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I just realized I’ve reviewed three books without posting the reviews. So this is a warning, a come-on, a post generating high anticipation (check one): they will be up on this site over the next week: Everything to Lose by Gordon Bickerstaff Murder at the Lighthouse by Frances Evesham Gorgito’s Ice Rink by Elizabeth Dulcie In between, I’ll take you along on my trip to the Blueridge Folk Life Festival in Ferrum, Viginia, this coming Saturday. We’ve been before and had a wonderful day: food, music, crafts, old cars, and hunting dog competitions. Stay tuned! 0 0

Just to follow up on a comment I made in the previous post: I did go to Bouchercon last week. I attended the speed dating event and two sessions. That’s it. This is how it fell out. Wednesday I was experiencing an ominous tickle in the back of my throat (posterior oral pharynx for any anatomists out there). My husband was just beginning to recover from a bad virus I assume he’d gotten from one of his patients, and my only thought was uh-oh. But I started sucking on zinc lozenges, went to bed early and was on my way at 6 AM Thursday morning, determined to get through the speed dating. Washed my hands extensively. Turns out having to talk loudly to be heard over the general noise in the room for two hours really did my throat in, and by the time noon rolled around, something had snuck up and sucker punched me, so I pleaded for my room at the hotel so I could lie down. Nothing available until 4 PM I was told, so I attended another session, sitting way back in the room and leaning up against a wall. I took notes but can’t remember most of what transpired. At 3 PM, a room opened up, so I schlepped my bags to the room, fell on the bed and slept until 6. Ordered something to eat, went back to sleep and slept through the Sisters in Crime breakfast the following morning, At that point, I realized I was good and truly sick, no point in even trying to make myself go to sessions and spread the evil virus, so I packed up and headed home. Thus endeth my time at Bouchercon 2015. Thanks to my friend Elizabeth Callwell for checking in on me and taking notes at various sessions to share. My voice has still not returned, so I’m grateful for a keyboard. Can’t give this to my husband since that darned germ carrier’s already had it.   0 0

I was an attendee at the Raleigh Bouchercon Convention this past week – at least for a day, which I will explain in a subsequent post. Bouchercon is held every year in a different city, and is billed as the “world’s finest annual crime fiction event, bringing together more than 1,000 authors, fans, publishers, reviewers, booksellers, and editors …for a fantastic four day event.” The very first activity was something called speed dating for authors. Those of us who signed up brought goody bags to the event and moved in pairs from table to table for 15 tables, each of us taking two minutes to introduce ourselves and our books – and hand our goody bags. I used specimen bags for mine, tucked a postcard of my first book, Death in a Red Canvas Chair, in the outside pocket, and chocolate, bookmarks for both DRCC and my second book, Death in a Dacron Sail, a red syringe pen (Rhe Brewster, my protagonist, is, after all, a nurse), my business card, and some colored paper clips for fun. I also told the people at each table that my first book would be available for free on Kindle this week.   So there you have it, folks! You can download Death in a Red Canvas Chair for FREE from Monday through Friday this week. If you haven’t read it yet, I’m making it easy for you to give it a try, and I hope you enjoy it. 0 0

Jemima Pett had been a great bogging friend almost from the beginning of my blog. She is a wonderful, thoughtful person –she emailed me early on to find out why I had not been on my blog for several weeks, when I had one of my should joints replaced! So it is with great embarrassment I post an interview and a promo for her books as part of a blog tour…three days late! Having a sick husband and a brain that looks like Swiss cheese does not make for keeping promises, but I hope better late than never. I also have to mention I’ve been very taken with her guinea pig pets, which have become very real in her books, and with her, I mourned when some of them passed on to guinea pig heaven. Jemima has written a series of books call The Princelings of the East, which feature her furry friends. The next book in that series will be out next year. In the meantime, she has The Book Elves Anthology Volume 2 for release in November and The Perihelix, her first sci-fi book, coming out in January.                        **** Jemima has offered to answer a few questions about how she came to be a writer and about herself: How did you get into writing? Well, I picked up a pencil, or maybe a crayon, and I copied the letters in front of me, and then I copied them onto the lines on the paper…. Seriously though, getting into writing was a continuous process. Writing fiction was something I did with things in my head, and by the time I tried to put it into a novel format I was about 17 or so. But I didn’t have any really good ideas about plot and characters, and it was rubbish. Unfortunately a friend told me my writing was rubbish, and I believed that I couldn’t write a book. So I didn’t until much later, when I decided that I just HAD to write these stories in my head or I would burst. I’d been writing other things in the meantime, sports journalism, if you like, but with a fair amount of fiction in them to entertain my sports club colleagues., as well as research papers, reports and manuals. Once I started writing the stories of the Princelings of the East, I shared them with my friends, and then the old thing of ‘oh you must get them published’ started. Everyone can get into writing; not everyone can or should get into publishing their stories, though! What inspired you to create stories featuring your guinea pigs? Entirely the guinea pigs, Fred and George, who were named after the Weasley twins, of course. I’d changed jobs, moved home, and was self-employed again. I needed company and I chose guinea pigs. I was fascinated with them, and watched their behaviour and interactions with each other, wondering about their personalities (I’d been in human resources before I’d retrained for environmental research), and I dubbed them the Philosopher (Fred) and the Engineer (George) way before the writing started. Well, six months at least, which is a long time in a guinea pig life. Then Hugo and Victor turned up, with totally different personalities… and we were doing a silly story on the guinea pig forum, writing one paragraph at a time, and somehow I just took that off into a whole new area and decided they needed a book. Three books, with the titles as they are today. And then I started writing them.   Tell us something about your Princelings books – they look like a great read for readers of all ages. Can you provide a brief, series overview? As one of my reviewers neatly summed it up: we are in a feudal world with advanced technology running on strawberry juice…. At first, there really isn’t much in the way of advanced technology, but due to the curious circumstances of the first book, George gets the idea to develop a new power source running on strawberry juice, which is a project that runs in the background of the second and third books, and then promotes change that occurs in society over the rest of the series. The series starts with two innocents using their friendship and their brains to solve problems, and the problems get bigger, and more acute as the series goes on, with an ever-growing cast of characters, some of whom pop up again in unexpected places. The big question, is how are they ever going to deliver the promise made at the end of the first book, when everything in their world is changing? What are your favorite books? Movies? My favourite books tend to be sci-fi with a challenging concept, or the ‘weird’ genre, or steampunk, alternative universes, and Lord of the Rings, of course. 😉 I read a lot of MG books and crime novels, MG to know what else is going on in the genre, and crime because I can’t write crime novels, so it’s a real relaxation for me!With movies it tends to be more escapist, or a ‘community banding together to overcome the evil corporation’ type of tale. My all-time favourite movies, that I can still watch at any time, are Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, and a small film that most people haven’t heard of called Local Hero. I’m not good on tension these days – I’m back to hiding behind the sofa for scary things, and I don’t do horror! Can you share some information about the upcoming releases? It’s a busy time for me at the moment, as my first scifi book will be launched in January. It’s called The Perihelix, and it stars two asteroid miners and their girls, made to search for the bits of The Perihelix so that one of the many big organizations in the universe can wield huge power… The original inspiration for that world came from a

I am coming close to my 300th post since starting my blog, and I want to thank all of you whom I follow for your friendship, support, humor, recommendations, and love. I’ve realized over the last couple of years that all y’all (Southern plural of you) make my life so much richer and interesting and how much I look forward to reading your blogs, enjoying your stories, delight in your photography and poetry. My only regret is that I can’t get to all of your posts every day. So thank you (in no particular order): Rara, Ali, Sally, Chris, Sylvia, Luccia, Elizabeth, Hug, Seamus, Bette, Jo, Bruce, Geof, Kev, Victo, Meredith, Barb, Becky, Irene, Melanie, Ed, Alex, NJ, Sue, Stuart, Hans, Esther, Takami, Charli, Jack, Darren, Charlotte, Tess, Joanne, Ronovan, John, Olga, Rosie, Eric, Suzie, Britteny, Annette, Keith, PG, Melissa, Nicholas, Belinda, Jemima, Janice, Nicholas, Esther, Cindy, PedroL, Pete, Anthony, Viv, Ellis, Hugh, Matt, Heather, Pam, Barb (#2), D. Wallace, J.W, W.H.…. and countless others. Please forgive my aging brain if your name isn’t here. You’re in my heart. I will be posting only occasionally for a while, because I am deep into the rewrite of my third book. But I’ll be stopping by to visit you.   0 0

When newly-fledged physician Dr. Adam Bascom discovers a body in a churchyard, he has no clue that discovering how the body came to be there and why the man had been killed will consume large parts of his life for the next few months. Thus opens An Unlamented Death, William Savage’s first historical novel.  Set against the background of Georgian and Regency Norfolk during the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the history of this tale focuses on the daily life of the people involved, their mores and discourse. This is what captured my interest. It is also written in the style of the time – think Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley – and it took a few chapters to get used to it, before I could submerge myself in the story. Once there, the rest of the book was good ride in the realities of the era. The richness and depth of the historical detail is amazing, and all of the characters are exceptionally well-drawn and interesting. As a medical professional, I especially liked the description of Bascom’s practice and that of his friend, Lassimer, an apothecary and a ladies’ man who serves as Bascom’s sounding board. I don’t want to give the mystery away but will tell you the body in the churchyard is that of an ultraconservative cleric, Reverend William  Ross, a whose bombast and judgmental personality has alienated all who know him, including his own son.  Why he would have been in the isolated churchyard, in an area known for smuggling of both goods and radical revolutionaries, is the crux of the story. When his death is ruled accidental and quickly and unseemingly put to rest, Bascom begins to worry at the decision, like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Unraveling the ball introduces us to the colorful Captain George Mimms, once of the Royal Navy, then a merchantman, and now retired, and Adam’s widowed mother and her circle of widowed but highly fashionable lady friends, who very much appreciate a good-looking, single doctor. His mother is not beyond a machination of her own, hiring the charming, intelligent, and lovely Sophia LaSalle as her companion, with the unstated hope her unmarried son will become interested. Woven expertly into story is an introduction to the social structure, polite and impolite society, religious prejudices, criminals, and civil and religious corruption of that area of England in the time. The only minor complaint I have about An Unlamented Death is its slowness in coming to the crime’s solution. As a mystery writer, I prefer things to move along at a good pace, but perhaps this is just a reflection of the time in which this mystery is set and the manner in which the book was written. I award the book five stars, but a caveat: its main appeal with be to readers who appreciate history, rich detail and absorbing characters, written in period style. I look forward to reading Mr. Savage’s next book in this series, The Fabric of Murder, also set in Norfolk. About the author: William Savage grew up in Hereford, on the border with Wales and too his degree at Cambridge. After a career in various managerial and executive roles, he retired to Norfolk, where he volunteers at a National Trust property. His life-long interest has been history, which led to research and writing about the eighteenth century.  But his is not just a superficial interest in history, but a real desire to understand and transmit the daily experience of living in turbulent times.   You can find An Unamented Death on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Unlamented-Death-Mystery-Georgian-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00RXGWIY0/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 William Savage’s blog is Pen and Pension:  http://penandpension.com/author/bluebrdz1946/ 0 0

Believe it or not, when I was learning to drive there was no Driver Ed available at my high school. My Dad showed me the basics of using a stick shift and a clutch (there was no automatic back in the Dark Ages) and on our way back from Cape Cod one weekend, he told me I could get behind the wheel of our Buick station wagon. I remember cruising down the two lane highway, wind blowing my hair (no A/C in the cars then either), and the tremulous voice of my Mom in the back seat, “Don’t you think she’s going a little fast, John?” “Noelle,” replied Dad, “can you slow down a little? You’re going 80.” I had to take that heavy Buick when I went to take my driver’s test. I remember coming out of the old Plymouth Court House with my examiner and getting behind the wheel. After starting the car, I put my foot firmly on the brake, released the parking brake and shifted into first. Then I stepped on the gas and gunned it. The examiner’s eyebrows went to the roof, but I just smiled as I slowly pulled away from the curb. I knew you had to rev it if the car wasn’t going to roll back into the car behind it. I had visions of having an old but serviceable car to drive to school, so imagine my surprise when I was presented with a Model B phaeton my Dad had seen in the garage of the house next to the Plymouth Yacht Club. The old woman who owned it had put 30 miles on the car and then stored it in her garage for 30 years. The only thing not surviving those years was the upholstery. Well… It took some learning to get the Ford started – it had a crank but it was just easier to jump start it on our driveway, which was a quarter of a mile straight down. As I recall, I put the key in the ignition and turned it, pushed the spark advance lever on the left hand side of the steering wheel all the way to the top, moved the throttle lever on the right hand side of the steering wheel to its center position, and released the brake. As soon as the engine “caught,” the spark lever was moved back to its original position. The throttle lever was moved back more slowly, to get the engine purring – well, chugging. The problem arose when I parked at the high school: there were no hills. I had to rely on fellow students to push me to get the car rolling. One day, I was late leaving and there was no one around…except for the small and round Miss Albertini, one of my teachers. I still can see her panting and pushing my car down the street in a dress and high heels! Of course, I drove the car to Plimoth Plantation when I was working there as a tour guide. Since there were no places to change into my Pilgrim dress, I had to wear it while driving the Model A. Wish I had a picture of that, but all the pictures were taken by the tourists when I parked in the lot at the Plantation. My father sold the car to pay my tuition for my sophomore year in college. I still miss that car, and it’s my goal to have another Model B one day. I’d thought maybe my books would sell well enough that I could buy one, but I suspect that’s a pipe dream. PS We named my car “The Untouchable,” an homage to Elliot Ness.     0 0

This is a re-post of something I posted on Jan 9, 2013, when I was a fledgling blogger. I still feel the same every time I drive by where they were. For many years I passed a dogwood and cedar on my way to and from home. There are lots of dogwoods and cedars along this road, but these two had grown intertwined.  In the spring the white blossoms of the dogwood popped against of the green of the cedar.  In summer, they offered two shades of green, and in the fall the burnished copper of the dogwood leaves and the red berries sparkled against the cedar branches.  In winter, I imagined the cedar protecting the dogwood, wrapping it with its branches, keeping it safe and warm until spring.  The two trees seemed like a married couple, husband and wife, complementing and protecting each other over the years. Finally, one day in late summer, I drove by my favorite trees and gasped. A road crew had come by and cut down the cedar.  It was gone.  The dogwood, forlorn and also damaged, stood, drooping.  It lasted through the winter but in the spring, the blossoms were few and the leaves were sparse.  It was as if its spouse had died, and it no longer had the will to live. Finally, toward the end of that year, the dogwood fell. Maybe I’m just getting old and sentimental, but I shed a few tears for those trees. 0 0

Bette and I met for coffee at the Red Cup Coffeehouse in Boothbay Harbor, Me, after I’d finished my stint of book selling at Sherman’s a few doors down. I had my usual latte and Bette had tea. My husband bought some scones to go with, since I’d missed lunch. This gave me lots of time to pepper her with questions! Bette, where did you grow up? From the age of one until I was ten my family lived in northern California, where my mother was born and raised. When Dad, a New Yorker, developed serious lung problems, we moved back to upstate New York. Mom, a stay-at-home mother for most of those years and a creative soul, always had books and art projects at the ready when weather kept us indoors. My childhood holds a treasure trove of happy family memories. What led you to start writing? I was always a reader. A good story—whether poetry or prose— continues to capture my imagination. When our daughters were young, I started journaling and writing poetry as a way to capture our family adventures. So you’ve actually been writing for a long time! Decades, but my first published pieces didn’t appear on the page until 1996 when I wrote two human interest articles for ECHOES, The Northern Maine Journal of Rural Culture. Then, the first edition of THE TANGRAM ZOO and WORD PUZZLES TOO! was published in 1997 by Windswept House Publishing, Mt. Desert, ME; a second edition was self-published in 2012. AMAZING MATILDA, my second children’s book was published in 2012. It won a 2013 Purple Dragonfly Book Award, which is an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Children’s Literature – Ages 6 and older category, and also placed #9 on The 2013 Gittle List for Self-published Children’s Picture Books. So when did you start writing books for older folks? 😉 In 2013, when I published my first book for the Middle-grade/YA/Adult audience. I titled it PURE TRASH. It was a short story of a boy growing up in rural New England in a family whose poverty and alcoholism mark him as a target for bullying by young and old alike. It ended up being the prequel to my novel DOG BONE SOUP, released January 2015. Inspired by nature and human nature, I continue to write poetry as well. What sparked the idea for DOG BONE SOUP? I have always loved to listen to friends and family talk about their lives, past and present. It seems that everyone has a story to tell. One of those stories had a lasting effect on me. Perhaps that’s because it was hard to wrap my mind around growing up in a dysfunctional family—about poverty or mean spirited people— because my own life was not touched by such things. At the same time, I was teaching and knew that many of my students faced these things and worse every day. I was sure that DOG BONE SOUP was a story worth telling. Which character, if any, has a personality that most closely resembles yours? When writing DOG BONE SOUP, I found that I had to learn to ‘walk in the shoes’ of each character as I wrote for them or about them. Having grown up in a loving family and supportive community myself, many of my characters were alien to me. Shawn Daniels is the character that most resembles my personality, but only in the respect that he is the eldest of four children. Being the eldest of five, I was responsible and expected to set the example for my siblings. Which character was the hardest to write and why? Eddy Daniels, Shawn’s father. Yes, he was the hardest. I had never met such a self-centered, uncaring person in my life. In fact, I didn’t realize that such people existed. In fact, all the negative characters were hard to write. The positive characters like Uncle Ted, Aunt Miranda and Mrs. Ashley were easy. I knew and their counterparts well in my own life and loved them. What’s your next project? I’m currently in the outlining stages for two stories—a sequel to DOG BONE SOUP and a story about a teacher and her students, set in the 1990s. Inspired by nature and human nature, I continue to write poetry as well. Is there one place where you find writing the easiest? Once my ideas are sketched out, it’s at my computer. But, I do journal daily in any comfortable spot at home and have paper and pen ready to jot down ideas when I’m on the go. Do you prefer e-books, hardcovers or paperbacks to read? I prefer paper and ink. There’s nothing like holding a book, putting it on a shelf and reading, rereading or leafing through it at will. In fact, we have hundreds of books, on tables, on bookshelves, on desks—so many that the grandchildren have called our house a library. But, I love my Kindle too. Especially when traveling, even if it’s only to an appointment. Whom do you admire most and why? I admire people who show kindness and love to all they meet and those who are not afraid to tell the hard stories that need to be told. Where can readers find out more about you and your work? Bette A. Stevens, Maine author/illustrator WEBSITE/BLOG http://www.4writersandreaders.com Amazon AUTHOR PAGE http://viewauthor.at/BetteAStevens   We left the coffee house with hugs and a promise for further visits! As you can tell from this interview, Bette is a very special person. She lives on a farm and delights in growing flowers and other things, and I can just imagine why her grandchildren love to visit her. I am so happy I had the chance to meet her while I was in Maine, and I encourage everyone to read Dog Bone Soup. I think children would love it, too. 0 0

I grew up in New England the 1950s and ‘60s, and Bette Stevens has written a coming of age novel about a life I wouldn’t recognize. Call me lucky. Shawn Daniels, the oldest of several children, lives in poverty. His father is the town drunk and beats his mother, who struggles to keep the family together in an unfinished, tar papered house with no indoor plumbing, running water, and heat. They have a TV but that’s for the enjoyment of Dad. Shawn and his brother Willie do all his chores: cutting and stacking firewood, hauling water into the house, and helping mind their two younger sisters. Despite the curtailment of a real childhood, the brothers still find a way to have adventures in small pockets of time, fishing for one, with a home-made pole and a safety pin for a hook. Dog bone soup, made from the marrow in left over bones, is what the family eats when there is nothing else. The author has written beautifully and lovingly of the daily joys, despairs and tribulations of growing up poor in a family of four children with an abusive father. She populates Shawn’s world with colorful and unforgettable characters: his long-suffering, wise and patient mother, the highly intelligent Mrs. Ashley, for whom Shawn works for a while, Uncle Hiram who aids and abets their father, Mr. Stark of Stark’s General Store, as well as Shawn’s neighbors and schoolmates. The reader is drawn into and becomes a part of Shawn’s family life, rooting for him to break away and make a life for himself. Dog Bone Soup is a gem of a book, fast paced, entertaining, and moving. I loved it and devoured it in two sittings (I had to stop to eat!). Bette Stevens is a talented storyteller and I hope we will have another book from her soon. Five stars! Excerpt from Dog Bone Soup by Bette A. Stevens Chapter 15: The 1956 Buick “Pull over!” Soon as I put her in park, Willie jumped out of the car and flew around to hop in the driver’s seat. I’d already let him back in and out of the door yard a few times. By the time Willie cruised around the edge of the field four or five times, I was getting bored. “Hey, let’s try to turn some donuts out here. Not enough room in the yard. Besides, Mum’d have a fit if she caught us doin’ something like that with Annie and Molly around. “Huh?” “Let’s switch seats and I’ll show you what I’m talkin’ about.” I jumped behind the wheel and headed straight for the middle of field, floored the pedal and held the wheels to the right as far as they’d go. The Buick was smokin’ and field grass was flyin’. I straightened the wheels, rolled to a new spot and floored it again. Then I let Willie take his turn. By the time we headed back up the road, we’d made more donuts in that field than Mum could fry up at one time in her twelve-inch cast iron skillet. “About time you boys got home,” Mum shook her head as we walked through the door without a fish in hand. Monday at work, the guys were all talking about a big police investigation going on over at Brown’s farm out on the Walker Road. “Some smart-ass kids been out there tearing up Troy Brown’s hay field. Brown’s madder than a bullfrog in a brush fire, and I don’t blame him. Says if he catches the culprits he’s gettin’ the judge to haul ’em off to the jug.” I could feel the heat flashin’ across my face. Didn’t dare look anywhere that day, except at the work tables and the hides that I tossed on ’em. Never said a word to anyone but Willie about what I heard at the tannery and I was darned lucky that we didn’t get caught. From then on we’d be sticking to open roads and fishin’ spots.   About the author: Bette A. Stevens is retired teacher, wife, mother of two and grandmother of five. She lives in Central Maine with her husband on their 37-acre farmstead. I recently met her when I was vacationing in Maine (she drove two hours to meet me!) and it is clear how much she enjoys writing, reading, gardening, and the beauty of nature. She advocates for children, childhood literacy and especially nice for me and my background, for monarch butterflies, an endangered species. She has published a children’s activity book, The Tangram Zoo and Word Puzzles, Too! And her second children’s book, Amazing Matilda, won a 2013 Purple Dragonfly Book Award (Honorable Mention for Excellence in Children’s Literature – Ages 6 and older category) and also placed #9 on The 2013 Gittle List for Self-published Children’s Picture Books. In 2013, the author published her first book for the YA/Adult audience: Pure Trash: The story, a short story of a boy growing up in rural New England and prequel to Dog Bone Soup. Read Chapter 1 of DOG BONE SOUP at http://4writersandreaders.com/dog-bone-soup-chapter-1/ Find out more about Bette A. Stevens and her books at http://viewauthor.at/BetteAStevens You can find Dog Bone Soup on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Dog-Bone-Soup-Boomers-Journey/dp/150314965X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1441806570&sr=1-1&keywords=Dog+Bone+Soup Bette’s blog is http://4writersandreaders.com/ Stay tuned for an interview with Bette in the next post.   0 0