Making your Art a part of Holy Week

Palm Sunday Haiku

by Dee Stewart

Palm branches waving
Sallow shoots shower The Messiah
Hosanna, Selah.

in honor of National Poetry Month

Read more at The Master’s Artist

Bubble Bath & A Good Book: THE TAKER

I met Alma Katsu last summer at The Decatur Book Festival. I was stage captain where she would be speaking on a panel with Tananarive Due. As they began to discuss there books I knew I would have to read her debut novel, THE TAKER. After Chapter One I knew it would be my next Bubble Bath and a Good Book Selection.

Let me notify you that THE TAKER is not Christian Fiction. However, I chose it this week, because it is a brilliant story about good and evil.

The Book:

The Taker in Katsu’s words: It's the story of a young woman, Lanore, growing up in an isolated village in Maine in the 1800s who falls in love with a young man, Jonathan. He's the eldest son of the family that owns the town: He's wealthy and, more than that, he's preternaturally, irresistibly beautiful. She knows that if she gives her heart to him, she's in for nothing but heartache, but she can't help herself. Lanore becomes pregnant by Jonathan and is sent by her family to Boston to have the baby in secret, but Lanore runs away and ends up being taken in by Adair, a mysterious man with otherworldly powers. He has the power to grant eternal life — but there's a catch. You can live forever, but you will be bound to the person who has made you immortal, and only that person can break the spell. In other words, only the person who gave you eternal life can take it away from you.

Now bound to Adair, Lanore decides to use this power to keep Jonathan with her forever. It's not until she's done this that she realizes she's made a terrible mistake: They are now both tethered to Adair, who is much more dangerous than she imagined, and it's up to her to save both Jonathan and herself from an eternity of torment. –USA Today

Bubble Bath Choice to go with this book:

Bath and Body Works BE ENCHANTED bubble bath. The name fits the theme of the book and it smells great. A mix of  Pomegranate, Sugared Petals, Creamy Musk fragrance notes. Bath & Body Works has a nice sale going on this weekend. Buy 3 Get 3 Free. Enjoy.

Thriller Thursday: Mollie Bryan on Writing Apprenticeship

Happy Thriller Thursday!

Today at The Thrill Begins blog Kensington Books author Mollie Bryan shares how being an editor apprenticeship prepared her for her year as a debut author. Read the article here and share what helped you prepare for your first year as a published author?
Here's the link: 

http://thethrillbegins.blogspot.com/2012/03/apprenticeship.html

Tags: advice, author, debut, thriller, thursday, tips, writing

The DRM Free Conversation Publishing Needs to Have thanks to JK Rowling

photo courtesy of THE VERGE

“In a break with industry practices, the [Harry Potter]books aren’t locked down by encryption, which means consumers can move them between devices and read them anywhere they like.” - JK Rowling’s Pottermore Breaks eBook Lockdown, Might Change eBooks Forever

This week the Harry Potter ebooks went on sale. To our surprise we learned that these ebooks are DRM free, meaning they can be loaded on any type of ereader device.

Doesn’t this resemble what happened with the universal conversion to the mp3? Are we going to react to what is inevitable ebooks becoming DRM free or will we learn from the digitization of the music industry? It’s going to happen. How will it affect author’s compensation? How can epublishers monetize DRM free content? Will publishers change their relationship with Amazon.com? Will publishers spend more on relationship building with their core readership and create their own epublishing hub similar to Harlequin’s Carina Press?

TPT: DiAnn Mills THE CHASE

This week’s Trailer Park Tuesday feature is Diann Mills THE CHASE

Based on a real-life cold case, The Chase, by bestselling author DiAnn Mills, teams novelist and former news-anchor Kariss Walker with FBI Special Agent Tigo Harris as they reopen an unsolved crime case and discover more than they bargained for. Will Kariss's pursuit of her dream as a suspense writer come at a deadly cost? Join in The Chase and find out. (Zondervan, March 2012)

Happy Birthday Selah

On March 22, 2000 God blessed me with a new purpose, a deeper faith in him, and unyielding joy when our daughter Selah Skye was born. For the past twelve years she has been and continues to be my best thing and the best gift God gave to me. She's sweet, full of empathy, helpful to others, and lives to make people happy. She's also an all A student, a Bronze award Girl Scout, first chair Clarinet for her middle school band, and believes that Christ is her Savior. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, baby. I love you with all I have

THRILLER THURSDAY: BIG AUTHOR X MENTORS

One of the missions of ITW's Debut Authors Program involves having established authors provide mentorship to those who are up and coming. You can find all sorts of evidence of this--in the informal conversations at ThrillerFest that take place between Big Author X and someone who has just begun querying, for example--and last Sunday a particularly inspiring instance took place.

Some of the Debuts were talking about which author we'd most like to sit down in a room with and get to ask all those questions that are so seldom asked. You know the ones.
How do you craft a book that gets so many people turning the pages--almost ripping the pages in their haste to turn them? What's it like to see your books all over the world? And even--how did you do it?

We quickly knew which author we'd like to talk with first. The only problem? Debut Authors come from all over the world, so where would the room to talk in be?

Learn more here.