inspiration I get from the soundtrack when editing etc to share something with you guys.  So be prepared for a musical Grey's Anatomy writers blog.

First off.  Let's start with How to Save a Life.

t to be a professional, want to be treated as one, make sure that what you put on Social Media is not only part of your life story but also the company you work with, the editors, the publishing house the everything and make sure not to EVER as in EVER over share.  It might be your wall, your connection, your board.  Your everything, and that is fine.  Remember though that the public buys brand names.  If you make sure yours is a professional brand name I can guarantee people will treat you professionally, if not, well then, don’t spend more time explaining why your life sucks…..

This guys eyes......

If you click you can listen to Chasing Cars

Secondly.  Wait.

Wait for the dawn my dear…. and you will not wait too long.  Stop being so impatient.  Strop trying to get in quantity and let quality drop.  See How to Save a Life above.  You have only one opportunity to make a first impression and if you do not do it right the first time, waiting around for the second book to be better etc will not work.  So give your beta readers some breathing room.  Sigh over the editors own sweet take on revision time and WAIT.

Thirdly. How We Operate.

Calm down and get straight.  It is in our eyes and it is how we operate…Do not let others turn you inside out and upside down making you see things their way.  Find your voice.  Find your story and let go of a sparkly 200+ year ole' vamp who thinks a 17 year old girl is his equal and mature enough for life ever after.  Calm down and get straight.  And make US see things your way.

Ok so his eyes and his abs....

After Thirdly.  Runnin' On Sunshine.

Trip on sunshine girl.  Sympathy never ever lasts as long as diamonds or respect.  Make sure you demand one or both but never play the sympathy card on any social media site.  And a nice feel good ending…it never hurt much like chasing tail.  And boy this songs beat ROCKS.

Five.  Breath.

If the boy has not been sober since maybe October last year then do the Breakback Mountain line, and learn how to quit him. If the boy is a repeated editing mistake make sure to take notice.  It does not matter if you think it is beautiful to see the boy smile.  Your story needs a large appeal.  Make sure it is suitable for that.  So Breath.  Get rid of but, just.  Make sure you do not use run-on sentences too much and neither should you use more than one apostrophe EVER!!!!! Breath people.  Think.  Do not write like you talk, write what you find easy to read. 

Six.  Chasing Cars.

If you have followed my blog over the years you will know that I use this song to preach to all authors over and over not to chase star ratings on Amazon or any such a media platform.  Do you need reviews? Yes, is nice positive reviews nice? Yes.  Can it bite you in the behind? YES.  So stop chasing stars my friends.  Chase excellence. 

Seven.  The Story.

All I need say here is …THESE STORIES DON’T MEAN ANYTHING IF YOU’VE GOT NO ONE TO TELL THEM TOO…..

Eight.  Universe & U.

Well now.  Try going at this alone.  You will soon find yourself out in the cold pretty much where you started.  People will help.  We all do what we can.  And if that is not a review but an encouraging world…well then.  They sit with you so beautifully…you know I tell the truth.

Nine and ten.  Monster Hospital.

This people is your passion.  If the war won…pick another battle but don’t give up.

Yes this is how we operate.  

The Cost of Crude by Inge-Lise Goss

Blurb thanks to #Amazon

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2014

Gwynn Reznick’s life is shattered when her best friend and co-worker 

at Wilton Oil & Gas Company dies in a car crash. She doubts it 

was an accident. Her suspicion is confirmed when a private investigator, 

Ruben Dordi, shows up at her door. His team has discovered 

a trail of unusual deaths and disappearances among Wilton employees. 

To make matters worse, Gwynn is under constant surveillance 

by those responsible for her friend’s death. But that doesn’t 

deter her from getting involved in the investigation. Danger lurks 

in every corner of the Wilton Tower. One false move could turn 

a risky situation into a death trap. As the investigation team digs 

deeper, they begin to unravel a sinister plot that threatens a catastrophic 

pipeline disaster. Will they solve the crime before it is too 

late?

My opinion of this read.

I read a book by this author earlier this year.  It was good, this one is great.  Gwynn is a likable character and it does not take long for the reader to get invested in her life.  Her love, her safety.  

The story is not a short read, nor particularly fast...at 248 pages it is a full length novel.  So it was not a book I managed to read in one sitting.  That said the plot moves smoothly. The action only now and then lets up to show us a bit more about Gwynn's new love interest before the roller coaster is off again.

The story is complicated but not overly so.  It moves fast and the twists and turns is manageable because the author put so much info into her character formation so that by the time that the book reaches it peak and most of the main role players plus a few tag on guys show up the reader is well enough established in the characters and the story line to follow the action with ease.  

Editing is very well done, the cover is amazing and if you love a good conspiracy theory book. Or a psychological thriller or even a who-dunnit, then this is the book you need to read.  

WaAr 

Why we write.

Paraphrasing Uvi Poznansky here in my title; The unbearable state of being an author.  Ok so it is a very touch and go paraphrase… still.  She uses a sentence a few times in her book Apart from Love that always make me take a moment, her sentence is about youth mine is about being….

And this is what we are; we are a people that will research a book for two decades, to wit The Bridge of Deaths by M.C.V. Egan. We are a people that will give all proceeds to charity like Paulette Mahurin and J.K.Accinni.

We are a people that write about passion like ChristophFischer, people who write about stuff that goes bump in the night like BonnieBernard and Gillian Joy. 

We are however more, much more.  We are a people on a learning curve - it would seem this is a permanent state so I for one have come to terms with it.

We are lovers, friends, daughters, and sons.  We are human and sometimes we only bleed on the inside and that blood flows onto the pages we write.  The same ones with errors in it.  The ones where we don’t fix our tenses don’t use the correct word or use makeup words to fit us.

We are a people.  A village, a unity and yes, we have plenty of things that unite us.  More still that divides us.  So what makes us, us? 

J. H Glaze is the personification of a knight in shining armor. 

Duncan Mcgonall is an amazing well of knowledge and Michelle McCarthy is one of the most giving people I have come across.  Yes a lot of backbiting is on the go in the Indie world.  Yes a lot of back biting is going on in the main pub world.  Yes I can name an entire telephone book more of people who write, should be admired and often times feel slighted.  So again.  What makes us, us?  Why you.  Yes you the reader who sends us private messages asking for the next book.  Giving helpful hints and suggestions.  You are the glue that holds us together.  That unites us.  I often think readers and reviewers especially go by unnoticed and unappreciated.  The moment they leave their money / review they become a task accomplished ….only for Indie authors that is not true. 

Little is worth more in the writing world than a person that cares.  A person that supports.  This supports needs not be a glorious fan girl/boy response to every word we utter.  It only needs to be real.  Real people supporting real words that we stumble over scratch out and replace with wrong words.  The Indie world is far more a symbioses than most "worlds".  So why all this….Thank you.  Thank you for cracking the spine of the books we write.  Thank you for bending that page to read that sentence again.  Thank you for sending us messages saying 31% into the book we used the wrong spelling for our own Heroine (Becky Corwin-Adams) name…

 

Thank you.

Audio/Book Review of Beautiful Darkness (Book 2) (Beautiful Creatures) by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Book Title: Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles #2)

Genre: YA/Paranormal Romance/Fantasy

Pages: 513

Author: Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Date Published: 28 October 2010

Synopsis:

Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world that had been hidden in plain sight all along. A Gatlin that harbored ancient secrets beneath its moss-covered oaks and cracked sidewalks. A Gatlin where a curse has marked Lena's family of powerful Supernaturals for generations. A Gatlin where impossible, magical, life-altering events happen.

Sometimes life-ending.

Together they can face anything Gatlin throws at them, but after suffering a tragic loss, Lena starts to pull away, keeping secrets that test their relationship. And now that Ethan's eyes have been opened to the darker side of Gatlin, there's no going back. Haunted by strange visions only he can see, Ethan is pulled deeper into his town's tangled history and finds himself caught up in the dangerous network of underground passageways endlessly crisscrossing the South, where nothing is as it seems.

Review:

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the second book in the Caster Chronicles series. I loved it!

I downloaded this book in audio format, as I wanted to read it, but didn't have time to. Having this book in audio format allowed me to listen to it whilst doing household chores, or before bedtime.
The story is again narrated by Kevin T. Collins, who does a fantastic job in bringing the characters alive. I loved his interpretation of Ethan's Great Aunts. I could just picture the sisters' quite clearly.

Ethan Wate is an extremely interesting character. I liked him very much. He is a sweet, loving young man, who happens to be a human thrust into a supernatural world of Casters (light and dark witches) and Incubi (demons).

Lena Duchannes is a character I didn't really like in the first book. She had a "woe is me" attitude that really grated on my nerves. However, in this story, she is mostly in the background.

This story continues from the end of the first book. I liked the fact that this story was again told from Ethan's point of view. I was hooked from the first few minutes of the chapter.

Life in Gatlin (or Gatdung as Ethan and Link call it) is not easy, but it's just about to get even harder! Lena has more than her fair share of teenage angst, but having the option in claiming herself on her sixteenth moon thwarted by her mother, she is struggling to cope with the death of her Uncle. Ethan is trying to cope with the fact that his father has had a breakdown and had been hiding in his office. He is also still hearing music, now about the seventeenth moon, and trying to figure out what it means.

This story is a mixture of mystery, suspense, danger, romance and intrigue that flowed much better than the first book; it is a little bit darker too. I liked the introduction of new characters such as Ethan's Great Aunts and their cat Lucille Ball and Liv, a trainee Keeper Librarian, as well as the Incubi, who are not Casters but demons. The influx of new characters gave the story a fresh twist. It was interesting to watch the dynamics of the characters change as things progressed, especially the friendship between Ethan and Liv. Link was his usual dorky self, but even his usually upbeat manner was tested when Ridley, Lena's Dark Caster cousin makes a reappearance. Ethan also finds out something about himself that shocks him; he is a Wayward (a person who is gifted the ability to find or track, as well as guide, a powerful witch such as Lena). There are several twists and turns which kept me enthralled, but there is one HUGE twist that I didn't see coming near the end of the book. I am now looking forward to reading/listening to Beautiful Chaos as soon as possible, to find out what happens next!

Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl seem to make a great writing team. Their writing style has improved a lot in this book, and it is more fast paced. The story also flowed better than the first book; I am glad that the erratic flow has been smoothed out and I look forward to reading more of their books in the future.

I highly recommend this book if you love YA or Paranormal Romances, or are fans of books such as The Twilight Saga. - Lynn Worton

View all my reviews

              

September on Wanda's amazing Amazon reviewers!

This is what a bunch of us will be reading in September 2014 on Wanda's amazing Amazon Reviewers aka WaAr.

If any of these books looks like you would love to read and review it on Amazon for us, hit that link button.

My review:

Yesterday I made a mistake and referred to this book as Wild Hunt. It does not take a genius to figure out how my mind works.

The story is slow to start and it feels kinda like going home after some time. Once you are all settled in however everything starts to happen at once.

The twins are back. They are older, and they are a bit more experienced. The forest is beckoning as is young love.

And right here is where I break from the story to tell you that natural age progression of teenagers might sound easy but it is not something many and until yesterday I would have said any author apart from J K Rowling can pull off. Yesterday, when I read this the third book in the series, the girls sounded more grown up. Less angst ridden, more goal oriented and far more self reliant even though they still do not have a car.

Yes by the end of the book the reader encounters a really detailed though not graphic sex scene. The coming of age of two of the characters is necessary for the plot and is not brushed over or hidden behind. It is instead used to show the magic of young love and the flip side of lust vs love.

The editing is very well done, the cover is brilliant. The story is on the brink of leaving YA for NA and it does so, so naturally that it seems planned from the start of book one.

Still Hunt is a wild hunt, dangers galore, even a twist in the sense of an unexpected sense of chivalry from a not so nice character. Above all it is a story about love, between sisters, mothers and grandmothers, friends and lovers. Love for nature respect for self and others and hope.

A brilliant book. One I recommend you pick up today.

Contact the author here via Facebook 

  Click on the pic...

or buy your copy by clicking on the top pic and go to Amazon directly.  

That is not all.  We also have....

Click on the pic to get your Amazon copy today.  

Here is what I thought of the book.

Nights Embrace by Brandy L Rivers

With one book Brandy turned my prejudice against shifter stories on it's ear!

The book is everything I don't like. Well almost. It has explicit adult content, wolves...I love wolves but dislike any were animals apart from Jacob in Twilight. I mean seriously, who would go for cold and sparkly if they can have hot and hot?

Any way. The book does get starred down due to the adult content. It is seriously not for me but it gets a star up for the fact that it has a kick butt heroine. With a brother whom is sweet, a friend that cares and is not in competition and a hot, hot guy. Ok so he is older... A few hundred years older but he is also as humanly realistic as I have ever come across in a NA story like this. He is a mature male with bite.

Well edited, well plotted and character development is really very well done this book turned out to be a very welcome surprise!

WaAr

Connect with the author on FB for a review copy or a chat by clicking on the pic.  

And our last book....

Click on the pic to go to Amazon to buy your copy.  

Here is my opinion of the book....

As a debut story this is unique, informative and due to it's nature I was glad it was a short story. Emotionally packed stories like these often get dragged out beyond it's best before date and gets to be too much.

Enter the world of our main protagonist, a beautiful educated young woman with passion and dreams of a career.

Before any of this can happen she meets her soon to be groom. A short pudgy and rather distasteful young man.

Social norm's with expectations clashes with personal desire and pride. Our heroin soon finds that the money into which she is marrying is at once making her parents very happy for their daughter and simultaneously also making her father feeling like a failure. This contradiction is obvious but none of the characters come to a point where they question the validity of their original conviction.....this is a pivot point in the book and the cliff hanger ending leaves open so many unanswered questions.

This book needs editing, a bit of polish and a commitment to first person present or third person past. I would also have loved it if the author explained the significance of some of the name falls in the book together with many other aspects unique to the Indian culture. Still the originality, the contemporary issue and the passion of the author for the topic makes this book worth the read!

WaAr

Connect with the author via FB by hitting that pic.....

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Book Review of Waking the Phoenix (Mythrian Realm Series Book 2) by Lindsay Avalon

Book Title: Waking The Phoenix (Mythrian Realm Series Book 2)

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Pages: 172

Author: Lindsay Avalon

Date Published: 27 August 2014

Synopsis:

As two Realms collide, the world descends into chaos.

From the moment Sha Phoenix dropped into the middle of Detective Connor Flynn’s murder scene, he had known his life would never be the same. Following her claim to be a Sorceri from the Mythrian Realm, he had received a crash course in the impossible as they had struggled to stop a madman. Unfortunately, despite their efforts to stop the Nexus, a magical barrier separating the Mythrian and Human Realms, fractured. Magic and myth are spilling over into the Human Realm, plunging everything into turmoil.

Is their love strong enough to survive the flames of the phoenix?

When Sha vanished through a portal in the middle of battle, Connor did not hesitate to follow the woman he had claimed as his. Now in the Mythrian Realm, they join forces with the Sentinels, the guardians of the Realms, to protect the world they love. Will they be able to contain the evil taking control? Or will they perish in the flames of war?

This is a continuation of Connor and Sha's story. Book 1, Breaking the Nexus, should be read first. Look for the third book coming this winter!

Review:

Waking the Phoenix by Lindsay Avalon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the second book in the Mythrian Realm Series. I loved it!

Sha Phoenix is a wonderful character. I love her wit and humour! She is a part Aquarum (water magic) and part Infernum (fire magic) Sorceri. This makes her a formidable protector of the Nexus; the gateway between her world and the human one.

Connor Flynn is a fantastic character. He is a cop, who is strong, handsome and honourable. It also helps that he is very charismatic. I love his protective streak! (As an aside: I wouldn't mind being arrested by this cop!).

I have been eager to read this story for a long time; ever since the first book had been released in 2012. As soon as I found out that this book had been released, I downloaded a copy and started reading. It was well worth the wait!

This story continues from the cliffhanger at the end of the first book, and sees Sha and Connor returning through the Nexus to Mythria.

This story is not only told through Sha and Connor's point of view, but through the eyes of Ian Kendrick, Connor's police partner. I loved this alternative point of view, as it gave the reader a chance to see what was happening on both sides of the Nexus. It was also nice to meet Saia, Achaius and Luca again. We are also introduced to Alec, a teenager who is more than he seems. Though he is still an enigma, I found myself liking this mouthy teen. Alec is a bit impertinent at times, but he seems to have a good heart; I look forward to find out what his story is in time. I did feel sorry for him at times, but giggled at the adults' - especially Achaius and Aries - method of discipline.
Maestro is still causing havoc through his magic and he is as evil as ever. But I'm not sure if he's the master, or a puppet for someone else.

There is plenty of danger and intrigue, which kept me hooked from the first page. There are also several twists and turns in this story that kept me on the edge of my seat. The author's descriptions of the scenes and the characters brought the story to life. I could picture everything quite clearly. This story took me on a roller coaster ride of adventure, danger and emotion.The ending finished on totally shocking cliffhanger, and now I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series as soon as possible.

Lindsay Avalon has written an amazing paranormal romance. I love her fast paced writing style, and the story flows beautifully. Her characters are extremely likable (except for Maestro) and come alive on the page.

Due to scenes of a sexual nature that are on the explicit side, as well as some bad language and violence, I do not recommend this book for younger readers. However, I highly recommend this book if you love YA (17+), paranormal romance or fantasy. - Lynn Worton

View all my reviews

           

Why Won't Somebody Help Me? By Gladys Quintal

 

Click on the pic to get your Amazon.com copy

About the book

I knew I had something going on as far as my health was concerned, but trying to get a diagnosis or to get doctors to actually listen to me became a nightmare. 
I had been living with pain, fatigue, weight gain, reflux and brain fog, going on 15 years now and really just wanted it to stop and to be able to feel 'normal' again. Most doctors just wanted to fob me off with antidepressants, they just weren't interested in what I had to say. 

This is my own personal journey to diagnosis and treatment and all the obstacles along the way.

My thoughts on this

This is a hard book to rate.  It speaks of courage to fight for your own right against people with degrees and "knowledge".  It speaks of community and support against odds where specialists say nothing is wrong, that said it is still not an easy read nor a particularly fun one.

It has it's merits but I am not gonna kid you saying that you will LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book and be engrossed in the character.  You might however find that you can relate to a very real person.

So pick up a copy and see.  

WaAr