Mystic Invisible Book Tour and Giveaway
June 4, 2021 by marianne h donley in category Apples & Oranges by Marianne H. Donley, Rabt Book Tours tagged as #RABTBookTours, Booktour, Fantansy, Ryder Hunte Clancy, young adult
Date Published: 3/17/21
Publisher: Winter Goose Publishing
Fifteen-year-old Monte moves to the mystically jeopardized Highlands of Scotland and discovers that life as a Celtic wizard is anything but easy. Whisperings of abnormal enchantments and vicious cat siths grip the small town he now calls home. Fear is at the helm and the instigator is unknown. An indefinite moratorium on magic is enforced. In a race against darkness, Monte and his friends must choose who to trust before time runs out, even if it means breaking some rules and facing danger head on.
About The Author
Ryder Hunte Clancy has lived most of her life in the desert but her heart belongs to the sea; her happy place, where brine and mist abound and allusive waves caress expansive stretches of compacted sand. A tried and true stay-at-home mom, she is often found scribbling notes between diaper changes or connecting plot points while everyone else sleeps. She survives off of toddler snacks like apple slices and cheese, and has just as much trouble keeping up with her fictional, teenage characters as she does her three small children. Mystic Invisible is her debut novel, the inspiration of which was gleaned from her husband’s homeland of Scotland, where fantasy, mystery, and folklore are rich and hits of adventure linger around every corner.
Excerpt
Mystic Invisible
Ryder Hunte Clancy
“Besides,” Garrick continued. “What else am I supposed to do? There’s not a lot of potential to
make hard and fast friends here, seeing as we’re the only Mystics around.”
“You could play with those madger thingies,” Monte suggested, as though he were the big
brother, not Garrick. He squinted at the line of firs across the field.
“And when would I ever need night-vision goggles?” Garrick asked. “That’s all they are.
They’re rudimentary.”
“Rudimentary?” Monte could never keep up with Garrick’s fancy words.
“Primal . . . basic . . . old,” Garrick rattled off.
His rant was interrupted by a loud whoop. The shout crossed through the field—a teenage battle
call—as a pale, springy kid scurried out from the firs.
“Finn?” Monte asked. “It’s Finn Cornelius!”
Finn sprung through the jungle of grass like a nymph, fear plastered across his face, pursued by a
posse of very large high school-aged boys.
“Hey!” Garrick tore toward the group. “Get away from him!”
Monte raced after his brother. A dark blur flashed in his peripheries, knocking him to the ground.
Dull lights, like distant stars, mottled his vision as he tumbled to a stop in the muddy grass. A
girl with scraggly black hair and bronzy skin stood above him. “Cameron?” He scrambled to his
Feet.
Cameron’s stare met his, her caramel eyes familiar and intense. The rainbow lights hung around
her neck, much dimmer than Monte remembered.
My Story and the Journey to Eye See
RYDER HUNTE CLANCY
For the dream seekers,
The downtrodden,
The courageous champions of good cause.
For the quirky and the quelled,
The unseen genius and
The undiscovered voice.
For the loud but unheard,
The soft and tender hearted.
For the quiet and devoted.
For the wallflowers,
The late bloomers,
Those ugly ducklings, now swans.
For the invisible ones.
I see you,
I hear you,
And I believe.
We are the change.
I recently had the opportunity to give my website a makeover. In doing so, it gave me the
opportunity to pen the above mission statement. This is what I live by. It’s what I march to
every day, rain or shine. It’s what I believe; from my calloused, keyboard-typing fingers, to the
very nucleus of my being. Everyone has a voice that should be heard, most especially those who
don’t believe they do. I used to be one of those people. I was more than just a wallflower. I was
invisible; so timid and “ordinary” that I was easily overlooked. But I always craved to be heard. I
tried many things to satiate that big, booming urge inside of me. However, it wasn’t until well
into adulthood that the anvil finally dropped. With a baby on my lap and a toddler at my feet, I
picked up a pen and started writing. The rest was history. I’m still quiet by nature but I have
finally found my voice, and so can you!
-Ryder
Chatting with Authors by Will Zeilinger & Janet Elizabeth Lynn
June 3, 2021 by Janet Elizabeth Lynn and Will Zeilinger in category Partners in Crime by Janet Elizabeth Lynn & Will Zeilinger tagged as Author Interviews, Chatting with Authors, Janet Elizabeth Lynn, Will Zeilinger, YouTube
Published authors Will Zeilinger and Janet Elizabeth Lynn had been writing individually until they got together and wrote the Skylar Drake Mystery Series. These hard-boiled tales are based in old Hollywood of 1955. Janet has published seven mystery novels and Will has three plus a couple of short stories. Their world travels have sparked several ideas for murder and crime stories. This creative couple is married and live in Southern California.
In 2020, Will and Janet created “Chatting With Authors.” This channel features informal interviews with authors of varied genres, produced via Zoom, and aired every Friday. Below are some of the chats from the past year.
Sheila Lowe, a real-life forensic handwriting expert, has appeared in countless forensic TV and radio shows, newspaper and magazine articles, and blogs. Her Amazon number one best-selling series, The Forensic Handwriting psychological suspense books, features Claudia Rose. Sheila’s new Beyond the Veil Series is paranormal suspense about a young woman who reluctantly communicates with dead people.
Listen to Judge Debra H. Goldstein, Author of the Sarah Blair Mystery series, Should Have Played Poker, and the IPPY Award-winning Maze in Blue. She’ll describe how her short stories and novels became finalists for several awards.
Fantasy readers will enjoy hearing from Christopher Ochs, author of Pindlebryth of Lenland. He tells about his collection of the mirthful macabre in If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep. His short stories have been published in several anthologies and were finalists for several awards.
Carol L. Wright tells us how she escaped a career in law and academia to write Mysteries and More. She created the Gracie McIntyre Mysteries where justice always prevails. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies.
Hope you enjoyed these interviews. To hear more interviews go to Chatting with Authors.
The Skylar Drake Mystery Series
Author Justin Murphy: A man of many talents!
June 2, 2021 by Jann Ryan in category Jann says . . .
Born November 26, 1985 in Dothan, Alabama. Whether it be Fiction or Non-Fiction, Justin Murphy has always tried to explore many themes in his work. One is probing into the darkness of pure evil with The Original Night Stalker: Portrait of A Killer, a fictional story based on a real life murderer Joseph James DeAngelo. He also enjoys exploring obscure figures often forgotten in entertainment. Such as with his most recent success Gene L. Coon: The Unsung Hero of Star Trek. It profiles the ex-Marine, pharmacist, and journalist who did the actual heavy lifting on The Original Series.
We’re here today talking with writer Justin Murphy. So let’s get started!!
Jann: At what age did you want to be a writer?
Justin: Was always told I was creative, imaginative, and lived in a fantasy world (for better AND worse)! But the moment of realization came on my 15th birthday, the desire to write hit me like an ocean wave! It was both terrifying and amazing.
Jann: What’s your favorite genre and why?
Justin: For a long time, I would’ve said Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Both for the spectacle and the idea of being transported to another world.
Yet in the years since I’ve started writing and been published, I’ve begun to prefer crime, detective, mystery. They pose questions and raise issues about our every day reality.
Jann: Your book Gene L. Coon: The Unsung Hero of Star Trek has been well received. What inspired to write about Gene L. Coon?
Justin: Read an article a few years ago announcing the documentary Batman and Bill creator Bill Finger. Read a comment on the article, saying “Someone should do the same thing on Gene Coon”. And I figured “Why not?”. Researched the online newspaper archives and every other resource I could about him.
In addition to his work on Star Trek, he sang on the radio in Omaha, Nebraska at age four. Was a Marine who served in Korea. He even ran a pharmacy for five years until becoming a screenwriter. Also did radio reports on the Atomic Bomb tests in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
Jann: I understand you are writing on a single mother detective series. Can you share a little about this series?
Justin: Been writing installments this past year. Working on the latest one, nothing published yet. But I’ll give you a teaser. It’s about a woman who balances work and family life to an extreme by investigating missing child cases while dealing with her own special needs kids.
Jann: Do you find yourself returning to certain themes in your stories? What? Why?
Justin: With the above-mentioned series, there are quite a few themes I keep returning to. Such as the main character’s struggle to balance single motherhood and investigating missing child cases. Of course, the issue of missing children is a recurring theme in of itself. As well as dealing with children who are disabled, as both the character’s kids are.
Jann: What kind of writer are you? A page a day? Or are you a burst writer?
Justin: For many years, I wrote four hours a day (based on the advice Stephen King and several other well-known authors publicized). In the last year or so, I write more whenever the mood hits, but I still try to remain consistent. Although my writing is somewhat limited by current cross-country travel.
Jann: Do you have a website, blog, or twitter where fans might read more about you and your books?
Justin: Here are the links to my Amazon, Audible, Facebook, and Twitter pages:
Jann: What’s your all-time favorite book?
Justin: Possibly Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. It’s the book that really got me paying attention to words, phrases, and sentence structure. Though I’m still not perfect. Also learned not to use the same word in a paragraph twice. There’s such a flow to the way Bradbury wrote that we may try to emulate, but never fully capture. It seems we as author tend to emulate the greats until we find ourselves.
Thank you Justin for talking with us today on A Slice Of Orange!
Jina Bacarr June Featured Author
June 1, 2021 by Jina Bacarr in category Apples & Oranges by Marianne H. Donley, Featured Author of the Month
About Jina Bacarr
I discovered early on that I inherited the gift of the gab from my large Irish family when I penned a story about a princess who ran away to Paris with her pet turtle Lulu. I was twelve. I grew up listening to their wild, outlandish tales and it was those early years of storytelling that led to my love of history and traveling. I enjoy writing to classical music with a hot cup of java by my side. I adore dark chocolate truffles, vintage anything, the smell of bread baking and rainy days in museums. I’ve always loved walking through history—from Pompeii to Verdun to Old Paris. The voices of the past speak to me through carriages with cracked leather seats, stiff ivory-colored crinolines, and worn satin slippers. I’ve always wondered what it was like to walk in those slippers when they were new.
You can follow Jina on social media:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Pinterest
Goodreads
Bookbub
Jina also has a column here on the 11th of every month: Jina’s Book Chat.
A Few of Jina’s Books
Birthday Wishes
May 30, 2021 by Dianna Sinovic in category Quill and Moss by Dianna Sinovic tagged as Birthday Wishes, fiction, short story
The first rays of the sun reached Zoë’s backyard shrine. They bathed the structure in slanted, golden stripes, as light filtered through the branches of the maples. Zoë knelt in front of the assembled stones and the small, smiling Buddha. She didn’t claim any religion, but she liked the way the Buddha looked, the way he seemed to know her thoughts, even if he was just an eight-inch-high statue from a local curiosity shop.
The rubber garden kneeling pad made the knees of her leggings damp, and she could feel the slight breeze from the south, from the foothills, as it lifted her bangs. Shivering slightly, Zoë placed her hands on the broad granite that formed the base of the shrine. The coolness of the rough stone added to her chill. By midday, she would walk through the yard in only shorts and a lightweight tee, but at this early hour, the temperature hovered in the forties.
Still, it was important to be there, as the sun rose, to let Daniel know that she remembered.
“Happy birthday, Danny,” she said. She stared at the smiling Buddha as though he were a stand-in for her friend, who had been neither short nor fat, nor a god. Daniel’s smile had buoyed her more times than she could count, though, and she missed him for that and for other reasons.
He was buried four hundred and twenty-three miles away, and because that was an inconvenient distance to visit his grave often, she had erected the shrine.
“It’s been four years, and I miss you still.”
The small things matter in friendships as much as the cosmic ones. He knew her preference for horror films (always and ever after The Shining); he brought her Ecuadoran coffee by the half-pound and ground it precisely for her French press pot; he was the only person who held her confession that she regularly cheated at poker. He might have been her lover—she held that truth deep in her heart.
Zoë dipped her fingers into the font next to the Buddha and kissed her fingertips before massaging the statue’s round belly. “This is for you, Danny. My luck is holding, but I’m sure you could use more wherever you are.”
In addition to the Buddha, the font, and the stones, the shrine had room for a ceramic vase filled with several red roses. The sun, now full above the horizon, made the moisture on the rose petals glisten and sparkle. The day would be a fine one, and Zoë would not left herself be dragged down into dark memories: his frail hand as it lay in hers, she waiting there beside his bed as his body shut down.
“Happy thoughts, Danny,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.
And then, as she watched, her mouth open in astonishment, the rose petals released one by one from their sepals, drifting down toward the granite. Instinctively, she turned her palms up, letting the back of her hands rest on the shrine, and felt petals settle there.
She brought her cupped hands to her face and inhaled the scent. Except that it wasn’t the lush aroma of roses but the nuttiness of coffee—Ecuadoran coffee. When she opened her palms to look, her hands were filled with coffee beans.
The Buddha smiled at her. Or maybe it was really Daniel’s smile.
Laughing, Zoë carried the handful of beans inside and made a pot of coffee.
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