Day one has been a great eye opener and a wonderful social mixer if I may add. I’m still new at this media thing, but those who have watched me take those first baby steps into the scary world of social media, especially blogging, will tell you that I have come a long way and still have a lot to learn.
And with that, I’m giving the last day of my promotion my gift of word. Rise of a Queen is still up on Amazon for anybody to download for free, my treat. Just read, share with friends, please write any kind of review you want (I am not fluent in Klingon so I don’t think that would help anybody that much) whether good or bad; I got big girl britches on so I’m ready for the punches. In a perfect world I’d live with 5 star reviews, millions of…
Weeeeee and the promotion kicks off. Go ahead and download Rise of a Queen, you know, cause you love me and want to give me warm virtual hugs, and get something free for the big 3 day weekend about to come up (in the US that is). If you’re outside the US, no worries, your Amazon has the ebook available there also.
You could always download it to give me a big virtual hug or check out my previous ANNOUNCEMENT on the upcoming promotion. I would say it would be a good post to see all my happiness, well wishes, and wisdom but we know the wisdom part is a lie. All things wise in my word turn into wisea……..anyway. check it out and check out the free book while you’re at it
That’s right folks, The Paperbook Blog is seeking guest posters to share with us your favourite books, authors, book stores and all else booky.
Do you love to read? Do you love to write? Do you love to write about reading or read about writing?
Then this could be the guest post for you!
I would like all posts to revolve around Penguin books, (or Penguin published authors, or even your local book store that sells these little gems!), bringing the reviews back to where I started from. They can be Penguins of any genre, but preferably Penguin Classics, simply because they are my absolute favourite. There are hundreds of these guys to choose from, and the beauty is, they’re only $10 each! Make friends with a Penguin, you’ll be glad you did.
My new Crimson and Clover novelette, Beyond Dusk: Anne, is now available on Amazon, for $.99. This will be the first of a series of companion novelettes, each giving glimpses into some of the secondary (but equally important) characters in the series.
So far the short is getting fantastic reviews, to my surprise and delight. One reviewer says it has “rich visual detail, naughty humor, agonizingly realistic characters, unexpected twists, and a generous dash of paranormal.”
Beyond Dusk is a fairly quick read, at just 10.5k words. Although it is a companion novelette to the larger novel, St. Charles at Dusk, it is not required that you have read anything else in the series to enjoy this. Several of the readers enjoying it now are coming into the series with this story as their entry point.
Ana Deschanel has made a terrible mistake. The only chance of protecting the other people involved is to flee New Orleans, the only home she has ever known, for the quiet solitude of Summer Island.
Summer Island, Maine (population 202) is not the tranquil escape Ana imagined. The locals are distant and cold, especially her neighbor, the reclusive veterinarian Jonathan St. Andrews. Her only lifeline is the kind but odd caretaker Alex Whitman. Showing up at all the right moments, he warns her she is completely unprepared for a Maine winter. As the first winter storm approaches to whispers of an island shutdown- Ana realizes that she may soon be cut off from the rest of the world.
After a surprising encounter with Jonathan’s brother, Finn, Ana finds herself braving the storm to return something to him. Unprepared for the Maine storm, she slips and falls onto the jagged rocks…
I’ve been thinking a lot about my personality type lately. I’ve had the unhappy realization that even in a virtual world, I’m still an introvert. It may be easier to project myself as an extrovert, as someone who thrives on being with large groups of people, but it ain’t the truth about me. My favorite face-to-face social events tend to be one-on-one encounters, such as a long lunch with one close friend. My limit is a dinner party of four, where I am one of the four. At the young age of 55, I started to finally embrace the introvert that is me after I read Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. For the first time in my life, I felt that my introversion was more “normal” than my society wanted me to believe.
But then I reentered the blogosphere and now I have a wide circle of blogging acquaintances, many of whom have become friends that I’ve grown to care about deeply. I value each one of these new friendships, and yet I still experience that paralyzing feeling I get when I feel multiple demands for my attention. Like when I open my Gmail account and see 200 new blog posts all wanting and deserving my attention. These are not people speaking directly to me all at once, but the sensation is the same. I feel overwhelmed and then I shut down.
So yesterday morning, upon discovering that for some reason WordPress is not sending me the daily digests of the blogs I follow as I requested, I turned to my Facebook page. I started with Candace Johnson at Change It Up Editing and Writing Services who had shared Lauren Sapala’s blog post on making time to write. [That is an excellent post, by the way.] From there, I saw another post Lauren had written called Know Your Type, and Then Sit Down to Write. Well, there we go. I was familiar with Jung’s personality test (also referred to the Myers-Briggs test). [Disclaimer: what is online is an abridged version of the actual test, and there is some controversy about it. Still, it’s fun to take and can be very insightful.] And, true to my introverted self, I love taking tests. You can take the test here.
I’ve taken this test in the past and as I’ve matured, my scores have changed slightly. What has not changed is the first letter of the score: “I” for Introvert. This morning’s test revealed me to be an ISFJ: Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, Judging. To be more specific, I have strong preferences of introversion over extroversion by 89%; sensing over intuition by 12%; feeling over thinking by 38%; and judging over perceiving by 44%. Over the years, I seem to have become more sensing than intuitive, but my other “preferences” have changed little. So what’s an introvert like me to do?
I’m not about to retreat into the quiet cocoon of anonymity just because I get a little overwhelmed now and then. I just need to relearn and pay attention to my limits. I would never turn back the clock on my blogging, for the friends I’ve gained have enriched my life beyond my imagination. Not only has my growth as a writer accelerated in the last few months due to the support of my blogging friends, but so has my self-confidence in general. In my real physical world, I have a handful of friends that I feel comfortable enough with to be fully myself. It’s a stark, finite number that, while I enjoy solitude, still leaves me uneasy. Is it me that is incapable of having more than two good friends? Or is it my immediate physical world that is incapable of accepting me as I am?
In my real virtual world, the number seems infinite. I am friends with people I never would have met except for the blogosphere, people who live in the U.S. and Canada but also far-flung countries like Australia, Latvia, Italy, Egypt. For an introvert like myself, this is nothing short of amazing. For an introvert, this could only happen through writing.
Here is the eighth installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not To Do by Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com and John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
Image source: Malaysiapublicspeaking.blogspot.com
10. When giving a presentation, do not sweep your eyes across the room, trying to make almost simultaneous eye contact with your audience. The movement to include everyone at opposite ends of the room will only give you motion-sickness and your audience will wonder if your green color source is contagious.
9. When giving a presentation, do not lock eyes with any single individual in the audience. You will likely be giving that person a creepy feeling, cause them to search the sexual offenders registry on their iPhone, and miss your presentation titled: Donald Trump, a Cultural Icon.
8. When giving a presentation, if your presentation is mid-morning or afternoon, do not try to drink up your courage in the form of Bloody Marys or Mimosas at breakfast. Combine drunkenness with #10 and you may project your presentation and breakfast onto the first row of your audience.
7. When giving a presentation, if your presentation is first thing in the morning, do not try to drink up your courage the night before with double shots of whiskey or a running tab of dirty gin martinis. Combine a hangover with #10 and you may wind up like #8.
6. When giving a presentation, do not wear clothes that you only just received in the mail and have not yet tried on. You don’t need your presentation to be the moment when you discover that you ordered two sizes too large and the audience becomes more interested in watching you try to keep your clothes on than in your slides of the migratory habits of snails.
5. When giving a presentation, do not wear a suit that you haven’t worn for several years. Chances are you forgot to dry clean it and you still have whiskey and other unidentifiable stains and smells from the wake where you wore it last. This would distract from your presentation on the sleeping habits of woodchucks.
4. When giving a presentation, do not make large arm movements while you’re holding a laser pointer. Your audience might become more engrossed in trying to spot the red dot flying around the room than anything you have to say on quantum mechanics.
3. When giving a presentation, do not forget to go to the bathroom in the half-hour before the start of the presentation. Even if you don’t think you need to go, you need to go. Otherwise, your audience might become more entertained watching you try to maintain your balance while squeezing your thighs together, than they are by your discussion of the role of cupcakes in the mating habits of squirrels and chipmunks.
2. When giving a presentation, if you are mindful enough to avoid #3, then do not leave the restroom without first checking to see that no toilet paper is stuck to your shoes or in your underwear. You don’t want the audience to start placing bets on when you may notice the trail of TP from the restroom down the hall to your shoe or backside when they should be paying attention to your discussion of 101 ways to tie a tourniquet.
1. When giving a presentation, do not put your soda or any other beverage on the podium above the laptop that you are using. Chances are you will at some point knock the drink over onto the laptop, causing it to shutdown, your presentation to disappear, and your investment in the presentation to be increased by the cost of one very expensive computer.
One of the things we like to do at Interesting Literature is find authors who aren’t as celebrated as they perhaps should be, and find some reasons why they should be better known, if not more widely read. A perfect case in point is George Meredith (1828-1909), the Victorian poet and novelist.
Although he was popular in his own lifetime, his achievements have been overlooked: as a poet he is overshadowed by Tennyson and Browning, and as a novelist he has been half-forgotten, while George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and many of his other contemporaries are still widely read. We’ve sought out five things everyone should know about this writer, who was once a famous name in literature but is now, sadly, not so celebrated a figure.
1. He inspired Britain’s favourite piece of music. In 2011, the famous piece of classical music called ‘The Lark Ascending’ topped a British poll…
Briana Vedstad has honored me with the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award. A huge thanks and big hug to Briana and her kindness in nominating me. You can (and should) visit her original post here and see what other wonderful sister bloggers she nominated :)
The rules for this award are simple:
Post the logo on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Choose 10-12 other ladies who blog as your nominees.
Post the links to the nominees’ blogs and notify them on their blog.
Marie at 1 Write Way 