Guest Post ~ The Devereaux Dilemma, by Steve McEllistrem

 

In a future where religion and disease have brought social order to the verge of collapse, and where some humans have been biologically and others mechanically enhanced, Jeremiah Jones must find the one man

who might be able to fix everything.

Available from Amazon US and Amazon UK

I’ve long loved the science fiction classics, like Dune, Foundation, Rendezvous with Rama and Fahrenheit 451. But I didn’t start out writing science fiction. I began with fantasies, westerns, mysteries, thrillers and literary fiction, none of which I published. I’ve also written legal books, newsletters and articles for many years. Those pay the bills but don’t provide the sort of comfort a good piece of fiction does.

The Devereaux Dilemma didn’t start as science fiction, but as a philosophical novel. I was curious about what would happen if someone proved there was no God. I thought that would be a fascinating question to explore. However, most of the people I discussed it with hated the idea of such a proof, so I was forced to re-think the concept and eventually I transformed it into a futuristic story about the nature of religion and its place in our society.

I thought at first that The Devereaux Dilemma would be a single book exploring the question of faith, but I realized as I was writing it that I had a much deeper story to tell, something that required a trilogy. And I wanted to write it as science fiction because the very best science fiction serves as a commentary on the present. It provides us with a warning of where we’re headed, showing us possible futures if we don’t change our direction.

I also wanted to write realistic science fiction. Hyper drive and aliens don’t really interest me. I’d much rather explore where humanity is going, what we will be in fifty or a hundred years. We may be less than a century from the point where we can create humans of any sort we like. Already many of us have non-human parts in us or genetically enhanced parts. When do we stop becoming human and become something else, something new? When will our growing understanding of how the mind works allow for unscrupulous people in power to manipulate our minds?

With my background in legal writing, it would be natural for me to warn of what we might become in an essay or article that is grounded in facts and predictions, based on our collective history.

But one thing I’ve learned through all my years of writing is that it’s the characters who make the story what it is. Detailed descriptions of technology are meaningless without the connection to what is human in all of us. Reading statistics about the holocaust, for example, one can easily fall into a jaded mindset. The numbers are too vast, the deprivations too horrifying to fully grasp. Yet when you put that into the context of one well-defined life, you understand it much more completely.

Think about how deaths in faraway places hit us compared to the loss of a loved one. It’s never the same. Yes, it’s terrible that all those people were killed by terrorists in Syria or Iraq or New York City, but if you don’t live there, if you don’t have friends or family there, it doesn’t have the same impact as the tragic death of someone close to you.

That’s where fiction generates its power. That’s why a science fiction novel with great characters can have a much greater impact than gloom-and-doom predictions from some physicist or social scientist. We grow attached to those characters and root for them, agonize with their defeats and cheer their victories.

So The Devereaux Dilemma and The Devereaux Disaster, though occasionally dark, also offer up hope. The future is not completely dystopic in my writing. It is firmly grounded in a world much like the one we live in today, with good and bad elements. I want to show readers my vision because I want them to think about where we’re headed and if we should be moving in that direction. Forewarned is forearmed.

Steve McEllistrem

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About the Author 

Steve McEllistrem is the author of The Devereaux Dilemma, which was a finalist for the 2014 International Book Awards, and The Devereaux Disaster, released in May 2014. The conclusion to the trilogy, The Devereaux Decision, is due out in January 2015.

He has also written dozens of legal books, including Higher Education Law in America and Deskbook Encyclopedia of Employment Law. In addition, he is a producer and co-host of Write On! Radio on KFAI in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Find out more at www.mcellistrem.com and find Steve on Twitter @SteveMcEllis

Guest Post by Author Russ Hall ~ What Fuels the Story!

Retired sheriff's detective Al Quinn hasn't spoken to his brother, Maury, in twenty years but when Maury lands in the hospital under suspicious circumstances, Al reluctantly has to investigate. Al learns the hard way who he can trust - and who's willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.

With everything he loves on the line, Al will find out just how far he'll go

to protect his own.

Available on Amazon US and Amazon UK

People coming early to writing often ask, “Where will I get my ideas? What will motivate me as I write?” Slightly more experienced writers (and even they are always learning, if they’re good) may say that there is an easy answer, but it can tend to sound magical or mystic at first. I’m talking about the “creative experience.”

No matter what you write, whether story, novel, song, or poem, you’re going to eventually leave some of yourself on the page. It doesn’t matter how you start out, if you stay at your writing you will start putting things that you think about and that matter to you on the page. You’ll go back later and see that it is often the good stuff in the story, because you felt it and imbued it with emotion.

Now I like to start a story with a point of tension, one that lets characters have an arena to show the reader something about themselves. I have read about Mexican cartel violence in the news, getting more brutal and closer to where I live, and I worry about how a local drought may lead to heightened chances of huge wildfires, again happening closer to where I live. I feel emotional about these things, so I use them. They pop into the book because I’m thinking about them. They interest me, and they should interest readers.

Then I need to think about characters in this setting. I recently retired and really enjoy my solitary times alone. I’ve lived by myself for quite a while and am used to it, and uncomfortable out of it. So I ask myself, “How would I feel if that got disturbed? If someone, or even more than one person, were thrust into that space?” I feel an emotion about that, so I use it.

In To Hell and Gone in Texas, I got to draw on a setting I like, which is peaceful but could be threatened. I got to draw on personal characteristics. I do feed the deer that crowd around my front office window each morning, I do fish, and I play chess by myself (sad to admit that last one).

We all of us like to feel comfortable and protected, which is why there is nothing cozier than reading an action-filled book full of danger while sitting in a favorite chair at home. When something threatens us, when we are yanked out of our comfort zones, and when we are suddenly pulled into danger where we are way over our heads, we can feel strong emotions.

I try to use that in every way possible, the way I feel presented in a way with which the reader can resonate. As you enter the process of writing your story, or poem for that matter, you may start with one sense of what you’re writing and find, as you draw more and more upon your experiences, values, interests, ambitions that you are weaving together characters who matter, a setting the helps drive your story, and raising issues about which you feel strongly.

In the process of writing, you will also know more and more about your characters and their dilemmas, and that will help the story stay engaging as you create complex people and situations. I’m a believer that to some extent I have to become at least part of each character, understand how everything feels from his or her perspective. In my case, it’s easier to understand some of the issues and aspects of male characters. But stretching hard to understand how I would feel from the female point of view is invaluable in making dialogue that matters in every line.

This where the “trust me” part comes in. Go ahead and leap into that story with whatever germ it takes to get you going—something you heard in the media or at the hair salon. Then let your inner self loose as you write. Ride the creative experience by letting pieces of yourself happen on the page. Once you get used to it, the process won’t seem mysterious at all. It’s just how writing often works.

Russ Hall 

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About the Author

A writer of mysteries, thrillers, westerns, poetry, and nonfiction books, Russ Hall has had more than twenty books published. He has been an editor for major publishing companies, ranging from Harper & Row (now HarperCollins), Simon & Schuster, to Pearson. He lives in Lago Vista, TX, where he hikes, fishes, and tends a herd of deer that visit daily to peep in the office window and help with the writing. In 2011 he was awarded Sage Award, by The Barbara Burnett Smith Mentoring Authors Foundation--an award for the mentoring author who demonstrates an outstanding spirit of service in mentoring, sharing and leading others in the mystery writing community. In 1996 he won the Nancy Pickard Mystery Fiction Award for short fiction. In 2014 he won First Place in the Austin International Poetry Festival. Find out more at his website www.russhall.com/

Book review ~ Paris Syndrome by Tahir Shah

On the morning of her fifth birthday, Miki Suzuki’s aged grandfather gave her an unusual gift – the fragment of a story. The tale told of a magical realm where all the women were beautiful, dressed in the finest gowns, and where the men had the looks of movie stars. The trees were covered in ivory-white blossom all year round, and

 everyone was joyful and proud. This place, young Miki learned,

was a city in far off Europe – a city called Paris.

Available from Amazon US and AmazonUK

Touching, exciting, lyrical and amusing, the adventures of a Japanese girl in Paris had my full attention from page one. I was reading the Kindle version and even the fact that there are an astounding 173 chapters didn’t stop me. Perfect for reading on portable devices, during those ‘grabbed’ moments of escapism, every chapter of Paris Syndrome has an appropriately haiku-like quality.

I could feel the innocent wonder of our heroine, Miki Suzuki, at her first sight of Paris. I shared her desire to complete the simple task she had promised for her grandfather, which is of course frustrated at every turn.

Tahir Shah has an engaging style, a convincing knowledge of Japanese culture and delights in breaking the ‘rules’ of novel writing. Coincidences and misunderstandings wittily keep up the pace and even the smallest characters are wonderfully observed. I particularly identified with the unlikely hero, Michi Kinjo, an erstwhile reporter prepared to do just about anything to have a desk by the window of his office at the Asahi Shimbun (Morning Sun) newspaper.

Paris Syndrome is a book you will happily re-read and still discover something I promise you won’t find anywhere else. Highly recommended!

  

Tony Riches 

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About the Author

Tahir Shah lives in Casablanca, Morocco, with his wife. The author of fifteen books, many of which chronicle his journeys through Africa, Asia and the Americas, they have appeared in thirty languages and in more than seventy editions. He says there is nothing so important as deciphering the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels. He also makes documentary films, which are shown worldwide on National Geographical Television and The History Channel. Find out more at Tahir’s website www.tahirshah.com/ and find him on Twitter @HumanStew.

Guest Post ~ The Poet’s Wife, by Rebecca Stonehill

An unforgettable journey into the heart of one family torn apart by war. 
Granada, 1920. Free-spirited Luisa and young poet Eduardo fall in love, cementing a bond that can never be broken.

Available on Amazon US and Amazon UK 

To be honest, the setting came before the story. Many years ago, I spent eighteen months living in the southern Spanish city of Granada, teaching English as a foreign language, learning Spanish and soaking up the culture. I really did fall in love with this city and although I’d only written short stories previously, I knew that I wanted to set my first novel in this enchanting place, almost in homage to Granada.

I knew very little about the Spanish Civil War but as I’ve always been attracted to historical settings, my novel naturally wanted to be set in the past. It wasn’t until I started talking to people and asking questions that I realised the civil war was a huge taboo still, despite having finished over sixty years ago. The more I asked questions, the more I discovered that there were people willing to talk to me about it and people who weren’t. But by then I was intrigued and longed to find out more about it, particularly as I loved the work of Granada’s celebrated son, the poet Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by the fascist forces at the start of the civil war.

Once I started doing my research, I couldn’t stop, reading as much as I could get my hands on and talking to as many people as I could. I was also fascinated by the International Brigades, men and women from many parts of the world who came to Spain between 1936 and 1939 to help the democratically elected, overthrown Republican government fight fascism. Many were never to return. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to talk to one Irishman, Bob Doyle, who did survive. By then, he was in his mid-nineties and we spoke a couple of years before he died and I was amazed and inspired by his commitment all those years ago to the Republican cause, a cause that he, like so many others, risked their lives for on Spanish soil because fascism affected everybody. The character Henry in my novel is inspired by the stories of these courageous, principled people.

At heart, The Poet’s Wife is a story told through the eyes of three generations of women from one family, a family that is ripped apart by the Spanish civil war but that never loses its courageous spirit nor its dignity. This war, I feel, is a dark but fascinating slice of modern European history that is often overlooked. I am always surprised that Spain welcomes more visitors from my native United Kingdom than anywhere else in the world and yet people know very little about what happened in this country during the civil war and, more recently, General Franco’s dictatorship. Through my novel, I’d like to redress this balance as well as provide people with a compelling, emotional read.

Rebecca Stonehill

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About the Author

Rebecca Stonehill is from London but currently lives in Nairobi with her three children and husband who works as a water and sanitation engineer with urban poor communities. As well as teaching creative writing to children, Rebecca is currently working on her second novel, set in Kenya in the early twentieth century (then known as the East Africa Protectorate) and the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950’s. 

Find out more at Rebecca's website: www.rebeccastonehil.com and find her on Facebook and Twitter @bexstonehill 

New Book Launch: Knight of Jerusalem, by Helena P Schrader

Balian, the landless son of a local baron, goes to Jerusalem to seek his fortune. Instead, he finds himself trapped into serving the young prince suffering from leprosy, an apparent sentence to obscurity and death. But the unexpected death of King Amalric makes the leper boy King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, and Balian’s prospects begin to improve.

The Byzantine princess Maria Comnena is just thirteen years old when she arrives in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at her great uncle’s orders to cement the alliance between the two Christian kingdoms in the East. The child wife of a man almost three times her own age, she is despite her excellent education and intelligence little more than a pretty doll in the eyes of her husband. When she fails to produce a male heir for the desperate king, her marriage becomes a gilded prison. Until suddenly the king is dead and Maria finds herself a wealthy widow at just twenty years of age.

Meanwhile, the charismatic Kurdish leader Saladin has united the forces of Islam and vowed to drive the Christians into the sea. While King Baldwin IV—and Balian—struggle to save the Holy Land for Christendom by whatever means they can, the internal rivalries of Templars and Hospitallers, the advocates of offense and defense, and the bitter rivalries of barons threaten to tear the kingdom apart.

✰ Available now on Amazon US and Amazon UK ✰

About the Author

Helena P. Schrader earned a PhD in History from University of Hamburg with a ground-breaking biography of the mastermind behind the coup attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, General Friedrich Olbricht. She earned her BA in History from the University of Michigan and an MA in Diplomacy and International Commerce at the Patterson School, University of Kentucky. Helena has published numerous works of non-fiction and fiction. Her non-fiction books are focused on the German Resistance to Hitler, Women in Aviation in WWII and the Berlin Airlift. As a novelist, she has focused on historical and biographical fiction set in Ancient Sparta, the Middle Ages and World War Two (WWII).

Visit her website: http://www.helenapschrader.com for descriptions and reviews of her publications, or follow her blog: http://schradershistoricalfiction.blogspot.com for updates on current works in progress or recent reviews and publications. For more on the Middle Ages visit: http://www.talesofchivalry.com or her blog on the Crusader Kingdoms at: http://defendingcrusaderkingdoms.blogspot.com Helena is a career Foreign Service Officer currently serving in Africa. 

Guest Post ~ Hand of Fire: A Novel of Briseis and the Trojan War, by Judith Starkston

The Trojan War threatens Troy’s allies and the Greek supply raids spread. A young healing priestess, designated as future queen, must defend her city against both divine anger and invading Greeks. She finds strength in visions of a handsome warrior god. Will that be enough when the half-immortal Achilles attacks? Hand of Fire, a tale of resilience and hope, blends history and legend in the untold story of Achilles’s famous captive, Briseis.

Available on Amazon US and Amazon UK  

Barnes and Noble and Powell’s

That’s a quick introduction to my novel, Hand of Fire. But how did I ever think of writing about this semi-mythological woman, Briseis, whom we know about only from a few lines in the Iliad, an epic poem composed by Homer more than 3,000 years ago?

It may sound strange but I started Hand of Fire to answer a question, and in the process I found such an engaging young woman that I had to give her the voice Homer denied her—to let Briseis tell her story.

For years I’d taught the Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, and kept wondering with my students how Briseis could possibly have loved Achilles—which is what Homer shows us. The half-immortal Greek had killed her husband and brothers, destroyed her city and turned her from princess to slave—hardly a heartwarming courtship. She is central to the plot of the Iliad and yet she gets only a handful of lines. In those few words, the one clear notion expressed is her sorrow at being parted from Achilles.

I should say I always liked Achilles, the existential hero who calls the whole war into question—which shows he’s no brainwasher—so the answer wasn’t some ancient version of Stockholm Syndrome. I wrote Hand of Fire to solve this psychological puzzle.

I also had to find a vivid, historical source to fill in the many gaps in Briseis’s life story. Homer’s fragmentary bits weren’t enough. He tells us simply that she was a princess of Lyrnessos, a city allied to Troy, and Achilles destroyed that life. Who was she before Achilles came crashing in? What kind of woman can stand up to this semi-divine, but immensely conflicted man and hold onto her own sense of self, as she must have, to form a genuine bond with him?

Fortunately modern archaeology in the area where ancient Troy was located, that is modern Turkey, and the excavation and translation of extensive libraries of clay tablets have provided a richly detailed portrait of life in this exotic time and place. I mined this treasure trove and created a heroine who is both very much of her era, but who also represents the hope-inspiring resilience of women through the ages. Briseis faces the personal violence against her and her family that is the fate of women in war, but she finds strength to guide herself and others back to an affirmation of life. 

Judith Starkston

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About the Author

Judith Starkston is a classicist (B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, M.A. Cornell University) who taught high school English, Latin and humanities. She and her husband have two grown children and live in Arizona with their golden retriever Socrates. Hand of Fire is her debut novel.

Find an excerpt, Q&A, book reviews, ancient recipes, historical background as well as on-going information about the historical fiction community on her website www.JudithStarkston.com. Follow Judith  on Facebook and Twitter @JudithStarkston  and visit her on Goodreads Hand of Fire

Cover Reveal: The Prophecies, Book 2 of The Sentinel Series by Holly Martin

The Prophecies, Book 2 of The Sentinel Series by Holly Martin

Published on October 1st 2014:

The world is a big place, will Eve really be the one to save it?

Eve grows stronger and more powerful every day as she strives to ensure she is ready to face her destiny. But some of her gifts are unwelcome.  Eve's visions of the future become darker and those she loves are in terrible danger. But when her actions result in tragedy, Eve is called before The Oraculum, the council that created her.

When she is summoned to their castle she becomes aware of a rift between the council members that not only could endanger her life, but could put the whole planet at risk. Would The Oraculum really turn against her and risk everything?

But in the darkness, a light burns bright. Her love for Seth is stronger than any of her powers.

But as she battles against a new threat, can she really forsake those closest to her in order to save the world?  Will everyone Eve loves survive?

The Sentinel, Book 1 of the series is only 77p/99c so if you haven't read it yet you can download it here http://myBook.to/TheSentinel

Follow the author on Twitter @hollymartin00 and learn more about her books on her website.