Harmony Kent's Blog, page 63
January 31, 2020
Using Goodreads Listopia to Promote Your Books
Check out this great post from Mae Clair over at Story Empire today … are you brave enough to ask someone to add your book? >>>
Hi, SEers! Mae here today with a small promo tactic you may not be using. This one involves some help from your friends, but it’s another avenue to get your work noticed. Have you ever search…
January 29, 2020
Wednesday Weirdness: The Ghosts of Time, Part 1
Fun with Wednesday Weirdness over at Mae Clair’s place today >>>
We’ve often heard the expression “time stopped.” But can it really? As much as I love time travel speculating about traversing centuries, time flows in a single direction–forward. Despite col…
January 26, 2020
#CoverReveal: Grinders by C S Boyack @virgilante
Hi everyone. Today, I have great pleasure in hosting fellow author and friend while he tours the blogosphere revealing the cover for his latest book, Grinders. Having read and enjoyed Craig’s other books, I’m so looking forward to this next one … but not too soon, Craig, because I still have to read Serang, lol! Okay, enough with my messing around … let’s hear from Craig >>>
I’m here to reveal my newest cover and talk a bit about Grinders. This time, I’m tackling a cyberpunk world. It’s one of those worlds where the Internet and being connected too much controls our lives.
One of the things I like about science fiction is the ability to project current events into the future. I call this, “Poking things with a stick.”
I poked a lot of things in this book, but most of them are in passing. Some of them show up in advertisements, which are invasive in this world. Others might just be a news blurb. There are times when I dive a bit deeper, and not everything is negative. Here is a small list of things that show up in the story:
Global warming
Plastic pollution
Helicopter moms
Cyber shut-ins
The energy crisis
New ways for package thieves to operate
Police who can’t carry guns until they are five-year veterans
Homeowner associations
There are a lot more, and most of them are pretty subtle. Cyberpunk is not known for deep plots, but I wanted one anyway.
Grinders is set about a hundred years in the future, in San Francisco. The main characters are cops assigned to the Grinder Squad. This is the duty nobody wants, and you almost have to screw up to get this assignment.
Grinders exist today, but I ramped them up for this story. These are people who surgically modify themselves, or each other, in basement surgeries, beauty salons, and tattoo parlors. Real world examples are those who implant chips under their skin to allow themselves to unlock doors or start cars without a key. There has even been one who injected dye into his eyeballs in an attempt to see in the dark. In that example, it actually worked but the results were temporary.
My story involves the downside of these modifications, why they’re illegal, and most of them are a bit more extreme than the real world versions. For example, you’ll meet Brandi, who has moth-like antennae implanted into her forehead. They aren’t just cute, they allow her to taste virtually everything. She’s almost like a bloodhound, only using the sense of taste.
Grinder Squad rarely ever does anything, but the new girl on the squad, Jimi, wants to bust a grind shop in the worst way. She feels like it could be her ticket off this crap detail and on to better duty.
One of my silly goals was to release the book in time for Chinese New Year. I’m not going to make it. I still need to finish my final pass, send it to the formatter, and get my promotional posters. It’s going to need a blurb, too.
I targeted this date because in the story, it’s the Year of the Rat. An important part of the story takes place at San Francisco’s annual parade. There are even a couple of rats in the story that play a pivotal role. Aside from that, I was born in the Year of the Rat.
Readers won’t actually care about my silly target date, and it’s more important to give everything the final polish. What I did get in time was cover art. So Gong Hei Fot Choi, everyone, and enjoy the cover. The story will be available before you know it, and I’ll announce that on my blog.
January 24, 2020
Smorgasbord Cafe and Bookstore – Author Updates #Reviews- #WritingProse Harmony Kent, #Fantasy Jack Eason, #Thriller Allan Hudson
One of my older publications … Polish Your Prose, which is all about how to self-edit your book, is getting some love over at Sally Cronin’s place today, along with a revisit of a recent 5 star review that I’m still doing a happy dance over >>>
Welcome to the second edition of the Cafe and Bookstore updates this week where I share recent reviews for authors on the shelves. The first author with a recent review is Harmony Kent for her non-…
January 22, 2020
#BookReview: Order No.227. From Stalin With Love by Marina Osipova @marosikok
Hi everyone. Today I share with you my second review of the week. This one is by an author I came across via Sally Cronin’s Cafe and Bookstore. I’ve haven’t read anything from this writer before, and being a fan of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I had to give this book a go. I’ll let my review say the rest >>>
About the Book:
“It is necessary to defend each position, each meter of our territory, up to the last drop of blood, to cling for each plot of Soviet land and to defend it as long as possible.” – from Order No. 227.
Based on the actual events on the Eastern Front of World War II, this short story is a rare account of a Soviet penal company, told from a perspective of a real person, the military prosecutor, Jakov Antonovich Krivenkov, and a fictional character, an ordinary Russian woman, Matryona, both caught in the horror of an impossible situation.
427,910 Soviet men shed their blood in defending their motherland in penal military units. They were to stop the enemy regardless of cost. Eighty percent of them did not survive. This is the story of thirteen of them.
My Review:
This is a short read at about 40 pages. But for all of its small size, it packs a lot in.
The story is told from two different points of view: the main character is based on a real person–the author’s grandfather–and the second character is a fictional woman in her late thirties, who is the only remaining person in an abandoned village as the fighting front approaches.
The content and style put me in mind of many of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books. However, many errors let the read down. We have things like ‘waived’ instead of ‘waved’, ‘caving’ instead of ‘cawing’, ‘glowed’ instead of ‘glowered’, ‘in mass’ instead of ‘en mass’, and ‘down’ instead of ‘dawn’, etc. Also, some sentence structures read strangely … for example: ‘And what for would she need it?’ instead of ‘for what’, and ‘What kind of life she had?’ instead of ‘What kind of life did she have/ (or) had she had?’, etc.
The errors were numerous–I had 18 notations for so few pages, and I don’t start notating until something has occurred a few times. All of which brings my rating down by a star.
With that said, I connected to the main character, but not so much with the village woman. The story is a familiar and brutal one, where prisoners and convicts are sent to the front to fight as a ‘penal troop’, and such men were expected to fight to the death to defend every last inch of ‘the motherland’.
The author portrayed well the complexities of war, and showed that both sides are simply human–often young men barely out of boyhood–rather than outright monsters. Of course, some were monsters, on every side of the war, but there were plenty of good people caught up in a bad situation.
The story itself (minus errors) merits 4 out of 5 stars. I enjoyed this book, and overall it gets a solid 3 stars from me, which means it was good (see below).
***
NOTE ON RATINGS: I consider a 3-star rating a positive review. Picky about which books I give 5 stars to, I reserve this highest rating for the stories I find stunning and which moved me.
5 STARS: IT WAS AMAZING! I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN! — Highly Recommended.
4 STARS: I WOULD PULL AN ALL-NIGHTER — Go read this book.
3 STARS: IT WAS GOOD! — An okay read. Didn’t love it. Didn’t hate it.
2 STARS: I MAY HAVE LIKED A FEW THINGS —Lacking in some areas: writing, characterisation, and/or problematic plot lines.
1 STAR: NOT MY CUP OF TEA —Lots of issues with this book.
Character Archetypes: The Hero
Check out a fun post from Craig Boyack today over at Story Empire >>>
Hi Gang, Craig here today. Put on your tinfoil hats, because I’m about to create a wormhole in the writing world. Once Upon a time, I wrote a series about The Hero’s Journey, also known as th…
Source: Character Archetypes: The Hero
January 21, 2020
The Light by @MarciaMeara
Hi everyone. Today, I am delighted to host fellow author and friend Marcia Meara, who is showcasing her latest book, The Light. I’ll let her tell you all about it >>>
Thanks so much for having me here today, Harmony! I’m truly excited to be sharing an excerpt from my fourth Wake-Robin Ridge Book, The Light, with your followers, and I hope they’ll be intrigued. Rabbit came along in the second book of my Wake-Robin Ridge romantic suspense series and usurped the entire thing. Happily, my readers seem to love him more than all my characters, so I think he did me a favor.
~~~
Excerpt from The Light: Midway into Chapter 2
“MA’AM? CAN WE TALK NOW?”
SETTING: THE WISEMAN’S VIEW OVERLOOK
Rabbit has convinced his mama and daddy to take him to see if the infamous Brown Mountain lights will make an appearance on Halloween night.
~~~
By the time full dark fell, Branna was asleep in her backpack carrier, her head resting on Mac’s shoulder. Rabbit had stopped pacing and stood leaning against the stone parapet, eyes glued to the east toward Brown Mountain.
A few stars twinkled above, and I had turned on our small, LED camping lantern, but overall, the night was inky-black and almost unnaturally quiet—until the growl of an approaching vehicle broke the shivery, anticipatory silence. A few minutes later, a young man lugging photography equipment trotted into view, slightly out of breath, even though the short, paved path was an easy walk from the parking lot. He came to an abrupt halt when he spotted us.
“Oh. Hi. I didn’t expect anyone else to be here on Halloween, especially with a kid.” He glanced at Rabbit and shrugged. “No candy here, I mean.”
Rabbit eyed the newcomer then offered a friendly grin. “We thought Halloween would be the most fun night to see the lights. Is that why you came?”
It shows how much both Mac and I had learned to trust Rabbit’s gifts—he’d become some sort of litmus test for strangers. If he relaxes around them, we tend to do so, as well. In this case, the young, probably college-aged man smiled back and introduced himself as Austin Dupree. He confirmed my guess when he added, “I’m planning to do a dissertation on unexplained phenomena in North Carolina, and these lights are at the top of my list, so I come here a lot. You don’t mind if I set up my cameras, do you?”
Mac and I didn’t mind a bit, and Rabbit was more excited than ever. He watched Austin’s every move, staying well out of the way but making comments now and then and asking the occasional question.
“That there’s the biggest camera I ever seen. Why’s it so long?”
“Telephoto lens. It will let me zoom right in on anything we see. The second one is for video.”
“You get any pictures on other visits?”
“Nope. Only managed to see the lights once, and they were gone almost before I realized what I was looking at. I’m hoping tonight’s my lucky night.”
“Me, too! I really wanna see ’em, an’ it’d be pretty interestin’ to be here when you finally get you some good pictures.”
Mac was following the conversation with obvious curiosity. “Have you tried any of the other viewing areas?”
“Only Brown Mountain Overlook, but I like this one better. I think if I’m ever going to capture the lights on film, this is where it’ll happen.”
“Do you have any theories on what the lights could be?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. I’m trying not to form any preconceived ideas. I want to be open to whatever the actual images suggest.”
Whoa! He ma’amed me. I liked it when our son did it, having been raised, myself, in an environment where children were expected to show that courtesy to adults. But Austin was a grown man. And he just ma’amed me! Was he being exceptionally polite, or was I getting that old?
Mac looked away, biting his lip as he tried not to laugh at my consternation. It seemed to be a struggle for him, and I was debating whether to be more upset by the ma’aming or by my husband’s obvious amusement. I was leaning toward the latter when Rabbit’s shout interrupted everything.
“Mama! Daddy! Look! Oh, just look at that!”
~~~
AND LOOK WE did! Goosebumps rose along my arms as I stared, all else forgotten. Far away, over the flat ridge of Brown Mountain, a dozen or more orbs floated and bobbed in the darkness. Most were white, but a few were blue or green, hovering over the ridge.
The soft whirr of Austin’s videocam was accompanied by a rapid-fire click, click, click, as he snapped stills, one after the other, whispering “Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah!”
The rest of us gaped in open-mouthed wonder, hardly able to breathe as the mysterious lights floated in the distance. As we watched, more and more joined in the display. While I wasn’t quite ready to believe the lights were anything paranormal, I also wasn’t buying a single online explanation Rabbit told us about.
I’d seen ball lightning. This wasn’t it. Nor did it look like it could be lights from passing trains. Whatever it was, it was beautiful, and mesmerizing, and I wished I understood what was happening.
“I don’t,” Rabbit said when I told him that. “It’s the not-knowing that makes it so special.”
Mac sided with Rabbit. “He’s right. Understanding what it is just might make it less fun.”
“I thought you guys were all about solving mysteries?”
“This here mystery ain’t ’bout someone who needs our help, like Sissy Birdwell’s mama did. It’s just somethin’ beautiful an’ sorta spooky, an’ I don’t need to know what it is to like it.”
“What about people who think this might be a sign of something bad, like dangerous aliens from another planet?”
“Aw, Mama, I ain’t feelin’ nothin’ like that at all.”
Mac tilted his head, studying him in the dim light. “You can sense something about these orbs from all the way over here?”
“I can’t say what they are, Daddy. I ain’t never seen nor felt anything like ’em before. But what I do feel seems natural, an’ not like nothin’ bad. It feels like somethin’ that belongs. Like plants, an’ trees, an’ animals do.”
Mac nodded. “So, a normal part of the environment and not something manmade?”
Rabbit stared at the lights again, frowning in concentration, then turned back to his daddy with a smile. “Yeah, like that. Maybe we don’t know what they are, but that don’t mean they ain’t natural. I reckon there’s lots of things in this here world we haven’t figgered out, right? Least, not yet. An’ whatever causes these lights don’t feel like nothin’ that should worry us. Might be they’re one more beautiful thing that’s part of these here mountains, an’ we should enjoy ’em just for that.”
Austin’s hesitant inquiry interrupted our discussion. “Excuse me? Am I missing something, here?”
Mac and I exchanged a quick glance, but before either of us could think of an explanation, Rabbit answered the young man. “It’s only that sometimes I know things like this here, even if it don’t seem like I should. That’s all.”
Austin’s brow wrinkled, then he gasped, and his eyes flew wide. “Oh, my God! You have it! The Sight, I mean.”
About Marcia:
Marcia Meara lives in central Florida, just north of Orlando, with her husband of over thirty years, four big cats, and one small dachshund.
When not writing or blogging, she spends her time gardening, and enjoying the surprising amount of wildlife that manages to make a home in her suburban yard. She enjoys nature. Really, really enjoys it. All of it! Well, almost all of it, anyway. From birds, to furry critters, to her very favorites, snakes. The exception would be spiders, which she truly loathes, convinced that anything with eight hairy legs is surely up to no good. She does not, however, kill spiders anymore, since she knows they have their place in the world. Besides, her husband now handles her Arachnid Catch and Release Program, and she’s good with that.
Spiders aside, the one thing Marcia would like to tell each of her readers is that it’s never too late to make your dreams come true. If, at the age of 69, she could write and publish a book (and thus fulfill 64 years of longing to do that very thing), you can make your own dreams a reality, too. Go for it! What have you got to lose?
Marcia has published seven novels, two novellas, and one book of poetry to date, all of which are available on Amazon:
Harbinger: Wake-Robin Ridge Book 3
The Light: Wake-Robin Ridge Book 4
Swamp Ghosts: A Riverbend Novel
Finding Hunter: Riverbend Book 2
That Darkest Place: Riverbend Book 3
The Emissary: A Riverbend Spinoff Novella
The Emissary 2: To Love Somebody
Summer Magic: Poems of Life & Love
You can reach Marcia via email at marciameara16@gmail.com or on the following social media sites:
Twitter: @marciameara
I haven’t read the Wake-Robin Ridge series yet, but I do have book one on my ereader waiting for me to get to it. After reading and enjoying the Rivervend series, I’m looking forward to this one. Best of luck, Marcia. It’s been wonderful having you visit today
#BookReview: The Bright Side of Darkness by J E Pinto
Hello everyone. Today I have another book review for you. This one is a book I’ve come across on a couple of blogs just lately. As the review says, it put me in mind of S E Hinton’s The Outsiders with its feel and beat. I’ll let the review say the rest >>>
About the Book:
What is a family? Rick Myers is a despondent seventeen-year-old who just lost his parents in a car wreck. His family is now the four teenage buddies he’s grown up with in a run-down apartment building. Fast with their fists, flip with their mouths, and loyal to a fault, “the crew” is all he has.
At least he thinks so until he meets Daisy, an intelligent, independent, self-assured blind girl. Her guts in a world where she’s often painfully vulnerable intrigue Rick, and her hopeful outlook inspires him to begin believing in himself.
But when the dark side of Daisy’s past catches up with her, tragedy scatters the crew and severely tests Rick’s resolve to build his promising future. Fortunately, his life is changed by a couple with a pay-it-forward attitude, forged out of their personal struggle with grief and loss. Their support makes all the difference to Rick and eventually to the ones he holds most dear as they face their own challenges.
“The Bright Side of Darkness” is a story of redemption and the ultimate victory that comes from the determination of the human spirit.
My Review:
This is a story about tragedy and triumph and, somewhat, about coming of age … all told from life on ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Much of the first half has a strong resonance with S E Hinton’s The Outsiders.
The author brought the characters to life, and the read played with my emotions. While some parts were sad and poignant, others proved amusing and hopeful. Some of the characters’ actions and decisions had me shaking my head, but then we all have to learn better at one point in our lives or another, and The Bright Side of Darkness portrayed this aspect of maturing well.
Sometimes the story left me wanting, but on the whole this was an entertaining and enjoyable read. It gets a solid 4 out of 5 stars from me.
***
NOTE ON RATINGS: I consider a 3-star rating a positive review. Picky about which books I give 5 stars to, I reserve this highest rating for the stories I find stunning and which moved me.
5 STARS: IT WAS AMAZING! I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN! — Highly Recommended.
4 STARS: I WOULD PULL AN ALL-NIGHTER — Go read this book.
3 STARS: IT WAS GOOD! — An okay read. Didn’t love it. Didn’t hate it.
2 STARS: I MAY HAVE LIKED A FEW THINGS —Lacking in some areas: writing, characterisation, and/or problematic plot lines.
1 STAR: NOT MY CUP OF TEA —Lots of issues with this book.
January 20, 2020
How to Publish with KDP: Part Two
Over at Story Empire today, I have the first in a series of posts on how to get your manuscript into both ebook and paperback. For essential formatting necessities, check out today’s installment >>>
Hello SErs. Harmony here. As promised earlier, here is the second installment in the post series dedicated to taking a step-by-step look at how to get your finished manuscript from your computer an…
January 17, 2020
Week In Review
Joan Hall shares some great writing-related links today and a gorgeous photo shot from her front porch … take a look over at her place >>>
Wow! It’s already Friday again. Not that I’m complaining, especially since I have a three-day weekend coming up. But time is flying and we’re already over halfway through January.…
Source: Week In Review
