A Month of FAVES December Blog Event - 12/11/15

Which Was My FAVE Of The Week...

Thanks to these ladies for the month of fun:

 Tanya @ Girlxoxo 

 Andi @ Estella’s Revenge

 Tamara @ Traveling With T

#WeekendReading 

{Picking Favorites} 

Let’s support each other by sharing your favorite post, book, or something else, mentioned on other #AMonthofFaves participant blogs 

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My FAVE of the week happens to be all of the posts on Wednesday, December 9, where everyone shared what they use to make their blogging experience better.

I found some really awesome sites I had never known about.

A SHOUT OUT to everyone who participated and shared.

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My other FAVE of the week was the day we shared NEW TO US authors.

I knew a few of the authors, but there were quite a few that I am going to "check out."

Thanks for these fun questions and the opportunity to learn new things and to learn more about our fellow bloggers.  

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Giveaway of Brave in Ribbons by Holly Maholm

ALL INFORMATION AND CONTENT IN THIS POST IS COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHER.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In her contemporary take on the holiday classic, Brave in Ribbons, Maholm revisits the original Dickens’ classic to set the stage for a new host of characters and a contemporary holiday story. 

Readers will recognize the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future and will quickly find themselves attached to the colorful and heartfelt cast of Brave in Ribbons, including a recently deceased brother, his three daughters and his transgender sister, Connie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Holly Maholm is a transgender woman who was born John S. Oney. She is a graduate of Yale University and The Ohio State University School of Law. She worked as a senior attorney for a major sports marketing agency until she retired in 2004 and went into private practice. 

She has been married twice and actively co-parented her three daughters from her first marriage. Maholm began her transition to living full-time as a woman in 2013. She is the author of several stage and screen plays and two novels: When Once I Lived (2011), and Brave in Ribbons (November, 2015). She lives in Cleveland, OH and is an active member of the local LGBTQ community.

WEBSITE:

 www.hollymaholm.com

WHERE YOU CAN PURCHASE BRAVE IN RIBBONS:

Brave in Ribbions is available on Amazon.

• Paperback: 130 pages
• Publisher: Angry Rabbit Enterprises LLC (November 1, 2015)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0981809022
• ISBN-13: 978-0981809021

Price: $12.95

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Giveaway

USA ONLY

December 11 - 18

Enter here 

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Review and Giveaway of The Seafront Tea Room by Vanessa Greene

THE SEAFRONT TEAROOM is a cozy, comfy, sweet read. 

Tea, cakes, love, and friendship are all a part of THE SEAFRONT TEAROOM.

We meet three women who start out as strangers and bond over tea, tea rooms, and personal situations.

Charlie works for a magazine that is currently reviewing tea rooms in Scarborough, England.  Kat is a single mom who is a tea connoisseur and has a talent for writing.  Seraphine is an au pair from France who helps with the tea room reviews.

I fell in love with the idea of visiting quaint, out-of-the-way tea rooms and meeting the owners.

​ Ms. Greene's descriptions of the characters as well as the surroundings pulled me in and had me wanting to open a tea room and spend time with these characters.  :)

THE SEAFRONT TEAROOM is filled with wonderful characters you would want to be friends with and tea room locations you will want to visit.

THE SEAFRONT TEAROOM is as inviting as the cover.

Read and enjoy!!  5/5

This book was given to me without compensation and free of charge in return for an honest review.​

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CONTEST HAS ENDED

Giveaway

USA ONLY

Enter Here

December 8 - 15

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A Month of Faves December Blog Event - 12/4/15

Choosing FAVES of the Week....

Thanks to these ladies for the month of fun:

 Tanya @ Girlxoxo 

 Andi @ Estella’s Revenge

 Tamara @ Traveling With T
 
I have to apologize that I forgot to write down my FAVES, but I definitely saw a lot of posts that were very noteworthy.

And I visited EVERY BLOG on the linky.

To me the posts were noteworthy because bloggers had books listed along with amazing photos of their year.

I need to spruce up my posts.  Mine were not that good.  Not in that creative of a mood I guess.

Giveaway of Pieces Like Pottery and Author Interview

ALL INFORMATION IN THIS POST IS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR!!

Today we have the pleasure to explore Dan Buri’s new book, Pieces Like Pottery, and Dan has been kind enough to join us today for an interview.

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Thank you for hosting me on your site, Elizabeth. You have a wonderful blog!

This is a great place for us all to indulge in our shared love of reading and writing. Thank you for your excellent content. I am grateful to be here and hopefully I have the opportunity to get to know your audience better.

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Thank you, Dan. Tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I grew up in the Midwest in the States with four brothers and one sister. I moved out to the beautiful Pacific Northwest a little over ten years ago. I am a patent attorney with an engineering background, which is what I spend my days doing when I am not writing. I have a beautiful wife and amazing two-year-old daughter who cracks me up daily. 

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What do you like to read? Who is your favorite author?

I feel like this is the question that readers and writers always ask in a judgmental way. It’s as if your readers are going to judge me by the authors I enjoy. “Oh no, I don’t agree with that at all. John Grisham? This guy clearly isn’t serious about his writing.” (I’m smiling if that’s not showing through your computer screen.)

Writers constantly inspire me. I have a lot of authors that I love. A few, in no particular order: Gertrude Warner, Shell Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, C.S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Grisham, Malcolm Gladwell, John Buri, Cormac McCarthy, Bill Bryson and Mark Twain. I could probably list another hundred whose writing I enjoy with wonderment.

Is there anything that prompted your latest book? Something that inspired you?

Great question. I wouldn’t say that there was any one moment that prompted me to write this book, but these stories constantly bubble up inside of me. As writers, I think the challenge is taking the stories from our head and our heart and putting them on the page. A lot of people have stories, but not everyone can communicate them effectively and clearly. It’s the great challenge of the writer.

Do you always write in the same genre?

My non-fiction work has been published in print and online at a number of places over the years. My wife and I actually had a fairly well regarded blog called Buris On the Couch a few years back. We would pick a narrow subject each week and then write He Says/She Says takes on that subject. We really enjoyed doing it, but it became difficult to keep up and we had to shut it down once we had our daughter. Maybe we’ll revisit it again in the future. We’ve had a lot of inquiries to start it back up. This is my first venture into the world of fiction. I have written fiction since I was young, but this is my first published work of fiction.

What is your writing process like? Do you map the whole thing out or do you just let it unfold?

A little bit of both. I keep a journal of notes and ideas that strike me throughout the day. We all have what an old teacher of mine liked to call pristine moments of coherence—those moments when an idea strikes us so profoundly and clearly. I don’t want to lose those thoughts when I have them, so I try to write them down. But I typically have an idea or framework for a story before I begin. Once I have that and I am writing, then I will pull concepts or paragraphs from my journals or other notebooks. In fact, one of the paragraphs in The Gravesite (from Pieces Like Pottery) was actually written back when I was a teenager, if you can believe that.

In one of the stories the ending I had planned just didn’t work. It felt dishonest to take the reader on the journey and then finish with the original ending. I just knew the reader would feel betrayed, so I had to rework it. Sometimes the original plan just doesn’t work and the story unfolds on it’s own.

Do you write in a specific place or at a specific time of day?

Once upon a time I thought I needed to write in a particular time and place. I would typically write at night and need to be in the perfect mood to do so. With a very demanding job, a wife, and two-year-old daughter, however, I quickly found that I was not finding much time to write at all. I had to begin writing anytime I could find a free 30 minutes. I was lucky I did too.

I think young writers always wait for the moment of inspiration to strike. These moments are amazing, but they are a great luxury. The truth, in my opinion, is that writing is as much about editing and revising as it is about the writing itself. I have so many pages of Pieces Like Pottery on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Maybe editing is a beautiful and inspiring process for some people, but for most writers I know, it is painstaking. There’s nothing inspirational about it for me. Having very little time to write each day helped me to begin taking my writing to the next level, to learn to hone it as a craft, rather than writing simply being an inspirational hobby. I had to find time to write whenever I could, regardless of whether the circumstances were perfect.

That being said, I still love to write at night over a glass of wine or a fine whiskey. Nothing beats that.

How much of YOU makes it into your characters?

I think every character an author creates is based on a real person or an amalgamation of real people. I also think an author will drop a little piece of himself or herself into every character they create. It is just too difficult to not let experiences and biases seep into one’s writing. There is certainly a piece of me in each character throughout Pieces Like Pottery. This made it particularly difficult to finish the book at times. I had to tap into both a sorrowful and a hopeful part of myself for these stories, which took an emotional toll at times. That being said, I didn’t create any of the characters in Pieces Like Pottery to represent me or to be a caricature of myself.

How important do you think Cover Page is for a book? How did you come up with the cover page?

Despite the old adage, everyone judges a book by its cover. It is very, very important. The cover for Pieces Like Pottery is a photograph by the brilliant photographer, David Mattox (http://davidmattox.com). His work has been featured in galleries throughout the Northeast in the States and he has been featured in the New Yorker. I am very lucky that he was gracious enough to allow me to use one of his photographs.

Do you have any advice for upcoming writers?

Over the years I have been lucky enough to be offered abundant feedback and to hear excellent commentary from a few creative people that I admire greatly. There are three comments/ideas that have stuck with me throughout all my writing endeavors. (Each of these is summarized in my own words.)

When asked about the fears and doubts that she had with her writing, Elizabeth Gilbert (best selling author of Eat, Pray, Love) said she finally had an epiphany that her “writing muse” was telling her that this isn’t her story. If she doesn’t tell it, she said, then the muse would move on to someone else who will. Ms. Gilbert discussed how freeing this was for her. She was no longer declaring to the reader: “Listen to me. I have something to say.” It was almost as if she had no other choice but to write. This opened her up to write every day without fear of the result.

Ira Glass is an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life. He has a great quote for young creatives. In short, he encourages that your work is not going to be good when you’re first starting out. We may have an excitement for our craft and a killer taste for what’s good, but our execution is poor. The only way to improve your work, the only way to close the gap so that your work is as good as your ambitions, is to do a lot of work. Write. Every day. Every week put yourself on a deadline to write something new. It’s going to take awhile, but that’s normal. Good writing doesn’t come the first time you sit down.

Louis C.K. is one of the most thoughtful and innovative comics alive right now. I heard him once speak about his HBO show, Lucky Louie, which was cancelled after one season in 2006. He was asked if he was disappointed with that and if he looked back at it as a failure. His answer was unequivocally: “No.” For him it was just another experience that taught him how to hone his craft, which was invaluable.

So those would be my three pieces of (long-winded) advice. One, don’t worry about whether you have anything important to say. If you are inspired, say it. Two, write constantly. You won’t become a good writer unless you’re writing all the time. Three, take every writing experience and use it to hone your craft. Something is not a failure simply because the public doesn’t receive it the way you would like.

Thank you, Dan. It has been a pleasure to have you with us! Any parting words?

Thank you, Elizabeth! I have appreciated this opportunity to spend some time with you and your readers. I loved it! You have a wonderful site. I really do hope you and some of your readers will check out my book. I need the support of thoughtful and intelligent readers like yours. The life of an indie author is not easy and I appreciate all the support I can get. And if your readers have questions or comments, please contact me. I would love to hear from your fans and readers. You can reach me via email at danburi777 [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @DanBuri777. Thanks!

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Author Bio:

Dan Buri's first collection of short fiction, Pieces Like Pottery, is an exploration of heartbreak and redemption that announces the arrival of a new American author. His writing is uniquely heartfelt and explores the depths of the human struggle and the human search for meaning in life.

Mr. Buri's non-fiction works have been distributed online and in print, including publications in Pundit Press, Tree, Summit Avenue Review, American Discovery, and TC Huddle. The defunct and very well regarded Buris On The Couch, was a He-Says/She-Says blog musing on the ups and downs of marriage with his wife.

Mr. Buri is an active attorney in the Pacific Northwest and has been recognized by Intellectual Asset Magazine as one of the World's Top 300 Intellectual Property Strategists every year since 2010. He lives in Oregon with his wife and two-year-old daughter.

Pieces Like Pottery Links
Currently at promotional pricing!

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Goodreads

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Giveaway: 

Contest has Ended.

Emily is the winner

CONGRATS!!

 

USA ONLY

Enter here

December 3 - 10 

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A Month of Faves December Blog Event

It’s day 3.

Thanks to these ladies for the month of fun:

 Tanya @ Girlxoxo 

 Andi @ Estella’s Revenge

 Tamara @ Traveling With T

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things in 2015

To eat:

My homemade sauce and my eggplant parmesan

To enjoy:

My books

Favorite outdoor activity:

Reading on my back porch in the summer

Favorite place visited:

Quebec City, Quebec

Most squee worthy moment of the year:

The BEA and staying with my son during the BEA

Giveaway of Saving Sophie by Ronald H. Balson

SAVING SOPHIE by Ronald H. Balson 

 

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The author of ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS has a new book, and the publisher has a giveaway for us.  

Enter the giveaway below this post. 

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ALL INFORMATION IN THIS POST OTHER THAN MY REVIEW LINK IS COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHER.

About SAVING SOPHIE:

An Action-Packed, Unforgettable journey of murder and deception, testing the bonds of family and love

Jack Sommers was just an unassuming accountant from Chicago—until his wife passed away, his young daughter was kidnapped, and he became the main suspect in an $88 million embezzlement case. Suddenly Jack is on the run, hoping to avoid detection long enough to rescue his daughter, Sophie

Now Catherine Lockhart and her partner, Liam Taggart, must join forces once again, this time working with mysterious CIA operative to launch a secret mission that aims not only to recue Sophie but also thwart a major terrorist attack in Hebron. But will the ever-escalating violence of the Palestine-Israel region put their entire team at risk and end in catastrophe? Or can they overcome the odds and save countless lives—including their own?

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Praise for ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS:

“As compelling a story as you would ever want to read…it will stay with you long after you have finished it.”—The Huffington Post

“Once We Were Brothers tells a great story…gripping.”—Chicago Tribune

“This thriller opens with a bang…a decades-spanning page-turner.”—Reader’s Digest

“Uplifting and moving…[with] an unusual insight into human character and motivations. Highly recommended for all readers.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“The author describes the atrocities of wartime Poland and the beautiful, eternal romance between Ben Solomon and his wife, Hannah. Balson’s first novel is hard to put down.”—Jewish Book World

“A legal thriller…a reader knows he’s writing from the inside.”—Chicago Jewish Star

RONALD H. BALSON is a Chicago trial attorney, an educator, and a writer. His practice has taken him to several international venues. He is also the author of the international bestseller Once We Were Brothers. 

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My full review of ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS IS HERE.

An excerpt from my review:

"ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS is a powerful, well-researched first novel that will have you glued to the pages as Ben tells his story of hatred, horror, and the annihilation of his and other Jewish families during WWII." 

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Praise for Ronald Balson's Books:

SAVING SOPHIE:

 
“Solid… Balson succeeds in illuminating the personal side of the Middle Eastern conflict through his deeply human, psychologically credible characters.”—Publishers Weekly

“Strong, colorful, and constantly suspenseful…With its well-handled, vividly painted settings in and around Jerusalem and Hebron, Hawaii, and Chicago, Saving Sophie will keep readers engaged from first to last. And educated, too. (It’s generously stocked with supplementary materials for reading groups.)”—Philip K. Jason, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Saving Sophie is a page turning read filled with despair and anger but with hope, love, and humanity at its core.”—Renita Last, Jewish Book Council

“Engaging.”—Donna Marchetti, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Saving Sophie is the perfect definition of a page-turner!”—Good Book Fairy

ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS:

 
“You won’t be disappointed…a new look at an old story, and it will stay with you long after you have finished it.” —Jackie K. Cooper, Huffington Post

“This novel is uplifting and moving, intelligently written and featuring historically accurate context and an unusual insight into human character and motivations.  Highly recommended for all readers.”—starred Library Journal

“The author describes the atrocities of wartime Poland and the beautiful, eternal romance between Ben Solomon and his wife, Hannah.  Balson’s first novel is hard to put down.”— The Jewish Book World

“Balson does a number of things superbly: he crafts a highly readable plotline and makes great use of the Chicago backdrop…many will enjoy this gripping novel for its narrative drive and its emotional storytelling.”—Booklist

Learn more about the author at:

Author’s Website: http://ronaldbalson.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ronbalson

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RonaldBalson/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4029839.Ronald_H_Balson

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Book Information:

Fiction | Trade Paperback
$15.99 * 416 pages
ISBN:  9781250065858
Publication Date:  September 15, 2015
St. Martin’s Griffin

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 Giveaway:

Contest has Ended

The Winner is:

Karen - #10
CONGRATS!!

USA ONLY

December 2  - 9

Enter HERE

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