Traci L. Slatton's Blog, page 8
August 2, 2015
Book Trailer for BLOOD SKY
So BLOOD SKY will soon be out… Here’s the Book Trailer.
This is the book trailer for BLOOD SKY, Book 4 in the award-winning After Series, by Traci L. Slatton
In a time of apocalyptic despair, love is put to the test… Deep in the badlands of Outpost City, in the Dark Horse saloon, a poker game is being played. The stakes are life and death—for the world. What can Emma afford to lose? Will she gamble on herself, or on Arthur? Will love find a way when the apocalypse closes in? A mystical odyssey, a haunting love…
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July 29, 2015
BLOOD SKY by Traci L. Slatton: Coming Soon
BLOOD SKY is available for Amazon pre-order.
In a time of apocalyptic despair, love is put to the test… Deep in the badlands of Outpost City, in the Dark Horse saloon, a poker game is being played. The stakes are life and death—for the world. What can Emma afford to lose? Will she gamble on herself, or on Arthur? Will love find a way when the apocalypse closes in? A mystical odyssey, a haunting love…
The eagerly awaited fourth book in the award-winning paranormal romantic dystopian After Series will soon be published.
A few select bloggers have been offered the ARC. If you’re a reviewer and you’re interested in an Advance Review Copy, please contact me directly.
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July 27, 2015
Birthday Fun
My husband Sabin spoiled me on my birthday. Some of my friends did, too. It was a delicious experience.
We started celebrating early because we had to make a trip to New Hampshire. So we went out for dinner on my birthday eve. The restaurant was The Fig and Olive, which I love. I’ve never had a bad meal there. The chicken tagine was fantastic! I love their fun drinks, also.
On the day of the anniversary of my birth, we drove to New Hampshire. We crowned the day from a small peak.
Then we found a charming American tapas restaurant called Tavern 27, which served the most delicious appetizer type foods. Sabin and I both ordered steak, though I got a small one. The meat was buttery soft and delectable, falling off the knife in luscious little bites of the tenderest flesh. Our kind, attentive waiter explained that it was organic meat from a nearby farm, in honor of New Hampshire’s state tradition of healthful food.
My friend Micki put together a beautiful image for FB, acknowledging me with much love. Don sent me flowers. Lots of emails and phone calls.
It was too much fun.
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July 20, 2015
Goodreads Giveaways: FALLEN, COLD LIGHT, and FAR SHORE
BLOOD SKY, Book 4 in the After series, will soon be published. In honor of its impending release, I am running three Goodreads giveaways, each for two copies of the book. So I will be giving away two copies of FALLEN (Book 1 of the After series), two copies of COLD LIGHT (Book 2 of the After series), and two copies of FAR SHORE (Book 3 of the After series). The giveaways will run from today through August 30, 2015. Good luck!
My author page at Goodreads can be found here
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
And the giveaways can be found on the giveaway page here
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Fallen
by Traci L. Slatton
Giveaway ends August 30, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Cold Light
by Traci L. Slatton
Giveaway ends August 30, 2015. See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Far Shore
by Traci L. Slatton
Giveaway ends August 30, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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July 5, 2015
Terminator Genisys: A Review
Go see this movie, it’s GREAT!
Now that my loyalty has been assuaged, let me discuss the movie more thoughtfully.
This latest addition to the franchise pays loving homage to the first Terminator. For people like me who are fans of the first Terminator, that’s a beatific thing. There were moments…lines…scenes…that made me cheer, because they precisely evoked the first Terminator.
The first Terminator is a perfect movie. Artistically speaking, it was extremely well done. I’m talking as a writer now, as a professional storyteller. The first movie has no loose ends, no extraneous moments, no extra dialogue, no unnecessary anything, no flab whatsoever. The entire movie argues to the specific value that machines can never be human.
What’s the name of the bar where Kyle Reese first reveals himself to Sarah Connor, when he saves her? Tech Noir. What’s on the answering machine for Sarah and her roommate? “Machines need love too….” Nope, they don’t. That’s the point. Machines don’t need love…they never feel remorse or pity. Machines are not human.
Machines will destroy humanity.
The original casting of Arnold Shwartzenegger as the Terminator was brilliant. As a young dude, he was so buffed up on lifting and steroids that he didn’t look human. He looked like a machine–like living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
In Terminator Genisys, Arnold looks…old but not obsolete. Never obsolete. No, never. I don’t care how many children he sires out of wedlock. As the Terminator, he can be gray, but he will always be relevant.
This movie was fun, and it had appropriate slow moments, too. What I mean is that, in order to be satisfying, movies need to flow between heightened intensity and lowered intensity. What I see lately–even in Mad Max Fury Road, which I enjoyed, [HELLO: CHARLIZE THERON, YOU ARE MY QUEEN!!!] is that too many movies are one long chase with explosions, boobs, and cars. Not good.
You get that kind of crap when you have too many suits involved in the process. Those people should not give a creative opinion. They should keep their traps shut and count beans. They should not try to weigh in on art–because when they do, they destroy art.
Terminator Genisys had moments of reflection and pause to balance and heighten the moments of wild over-the-top intensity. Someone exercised a little bit of control over those stupid suits.
My husband didn’t love the movie as I did. He’s not a fan of the first Terminator, that perfect movie. He asked me, “Why do you like those kinds of after-the-world-ends movies?”
Fair question.
Since I was a kid, I’ve looked around and noticed the insanity and evil in the world at large. Genocide. Monsanto. Bio-engineered fruits and vegetables that look good but taste like crap. Terminator genes. The unrepentant, unbridled financial ambition of large, multinational corporations that function as sovereign nation states without oversight or accountability.
The apocalypse is coming and it will be unleashed by one of these companies.
Am I really the one person who sees Google in Genisys? The head of Google says they come up to the line of being creepy but don’t cross over. I disagree. It is my personal opinion that Google crosses right over. Data mining is the latest iteration of EVIL. Big Brother is watching: Brought to you by Google.
I think Google is Genisys is Skynet.
So I am attracted to these themes because I see them being played out in front of our eyes.
Few people care. As long as they have the latest iPhone, Netflix, Spotify, and access to marijuana, they don’t question what is really going on.
A stoner is a subject, not a citizen.
The suits are winning. In the real world and in the making of movies.
Go see Terminator Genisys. And think about it.
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June 30, 2015
The Last Ship: A review
Review of THE LAST SHIP on TNT.
I am a Navy brat, let me get that out of the way immediately. My father was career Navy. He served on several submarines: the George Washington, the Benjamin Franklin. He served on one of the old pig boats, too–and anyone who knows what that means can email me directly and ask which one. When my dad was done with subs, he served on a destroyer. My dad was career Navy and I am a Navy brat, got that?
I am also a red-blooded woman. Yep, I appreciate eye candy, aka HOT GUYS. And isn’t Eric Dane just SMOKIN’ HOT?! Ohmigod. Eric Dane in a uniform is like…oh, skip the first two bases and go directly to a home run. Ok? I mean, Wow. The man is hot. Have I mentioned that Eric Dane in a uniform is hot? Hot like, wore out my vibrator, wore out my right hand, started in on my left….
So this series started out with two features strongly in its favor, concerning me: it revolves around a US Navy ship, and it stars Eric Dane, ohmigod. This show couldn’t have hit more of my buttons IF IT TRIED. Oh please. Somewhere, Sigmund Freud, that old misogynist, is chortling in his grave.
But it wasn’t Eric Dane’s hotness that got me to buy a season pass to Season 2 on my Apple TV. Nope, it was the fact that this TV show is very well written, with intriguing 3 dimensional characters and plot lines that grab you by the throat and keep you hooked. The action is AMAZING and exciting and I can’t WAIT to see what happens in the next episode. I care about all the characters and about the US Nathan James.
The Apocalypse has happened and one lone US Navy ship is fighting to save the world. What stronger premise could there be?
“Mom, this sounds like something you wrote,” said the Munchkin.
Yeah ok, I am post-apocalyptic, as an author.
Soe, watch this show, OK? Buy a season pass on iTunes. It’s GREAT!
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May 26, 2015
Lost Parents: When High Conflict Divorce Leads to Parental Alienation
This is my latest article on the Huffington Post. It’s about Parental Alienation. I interviewed Dr. Bill Bernet on Independent Artists & Thinkers a few weeks ago.
The space of time sandwiched between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can bring unique anguish for people whose children have become alienated from them through a high conflict divorce.
Parental alienation happens when a child becomes enmeshed with one parent, strongly allying himself or herself with that parent, and rejects the other parent without legitimate justification. These children are encouraged by one parent, the favored parent or alienating parent, to unjustly reject the other parent, the targeted parent. The children can fall prey to the alienating parent’s tactics as a means of escaping the conflict.
According to psychiatrist Dr. William Bernet, professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University and a researcher into the phenomenon, “Almost every mental health professional who works with children of divorced parents acknowledges that PA—as we define it—affects thousands of families and causes enormous pain and hardship.” (Parental Alienation, AACAP News, Sept 2013, pp. 255-256.)
Bernet and other researchers refer to eight criteria for diagnosing parental alienation, including a campaign of denigration against the targeted parent, the child’s lack of ambivalence, frivolous rationalizations for the child’s criticisms against the target parent, reflexive support of the alienating parent against the target parent, the child’s lack of guilt over exploitation and mistreatment of the target parent, borrowed scenarios, and the spread of the child’s animosity toward the target parent’s extended family or friends.
These criteria sound academic but their effect is exquisitely awful in the most human and primal way. The child basically constructs an alternate reality where the parent is some kind of monster. There’s no longer any sense of the parent as a human being with the ordinary nuances of the gray scale, or as a good-enough parent; the parent’s actions and statements are twisted, distorted, and massaged to “prove” that the parent is unworthy of contact.
Children will adamantly maintain that they themselves have compiled their list of rationalizations for the parentectomy in progress. This is called the independent thinker phenomenon.
For a parent who would willingly give his or her heart or liver to a beloved child who needs it, it’s a nightmarish turn of events. The pain is surreal, and it’s frequently heightened both by outright viciousness on the child’s part and by the child’s complete lack of remorse about the way he or she has treated the targeted parent. The child feels entitled to demonize the targeted parent and justified in doing so, and therefore entitled to behave with extreme nastiness toward the parent.
Amy J. L. Baker, PhD, one of Bernet’s research colleagues, writes about seventeen primary strategies used by the alienating parent to foster conflict and psychological distance between the child and the targeted parent.
These include poisonous messages to the child about the targeted parent in which he or she is portrayed as unloving, unsafe, and unavailable, such as, “your mother is a rage monster who shames you”; erasing and replacing the targeted parent in the heart and mind of the child, “you can trust mommy, she doesn’t judge and malign you like daddy does”; encouraging the child to betray the targeted parent’s trust, “how bad was daddy this weekend?”; and undermining the authority of the targeted parent, “your mom’s rules don’t apply, you don’t have to listen to your mother, do whatever you want.”
See the whole article here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/traci-l...
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May 23, 2015
Fragile
Yesterday I was at Johns Hopkins, standing at the bedside of a very sick, most beloved friend.
I don’t know if she’ll make it all the way back.
This particular friend is an extraordinary human being. She’s immensely kind without being a patsy. She’s unstintingly generous and also savvy, an astute businesswoman who worked as a book keeper in her early life. She’s spiritual and impish. She’s wise and funny. She’s opinionated and yet respectful. She changed the world in a specific way–for the better–and few people know it. I do, because we had a similar background, in some ways.
I know that she changed the world and that many people benefited from a specific thing she set in motion. Yet she didn’t want anyone else to know about it. She preferred to stay out of the spotlight.
She’s loving and yet regularly looked me in the eyes and told me what I needed to do to improve myself. She was always right, yet I never felt that she was judging or condemning me. I just felt loved and seen, and I felt that if I did what she was suggesting, my life would improve.
Over the last few decades, I had adopted her as an alternate mother. My biological mother is a borderline personality disorder, incredibly vicious toward me, completely unaware of it. I married badly the first time around. I found someone who would continue the pattern of abusively treating me like a non-person who existed only to serve others, or at best, like a second class citizen.
This woman was someone who came into my life as I started to heal and I began to realize that I deserved better. That I deserved to be treated well, with respect and kindness.
Her constant mantra to me, from our earliest meetings, was, “Trust yourself, Traci. Be happy and be soft. Trust yourself. Love yourself.”
This stood in direct and startling contrast with the mantras of my family of origin and my first marriage, where I heard, “You are not a person. You don’t deserve to be treated well. You are a (fill in the blank: non-human, slave, rage monster, crazy weirdo, etc.).”
She was model to me for how to be spiritual and yet also be grounded in reality. In fact, far too many “spiritual” people flake out. My friend was not flaky. She was dependable, reliable, and intensely practical.
At the same time, she was the most psychic person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of psychics. I have no small talent in that direction myself, though I tend to underplay it these days. She was, with one exception, always right when she read the energy of a person, situation, or event for me.
That one time had to do with me; when she read that situation, I vowed I would not let it turn out that way. I worked unbelievably hard, with another party’s help, to prevent the outcome she foresaw.
She helped me forgive my father, who was a sociopath. As my father had by beating me, her father tried to kill her. Her own father was, if anything, a worse sociopath. Yet she harbored no ill will toward him. Being with her, in her presence, I realized that holding on to anger at my father would only hurt me. And I realized that my dad was just a terribly flawed human being doing the best he could, which was piss-poor terrible. That was his best.
I can remember the specific moment I forgave him, sitting in a church that my little one likes. I prefer synagogues, but I am tolerant and accepting of my little one’s choices. So I was there to please my little one when that current of forgiveness ran up me like gold light, washing everything out.
“That’s the way it happens,” my friend said, with a warm smile. “Congratulations. You’re doing the hard work of life. I’m so proud of you.”
She never suggested my father wasn’t a sociopath. But she knew that letting go of the anger and drama would benefit me.
She was right. As she was about so many things.
She knew all my secrets. She knew the things I was deeply ashamed of. She knew what I had done that I wished I hadn’t done, and she knew what was done to me, the horrifying things I’ve never told anyone. She loved me anyway. She held my confidences in a neutral, loving space.
I love her for it.
I hope she makes it back. Yesterday I stood at her bedside, praying for her. “Please God, help her.” I was also keenly aware of the fragility and preciousness of life, and of now important it is to let the important people in your life know that you love them. Everything can change in a split-second. Someone you always relied on is suddenly gone, suddenly shattered.
She would tell me to know that and to stay open and soft. She would tell me that that is the essential task of the human being.
To the people in my life whom I love: You know who you are, and I am telling you, I treasure you.
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May 11, 2015
Traci Slatton interviewed by Desiree Watson on Wellness Lounge
Desiree Watson interviewed me on her VoiceAmerica radio show Wellness Lounge, A Step Further.
Life in its multifarious impishness is both funny and fun. Recently I started a BlogTalkRadio show, Independent Artists & Thinkers. I’ve been booking guests and thinking about people I’d enjoy having on the show.
A friend of many years came to mind, a woman of vision and great energy: Desiree Watson. Back in the day when I was a healer, Desiree was interested in holistic health and wellness, and we had done some things together. So I googled around and found her Wellness Interactive site. Desiree has been a busy lady, I thought, and promptly emailed her.
A few hours later, my cell phone rang. It was Desiree herself. What a delight to hear her warm voice!
I had meant to invite her to be a guest on my show, but she beat me to it and invited me to be a guest on her VoiceAmerica Radio Show: Wellness Lounge, A Step Further. Her show is focused on empowering listeners, body mind and soul.
Here’s what the show has to say about itself:
THE WELLNESS LOUNGE-A STEP FURTHER empowers you with the benefits of a wellness lifestyle. Desiree Watson, a pioneer in the wellness lifestyle movement, guides you toward incorporating wellness into your life through commentary and interviews with exemplary personalities from such diverse fields as professional sports, corporate management, government, and health care. Our topics embrace the interconnections of mind, body and spirit, while offering in-depth analyses of the wellness lifestyle movement and its impact on the health care system, politics and international aid. Related topics will spark awareness of the positive impact of the wellness lifestyle movement and how a wellness lifestyle commitment can successfully empower the individual and influence educational and political processes on a local, national and international scale. The Wellness Lounge – A Step Further airs Mondays at 6 AM Pacific on VoiceAmerica Empowerment and Saturdays at 7 AM Pacific on VoiceAmerica Variety.
This morning we aired. It was a delight to be a guest; Desiree has a talent for supporting and encouraging her guests to open up and be eloquent. What fun!
Here’s the show link: http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/85279/empowerment-of-self
You can listen here, too.
http://tracilslatton.com/watson051115.mp3
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April 23, 2015
BookGorilla and Kindle Nation Daily: Excellent Promotion
BookGorilla brings free or deeply discounted books to readers via an online subscription service.
As an independent author and the publisher of a small press, I am always, eternally, and forever looking for ways to market and promote my books. It’s an essential part of the job. I do marketing and promotion tasks weekly. Should do them daily.
I can write and publish the most awesomely delicious books, but if readers don’t know about those books, they won’t buy them.
Over the years, I’ve tried various methods for making people aware of my books. I’ve paid to have book trailers made. Those help; everyone likes to watch a short, well-made video that teases and intrigues.
I regularly submit my books to book review blogs, because those sites can spread the word about a book all across the worldwide web. In fact, I constantly troll the internet for book review sites that would be a good fit for my books.
I blog regularly, and you, dear reader, are tasting the fruit of that effort at this very moment. I write pieces for the Huffington Post. I create podcasts for an iTunes podcast channel. I’ve recently started a BlogTalkRadio show, “Independent Artists & Thinkers.”
Perhaps the single most effective promotion I’ve done, that has the most immediate and measurable impact on ebook sales, is run a promotion through BookGorilla and Kindle Nation Daily.
The way it works is that readers subscribe to BookGorilla. When they sign up, they choose their personal reading preferences from a detailed list of genres and sub-genres. Then, every day, subscribers receive an email tailored specifically to their individual preferences. This email lists top quality ebooks that are, for a limited time, offered either free or at a juicy discount.
Kindle Nation Daily is more like a news service for all things kindle, and it dovetails with BookGorilla to offer bargains to readers.
For my recent novel BROKEN, I paid for a Kindle Nation Daily feature, which includes an excerpt, and received a free slideover to the BookGorilla email blast.
The KND feature looked gorgeous:
Beautiful, yes? Beneath the 5 Star Praise box was the excerpt, so readers could get a taste of the novel–so they would be tempted to buy it.
The same day, Broken was included in the BookGorilla email blast:
Nice, right? But much more than nice. It’s effective. Immediately, book sales increased. Amazon ratings started rising. After a while, I took screenshots to capture those lovely high rankings:
Then:
And:
It was extremely satisfying to watch the ratings rise! I didn’t capture the ascent at its peak, because I was busy through the day.
To be clear, the ratings rose because the book was selling and selling!
These screenshots speak for themselves. BookGorilla, with Kindle Nation Daily, was an effective way to market and promote my novel. I recommend it.
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