MaryAnn Bernal's Blog, page 423

History Trivia - Edmund de la Pole executed

April 30

311 Emperor Galerius legal recognition of Christians in the Roman Empire.

313 Roman emperor Licinius unified the entire Eastern Roman Empire under his rule.

1006 Supernova was observed in Europe, China, Japan, and Egypt.

1513  Edmund de la Pole, Yorkist pretender to the English throne, was executed on the orders of Henry VIII.

1527 Henry VIII of England and King Francis of France signed the treaty of Westminster.

The Stream: Emprise - Kindle Edition - free through May 1st, 2013

Emprise for Kindle is free through this Wednesday, May 1, 2013http://www.amazon.com/Emprise-The-Stream-3-ebook/dp/B009YYFGFM/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1367240364&sr=1-3-fkmr0&keywords=The+Stream+Emprise+by+Bill+Jones+Jr

   In small-town Virginia, sixteen-year-old Charlie Patterson is hunting creatures that have escaped from the dream world, the Stream. With his partner, Robin LeBeaux, he discovers that something is tearing apart the gateway that separates dreams from reality, and even life from death. Now, he and Robin must find the source of the invasion from the dream world and stop it, before the entire universe turns to chaos.

There is, however, a complication -- Robin has begun to realize that she may be falling in love with her best friend, just when he no longer seems interested. First invading creatures from a nightmare realm threaten the fabric of reality, and now she has to fight off rivals for Charlie’s affection. Both teens' worlds are about to get very complicated.

Powerful, imaginative, poignant, funny and romantic, this exciting installment of The Stream features characters from the prior books, but with a story that stands on its own. It promises to please lovers of fantasy, adventure, and romance everywhere.    

The Phil Naessens Show 4-29-2013 Week Five Major League Baseball Preview

http://phillipnaessens.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-phil-naessens-show-4-29-2013-week-five-major-league-baseball-preview/  
Week Five of the Major League Baseball season is upon us. Please join host Phil Naessens and special guest Sports-Kings Reading Between the Seams Managing Editor David Whitlock as they preview several key matchups this week including Washington visiting Atlanta, Colorado against Los Angeles, Houston against New York, St. Louis against Cincinnati  Boston against Toronto, Pittsburgh against Milwaukee, San Francisco against Arizona and Anaheim against Oakland

History Trivia - Joan of Arc victorious over the English at Orleans

April 29

711 Islamic conquest of Hispania: Moorish troops led by Tariq ibn-Ziyad land at Gibraltar to began their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus).

1109 Hugh of Cluny died. Hugh was the driving force in bringing the monastery of Cluny to preeminence in medieval France.

1347 Catherine of Siena was born. Catherine, the patron saint of Italy, played a significant role in returning the Papacy from Avignon to Rome. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

1429 Joan of Arc led French forces to victory over English at Orleans.

Home Wrecker by Brenda Perlin - Release Party April 29, 2013 -TODAY 4 pm PST Behind the Scenes and More tantalizing tidbits

You don’t have to be Home Wrecker to enjoy the book!
Please join me and my friends here on Facebook for my Home Wrecker book release party on Monday, April 29th at 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Pacific Standard Time
 https://www.facebook.com/events/447180968707670/ Brenda Perlin12:38am Apr 29
HOME WRECKER, A SUSPENSEFUL COMING-OF-AGE STORY
A Heroine Finds Her True Match

Ladera Ranch, April 29th, 2013: Home Wrecker, a contemporary fiction novel, is set to captivate readers across the globe with its re-release.

Home Wrecker is an exquisitely written coming-of-age story revolving around the main character, Brooklyn. This new novel is inspired by the true-to-life experiences of Brenda, although the names, places, and dates have been changed to protect identities. Through the novel, the author conveys the harsh realities faced by a woman conflicted between her heart and her conscience. When she reaches the painful realization that her yearning for a deep connection is not being fulfilled by the relationship with her husband, she finds herself inadvertently drawn into a passionate, soul-searching, struggle from the emptiness... and, in the process, becomes accused of being a Home Wrecker.

“From the moment I started reading this book I knew I was going to like it. Little did I know by the end of the book I would fall in love with it,”
–Natalie(Amazon Review)

Home Wrecker will be available through Master Koda Select Publishing, via Amazon, as a Kindle ebook and paperback April 29th, 2013.

Master Koda Select Publishing is a small, but high quality, publisher of ebooks and paperbacks. The company takes pride in its authors by implementing aggressive marketing initiatives. Master Koda Select Publishing selects only a few authors per year to ensure they are receiving the attention they deserve.

For further inquiries about Home Wrecker, please contact:

Kim Mutch Emerson http://masterkodaselectpublishing.com/

https://www.facebook.com/HomeWreckertheBook
https://twitter.com/HomeWreckerbook
[image error] 
Home Wrecker:
"At the party, I remember a lot of drinking, dancing and people passing around a thin cigarette that didn't smell like my dad’s Marlboros. I didn’t really understand that they were using drugs because I had never witnessed it before. I was pretty sheltered and naïve about such things."[image error] PLEASE DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY IT'S COVER.
THINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE. [image error]  
Home Wrecker
"He carried around an innocence that I no longer possessed; he was not jaded like me. So much bad stuff had happened and there were times when my hope was gone. He, on the other hand, still looked for the bright side. If only I could let go of some of the darker side that seemed to have haunted me throughout my life. I realized it was time to let go of the pessimism. I wanted to learn to look at things through his eyes." [image error]
  

Gladiator's Pen: Villains Are Valuable to Verse

Gladiator's Pen: Villains Are Valuable to Verse: Villains are essential for a story. They give our heroes and heroines purpose. Baddies help the good guys see how important the good thi...

The Ritual by Mark Barry - behind the scenes

The Ritual by Mark Barry

The Ritual, at 130,000 words, is Green Wizard’s longest piece of continuous work. It is horror, but like all Green Wizard books, it is written with a difference.

But first, a digression.
In 1982, at eighteen, as a student, I started work on a horror novel based on the magnificent cover of the first Black Sabbath album. 


I bought a secondhand typewriter and wrote most of it in a bedsit, where I lived with my then girlfriend, Julie.  (The rent was eleven pounds a week and it didn't change for three years). 

I wrote it in a huge bay window and I wrote most of it with the curtains open as I watched the people of Plymouth walk and drive by. 

Proper work


Writing with a typewriter is proper work. You have to really push the keys and you can’t write 2.5 k per day without causing serious repetitive strain injury before long. That’s why many of the books in the decade after the typewriter were much shorter and faster. Health reasons. You had to replace the ribbons (which was quite an expensive exercise ) and there was just the one choice of font. You crossed out mistakes and then, when you’d finished, you went back and rewrote the manuscript, eliminating the mistakes. 




If you wanted a copy for yourself, you inlaid the sheet of paper on which you were writing with royal blue carbon paper. 

After a while, you got used to it and some of the original manuscripts are works of art. The ones that survive from the golden era of writing in the fifties are worth money – the basis of my book “Hollywood Shakedown”. 

Writing on a word processor is fantastic – and, as I wrote the other other day – has democratised writing and created an explosion of creative talent  and desire the world over. But writing a complete manuscript on a typewriter it something else. 

(Any of you do it? I’m toying with the idea of doing so for Christmas to see what it’s like, whether I'm remembering something through rose tinted spectacles).
This is what my books are like, btw. Massive digressions.
A setback

So I wrote the manuscript and handed it to my friend Phil Hill to read. Excitedly, I awaited his response.
“I much prefer your assessed essays,’ he said, looking quite guilty.
So discouraged was I, I didn’t write a complete manuscript again for twenty three years.
The manuscript was thrown in with my diaries, cards and love letters from my then girlfriend Julie (whom I was going to marry, who I loved with rare enthusiasm, until she shagged a soldier (or a sailor) on a student bingo one night on Union Street, transforming a naïve young lad from Nottingham into the elephant-skinned cynic he is today), into a suitcase and stored in my dad’s loft. 

I tried to look for it a while back, but it had gone. Probably for the best.

Blockbusters
The Ritual, which was written from January to March 2012, is the son and daughter of that manuscript. At the time, in the eighties, I was reading King, Herbert, Sharman, Hawkey, the amazing Peter Straub, the last embers of the New English Library literati, and anything I could get my hands on. 

I must have read every single modern horror paperback printed between 1980 and 1985. Then I stopped. Just like that. I was no longer interested in horror fiction. The desire just left me behind.

So why The Ritual? 
I guess it was something from my unconscious, a debt to be paid to all those authors who taught to me to read and write more than any English teacher did at the rather brutal school I was forced to attend as a child. 

But mainly, I wrote it because I realised that no one writes long books any more.
Almost every book I read in those years, (the late seventies to the middle eighties), was a long read, a shoebox, a doorstop sandwich. 

Something which could last at least a week of a fortnight’s beach holiday in Benidorm. A book you couldn’t slide into a jacket pocket. And all this with size ten Times New Roman. Big books. 

A big, memorable read.
After a standard sized opener (Carrie), shockmeister Stephen King wrote three long classics in a row: The Shining, which is a monster of a book and possibly the greatest horror book ever written, Salem’s Lot, which is a long, long book about vampires which still has the capacity to curdle milk, and most colossal of all, The Stand.

Not particularly horror, but very, very long and scary in parts. King memorably described the latter as his Vietnam War and it nearly drove him mad.
His friend and confidante Peter Straub seemed incapable of writing a short book at the time and wrote three increasingly scary novels - a loose horror trilogy, Shadowland, the brilliant Ghost Story, and the book that most inspired The Ritual, the unbelievable Floating Dragon.




(Straub turned to horror after his serious literature novels sold in the tens and then returned to serious literature without ever replicating the success of this trilogy – by some way the best written horror novels in history).

Other authors followed suit with the big long books: There’s the magnificent Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon (which will knock your head off) and Judgement Day by Nick Sharman. Long long books. You can still find these books now in second hand shops and online.
The reincarnation of the blockbuster

Then, as soon as I disappeared from the world of horror fiction, it appeared that so did the long novel. 

When I started writing, I was surprised to see that Amazon classed 50,000 words as a Novel and 80,000 words as moving into Epic territory. I had to laugh. I wouldn’t buy a book as short as 50k. I’d only just be getting into it and I would feel cheated. It seems that not only music, films and TV had descended into dumbed down status.
So, bearing all this in mind, I decided to write a horror novel. A big, epic horror blockbuster.
My favourite genre in horror is the Resurrect Lucifer genre. 

Satan Worshippers. You can keep vampires and zombies and all that – they don’t exist and thus, I am uninterested in reading about them, 

But near me, is a coven of witches. 

Near where I live, in a small village near Mansfield, there is rumoured to be a sect of wife swapping devil worshippers from all over the East Midlands who sacrifice goats, and black chickens and white cockerels on certain nights of the year.

Walpurgisnacht. April 30th/May 1st. The night the witches dance.
Near me, are Druids.
Real people. Messing about with the occult. Some of them are trying to resurrect Satan.
Love it!
The Ritual: Contents

Original Pre July Cover designed by
Igor and Oleg Designs of Carpathia
The motif for Green Wizard is Ordinary People. Extraordinary Situations. The Ritual fits it like a glove.
So The Ritual is about a satanic cult of American devil worshippers who follow a mother and a daughter from Ohio to the prosperous town of Wheatley Fields. 

It’s not clear why they do so. Mum (the MILFY, Lindsay Wagner look-a-like, Phillippa) and Daughter (the angry, outlandish, England-hating Emo, Jennifer), are unaware of the stalking until strange things start to happen in their lives. 
And the strangeness transfers to the posh, insular people who live in the town which begins to erupt. 
People die horribly. Unexplained deaths. Missing people. Strange animals. An infestation of  ravens. Worms consuming gardens. Ephemeral shadows everywhere just under the level of perception. A terrifying spider visiting each house. An uncatchable spider, unnaturally fast, the size of a saucer.
The church is taken over by the handsome and popular American, The Reverend Starkweather. Shops are bought for amazing prices and before you know it, the Americans are coming in force. Soon. You cannot get a hotel room anywhere. There is an event coming to Wheatley Fields. A once in a lifetime event.

Oblivious, Phillippa and Jennifer try to get on with their lives – until one day, it’s too late.


It’s wacky, intense, bloody, sexy, fast paced, cheeky, gory, political, has a core of social comment and a skin of bleak 2012 reality, and it ends in a Crank-style climatic bloodbath I haven't seen in years.
Chapter's 36 and 41 are well over the top, as are the Uppity Box chapters. The characters are engaging and likeable, even when they are no supposed to be. There are references to over fifty Hammer Horror films. 

There are historical references, there is psychic phenomena; there are gorgeous lipstick lesbians, massive explosions, disappearing things, horrible animal infestations, doppelgangers, evil American villains, nasty English snobs getting their just desserts - and some mint jokes.  

(NB: "mint" is British English for "great")

And there three twists which none of my proofreaders spotted. 

Talking about myself? I generally hate  my own work and I absolutely detest having to market my work on FB, Goodreads and worst of all - the absolute worst of all - Twitter. 

But I can read this book over and over again.  It has everything I want to read in a book.

Gosh, that was a long and self indulgent article!! Enjoy. Love, Wiz xx
Oh. The original title for The Ritual was The Daughter of Satan

TDOS cover
Igor and Oleg Designs 2012

 Visit Mark Barry's author page at Amazon for a complete selection of his work. UKhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
US
http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

History Trivia - Conrad of Montferrat assassinated

April 28

32 Emperor Otho (second emperor of the Year of the Four Emperors) was born.  His reign lasted three months - January 15 - April 16, 69.

357 Emperor Constantius II, after dealing with the Franks, visited Rome before moving his army north to campaign against the Sarmatians, Suevi and the Quadi along the Danube. Constantius spent most of his reign quelling uprisings throughout the Roman Empire, succumbing to a fever in the winter of 361 at Mopsucrene (central Turkey).

585 War between Lydia (modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir) and Media (modern northwest Iran) ended by solar eclipse.

1192 Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat (Conrad I), King of Jerusalem, in Tyre, two days after his title to the throne was confirmed by election.


1442 King Edward IV of England was born. The first half of his rule was marred by the violence associated with the Wars of the Roses, but he overcame the Lancastrian challenge to this throne at Tewkesbury in 1471 to reign in peace until his sudden death.

The Night I Danced With Rommel - Book Review

Review by Mary Ann Bernal
 The Night I Danced with Rommel is about the life of a young German woman, Hilde, who survived World War II.  The author brings to life the time period, accurately describing the events, which shaped Hilde’s life.  The reader is drawn into a war-torn country where civilians are not privy to the truth of Hitler’s regime, where speculation and fear dominate daily life.  Hilde’s courage is evident as she tries to maintain a degree of normalcy with her young children while her husband is deployed, which is severely tested during the bombing raids.  The gamut of emotions is evident, no matter the nationality of the political arena.  A great read and highly recommended.
 

http://www.amazon.com/Night-Danced-Rommel-ebook/dp/B00B854ZXY/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1367114542&sr=8-1&keywords=the+night+i+danced+with+rommel

Home Wrecker by Brenda Perlin - Release Party April 29, 2013 - More tantalizing tidbits

You don’t have to be Home Wrecker to enjoy the book!
Please join me and my friends here on Facebook for my Home Wrecker book release party on Monday, April 29th at 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Pacific Standard Time  https://www.facebook.com/events/447180968707670/



Brooklyn is a Southern California girl that married the wrong man--only it took her over fifteen years to realize it.

Why? Because the heroine of this recently completed novel, Home Wrecker thought by looking for a different kind of man would lead her to the man she should have been looking for all along.

Set in California in the 1960’s through current day, this first person character driven narrative is a 70,000 word true life romance story. Names, places, dates and the circumstances of the characters in this memoir have been changed to protect their identities.
[image error]  Home Wrecker:
"Bo and I should have been enjoying our new found love without interruption. The start of a relationship was the only time when everything was pure and unmarked. Our new love had been flawed by scandal, accusations and controversy. We had these extra experiences getting in the way of what felt natural to us." [image error] HOME WRECKER:

Bo and Brooklyn

"Somehow, we both got carried away. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but before long, I knew nothing was ever going to be the same. I guess you could say we were falling in love; I think we fell. There was no turning back and I did the most unpredictable thing by not wanting to work things out at home and just packing my belongings and leaving. There were no talks, therapy or decisions to make. It was just me saying I was done and that was that. Within days, I was out of the house." [image error]