Simply Irresistible ~ Guest Post from Naomi King

Simply Irresistible:
Cute Kids and Heroic Dogs

As ROSEMARY OPENS HER HEART goes on sale this week, I’m going to reveal a sneaky way I love to manipulate readers. I’ve used it in several books before, but the appeal is universal: no matter what sort of story you’re telling, cute little kids hook readers’ hearts. And when you add in valiant dogs who come to the rescue just when those little kids are in deep, dark danger, it’s an unbeatable combo. Kids and dogs just go together—especially in faith-and family stories like these Amish series I’ve been writing.
   
Travel back with me, to those thrilling days of yesteryear…do you remember watching “Lassie” on TV (black and white, back in the day)? Do you recall how just hearing the theme song of that show made you rush to the living room to catch the latest adventures of Timmy and his faithful collie, Lassie? You knew darn well that sometime during the show, Timmy would get into a dangerous situation and Lassie would drag him out of the pit or defend him from a predator. Or, that noble, intelligent dog would rush back to the house and bark and bark until someone there realized Timmy was in deep doodoo and needed more help than Lassie could give him.

The technique still works! And I use it ruthlessly in ROSEMARY OPENS HER HEART.

While Rosemary, a young Amish widow, already has plenty of conflict on her plate, her toddler Katie is the light of her life—and the life of the party, far as how this story unfolds. Matt Lambright (we met him in book 1, ABBY FINDS HER CALLING) meets Rosemary at a wedding and wham! He has to know more about that attractive stranger in black. But it’s playful Katie who started the ball rolling by toddling over to him and wanting to play with his two Border collies, which meant Rosemary came into the scene looking for her wandering child. See how a three-year-old blonde set up the whole romance with a giggle and a finger in her mouth?

Rosemary, however, wants nothing to do with Matt—or any other man. She lost her husband in a hunting accident and moved in with his father Titus to run the household and help with Titus’s twelve-year-old daughter, as Titus’s wife had died shortly before his son did. It was a noble gesture on Rosemary’s part, but now she’s trapped. Titus, who raises sheep, decides to partner with Matt and combine their flocks, so Rosemary must decide: will she make the move to Cedar Creek, or stay behind on her own? It doesn’t help one bit that everyone is telling her little Katie needs a father, and that Rosemary should come out of mourning and live again.

Long story short: during the move, Katie’s innocent wanderings lead her into the sheep pasture, where testy ewes are watching her…ready to charge if Katie messes with their lambs. Matt and Rosemary realize the little girl has disappeared but she could have toddled anywhere on either of two farms—crossed the road and gotten hit—

But the Border collies save the day. And when Matt scoops that little girl into his arms and gives her a talking-to about how badly she’s scared everyone, Rosemary realizes that maybe this young fellow who’s been pursuing her so relentlessly has a few points in his favor. It’s a gratifying story to tell, all about Amish families coming together to help each other. And just like when each TV episode of “Lassie” came to an end, you can heave a sigh of relief that all will be well. Rosemary might be the title character, but it’s her daughter and Matt’s dogs that pull readers through the story by their heartstrings.

Thanks for your interest in my books! You can find excerpts and more info at www.NaomiKingAuthor.com. Here’s wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving, and many blessings to count in the coming holiday season.

Guest Post from Charlotte Hubbard - Author of Autumn Winds

 

 Goats by Charlotte Hubbard

You wouldn’t think inspiration for an Amish novel would come from a trip to Lowe’s, but that’s exactly where the idea for the four little goats—and then the two maidel aunts—in AUTUMN WINDS came from!

You see, I was hanging around Lowe’s waiting for my husband to find his home improvement stuff, just gawking at the book and magazine rack to kill time. I was partway into writing this book about Miriam Lantz and her wonderful new love, Ben Hooley . . . wondering how on earth they were going to get Bishop Hiram Knepp off Miriam’s case, when voila! I spotted a book about raising goats! I didn’t know a thing about goats, and didn’t know how they would play into the story, but instinct told me that if I took that book home I wouldn’t be sorry.

From out of nowhere (which usually means it’s a direct lightning strike from God) I got the idea that goats would be just the diversionary tactic I needed to waylay Hiram’s unwanted attentions—and along with the goats came two old maid school teacher aunts. We all know how you can’t tell those women what to do! And, as it turned out, Hiram Knepp was no match for Jerusalem Hooley and the four little goats she brought him as a gift when she and her sister Nazareth came to Missouri with their nephews, the Hooley brothers.

What followed was sheer magic, and more fun than I’ve ever had with creating characters. From the first moment they appeared on my page, Jerusalem and Nazareth were so alive and so funny—and so outspoken—I knew AUTUMN WINDS wouldn’t be the last story they appeared in. Hiram, too, was more smitten with Jerusalem than he cared to admit . . . enough that he sort of makes a fool of himself. But then, everyone around Miriam is just grateful that the bishop has backed off, while Hiram’s oldest daughters are glad for the way the Hooley aunts take charge of their four youngest sibs as only old schoolteachers can do.

But because Bishop Knepp has been a villain my readers, my editor, and I love to hate, I certainly couldn’t let his attraction to Jerusalem run the easy, satisfying course. Nope. The arrogant bishop of Willow Ridge will dig himself deeper into trouble in WINTER OF WISHES (comes out 9/13) just as Jerusalem and Nazareth have inspired sweet romances with far more worthy men in AN AMISH COUNTRY CHRISTMAS (comes out 10/13).  

So, see? Who knew, when I entered Lowe’s on that ordinary evening about a year ago, that I would be taking home such extraordinary inspiration for many Willow Ridge story lines to come?  I hope you’ll enjoy the Hooley sisters as well as the fine, fun story Ben Hooley creates with Miriam Lantz in AUTUMN WINDS. Isn’t it a wonderful thing when a spirited, forty-year-old widow finds love with an attractive (and rather mysterious) younger man? 

Thanks to Charlotte Hubbard for taking the time out to share with us readers just how Autumn Winds was conceived and giving us insight into what it takes to breath life into a novel!

Guest Post with Author M Thomas Long of Blue Monday

Neil Diamond, Bob and Writing

According to Bill Murray in the movie “What About Bob?”, ‘there are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him.’ 

It was just a few minutes before Neil took the stage at the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum in Birmingham, Alabama a few years back when the power of artistic creation hit me in a way that I had never realized before. There was an aura of excitement and anticipation in the air that surrounded you, even soaked into you…whether you were a fan or not. 

As I sat in the upper deck, I looked around the arena and thought about exactly what I was experiencing. The audience of over 18,000 ranged from young teens to men and women in their 70’s, all wearing similar Neil Diamond merchandise. Some had signs. Women in the first few rows down on the floor had bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals and other gifts that they planned present to Neil once the show started and they could get his attention for a few seconds.

Suspended above the stage was over 100,000 pounds of lighting and sound gear worth at least half a million dollars.

Then the most fascinating, incredible aspect of the entire scenario occurred to me. Everything I was seeing and would soon experience was the product of one man’s imagination. More specifically, his art. A seed had been planted in his soul and he had exercised the courage to water it, face the vulnerability to expose it to the light, care for it, prune it and allow it to grow and mature.

Whether you side with Bob or his ex-wife concerning Neil Diamond, you owe it to yourself to experience his classic song ‘I Am…I Said’ in a live setting. The power, the emptiness, the longing and the painful struggle of self-assertion move you in a way that you just don’t experience very often in this life. It moves you. The force and range of emotion you experience is not what you could have imagined just a few minutes earlier looking at inanimate instruments on a dark stage.

That’s why we read fiction; more importantly, it’s why authors write it. The very same experience is what we both are looking for, and it comes from the same place that a Neil Diamond show originates.

It’s where all art comes from that reaches us. Painting, music, film, sculpture, photography, writing and many others all originate in the imagination of an eternal soul inhabiting a body on a journey through this life. Asking questions, finding answers, seeking solutions, sharing, laughing, hurting and healing. 

A single person with an idea, a belief, a story, an experience, and a blank canvass. The brush can take many forms; chalk, oils, a chisel, or words...in the hands of an artist, anything can become a brush.

When a person decides to face the vulnerability and pick up his or her personal brush and make that first stroke, indescribable beauty and power can be unleashed. For a writer, it is often a story that reveals us to ourselves.

For the reader, it’s that feeling you get when you hit page 20 and realize that this one is speaking to you…yes, this one is special. By page 50, you’re a part of a situation, a town, a life, a challenge that calls you back every time you leave to take care of necessities like work, relationships or buying groceries. It’s not just some character in a book who falls in love, wins the lottery, loses a loved one, meets someone special…it’s you doing those things and it’s hard to distinguish where the character ends and you begin.

All the emotion, the introspection, the sheer glee of breaking through, solving the problem, reaching the goal…it all takes place in a most unique, incredible medium.

No words have been spoken. There was no music or special effects to guide the senses. Often, the characters and towns never existed in our world in a physical sense. The writer silently writes or types and the reader silently reads. Only silence and intimacy, and the world changes.

That’s why we write; it’s why we read. ~ M. Thomas Long

Please don't forget to check back tomorrow for my review of M. Thomas Long's latest novel Blue Monday sponsored through Pump Up Your Book Tours. You will definitely LOVE this one!

Why I Want A WABAC Machine ~ Guest Post from Author: Deborah Heal

WHY I WANT A WABAC MACHINE
by Deborah Heal

Some people I could mention have already started dropping hints about the gifts they want for Christmas. As for me, I’m hoping for a WABAC Machine. I’ve wanted one ever since I saw Sherman and Mr. Peabody’s on our black and white TV when I was a kid. In each episode, Sherman and Mr. Peabody went back in time to a famous event in history, which was always humorously skewed to show what had “really” happened.

My desire to know about the past comes from growing up in an old house, in an old village, both steeped in history.

I grew up in Woodburn, Illinois, an unincorporated village so tiny it only had one store where you could get Wonder Bread, bologna, bacon, Cokes, cookies, and gasoline. Woodburn may have been boring compared to the city we had left behind, but we lived in a cool vintage brick house. I loved that old house for its character, or as I like to say, its “soul.”

And some of that soul seemed to be embodied in what my family still calls "The Brick." We discovered it, engraved with the date the house was built, on the back porch when we moved there. I used to run my fingers over that date, wishing I could go back to see what it was really like so long ago.

Woodburn wasn’t always so small. Once it had been a thriving little town with numerous stores, including the one owned by Mr. Welch, the builder of our house, which had stood where the petunias grew in our front yard. I learned that the brick for our house had been made right there in Woodburn. That where our pasture was, there once had been a livery stable and blacksmith shop. That down the street from us once stood an inn that served as a stagecoach stop. That Abraham Lincoln used to travel through our town and sleep in the inn and in some of the houses.

I used to tell the kids at school that Lincoln had slept in my house too. How I wish that were true. But since the house was built in 1874 that wasn’t likely, unless he had managed to be reincarnated and decided to come back for a visit to Woodburn for old time’s sake.

My brothers and sister and I were thrilled the summer we discovered Mr. Stevenson had an actual stagecoach stored in his old barn. We may have trespassed just a bit to sneak in and explore this wondrous blast from the past.

There are a couple of old houses still standing in the country around Woodburn that were also stagecoach stops. There’s the old Pennington place north of Woodburn, painted blue with white trim. And then Shake Rag Corner, between Woodburn and Brighton. It wasn’t a regular stop. If you wanted to board the coach, someone waved a rag out the window so the driver would know to stop.

I loved imagining the bustling little town. Late at night, I could almost hear the sounds of horses clomping down the street, the stage coach rushing by, the blacksmith clanking out horseshoes. I could read the history books, and I could imagine those earlier days. But I always yearned to know more.

When I grew up and married my husband, I moved two miles up the road from Woodburn to the Heal Farm. One day the county got around to giving our road a name, and with it came a shiny new sign. I got curious about how they came up with the name. Miles Station? What kind of a Station? So I went back to the library to find out.

Amazingly, there used to be a town named Miles Station just down the road from our farm, named, not for a unit of measurement as I had first assumed, but for its founder Jonathan Miles, a pioneer from Kentucky who settled there in 1832. He and his wife had three children, one of them a girl named Charlotte. Today, you’d never know a town once thrived there, but if you look closely, you can see clues.

All that history seeped into my bones as I grew up there in Woodburn. And so, when I sat down to write Time and Again, I told the story of Abby and Merrideth, who live in an old, rundown house in Nowhereville which had in the 1850s been the town of Miles Station. And, although I have never found a WABAC Machine, my characters (Ah, the beauty of fiction!) get to “time-surf” back to see what it was like in the “olden days.”


CLICK TO LEARN MORE:

About Time and Again: Charlotte of Miles Station The History behind Time and Again
About Unclaimed Legacy, the second book in the seriesThe History behind Unclaimed Legacy

About the Author
    Website: http://www.deborahheal.com
    Facebook: http://facebook.com/DeborahHeal

Where to buy the books
    Amazon
    Barnes & Noble

Guest Post: Where Ideas Gestate by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

WHERE IDEAS GESTATE
By Benjamin Kane Ethridge

            It’s interesting many people want to know where an author’s ideas come from. Did they have a vivid dream and happen on something by chance? Did they find a secret book bursting with fresh new material? Or did they steal the idea from a friend who didn’t have the ambition to write?

            I suppose any of these notions could be viable. Well, the book bursting with concepts is probably a stretch—while I’d definitely recommend reading some great authors in lieu of finding a magic cookbook. Really though, the answer to this question is boring. Where do ideas come from?

            Your brain.

Everybody has ideas. Case closed. How you recognize good ideas is more valuable to this discussion. Crazy concepts enter our minds and sometimes manifest into scenarios. Writers tend to immediately frame these as a larger story. Richard Matheson, for instance, was almost run off the road by a semi truck on a trip once. The truck driver wasn’t homicidal and yet…  what-if. Matheson’s near-accident was literary intercourse for his mind, and his short novel Duel, the resulting baby. 

            Was it a good idea for a story though? I say yes. But how do you distinguish the good from the bad?  Without being too wishy-washy, I’ll say that one can never know the answer until the story has been consumed and the verdict is in. However, judging from all the stories you’ve read or heard or watched, it’s easy to determine if it’s worthwhile in comparison.

            I thought of Matheson for my example because today I was almost rear-ended by a mysterious looking figure in a white van. This person had some type of white and blue head-wrap, possibly a religious garment. My mind, as soon as I knew I was safe, started immediately playing off that garment. That person was a lunatic driver, and yet, what if that wasn’t the whole truth… that head-wrap was strange—vaguely middle eastern, but nothing like I’d seen any culture wear. If that was a psycho back there, perhaps he’d invented his own religion. Maybe he’s a maniac that has all sorts of strange rules he lives by and practices a religion that only manifested in his mind?

            Has a story with a character like this been done before? Honestly, I don’t know. Probably, is always my first reaction.  Now, I’ll go a bit further, with some Brian Keene philosophy here: who cares if it’s been done before; the real question is, has it been done by me? I’ve never written anything about a delusional psychopath who invented his own religion, and more importantly, I’ve never read anything like that by anyone else. You never want to embrace a cliché, but if you do attempt a story with a familiar idea to others, at least you’re going at it from your own perspective. 

So make it seem like your own idea, regardless if you know it’s been done before. It’s all about what story you wish to tell, after all. The great ideas are born from the desire to tell them. Your DNA will run all through it, from cover to cover, and by the time people are reading and asking how you came up with the concept, you’ll vaguely recall the genesis, like a drunken tryst, but that baby will be alive and bawling, ready for the world.

Guest Post from J. Thomas Shaw - Author of The RX Factor

A Solution to Transform Medical Research and the United States Health Care System

Despite spending more than any other nation in the world on health care, only 15% of Americans believe we have the world’s best health care, according to a recent Pew Research Center and Gallup Poll. The CIA world Factbook reports that the United States is ranked #50 in terms of average life expectancy. The average age at death in the U.S. is 78.49 years of age, over 11 years behind #1 ranked Monaco.

This is where you end up on the list with a “make money at all cost” health care system. However, I have a three step plan that will transform medical research and the health care system as we know it in the U.S. If we act now, we can go from #50 to #1 by 2030 while at the same time cutting our spending on health care in half. My plan will also drive down insurance premiums, making coverage affordable for the vast majority.

Half of the country is demanding that the government stay out of health care while the other half is supporting a quasi-socialized health care system. With such vehemently opposing views, there is zero chance for a consensus and therefore nothing will ever get done that moves us in the right direction. And this is exactly what Big Pharma wants. Therefore, the first step is to change the debate. From Hillarycare through Obamacare, we have been debating {health care} costs and {health insurance} coverage. Cost and coverage are not the problems; they are symptoms of the real problems which are {unidentified} causes and {a lack of} cures.

The next step is to stop donating money to the mega health charities who each take in tens of millions of dollars annually by offering hope to find a cure, but continue to come up empty as a result of Big Pharma’s influence over all medical research. Instead, not-for-profit universities conducting medical research need to sever their ties to Big Pharma and seek funding from private citizens. The vast majority of medical researchers want to be involved in discovering the cause and cures for human ailments, but they also have to live and they know who butters their bread. If private individuals fund this research, then our nation’s medical researchers no longer need to be beholden to Big Pharma.

The third step is to fight fire with fire. Like any other publicly traded company, Big Phamra has a fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value by enacting business plans that will increase revenues and profits year over year. In the current environment, the best way to accomplish that objective is to get more people reliant (addicted) on the drugs they produce.

Big Pharma’s mission is not necessarily to get every single American popping their daily maintenance drugs, rather it is to make as much money as possible and selling addictive maintenance drugs is the best way to accomplish that mission as things stand right now. Therefore we need to change the tax code and enact legislation to make their pursuit of profits align with the greater good of the health our citizens.

This can be accomplished by the carrot and stick approach. First we need to show Big Pharma the stick:

1. Institute a windfall profits tax on any profits derived from any new products developed that is considered a maintenance drug.

2. Eliminate deductions for R&D expenses associated with any drug being developed as a maintenance drug and not a cure.

Next is the carrot:

1. No income tax paid on the profits generated by any product that cures a human ailment – for eternity.

2. Offer permanent patent protection on any product produced that offers a real cure. Expand patent protection to natural cures documented in human trials.

3. Pricing – fix pricing on drugs that cure human disease to make it as profitable to cure as it does to maintain in today’s health care environment.

This is all about money. If we have the courage to make those changes to the tax code and enact this type of meaningful health care reform, within 15 -20 years, we will have a cure for nearly every human disease known to man. In addition, the cost of health insurance will be affordable for almost everyone and the vast majority of us will end up living much longer and more productive and healthier lives.

About J. Thomas Shaw

J. Thomas Shaw is the author of The RX Factor, a fact based thriller that pits one man against Big Phamra and the FDA. Fact based fiction has the power to bring people from all walks of life together and focus on a single issue. Check it out at www.therxfactor.com. The web site includes reviews, excerpts, a book trailer that has been viewed by over 50,000 fans in the past few months, a book review contest and a 6 day/7 night dream vacation sweepstakes. You can follow the author on Twitter @thejshawfactor and on Facebook at the link below: https://www.facebook.com/pages/J-Thomas-Shaw/164417803664023

Watch for my review coming up on The Rx Factor next month. You won't want to miss this!