Along with the pre-release sale going on with my book, The Brothers Cameron: An Opportunity for Resentment, I'm also guest blogging this week.

Please go and enjoy the blogs. It's a lot of fun doing this sort of thing. And I'd love to get feed back from you. PLUS, we've got a contest going on with one of the blogs.

David J. Roth is the author of The Adventures of the Magnificent Seven, a wonderful children/young adult's book about seven incredibly inventive, intelligent children who have the most amazing adventures. David graciously invited me to guest on his blog, Poetica in Silentium.

AND, author Felicia Rogers interviewed me and she's hosting the contest. Go read her blog and the interview, and then leave a comment to be one  of five winners of a free copy of the ebook. I'm trying to get her as a guest on Edin Road Radio. I hope she'll say yes. :-) In the meantime, check her blog out! And good luck to everyone.

I'm having my own contest. I'll be posting details here later today! So come back and read. Or catch me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for the skinny on the Edin Road Press contest. :-)

Later, taters.

My next release, The Brothers Cameron: An Opportunity for Resentment is finally here, published through Edin Road Press! 

Stephan Cameron is impetuous and lusty; William Cameron is measured and romantic. Only one thing can divide them--an attraction to the Lady Jessica Chynoweth. Only one thing can bring them together again--bringing the murderer of their father to justice. If it doesn't kill them first, they will! 

The "official" release date will be September 15, 2011. At that point, the book will be available on every major book store online. But in the meantime, I intend to entice you with a little sale. On the release date, the price of An Opportunity for Resentment will be the list price of $2.99. Until that date, you can buy the book for $.99 at the distributor's home page. 

Yup, just click on that link and for the price of ninety-nine cents you can be one of the first to buy my book and then proceed to tell me how you loved it or hated it with reviews. And hopefully be entertained in the meantime. 

So, come celebrate with me and get a break on the price. Go to the book's page on Smashwords and purchase before the price goes up. And keep looking for a contest coming in the next couple of weeks, as well as more information on my blog tour next month. It's gonna be a swashbuckling, romantic time for all!

I'm really not. In the mood. For anything.

I have three chapters left on a book in the last stages of publication.  I need to get that done, damn it. <sigh> I just don't want to do anything. Wah wah, sucks to be me.

Okay, three more chapters on An Opportunity for Resentment. Coming up. This week. Then, work with cover artist on cover while I restyle the book into ebook format. Then, I can upload and I can start promoting my own books.

Eva was right; I really need to grow an ego.

I can't focus on anything today. I can't. I'm up in the air, thrilled to death, happy as a clam, and wicked toasted! Why, you ask?

Because last night, my publishing company became official! Last night, Edin Road Press published its first book--author David Roth's The Adventures of the Magnificent Seven. If you haven't heard about this book, don't worry--you will. I'll be posting more about it, both here and on the Edin Road Press website.

Oh, my Gods, I can't begin to describe how I feel right now. I'm on a high that no drug could ever touch or replace. My feet haven't touched the ground yet. I am euphoric, dazed, amazed, entranced, overjoyed, and downright blown away. I'm a publisher! Okay, we're small potatoes yet, but that doesn't matter. I'M A FECKING PUBLISHER!!! 

Thank you, Chris and Lorrieann, for what you do. Chris handles the website and marketing. Lorrieann is the art department, layout lady, and graphic goddess. I hustle and announce and do what I do--which is the rest. It's going to be a long haul, such a lot of hard work. But it'll be so worth it in the end. You'll see. I'll see. Wow!

And right this minute, that's really all I have. "Wow!" I'll try and have more next time. ;-)

You know, I wasn't in that bad a mood when I got up today. Not really. Work today has been a veritable bear and now I'm grumpy. It's raining outside and I want to be home, reading my book and snuggling with my kitteh! Ah well. Such is life.

I need to be writing. I need some story to write and embellish on. I need to be creative in my own inimitable style. So, I am taking the pledge. And making my schedule. Right here and right now.  I have three columns to write, one radio show to produce and host. And there's no reason why I can't write around them. So...with all of you who read as my witnesses:

My work involves my being there between 8AM - 5PM Monday - Friday. And I sleep from 12:30 AM to 7:30 AM. So, that leaves me from 6:30PM to 11:30 nightly--not counting for travel time to home, changing clothes and the shower needed to clean sweat from my body, and cooking and eating dinner time. That's five hours a night. Okay.

I need one hour daily to promote Edin Road Radio, invite guests, confirm guests, schedule the shows through BTR's site. If I do that daily, chances are I won't even need the entire time so I can use it to read and answer emails. One hour is good.

I need one hour at least three times a week to promote Edin Road Press and get manuscripts ready for publication. If needed an hour nightly. I can do that too. One hour daily is good too.

That leaves three hours of writing time. But hey, the soul needs to be fulfilled so here's my compromise--dumping the games. Farmville, Petville, all of them are going to be dumped. I will, however, keep Zuma Blitz--because I must keep my frog balls, thank you, it keeps me sane when I'm working something out--and Bejeweled Blitz. That's it. No more. The games get dumped and blocked and I play them no more. I write. And read. Two hours of writing time a night equals about 10 pages of double spaced, single sided prose. That's 2000 words a day, approximately. That's a full book's worth of first write in two - three months. Creativity will be mine again.

So, if you're reading this, my Facebook friends, I'm giving you warning now. Tonight, the games get dumped and you will get no more requests from me for hammers and saws and concrete and seeds and shovels. I will be sending no more to you either. The games go, the words flow. My schedule is made. I am going to use my evening to plot and plan and start writing something.

I have thus decreed. There is my promise--to get rid of games and focus on my writing--and my schedule. I am ready!

I  have absolutely nothing to complain about today. And really wouldn't if I did. With current events unfolding in Japan, it would be intensely petty of me to do so. But, as the day goes on, I really have nothing to complain about.

I spoke to the most amazing man last week. His name is Dan Holdridge and he was on my radio show, hyping his book, Pentagon Prayer. He called in and I was anticipating...well, I don't know what I was anticipating. I didn't get it, whatever I thought it would be. I invited him on the show to read an excerpt of his book. Instead....

Dan is a survivor of the Pentagon bombing on 9/11--remember the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Dude was there. In the fecking Pentagon. In fact, if he'd turned right instead of left, he wouldn't be here today. Instead, he was running a bit late and when he took his co-worker down to go start a job in that area, his co-worker wanted to go smoke a cigarette first. So they had turned a different way to go outside for a bit. It made all the difference. Rather like The Road Not Taken.

To listen to him tell that story put chills up and down my back and I swear to you, I couldn't talk. I could not say one word; I was beyond flabbergasted. I was floored. And I was afraid that anything that came out of my mouth was going to be so stupid, that I just kept quiet and let him go. And go, he did. It put so many things in perspective for me. i asked him, at one point, what lessons did he pull out of that day--trying to steer him in the direction of discussing his book--and he said something that I really didn't expect.
He said, "you're not entitled..." He went on to elaborate at how, we all feel as if we're entitled to things. And we take them for granted as being ours, we're owed them. When the truth is, we're not entitled to one damn thing in this world or life. Nothing! And we have no assurances that tomorrow is ours, that anything is ours...and we shouldn't take that for granted. He said--and forgive me for paraphrasing a bit--"If you feel like you're entitled to a job, look at the unemployment line. If you think you're entitled to a house or apartment, look at the people living on the street. If you think you're entitled to food, look at those in the homeless shelter. They are so grateful for everything they get, anything and it matters not how small."

So many things in my life that I took for granted, feeling entitled to having them there. And then they were gone. And I truly understand it now. I do. I'm very sorry now, because I can see so many wasted opportunities that I should have taken and didn't. Don't get me wrong here, I made choices in my life and I stand by each and every one of them. This isn't a pity party for Jesse--I'm not entitled to one nor do I want it. But there are things I should have said and done while I had the time, things I could have learned. And I can do nothing about the past. But I can do something about my future. And listening to Dan the other night, I learned that lesson very well. And believe me, I will apply that lesson to tomorrow...and tomorrow and tomorrow.

There are a great many Japanese people, right now, who have learned that lesson the hard way. A great many Haitian people who learned it the hard way too. Sometimes, that's what it takes--a major tragedy--to make us all see that.

He said it took him four years to write that book, to get past the pain of that day. I believe him. He says, he wrote this book for the 184 souls that passed from this world to the next that day. I believe that too. And it's a hell of a way to honor them. And a hell of a lesson to learn.

What will you learn and how will you feel today? Amazing, isn't it?

I started thinking about this new idea of reaching out and touching someone--aka "social media"--and I suddenly thought, "wow, isn't that a real contradiction in terms."

I mean, think about it. Once upon a time, if you wanted to "socialize," you went out. You went to bars or church socials or book clubs or movies. You met people through friends and you added them to the friends roster. You invited them to your house and they invited you to theirs. Then, along comes the internet--whoever "invented" it--and people withdrew from each other. They became too busy looking up stuff--googling for you youngsters--or playing games or joining first communities through CompuServe and AOL, then Usenet groups, and then emailing groups. And while the macrocosm go smaller because of it, so did the individual's microcosm.

I have to confess it--my world revolves around my internet friends. I'm just as bad as the rest of the world. I went through a year where I lost several friends and family members that were very dear to me, very important to me. Depression kept me inside, kept me from going out. But, that passed finally. And I discovered the internet and I stopped going out. If my friends wanted to see me, they came to MY house or they saw me on the internet.

And there's the contradiction. Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, what have you; you call them social media but in reality, there's another reason to close off the outside world. We're being "social" without being sociable. There's no physical interaction. And, in truth, that other person can be anything they choose to be, look like anyone they choose to look like, and there's no way that you have to know the difference in reality and fantasy. There's an anonymous aspect added to this mix, too. That "sharing" may be real, may be faux--as has been demonstrated too many times, lately. We forget that there is a real person on the other end of that text or email or entry, a real person that can be hurt or insulted by what you say--and yet you say it anyway, something you wouldn't say directly to their faces.

Which is where the contradiction comes in. Have our social skills suffered because of this "social media?" I wonder. I'm becoming more and more agoraphobic and maybe a bit xenophobic because it's easier to have the world come to me through my computer than it is for me to get off my arse and go out. I'm wondering if I still have the skills to speak to people, act human and ladylike in public. I'm wondering.

Don't get me wrong; I love my internet friends. I wouldn't trade them for all the world. And I can be just as social there as I can out in the world. There is one whom I have met in reality and I've pretty much shared my entire life with her as she has with me. I would go so far as to say, she's a sister to me--so much more than just a best friend. She lives in another state and that hasn't stopped us at all. In fact, I have friends from all over the world--Australia, the UK, Argentina. But as all of them have insisted, I have friends close by too. And I try to make time with them and for them. To get out there and be sociable.

And yet...I wonder. It's so contradictory.

Dear news persons and talk show hosts and celebrity gossip columnists:

I was so glad to read this column today. Because, I've been doing a slow burn on the subject myself and I was planning on blogging about it this weekend--but got a bit busy with working on the new chapters and cleaning my apartment, but I digress. So, to quote the late John Denver, "I was gonna write this." Someone just beat me to it.

And I have one message for you lot--ENOUGH ALREADY ABOUT CHARLIE SHEEN!!

I find it hard enough to believe that it's been such slow news days that you had absolutely nothing more to report on than Charlie Sheen's public meltdown and self-destruction. I mean really. How many people died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last seven days? Hmm? How's the war effort going? How about the fire in KY that killed 19 horses. Kidnappings, bombings, murders? The world at large? You can't tell me that nothing was going on in the world and this was all you had. I don't believe it.

Charlie Sheen is a very talented but sad individual who has an addictive personality and a few other issues going on. He's literally falling apart before our eyes. So, quite frankly, he doesn't need the help. All you're doing is making it worse by aiding him. Think of it this way--Charlie Sheen's tantrums are a stray dog; stop feeding it and it will go away. The more you feed his insane need for attention by giving him all this media coverage, the more you step in the way of his getting the help he needs to get better. If you stop covering it, he'll stop shooting himself in the foot and his family can do what they've been trying to do since this started--shut him the f**k up, get him into rehab and counseling, and help him get his act together.

I've never understood this incessant need for celebrities to fall apart in public. Why? Are the Lindsay Lohans and Robert Downey Jrs and the Mel Gibsons of this world not happy unless they're losing touch with reality and taking us down with them? Are we really that desperate for entertainment just to make ourselves feel better that we have to aid and abet this? I remember "the good old days" when celebrities did this in private and the studios did everything possible to hush it up. It was an embarrassment and something to keep hidden. When did that change? And more importantly, why did that change?

I have great sympathy for Mel Gibson, for Lindsay Lohan, for Robert Downey Jr.. That is, I have sympathy until it becomes all to obvious that they're seriously in denial and refusing to get the help they need and keep indulging themselves in a very public blaze of glory, and then they lose all sympathy from me. Then, it's a very strong case of "your fifteen minutes are over; shut up and go to Betty Ford already!"

OH! And stop getting these pop psychologists who are only too glad to use the BP word (bi-polar) when they haven't examined him and they don't know shit about him. You can't make that diagnosis until you've done a full psych and physical examination.  May he has it, maybe he doesn't. But all you're doing is screwing this up even more by throwing the jokes and barbs and pop diagnoses about his mental condition. You don't know; you have no clue! Shut up about it already. When you get a degree in psychiatry, when you've performed the physical and psychological tests on the man, THEN you have the right to run that diagnosis up the flagpole and we'll see who salutes. In the meantime, SHUT UP.

The time has come to let the Sheen/Estevez family take care of Charlie and do what they need to do to help him. And that means the media needs to stop covering this and give them the space to do it! And stop invading my TV, my radio, my internet, and life with it!

Thank you.

Sincerely,
~The Red Haired Celt~

 

So, as anyone reading along knows, I do an internet radio show called Edin Road Radio on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6:30 PM Eastern.

I've been reading one of my books, a WIP that I thought was ready to rock and roll, entitled Wilde Mountain Time. It's a romantic thriller about a fading pop star that's very much in the John Denver category who finds that he's got a bullseye painted on his chest and no idea who's after him or why. All he wants to do is play some golf, do some hiking, and hit one of the most difficult trails in the area--a personal challenge called Wilde Mountain. The good thing is, he gets to do some hiking on Wilde after all; the bad thing is, he's trying to get away from kidnappers at the time.

I've discovered something--if you ever want to know your book/story's strengths and weaknesses, read it out loud. You'll find out PDQ, trust me.

I really thought the book was ready to go until I started reading it out loud on the radio. Dialogue is pedestrian in some places--not as many as it had before, so this is good. I've missed the boat in setting the scene and establishing character in places--too many to count.

This bad boy is about to go through yet one more fecking rewrite. But that's okay. I'm committed to getting this book in the best possible shape because I truly believe in the story. But at some point, it's gotta be ready to go out the door. Right? Or am I being overly critical and it's not as bad as I think it is?

We'll see as we go, right? Oh, and come listen to the show tonight. It's Tuesday. ;-)