Linda Welch's Blog, page 6

Demon on a Distant Shore

Demon on a Distant Shore has a lovely new cover created by Flip City Books.

 As well as custom covers, Flip City also does beautiful premade covers, book trailers and Facebook banners. If you’re thinking of getting a new cover for your book, check them out!

SAVE THIS DATE!

FREE!

 Along Came a Demon will be FREE Friday June 1st and Saturday June 2nd on Amazon. Tell your family! Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! USA UK Germany France Italy Spain.

And, the Whisperings books are now available as paperback from Amazon worldwide, including China and Canada.

 It seems I created a minor furor when I announced I am working to get my science fiction novel Mindbender into shape for republication. Readers thought this meant the end of Whisperings. WRONG. I am, in fact, 14K words into book six: A Conspiracy of Demons.

 Expect to see it this fall.

 

 

Summer Fun.

I’m looking forward to summer this year. For the first time since we moved into our mountain valley, we will not have guests, or take weeks-long vacations in other states or in the UK. Don’t misunderstand me – I enjoy entertaining guests. But our visitors have been to Northern Utah before, so keeping them amused means ferrying them to other areas of Utah or other states, so we miss many local events.

This year, I will go to every Music in the Mountains event. It happens at the ski resort across from our house.  People come from all over, not only singles and couples, but entire families. Everyone sits on the grassy slope above the ski shop and offices. We take blankets and fold-up chairs, and snacks. Or we purchase food from one of the local eateries that set up stalls below. Children run around playing. We socialize with our friends and neighbors. The air grows cooler, even in the height of summer. The sun sets. Then the music begins.

Every year, the events are kicked off by the Utah Symphony Orchestra. The area is a natural amphitheater, the acoustics are marvelous. The music booms and whispers around the valley. Every other week sees a different style of musical entertainment. This year’s performances include Reggae Rock and Classical New Age. I’ll see it all this year.

And the Ogden Valley Balloon and Arts Festival. We’ll go down into the valley early in the morning to see the hot air balloons rise. We’ll browse stalls of beautiful artwork and crafts, and munch our way through the food booth. In the evening, we’ll watch the balloons take off again in the dark, each lit up with lanterns. When they are high, they look like stars dancing in the night sky.

We’ll go the Pioneer Days events at the end of June. Parades, street festivals, shows and exhibitions.

I’ll visit the Farmers Market more than once or twice.  And this year I’ll take the time to listen to the musicians, and maybe I’ll ride in a stagecoach and watch a gunfight on 25th Street.

I’ll go to the Men Can Cook charity event. And the Chili Cook-off. And one where everything is made of chocolate. Ooh, and what about the one where we go from restaurant to restaurant?

If I’m not careful, I’ll look like a hippo by summer’s end.

We’ll ride the gondola at the Snowbasin resort for the Full Moon Stargazing and dinner.

We’ll go to the Lagoon Amusement Park. Not that anyone can get me up on a ride, but I enjoy the Pioneer Village, the old homes and stores which have been transported from all over the States. And I want to revisit Chesterfield, a wonderful ghost town in Idaho. I hope they still sell their homemade spiced peach jam in the little general store.

I know there’s a lot more to be seen and done, but I can’t remember all of it at the moment. Still, it’s going to be a very busy summer, and I’ll enjoy every minute.

A new look for Whisperings.

Long overdue. Finally here. Whisperings has new covers created by Flip City Books. As well as custom covers, Flip City also does beautiful premade covers, book trailers and Facebook banners. If you’re thinking of getting a new cover for your book, check them out!

 

 

 

 

Both Sides Now

It’s not Mother’s Day in England this month. They celebrated Mother’s Day in March. Still, I think of Mum more than usual when I see the cards in the shops. I wish I saw her more often.

She asks after her grandchildren and great-grandchildren when we talk on the phone. I had a bit of a moan about one of my daughters-in-law last time Mum and I chatted, and she reminded me of how we were often at loggerheads when my boys were little.

Mum constantly advised me on parenting, often in a very forceful manner. “She won’t listen!” I told my husband. “We do things differently nowadays, but she insists she knows how to do it the right way, and I’m wrong. We fight all the time. I dread her coming to the house. And we used to get on so well. I don’t think our relationship will survive it.”

It did.

Back then, babies were laid on their side in the crib, with a pillow behind them to stop them rolling on their backs, a bumper pad all around. Mum insisted Heath should be on his stomach. When we stayed with her, I’d check on him and find him on his stomach and have to turn him. Asking Mum to not roll him was a waste of breath.

He formed the delightful habit of banging the back of his head against the wall. Mum said he’d damage his brain.

I was alert the entire time we stayed with Mum when the boys reached the crawling/standing up stage. No gates to stop them crawling upstairs or falling down them. No safety knobs on the cooker to stop them turning on the burners. Not only were knives and other sharp objects left on the kitchen counters, Mum kept a little step in the kitchen so she could reach the top cabinets. My boys soon learned how to get up on it.

Mum said, “You grew up all right.”

I responded, “We didn’t grow up, we survived!”

Heath was tired every evening around six or seven o’clock, but I kept him awake until nine. He’d only nap for an hour, and then be up the rest of the night. Mum said I was cruel. Tom and I went on vacation to Scotland and Wales when Heath was 10 months. I called home after two days. “I’m exhausted,” Mum said. “Heath was up until two in the morning.”

I said, “You let him fall asleep in the evening, didn’t you.”

These are just a few examples of how we disagreed.

But now I’m a grandmother and I’ve turned into my mother. I am somewhat hampered in the “trying to correct obviously deficient parents” department, because I don’t have daughters. I do have daughters-in-law. Do I agree with every aspect of their care of my grandchildren? Damn right I don’t. But they are not my daughters and I don’t feel I can come right out and say anything. I make subtle little comments, usually to my grandchildren. Mum did the same. I recall her saying to one of my brother’s boys, “Poor little chap. No wonder you’re so cranky in the morning, as late as you stay up every night.”

So there we were, thirty years later, chatting about it in a light-hearted way. “Weren’t we silly,” Mum said.

A mother and a grandmother, I see both sides now.

There are always exceptions to every “rule,” but grandmothers don’t, as a rule, think their daughters or daughters-in-law are stupid and incapable of caring for their children. They don’t interfere for interference sake. No matter how they try to guard their tongues, they can’t help butting in now and then. All of us are positive we know best at one time or another. Perhaps your mother drives you crazy, sticking her nose in where you don’t think she has a right to be. But perhaps, if you look at it from both sides, you’ll see she is driven by a grandmother’s love for her grandchildren.

Mum and I laugh about it now. It’s just another in endless examples of how kids don’t understand their parents any more than parents understand their kids, this time in the context of young mothers, their mothers and parenting. What a shame we have to grow up before we understand our parents’ motivations, but that’s the way it is and will be. I know I often said to myself, “I won’t do/say/act that way when I’m a mother.” And of course, when I became a mother and faced the challenges, I often did/said/acted just as Mum had.

Mum and I were not at odds all the time. She was my rock in so many ways and still is. No matter our differences, she gave her children the most valuable commodity in the world. A mother’s love. A grandmother’s love.

And for the past fifteen years, a great-grandmother’s love.

I’m looking forward to the time when she’s a great-great-grandmother. We’ll watch the interaction between the latest generations and know just what they’re going through. And we’ll probably give each other knowing looks and have a jolly good chuckle.

Announcing . . . . .

OPEN TODAY,  the Indie Chicks Cafe where authors talk about everything except writing. Look into their lives, thoughts, ideas, dreams and motivations. The Café is now open for business.

 

AND

 

FREE today on Amazon.com. The IWU Cookbook, Dine With Us,  a collection of fantastic, mouthwatering recipes from the authors of Indie Writers Unite. Check out my recipe for Pasta a Fagioli, and many more. Delicious! I have my FREE copy – get yours

Spring Has Sprung

Spring came early this year.  I don’t look at a date on the calendar to tell me when spring arrives. Spring arrives when the first wild onion blooms in May. But Mother Nature fooled us. Wild onion bloomed the middle of April and is already dying. Normally, snow is just disappearing from the bottom of the driveway and snowdrops and daffodils are poking from the soil. Now, daffodils, tulips and hyacinth in full bloom are rioting down there. Perennials seem to sprout up overnight. And the damned weeds.

Mother Nature has disrupted my schedule.  I’ll have to get out and work on the garden soon. Not to mention doing something about the state of the house.

In Demon on a Distant Shore, Tiff Banks waxes lyrical about sunshine. “Sunshine is marvelous, not only because we need it to survive, but for how it makes us feel.” Right now I’m cursing the sunshine. It cheerfully illuminates the dust, grime, cobwebs, dirty windows and all the trash the animals bring inside on their furry bodies. So spring cleaning is also in the works.

I hate anything that takes me away from writing, but real life can’t be ignored.

Fortunately, I’ve just finished my first edit of Mindbender, so I can take a break and attend to some of the mundane stuff. Mindbender is my first love, my first book. Published in 2008, I unpublished it when I realized my writing was less than satisfactory. Then Whisperings distracted me, but I’ve always meant to get back to Mindbender. It’s soft sci-fi/fantasy. You won’t find any highly technical scientific terms you don’t understand. There are no epic space battles. It’s about people who are on a quest that challenges their self-perception and personal values, who are not always correct in their beliefs and assumptions, and if you’ve read Whisperings you know I like to write about folk who are not what they appear to be.

I have to go now, gather my mops and brooms, buckets and dusters. If I can remember where I left them last year.

Melissa Smith – Writing Out of Grief.

Writing Out the Grief

Melissa A. Smith

 

A common question people ask a writer is what made them decide to sit down and start writing in the first place. For me, it was grief.

While in high school, I wrote. I had taken journalism and the teacher loved my writings. Two pieces of my work had been published in two different school publications. I was also asked to join the staff for the school paper, but declined. I just didn’t like writing the things wanted for a paper. I liked creating stories to take you places. Inventing new worlds and people to live in them. I stopped writing after getting out of school and didn’t start again for several long years.

December 2008 had started like any other December before it. I was out shopping for those perfect gifts for each member of my family, and loving every minute of it. By my side was my shopping partner. My mom. My best friend. This year was a little different, as we made our rounds trying to get most of her shopping done earlier than her normal pace of slow (she was known to be out shopping as late as Christmas Eve), because she was set to have her final knee replacement surgery on the 19th. That day was also the last day of work I had before school let out for Christmas Break.

We had almost done everything she’d wanted to have done, done. But there were still a few things to gather, like stocking stuffers and things of that nature. She went in for her surgery and everything went great! The last time she’d been in the hospital, for the first knee 6 months prior, she’d contracted hospital-acquired pneumonia. Her doctor, wanting her to be healthy for the rigorous knee therapy that follows two days after surgery, released her the following day. The 20th.

Wanting to forgo giving you all the details, I received a phone call early on the 21st. A phone call no one wants to get. My father, who’d awoken to find his partner for the past 34 years gone, couldn’t make that call. The responding police officer had to do it for him. Pneumonia had taken her from us.

So started my decent into grief.

We were supposed to do some shopping before I took her to physical therapy that day. We were supposed to do a lot of things during my break, because she too had it off for recovery.

Instead, I had to help my dad organize a funeral.

During the year and a half that followed, I read over 230 books. All while working full time and tending to a family.

It was the start of summer vacation in 2010 when I’d run out of books to read. I dove into spending time with my boys and vegging at the pool daily. I thought it had been long enough, and maybe the grief wouldn’t be so sharp. I was wrong. Without having someplace for my mind to wander, to live in, I was a mess of tears.

It was then I’d woke up in the middle of the night, leaving a dream that made my brain buzz. I tried to shake it off, leave it where I found it. In my dreams. But it wanted to be let out. So I sat down in secret and started writing.

At first when my family noticed my switch from books to the computer and all my constant typing, they asked what I was doing. I lied. I told them I was writing to my sister who lives in Texas. At first they bought it, but as the typing went on, they were puzzled as to why I didn’t just call her and talk to her. Again, I lied. But this time I said she’d asked me to write down some things about our mom.

While they still were puzzled by all the clicking going on at the keyboard, they left me alone.

Three months later, I’d written and finished my first novel. Cloud Nine. During that time I also started on another story which I finished and released four months later. 

While writing started out as therapy for a grieving soul, it is now something I must do to keep all the exciting characters quiet. I love it! I only wish it could have developed without such dark beginnings, but nonetheless, my mother would be proud.

******

This is one story from Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

for the wonderfully low price of Free! To read all of the stories, grab your copy today!

Also included are sneak peeks into 25 great novels!

My young adult paranormal romance, Cloud Nine is one of the novels featured.

 

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Want to find out more about Melissa and her books?

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Do your part to help prevent child abuse.

 

My first few months as a new mother in England were difficult. When I came home with my son, my husband had flu. He couldn’t help in any way. I thought I had to carry on as always, keeping the house clean, doing laundry, shopping, as well as caring for a new baby. I hemorrhaged, although not seriously enough to get treatment. My baby didn’t feed well, he stayed awake most of the night. I was exhausted.

At the local Well Baby Clinic, mothers sat in a circle with their babies, with the local nurse in attendance. One by one, they talked about their children. When it came to my turn, I said, “He’s awful. He won’t take his milk, he never sleeps. Sometimes I wish I’d never had him.”

The nurse looked at me and said, “Mrs. Welch, what a terrible thing to say.”

Yeah, that’s all the help I got.

Around about that time a sensational story made headlines. A little girl had died of child abuse. All the warning sign were there, but the social services professionals who visited on a regular basis ignored them. This was the first time child abuse made headlines in modern England.

I thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

If I had a little less patience, more stress, more anger, that mother could have been me.

So when I started work at a child abuse prevention agency 17 years later, I already knew not all child abusers are evil monsters. Yes, some are, but most are parents who are at their wits end, those who can no longer cope with enormous pressures most of can’t imagine. Or they just don’t know how to properly rear a child. Or they treat their children the same way in which their parents treated them, because they know of no other way. I learned that many of these parents just need education and a few supportive services.

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. I urge you to support nonprofit child abuse prevention services.  Families that complete prevention services don’t go into the welfare system in the first place. These services make all the difference, and not only in the life of a child, and his family. They save money for our state and nation.

When a child is removed from the home, these are only a few of the services that come into play:

Children’s shelters.

Foster care.

Counseling.

Therapy.

Police.

Courts.

Parenting Classes.

Anger Management Classes.

These services are paid for on a state and federal level, and can be needed for years after the child returns to his home. Dealing with the aftermath of abuse costs state and federal governments thousands of dollars, per family. Prevention services, on the other hand, are cheap by comparison.

Please, give to your local agencies. When government feels the crunch, it cuts funding to needed community services. I’ve never understood that, but that’s the way it is. Small, local agencies are closing or having to drastically reduce services. So give a little now, and save a lot. Give a few dollars and save your state thousands. Give a few dollars and save a child.

A Prayer for Children

We pray for children who put chocolate fingers everywhere, who like to be tickled, who stomp in puddles and ruin their new pants, who sneak popsicles before supper, who erase holes in math work books, who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those who stare at photographs from behind barbed wire, who can’t bound in the street in a new pair of sneakers, who never get to go to the circus, who live in an X-rated world.

 We pray for children who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who sleep with the dog and bury the goldfish, who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money, who cover themselves in Band-Aids, who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink, who slurp their soup.

 And we pray for those who never get dessert, who have no safe blanket to drag behind them, who watch their parents watch them die, who can’t find any bread to steal, who don’t have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser, whose monsters are real.

 We pray for children who spend their allowance before Tuesday, who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food, who like ghost stories, who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse the tub, who get visits from the tooth fairy, who don’t like to be kissed in front of the carpool, who squirm in church and scream in the phone, whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

 And we pray for those whose nightmares come in the daytime, who will eat anything, who aren’t spoiled by anybody, who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep, who live and move, but have no being.

 We pray for children who want to be carried and those who must, for those we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance. For those we smother . . . and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.

 Ina J. Hughes.

 

 

 

 

 

An Inspirational Story From Michelle Muto, Who Never Gave Up.

THE MAGIC WITHIN AND THE LITTLE BOOK THAT COULD

That’s what I’ve been calling The Book of Lost Souls, the book that started my path to publication. I’ve always loved to write. I’ve always loved the way imagination and words blend on a page, the way they transport a reader to faraway worlds, or right next door, where witches live. From the time I was very young, books were an amazing world to me. There was no greater joy than going to the library with my mother whose love of books knew no measure. When I was very young, my mother read to me every night. As I grew older, we’d talk about the books we were reading.

Even as a young child, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. But, writing wasn’t what paid the bills. I got a regular job and life went on, although I still dreamed of writing. My father always told me to believe in myself and to never give up on what I firmly believed in. A few years after his death, I took up writing again. My mother, who was now ill and who had moved in with my husband and me, was happy to read what I wrote, or to set the table in order to give me a few more minutes of writing time.

And so I wrote and edited and revised. Just before the book was ready to send to agents, my mother died. I set the book aside. Writing was too painful, too full of memories.

But, the stories in my head wouldn’t let up, and so after a few years I started writing again. This time, I wrote about a teen witch named Ivy and her life in a small town, and I quickly fell in love with the story and the eclectic group of characters. I think of it as Buffy meets Harry Potter. When I typed the last line, I actually felt a pang of sorrow—I didn’t want to say goodbye. Ivy and her story became The Book of Lost Souls, and after polishing it up, I sent it off to agents. Plenty were interested and requested the full manuscript. Unfortunately, most of them thought the book was too light. Too cute. Too Disney. They offered to read whatever else I had, as long as it was darker. Darker sells! Or so they said.

So, after two revisions for two separate agents that eventually didn’t pan out (they said the book still had a lighthearted feel to it that wouldn’t appeal to publishing houses), I set The Book of Lost Souls aside and started working on an outline for a much darker book.

It was around this time that the economy began to collapse—hard—and I was given the pink slip on Friday the 13th, right after I had completed a project that saved the company $400,000 annually. Say goodbye to eighteen years of loyal service! Suddenly, writing a darker, more dystopian book about the afterlife on top of losing my job seemed too much to take. Still, I recalled my father’s wisdom of believing in myself even when no one else did. I wrote and finished the next book, Don’t Fear the Reaper, in about seven months.

Still unemployed despite literally hundreds of applications, I began to worry we would lose our home or deplete our savings before I found a job. My career in IT was gone—off shored as they call it. I also wondered if I’d ever see any of my books published. I was so close to getting an agent so many times. Agents wrote back: You’re a strong writer. Or, The Book of Lost Souls is a great story and is well-written, but it’s not for me.

Nearly every morning, my inbox was filled with rejection letters from jobs and agents, yet I tried to stay positive. I kept repeating my father’s words to believe, to never give up. For every rejection, I sent out twice as many applications, twice as many query letters. I just tried harder.

I had been querying Reaper for about three months when I got an editorial letter from one of New York’s biggest literary agencies who’d had The Book of Lost Souls for nearly a year. A year! But, the letter was so enthusiastic about the story and my writing that I sat down and made every last revision they suggested. I turned it in and waited. Months went by. In the end, they rejected the story—not because they didn’t love it, but because in the year and change they’d had the manuscript, another client had submitted a proposal for a story about a teen witch. Conflict of interest, they called it.

And that was that. My novel, the book that was finished, was dumped for someone else’s book that hadn’t yet been written. Somewhat angry and depressed, I set The Book of Lost Souls aside. Again. By now, I was at the end of my rope. I was still unemployed and out of unemployment benefits. The only work I could find was the occasional short-term computer job, some tech writing gigs, or dog-sitting. Nothing full-time, and certainly nothing we could count on.

If the near-miss with Super Agency wasn’t enough, I found myself running into similar situations with Don’t Fear the Reaper. Now, agents were saying, Too dark! But, you’re a talented writer and we’d love to see other work. Or, You’re capable of incredibly incisive scenes—the opener is still one of the best things I read all year. And, my personal favorite, In this economy…

It was then that I learned about self-published authors such as Karen McQuestion and Amanda Hocking. I decided to go indie as well, starting with The Book of Lost Souls. What did I have to lose? A lot if I didn’t figure out a way for our household to stop hemorrhaging money. The only problem? I had no idea where to start. I sent an email to Ms. McQuestion, in the hopes she could point me in the right direction. She was so incredibly kind! Not only did she reply, she sent me a wealth of information on self-publishing. Today, she shares all that information on her blog. I’m incredibly grateful to her.

I got a cover I could afford with the help of another indie, Sam Torode. Two editor friends went over my work. Finally, I formatted the book and the rest is history. I uploaded The Book of Lost Souls in early March, and it’s been getting consistently great reviews ever since. As for being too lighthearted? I receive emails all the time from people who love that the book is funny, upbeat, and clean.

Within my first five weeks of self-publishing, I hit three best seller lists on Amazon. Me. An indie author without a publicist or a big agency or publisher behind them. Just me, my computer, my loving husband, and the devotion of two dogs at my feet.

I’ve been asked if there will be a sequel to The Book of Lost Souls. The answer is yes. Two more books, maybe a third. I just haven’t thought that far out yet.

And the other, darker book? After some revisions, Don’t Fear the Reaper debuted in late September 2011. On its first day, the book reached lucky #13 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases, Children’s Fiction, Spine-Tingling Horror. 

I’m only sorry that my parents aren’t here to see this. I took my father’s advice and my mother’s faith and reinvented myself. I still dog-sit and take on small computer jobs and tech writing gigs to help keep us afloat financially. But one day, I hope that my hard work will pay even more of the bills. Until then, I’m at peace with the way things are. 

Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Great advice. And so, The Book of Lost Souls, the book that nearly wasn’t, became the little book that could. I’m a firm believer that hopes and dreams are something to hold onto and fight for. Believe in the magic that is you. Keep your dreams close, and set your imagination free.

I’d like to dedicate my section of this anthology to readers everywhere—words alone cannot express how much I appreciate you believing in me. You’re every bit as much a part of the magic as Ivy herself. 

So, thank you, Dear Reader. Sincerely. Because, every author with a story to tell writes with you in mind.

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Createspace: The Book of Lost Souls Don’t Fear the Reaper