Good books and a good cause.

Making a Difference for Kids with Autism

Nicole Storey

When my son was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, I was devastated and lost.  I had no idea who to turn to for help.  Thankfully, a dear friend advised me to go on the web and search for autism support sites.  I did, and found many parents treading the same turbulent waters.  I was no longer alone.

It is charities such as The GreaterGood Network at The Autism Site that help parents to believe their children can do more, be more, than the doctors dictate.  This charity helps to fund therapy for children with autism: Speech, Sensory Integration, Cognitive/Behavioral, Diet, and so many more.

For the month of July, a percentage of the sales from my books will be donated to The GreaterGood Network to help provide autistic children with the help they need to thrive.  I would love it if you could give just a few dollars and download an eBook or perhaps buy a paperback.  Together, we can make a difference for children with autism!  Thank you so very much!

The GreaterGood Network:  http://bit.ly/N0y9cr

My Amazon Author Page:  http://amzn.to/KThYif

Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/84094    

I spent years working with kids on the autistic spectrum.  Some of the best moments of my life.  Pick up a good book for a good cause. 

It's all in the Paperwork by Richard Godwin

          His charm wasn’t contagious. No vaccines were made against it. He didn’t even know what a Rorschach test was. Dolphins hated him and dreamed of eating him. He tried growing a beard but he looked like a twat. He’d been known to make people throw up just by walking into a room.

          Josh Adams started out as a campus rapist. He tied two students to their beds and fucked them with a Dos Equis bottle. He stood in front of the mirror for hours imitating the Dos Equis ads, saying over and over ‘I am the most interesting man in the world’. He played the all-round good guy in front of his friends and flunked his geography course. Until he found his true career path, he’d only ever been interested in geography because he wanted to travel. He’d never left the States, in fact he’d never travelled out of Kansas. When he became a cop he didn’t even own a passport. 

          He made a lot of arrests and got on the good side of his corrupt, racist boss who ignored his misdemeanors and sloppy paperwork. He liked to strip search his female arrests.

          One day he was called to the scene of a bank robbery. Two masked men had beaten up the manager. Josh had no interest in catching them and instead looked for records of any recent releases from jail.

          He arrested Blake Thomson, one time thief and petty criminal who had gotten out of jail a few days before. Blake was shopping out of state when the robbery occurred.

          ‘It’s all in the paperwork’, Josh said.

          Blake gave him the receipts to prove it. Josh buried them and Blake went back to jail.

          Josh’s boss retired and he took over. His obsession with Dos Equis returned and he bought a fake beard and kept a supply of the beer at the back of the station. One night he arrested a tall blonde called Cindy. She’d thrown a glass at the barman in a nightclub. Josh walked into the cell wearing his beard and stuck his hand up her skirt.

          ‘I am the most interesting man in the world’, he said, and stopped suddenly.

           He felt a dick.

          ‘What the fuck?’, he said.

          ‘I’m a boy’, Cindy said and started laughing.

          Josh broke Cindy’s jaw then smashed himself in the face with the butt of his gun.

          Cindy was sent to jail for assaulting a police officer. He ran into Blake there.

          ‘That fucking pig’s scared of trannies’, he said. ‘He thinks he’s that guy on the Dos Equis ads, dresses up like him.’

          ‘It’s good to meet you Cindy’, Blake said.

          When Blake was released Josh was nearing retirement. He’d bought a stable where he kept a horse. He’d ride out on it wearing his beard, thinking of all the amazing things he’d done with his life. It was a beautiful summer morning when Blake caught up with Josh.

          Blake stepped out of his pick up in a long black dress with a police badge on it, army boots, a Colt 45 and a fake beard.

          He found Josh sweeping the floor of the stables.

          ‘Who the fuck are you?’, Josh said, staring at the large man in the dress.

          ‘I’m the most interesting man in the world’, Blake said, ‘and I’m here to serve you papers.’

          ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

          ‘I think you ought to read this’, Blake said and handed him a piece of paper.

          It read ‘Acquisition Notice: you are now my property, I own the police.’

          ‘It’s all in the paperwork’, Blake said.

          He pistol whipped Josh, opening up a deep gash in his forehead. He removed his police badge and stuck it in the wound.

          ‘You’re mine, now vend motherfucker’, he said, kicking the tip of the badge so it jammed deep into his skull.

          ‘You might be a useless fucking cop who doesn’t do his paperwork, but I’m going to give you an interesting death.’

          He turned him over and stuck his Colt up his ass and blew a hole through him.

          ‘I’m going to have a bottle of Dos Equis’, Blake said, and headed out into the sunlight.

Richard Godwin is a good friend and great writer.  He was kind enough to loan me this piece.

Author Bio: Richard Godwin is a widely published crime and horror writer, whose work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including recently Pulp Ink. Apostle Rising, in which a serial killer is crucifying politicians and recreating the murder scenes of an unsolved case, was his first published novel. It received excellent reviews and is under offer for two foreign rights acquisitions. He has recently Published Mr. Glamour, and is working on the sequel to Apostle Rising. You can find out more about the author at his website: http://www.richardgodwin.net/.  His Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse are popular interviews he conducts with other writers:http://www.richardgodwin.net/blog.

Napping Blogger Award

The mighty RUSH!!!!!!! has seen fit to give me more work to do, and I thank him for it.  See, here’s the thing.  Rush is awesome, and he is a good friend and a good writer.  And I actually took a nap yesterday, which I rarely do.  It is an honor to be included in this group of prolific writers.

I write a lot for a lot of different people in a lot of different places.  It’s a bit like being schizophrenic. 

So, I’ma link back to my boy at http://kdrush.net/.  And I’m going to tell you what I do to relax.  And then nominate five other bloggers.  Them’s the rules.

What I do to relax:

I like to chew glass and get in fights with pitbulls and meth addicts.  I quite enjoy riding my motorcycle.  I like to hang out with my family.  I like to huff …anything really.  I like to write and I used to like reading when I had time to do it.  I like to play music.  But I never actually relax…ready at all times.

Who do I nominate to the mighty 5 (five bloggers and writers)?

Richard Godwin

David Antrobus

J.L. Murray

Rosanne Dingli

Yvonne Hertzberger

These writers can write and DO write.  Thanks Rush.  

The Ten Dollar Stove

Yusuf Tura is a man with an interesting story.  Several interesting stories, in fact.  There is the story of his escape from Ethiopia…his redemption in the United States…his vision for a safer world.  They are all threads in the quilt of one man’s life.  That man is Yusuf Tura.

           

When Tura was young, he left Ethiopia for the relative safety of a refugee camp in Kenya.  The conditions were anything but comfortable, but compared to the horror he was fleeing, it was everything.  When Tura arrived in the United States, the shelter he was taken to seemed like a luxury hotel…his own bed, clean bathrooms, and as much food as he could eat.  And he could eat.

There are too many people who have stories similar to Tura’s.  It is our collective shame as a planet that we allow our brothers and sisters in other lands to suffer and starve.  Tura decided to do something about the problem.  He set his sights on one very simple, ten dollar solution to a very big problem.

Tura is the inventor of the ‘Ten Dollar Stove’.  People all over the world suffer from eating food cooked, inside, over a wood fire.  The air is polluted, many suffer horrible burns, and firewood is so scarce that much of the day is spent looking for fuel.  And it is taken anywhere it can be found…from palm fronds to trash dumps. 

That is only a piece of the problem.  In the quest for wood, forests are decimated.  Vast areas of woodland are flattened because of the need to solve an immediate problem: how to eat, how to stay warm. 

Tura decided a simple stove was the answer, and he went to work.  After researching and experimenting, he devised a simple stove, made of sheet metal, that houses a briquette made from waste materials.  The stove costs ten dollars.  The briquettes a small handful of change.  And they will burn safely for four hours.

This is by no means the end of the story.  No, this is the beginning.  Tura provides jobs in his homeland, where the stoves are constructed, but aside from his co-workers, most cannot afford the ten dollars for a stove.  Many trade crafts that they make…and Tura must now figure out how to turn this into profit with which to expand his vision.

There are many people that talk about helping those in need.  There are many people who talk about saving the environment.  Tura is accomplishing both these things for less that the average American spends on food in a day. 

No, the story is not over.  It is just beginning.  And you can help be a part of the change.  Donate, spread the word, be aware of what is being done.  And by sharing your time and awareness, this project will succeed and Tura’s vision will become a reality.  Safe stoves.  That doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for.  But for many it is the difference between life and death.

Email: greenenergywithoutborders@gmail.com

Blog post for JD: ‘The art of interviews – to cut a short story long’

The lovely and talented Morgen Bailey everyone!!!

JD loves to set me a challenge and this could have been the shortest guest blog post in history because I figured there isn’t really an art to interviewing someone but then I thought again…

Although I’m famous (amongst my friends anyway) for cutting a short story long (one of the attributes I inherited from my father), I’ll try to restrain myself here… (do I hear a “hoorah” from the back?).

I started my podcast (Bailey’s Writing Tips) not long after buying my first Mac laptop (another “hoorah”… who is that?) last summer and once I spotted the ‘Podcast’ logo I was hooked. I’d already been listening to, and loving, other writing-related podcasts for several months and so I started mine with mixed hints and tips – rehashed… er, carefully crafted from the fortnightly handouts I provide to my writing group. I did this, as an episode a week, for almost a month and then thought it might be nice to do some interviews as I’d enjoyed the ones I’d been hearing, so my first guinea pig… um, interviewee was the poetry circle host of one of the writing groups I belong to. I went round to her house mid-September and there she was, Sunday best outfit and full face of make-up… oops. I’d neglected to mention that it was audio only so I felt guilty, but Julia being Julia, she didn’t mind one jot and gleefully sat in front of the (lovely-looking 1950’s style) microphone. I’d emailed her the questions I wanted to put to her, to which she’d typed in her answers and then read it like a script, including some of her poetry towards the end. As you would expect, we did go off topic but it generally went to plan and after some minor editing, was then released as a 17-minute special episode (no.1) a few days later.

Another writing friend / former tutor (romance novelist Sue Moorcroft) was then October’s guest although we went off at more tangents than a schoolchild’s geometry set so that ended up being two nearly half-hour episodes revolving around her genre, short stories, non-fiction writing (including a Formula One column) and her competition judging for the monthly Writers’ Forum magazine.

In November I then travelled to Derbyshire to meet my third guest, another former tutor (of women’s magazine writing) Joanna Barnden. From then on, having discovered Skype, the genres became more varied, the frequency upped from monthly to fortnightly and locations became a little more exotic from Cardiff (Wales) to Yorkshire and Surrey to the USA and finally meeting up with former tutor (I have a lot of those don’t I?) crime writer Sally Spedding (whose writing group I took over in 2008) at Winchester Writers’ Conference this July.

The downside of all this was the editing time. I wanted to produce polished episodes and therefore every “um”, “ah” and “er” was chopped which often meant listening to the recording several times which in the case of Jane Davis (because we had such a good time) was nearly two hours. It took the whole day to record, edit and publish, although it produced three episodes, which was great.

The time spent on these interviews was starting to take its toll on my other commitments so I was beginning to think about easing off this side of the podcasts. Then I started my blog and not long after that I was invited to partake in a blog interview; cue light-bulb moment. So, using the questions I used in my in-person and Skype interviews fellow Litopian (http://litopia.com/radio) Colin Barnes became my first subject. I emailed him the Word document of questions – which has grown considerably since then – which he completed and emailed back with a photo and web links – and the rest, as they say (or they would if it wasn’t a cliché) is history.

These days I post an author blog interview every morning with other projects (including author spotlights, guest blogs, flash fiction – of which JD has been a regular contributor) every evening. Yes, it’s time consuming (especially the interviews as I add my comments to their replies in for a ‘fireside chat’ feel) but to me, if a job is worth doing it’s worth doing well (another of my dad’s attributes) and these days I post 14-31 times the amount of interviews I did when I was podcasting then so that’s got to be a win-win… or it would be except it’s also a cliché. J

So, is there an art to it? I don’t really think there is; just ask the right questions, get the right interviewees, smile in all the right places and have fun.

If you’d like to listen to any (or all, they’re all there) of my audio interviews the details are listed on http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/bwt-podcast and the blog interviews on http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/blog-interviews.

Thanks JD.

Morgen Bailey

http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com

Richard Godwin's 'Mr. Glamour'!

Today I pass the mic to my good friend, Richard Godwin. He has a new book out, see? And you should read it. And you should also read 'Apostle Rising'. Or send him money in a bag. He's that good.  In his words:

MR. GLAMOUR, Richard Godwin.

Designer goods, beautiful women, wealthy men, a lifestyle preyed on by a serial killer.

A killer who is watching everyone, including the police.

Latest headlines?

No, an outline of my second novel, Mr. Glamour.

My debut novel, Apostle Rising, was published in paperback by Black Jackal Books last year. It was about a serial killer crucifying politicians, and sold extremely well, received excellent reviews, and sold foreign rights to the largest publisher in Hungary.

Now Black Jackal Books have published Mr. Glamour, and I’d like to tell you a bit about it. The settings are exotic, and the pages drip with wealth. The story’s told in my usual style, and my readers will know what that means. I have been told I write with a blend of lyricism and graphic description. I like to explore what motivates people, and I certainly do so with the leading characters in Mr. Glamour.

The two central cops, DCI Jackson Flare and Inspector Steele, are unusual and strong in their own ways, as reviewers are already picking up. At the beginning of the novel, Steele hates working with Flare for personal reasons. She doesn’t by the end, and the investigation takes them both on a journey which changes them and their opinions of one another.

Let me give you the setting if you are tempted to read Mr. Glamour.

Something dark is preying on the glitz of the glamour set. There is a lot about designer goods and lifestyles in Mr. Glamour. The killer knows all about design, he knows what brands mean to his victims. He is branding their skins. And he has the police stumped.

As Flare and Steele investigate the killings, they enter an exclusive world with its own rules and quickly realise the man they are looking for is playing a game with them, a game they cannot interpret. The killer is targeting an exclusive group of people he seems to know a lot about.

The police investigation isn’t helped by the fact that Flare and Steele have troubled lives. Harlan White, a pimp who got on the wrong side of Flare, is planning to have him killed. And Steele has secrets. She leads a double life. She is an interesting woman who pushes her sexual boundaries in private. She travels a journey into her own past and rescues herself. And in a strange way she is helped by the killer she is looking for. And Flare has some revelations in store.

As they try to catch a predator who has climbed inside their heads, they find themselves up against a wall of secrecy. The investigation drives Flare and Steele to acts of darkness. And the killer is watching everyone.

Then there is the sub plot.

Contrasting this lifestyle is the suburban existence of Gertrude Miller, who acts out strange rituals, trapped in a sterile marriage to husband, Ben. She cleans compulsively and seems to be hiding something from him, obsessed that she is being followed. As she slips into a psychosis, characters from the glamorous set stray into Gertrude’s world, so the two plots dovetail neatly with one another.

And when Flare and Steele make an arrest they discover there is far more to this glamorous world than they realised. There is a series of shocks at the end of the novel as a set of fireworks go off. Watch out for the highly dramatic ending.

It is already picking up some great reviews.

Advance praise for Mr. Glamour:

“Richard Godwin knows how his characters dress, what they drink and what they drive. He knows how they live--- and how they die. Here's hoping no one recognized themselves in Godwin's cold canvas. Combines the fun of a good story with the joy of witty, vivid writing.”
Heywood Gould, author of The Serial Killer's Daughter.

“Smart, scary, suspenseful enough for me to keep the light on until 3AM on a Sunday night, Richard Godwin once more proves to fans of crime fiction the world over with Mr. Glamour, that he is not only one of the best contemporary writers of the procedural cop thriller around today, he is a master storyteller.”  

Vincent Zandri, author of Scream Catcher.

“Richard Godwin’s top-of-the-line psychological police procedural driven by its heady pace, steely dialogue, and unsparing vision transfixes the reader from page one.”

Ed Lynskey, author of Skin In The Game.

 “Mr. Glamour is a striking effort from one of the most daring crime writers in the business. It is the noirest of noir...and hellishly addictive.”

Mike Stafford, BookGeeks Magazine.

“This first rate detective thriller will have you gripped from the start. Richard Godwin is an author not to be missed.”

Sheila Quigley Author of Thorn In My Side.

“Mr Glamour is, in every sense of the word, the real McCoy: genuine hard boiled detective fiction.  Lean, gritty, and tough, it’s a journey into the heart of darkness ... you won’t soon forget. Connoisseurs of Nouveau Noir will have to add Richard Godwin to the list of writers to watch!”

C E Lawrence, author of Silent Kills.

“Involving and compellingly sinister, Richard Godwin’s Mr. Glamour portrays cops and criminals, the mad and the driven in a novel of psychological noir. Read it while snuggling with your stuffed teddy bear for comfort.”

                            -- Gary Phillips, author of Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers

“This is one outstanding novel written by one amazing author.”

Fran Lewis Review.

I think Mr. Glamour will appeal to mystery and crime aficionados, to readers interested in psychological profiling and designer lifestyles, to thriller and noir fans, and to anyone who enjoys a fast paced narrative with strong characters.

Mr. Glamour can be bought now at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk; at all good retailers online, and in stores in April. If you Google it you should see a range of options come up.

And you can find out more about me at my website and my stories here.

Richard Godwin is a respected and prolific writer...I'm pretty sure he writes in blood.  See the review I did of Apostle Rising here.

Check out Godwin's work. You won't be disappointed.  You might never sleep again.  But you won't be disappointed.

Indies Unlimited: New Book Marketing Strategy

Press Release: INDIES UNLIMITED TO REVEAL NEW BOOK MARKETING STRATEGY

INDIES UNLIMITED TO REVEAL NEW BOOK MARKETING STRATEGY
March 26, 2012; Phoenix, AZ – On April 1st, 2012 at 8 a.m. Pacific time, Indies Unlimited – the premier multi-national, multi-author web site for the Independent Publishing industry – will announce a new and innovative ‘reverse marketing’ book promotion tactic developed by founder Stephen Hise.

“Mr. Hise is an innovator and mastermind,” Indies Unlimited co-administrator K. S. Brooks said in a written statement. “This new method is definitely not for everyone, but I believe it could start a new trend in the marketplace. Indie book promotion will definitely be impacted, and quite frankly, may never be the same again. We’re looking forward to sharing Mr. Hise’s perspicacity with the industry.

”Stephen Hise founded IndiesUnlimited.com in October of 2011 to provide a platform for independent authors to share and exchange ideas, knowledge, expertise and frustrations; and, for readers and reviewers to become exposed to the amazing depth and array of talent in the indie community.
For more information, go to http://www.IndiesUnlimited.com###Contact:K. S. BrooksCo-Adminstrator, Indies Unlimitedksbrooks@ksbrooks.com