A Wish For A Happy Writing Day!
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Have A Good Writing Day–Everyday!
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I simply wanted to wish all writers a good writing day–today and always. I also hope you will have excellent production on whatever project you are tackling.
Never doubt your abilities, and work on getting your first drafts done. They will not be perfect, but you will then have material to revise.
Remember to try to write every day and read everyday.
Happy Writing!
Get The Draft Done! is available here: Amazon.com
Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.
Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.
An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.
Please follow the following links to find my novel:
Thank you!
The book trailer:
Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I
My radio interview:
Available on Amazon
Maledicus: The Investigative Paranormal Society, Book 1 by Charles F. French — 100 reviews!
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Photo by rovenimages.com on Pexels.com
Yay!
Woo-hoo!
My book Maledicus: The Investigative Paranormal Society, Book 1 reached 100 reviews on Amazon!
Here is one of the most recent reviews:
Invite Maledicus into your home, you won’t regret it!
Please follow the following links to find my novel:
Thank you!
The book trailer:
Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I
My radio interview:
The Bright Side of Darkness by J. E. Pinto
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I want to thank Jo Elizabeth Pinto for her post about her book The Bright Side of Darkness.
I recently came across an intriguing prompt for authors interested in sharing their books. The prompt was, “Write a diary entry from the point of view of a character in your novel.”
As Alice Mills bends over the table in her cheery kitchen with the flowered wallpaper, intent on filling a page in her journal, the early morning sun falls across her graying hair. She wears a faded cotton nightgown, and a neglected cup of coffee has turned cold beside her.
September 8, 1986
This morning began like any other Saturday, except I must have been real tired because I didn’t hear Walter get up and go out to the pool. So he’d already come in from swimming laps and started the coffee before I made it to the kitchen. He was flipping through the local newspaper the way he always does. I was about to get him a lemon bar or two I’d brought home from the ladies’ tea at church yesterday, and then he saw something at the back of the paper that put him on a tear!
I couldn’t piece it all together, but it had to do with Rick Myers, the orphan Walter sent to the reformatory a few weeks ago. He came home awful broken up about it that night. The poor kid’s folks had died in a car wreck a few months back, and then to tragically lose his girlfriend while he was trying his best to keep her safe … it really was too much. But there had been alcohol in his blood, and he’d been driving recklessly, even if his reasons were justified. Sometimes being a judge is a heartbreaking job. Walter can’t bring home all the lost boys who need us, So he did what needed doing.
But something must have gone as wrong as it could go at the reform school, because all at once, my unflappable husband jumped up from the kitchen table like he’d been sitting on a mound of fire ants. He bolted for the bedroom, dialing up the head of the reformatory as he went, and the way he lit into that man, Alvin Kingston, well, I was glad to be safe in my own kitchen and not on the other end of the phone line.
Quick like a bunny, Walter came out of the bedroom in a white shirt and dress slacks instead of his bathrobe, still spitting nails about Alvin Kingston. He told me he was going to the hospital to deal with the Myers boy, so I know something awful must have happened. I made sure to settle him down–he needed to forget about Alvin Kingston and focus his attention where it really mattered.
Speaking of focusing, I better put aside this silly diary and get busy. We’ll probably have a new boy living with us again. The bedroom where my baby Arthur grew up never stays empty too long.
What is a family? For Rick Myers, a despondent seventeen-year-old who has just lost his parents in a car wreck, it’s 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 touched 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, through him, 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.
I was among the first blind students to integrate the public schools in the 1970s. In 1992, I received a degree in Human Services from the University of Northern Colorado. While teaching students how to use adaptive technology, I earned a second degree in 2004 from the Metropolitan State College of Denver in Nonprofit Management. These days, I freelance as an editor and a braille proofreader.
As an author, I entertain my readers while giving them food for thought. In my fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, I draw on personal experience to illustrate that hope is always an action away.
I live in Colorado with my husband, my preteen daughter, and our pets.
To find out more about my books and me, please visit my Website at https://www.brightsideauthor.com.
Twitter: @BrightSideAU
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorjepinto/
You can purchase her books on Amazon
Thank you again to Jo Elizabeth Pinto!
If any authors would like to publicize their books on my blog, please reach me by email: frenchc1955@yahoo.com
What Are You Reading?
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We are well into the month of June, and I was wondering what everyone was reading. Reading is one of the great pleasures in life, one in which I constantly indulge.
The spring semester is over, but the summer sessions of classes have already begun at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, and I am excited that I am teaching a course called Science Fiction & Fantasy. In that course, we have already covered Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling, and we are now doing American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
In addition to rereading those books, I am also reading Next To last Stand by Craig Johnson, While The Bombs Fell by Robbie Cheadle & Elsie Hancy Eaton, and Celtic Myth and Religion by Sharon Paice MacLeod.
So, I ask everyone out there: what are you reading now?
(Photo by Janko Ferlic on Pexels.com)
Please Help Me on #PitMad On Thursday 6/3/2021
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Hello everyone! This may sound like an odd request, but tomorrow I am participating in #PitMad on Twitter, a day long event in which authors tweet a pitch for a book to agents.
If any of you have Twitter, please consider retweeting my pinned tweet, which I will put up tomorrow morning around 8 a.m. EST.
My Twitter handle is @French_C1955
This is also important– DO NOT LIKE THE PITCH–that is for agents to let writers know they are interested in your work.
The tweet will be for my horror novel The Curse Of The Demon Mine.
It will look something like this:
It x Stranger Things x The Magicians
In 1957 S. Dakota teens Dancer, Micah, and James fight a monster threatening their beloved teacher. To save him, and the magical realm, they must defeat homicidal bullies and supernatural threats, controlled by the creature. #PitMad #YA #DF
Again, thank you to all!
A Review of The Investigative Paranormal Society Cookbook by Charles F. French
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Thank you to Robbie Cheadle for this lovely review of my little cookbook! Please be sure to visit her wonderful websites: Robbie Cheadle Books/Poems/Reviews and Robbie’s inspiration
I have read all three books in The Investigative Paranormal Society series and the cookbook is an added bonus. Each recipe is contributed by a specific character from the series and is introduced with an overview of that character’s contribution to a specific book and the series as a whole.
I enjoyed reading a little more about my favourite characters in the more relaxed and culinary setting provided by this cookbook.
The cookbook offers a wide range of recipes, all of which are reasonably simple to make and cover the full spectrum of appetizers, main course and side dishes, desserts, and even drinks. The drinks was rather a fun addition for me, and I was pleased to find some great recipes for cocktails including Helen’s Bethberg Iced Tea and Jeremy’s Mint Julep Mocktail (non alcoholic).
From the appetizers, Helen’s Grape and Walnut Side Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing grabbed my attention. I love walnuts and anything involving blue cheese. This salad is certainly a bit different and slightly sophisticated, and would certainly add to any dinner party.
The main course and side dishes range from the fun Roosevelt’s Cheeseburgers and Panfried Vegetables to the more unusual Sam’s Chicken Paprikash to Roosevelt’s Baked Beans. I am pleased to have this last recipe as homemade Baked Beans often come up in American literature and I’ve never tasted them. Now I will be able to try this dish.
The desserts all sound delicious and I am keen to try Roosevelt’s Bread Pudding and Whiskey Sauce and Sarah’s Irish Stout Brownies.
Overall, this book is a great introduction to the memorable characters in this terrific series and is also a useful recipe book with some delicious sounding recipes.
Available on Amazon
Get The Draft Done! is available here: Amazon.com
Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.
Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.
An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.
Please follow the following links to find my novel:
Thank you!
The book trailer:
Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I
My radio interview:
Welcome Alexis Cunningham to the U. L. S. The Underground Library Society
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I want to welcome the newest member of the U. L. S. — the Underground Library Society — Alexis Cunningham!
The U. L. S. is an unofficial organization dedicated to preserving books and to opposing censorship.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called poetry “the best words in the best order” or so the blurb on the inner cover of Best Words poetry anthology tells me. Issued to my English literature class as we prepared for our G.C.S.E exams (the equivalent to High School leavers exams) many years ago, I could not have imagined how big an impact one single poem inside could have on me.
Thing is, I’m not generally a fan of poetry. I’m staunchly a prose kind of girl. I think it. I write it. I want to expound at length, not distil language into something symbolic, or constrain it with iambic pentameter, or any of those other fiercely rigid structures that transform the written word into a composition and not an essay.
But when I thought about what book I’d want to become for the Underground Library Society my mind went blank…until they came. Snatches of words, rising from the conquered regions of my mind.
“Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.”
These words form the final line of the first stanza of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem the War Photographer, a work of literature I’ve never been able to forget.
When I was sixteen I didn’t know where Beirut was. I’d never heard of Phnom Penh. Yet it didn’t matter. The specific conflicts didn’t matter –I understood. In war, all flesh is grass.
In four unpretentious stanzas, Duffy asks her reader to consider not just war, and the privilege of peace, but also the culpability of a world where the safe can witness horrors from a TV or PC screen, a smartphone video, or, as she puts it “the Sunday supplement” where “reader’s eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.”
This was heavy stuff for a sixteen year old who could barely stay awake when asked to wander lonely as a cloud, or compare thee to a summer’s day, and it’s heavy stuff now –and I suppose I must like that, because poor old Keats and Browning, Byron and Billy Shakespeare have never done a thing for me.
Like the eponymous war photography himself, who “stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care” reading the War Photography left me feeling bereft and guilty, shaken out of my complacency and introduced to a new world of vivid imagery that made me look at the everyday through a different lens.
There is one place that links me, Duffy and her War Photography. England. The place I call home and Duffy describes as a land of “ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel”.
Yet England is irrevocably connected to foreign fields that explode “beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat,” through the War Photography himself. Forever jaded by all he has seen, he brings the war home to sleepy England with its baths and Sunday luncheons.
That juxtaposition of ordinary pain and nightmare heat, and of grass and flesh, is one that has captivated my imagination ever since.
It’s no real surprise that in my first published work, The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear, I chose to write ten short stories of an England where monsters roam in plain clothes and innocents live with their eyes wide-shut, creating a suburban world where horror lives hand-in-hand with absurdity.
Sometimes, we don’t choose to become our words, they choose us, and there are ideas that are much bigger than the pages that contain them.
About me: I am a fantasy fiction writer and life-long n00b working on a book series –The Seraphim Chronicles–focused on a group of dysfunction gods and their human avatars, set in the world of Aldlis where souls fuel magic and the dead can’t pass on. I am also learning to run my blog Aldlis Chronicles, while knowing nothing and doing it all backwards. It’s going great!
My first published work, The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear and Other Stories of Chilling Modern Horror Fantasy is available on Amazon and a follow up, The Innocent Need Not Apply is in development.
Links to me:
Once again, thanks to Alexis Cunningham for joining the U. L. S.!
April Self-Promotion Party!
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It’s Spring, and weather has become warmer, plants are beginning to grow, and trees and starting to bud.
This is also a good time to do some unashamed self-promotion!
Tell us about your book(s)!
Leave links and images.
Shout to the world about your work!
You are writers–be proud of what you make.
So as many as possible can see your work, please like, tweet, and reblog this post!
Available on Amazon
Get The Draft Done! is available here: Amazon.com
Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.
Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.
An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.
Please follow the following links to find my novel:
Thank you!
The book trailer:
Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I
My radio interview:
Revisiting Characters From My First Novel, Maledicus: The Investigative Paranormal Society, Book 1 by Charles F. French
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This entry is one of several posts I wrote about some of the characters in my first novel. I hope you enjoy it.
Roosevelt Theodore Franklin, the protagonist of my supernatural horror thriller Maledicus: The Investigative Paranormal Society Book I, is a retired History professor, living in Bethberg, a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. He is a deeply complex man, influenced by, among other things, his service in the Vietnam War and the profound and loving marriage with his now deceased wife.
Roosevelt has several deep enjoyments in life—eating, drinking good whisky, especially single malt Scotch, and smoking high level cigars, but his primary passion in life is books. A visitor to his home would notice, more than anything else, the enormous number of bookcases lining many of the walls in his house. Roosevelt’s home is an old Victorian home that he and his wife Sarah had purchased and renovated shortly after their marriage.
While she did have a large room dedicated to being her art studio, an avocation she loved, even while being a surgeon, and Roosevelt had a large room that was his studio, smoking room and library, other rooms also were filled with books of many kinds and conditions. Roosevelt, although a man of financial means, is not a book collector. He believes that books should be read and not simply owned to be put on display. He thinks that the words in a piece are what make the book important, not a fine leather cover or being a first edition. He places worth on the ideas, the stories, the tales, the histories, and the communications in books and not their potential monetary value.
At one point, he tried to make a calculated estimate of how many books he owned, but he decided it was an almost impossible task, so he stopped the tally when he reached 4000. And no matter how many books he owns, he seems to always find more to buy. Again, he is not a snob when it comes to the owning of books. His snobbery emerges when it comes to whiskey and cigars.
More on that later.
Available on Amazon
Get The Draft Done! is available here: Amazon.com
Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.
Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.
An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.
Please follow the following links to find my novel:
Thank you!
The book trailer:
Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I
My radio interview:
