Joyce DiPastena's Blog, page 26

Lucky Leprechaun Hop: Winner!

Congratulations to Annah S, winner of the Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop on JDP NEWS! Annah has won her choice of a $15.22 gift certificate to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Book Depository. 

Thank you to all of you who entered!

Summary Sunday

I went to the Arizona Renaissance Festival again this week, this time for a "play day", so I only got five writing days in again. Here's a sampling from The Lady and the Minstrel this week. Rob (my hero) is giving Marguerite (my heroine) a flute lesson in the scene from Friday. :-)


Monday: William had never understood him—none of them had—but Robert saw the gulf between them widen further than ever at his answer.
Tuesday: “But ye wanted to,” William repeated roughly, “and once ye take a notion into yer head, it’s hell to pay with ye, Rob.”
Wednesday: But last night . . . last night, after the feast had ended, while she had waited for Maida to come and help her dress for bed, he had all unbeknownst to himself, become her hero.
Thursday: The way Robert spoke in the same refined accents as she, the easy assurance in his stride, the proud way he tilted his chin when he sang before her father’s hall . . . surely these all betrayed his noble blood?
Friday: In spite of her determined attempts to will it otherwise, air had begun to leak out of the corners of her mouth until notes that she had finally learned to produce with aplomb gradually began to wobble.

Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop

Happy Almost St. Patrick's Day! What better way to celebrate than with a giveaway hop. Thank you to I Am a Reader, Not a Writer, Books Complete Me, and Author Cindy Thomas, for sponsoring this blog hop.

Here at JDP NEWS I am giving away a gift certificate for $15.22 (USD) for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or for international entries, a book of your choice up to that amount at the Book Depository. All you have to do is enter via the Rafflecopter form below. Then hop along the list of links to find more great giveaways!


a Rafflecopter giveaway


The winner will be announced March 23. This giveaway is open to International entries.

OFFICIAL RULES: NO PURCHASE NECESSSARY. Entrants must be 18 years or older. Winners will be selected on March 23 and have 48 hours to respond to an email notifying them of their win. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Questions? Contact me at jdipastena@yahoo.com.

Tuesday Teaser

Tuesday Teaser is a weekly bookish meme (rhymes with “cream"), hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. (I’ve borrowed it from LDS Women’s Book Review.) Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare at least two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that pageBE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
I'm adapting the rules slightly. I'll be quoting some random lines from the last chapter I read before I post a teaser. I'm a slow reader, so you may get multiple teasers per book from me. Here's my third teaser from  The Winter Sea , by Susanna Kearsley. (There may be several more. This book is over 500 pp long. I'm enjoying it, but as I said, I'm slow!)
The horse, still standing warm against her back, became a living wall that blocked her view of everything except John Moray's shoulders, and his face as he looked down at her. 'If ever ye do find my pace too slow,' he told her, quietly, 'ye only have to tell me.'
She knew he was not speaking of their ride.
(From  The Winter Sea , 41% Kindle)
If you'd like to share a teaser from a book you're currently reading, I'd love you to do so in the comment section. And you don't even have to share it on a Tuesday! Be sure to include the title, author, and page number in case others would like to check out the book you're reading.

Summary Sunday

I had an equal number of great writing days and slow revising days this week, but I still managed to crank out a few new sentences on even the slowest days. Here is a sampling of this week’s work from The Lady and the Minstrel.
Monday: Having naught to offer her, it was not his place to try to ease a heart she had willingly given Strode to break.
Tuesday: Robert did not hear any more, for a drubbing rage pounded between his ears.
Wednesday: The squire would be shamed, and the earl more so, that a man both considered beneath their notice, a mere musician, had defeated a man of warrior blood.
Thursday: “But I’d left the door open a bit for some light, an’ one minute we were talkin’ and holdin’ hands and the next I was on the ground and my head was swimmin’ an’ Maida was screamin’ and that devil was laughin’, an’ if I’d had a knife on me I would have sliced out his guts.”
Friday: “I hate it as much as you, but sometimes no matter how hard we try to stop them, they still win.”
Saturday: ’Twas no trick of the shadows. Will had definitely been brooding.

Tuesday Teaser

Tuesday Teaser is a weekly bookish meme (rhymes with “cream"), hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. (I’ve borrowed it from LDS Women’s Book Review.) Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare at least two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that pageBE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
I'm adapting the rules slightly. I'll be quoting some random lines from the last chapter I read before I post a teaser. I'm a slow reader, so you may get multiple teasers per book from me. Here's my second teaser from  The Winter Sea , by Susanna Kearsley:
'My father always says I like the sea so much because it's in my blood, because our ancestors were shipbuilders from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He doesn't mean it literally, but given what's been happening to me I wondered if you knew if there was such a thing,' I asked him, 'as genetic memory?'
His eyes, behind the spectacles, grew thoughtful. 'Could you have Sophia's memories, do you mean?'
(From  The Winter Sea , 28% Kindle - this book has 500+ pages and I missed 2 nights of reading)
If you'd like to share a teaser from a book you're currently reading, I'd love you to do so in the comment section. And you don't even have to share it on a Tuesday! Be sure to include the title, author, and page number in case others would like to check out the book you're reading.

Summary Sunday

Here's a new sampling of sentences from The Lady and the Minstrel. I only got five days in this week because I had a book signing at the Arizona Renaissance Festival on Saturday and got home so late, I took the night off from writing. :-)


Monday: She cursed herself for stumbling in her attempt to make up an excuse for the non-existent “conversation” she had “overheard”.
Tuesday: She longed to stamp her foot with frustration, but dared do no more than wiggle her toes hard in her slippers.
Wednesday: The consequence of either of her choices had driven her mouth dry.
Thursday: He had sat for a long while in the glade after the Lady Marguerite had gone, berating himself for agreeing to meet her again, yet knowing he would count every hour until her return.
Friday: He made a face from his unobtrusive corner mocking, unbeknownst to them, their puffed up airs as they played their slow, stately cadences.

Tuesday Teaser

Tuesday Teaser is a weekly bookish meme (rhymes with “cream"), hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. (I’ve borrowed it from LDS Women’s Book Review.) Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare at least two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that pageBE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
I'm adapting the rules slightly. I'll be quoting some random lines from the last chapter I read before I post a teaser.
Actually I'm going to share two teasers with you from the same book today. Both are from The Winter Sea , by Susanna Kearsley. The narrator of this story is an author with whom I immediately bonded when she said:
I'd never been a fast writer, and five hundred words in one day was, to me, a good effort. A thousand words left me ecstatic. (9% Kindle version)
Yes! That is so me! :-)
Okay, now here's a teaser for non-writer readers.
Still, you couldn't just remember something if you hadn't had it in your memory to begin with.
Could you?
(From The Winter Sea, 19% Kindle version)
If you'd like to share a teaser from a book you're currently reading, I'd love you to do so in the comment section. And you don't even have to share it on a Tuesday! Be sure to include the title, author, and page number in case others would like to check out the book you're reading.

What Am I Reading Now?

I've fallen behind on my What Am I Reading Now updates. I got behind while moving into a new house over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays and then trying to settle into my new home. But I did, indeed, continue to read during that time! Most of my print books were "somewhere" in packing boxes, so I've been relying on my iPad Kindle app to keep me entertained. Between Christmas and the middle of February, I reread three of my favorite books from childhood: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew , The Five Little Peppers Midway , and The Five Little Peppers Grown Up , all by Margaret Sidney. It's always a treat to discover that a book that was a favorite "then" (whenever "then" might be) is still a favorite when you read it again, and so it was for the Five Little Peppers books. These books were written in the late 19th/early 20th Century and have an old time feel with old time values. They may not be fast paced enough for kids today, but when I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up to be just like Polly Pepper. :-)

(Note: The Five Little Peppers series is free on Kindle, but be aware that whoever uploaded them failed to format them properly for e-books, and to say that the formatting is "haywire" is a vast understatement. I loved the stories enough not to mind, but it may bother "new" readers. The formatting in print versions is, to my knowledge, just fine.)

Okay, on to my current "read." The Winter Sea , by Susanna Kearsley, was recommended to me by a good friend who thought (correctly) that I might be interested in the early 18th Century Jacobites (those who wanted to restore the descendants of James II Stewart to the throne of England after James had been driven out of England for being a Catholic king in Protestant England). Here is the back cover blurb:


In the spring of 1708, an invading Jacobite fleet of French and Scottish soldiers nearly succeeded in landing the exiled James Stewart in Scotland to reclaim his crown.
Now, Carrie McClelland hopes to turn that story into her next bestselling novel. Settling herself in the shadow of Slains Castle, she creates a heroine named for one of her own ancestors and starts to write.
But when she discovers her novel is more fact than fiction, Carrie wonders if she might be dealing with ancestral memory, making her the only living person who knows the truth-the ultimate betrayal-that happened all those years ago, and that knowledge comes very close to destroying her.
Stop by on Tuesday and I'll share a Tuesday Teaser with you from The Winter Sea .

Blog Hop Winners!

Congratulations to:
Doodle Bug, winner of the For the Love of Swoon blog hop! Doodle Bug has won a copy of my sweet medieval romance, Illuminations of the Heart .
Farah Khalaf, winner of the Random Act of Kindness blog hop! Farah has won a $17.21 gift certificate to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Book Depository.
Thank you to everyone who entered!