Judy Peterson, Amazing Outdoor Photographer

 

I'm happy to welcome Judy Peterson to my mountaintop. Judy is a talented photographer who captures beautiful outdoor scenes, despite the fact that she's confined to a wheelchair.

Judy, when did you develop an interest in photography?

My parents gave me my first camera when I was 10 years old. I'll never forget. It was a Kodak Instamatic and had a green button on it. The flash bulbs clicked on top of the camera. What fun I had with this camera! The fun hasn't stopped!

 

 

 

 

Why do you prefer to photograph birds and outdoor scenes?  

 

My first love is taking photos of those precious to me. Always will be. I have been the family historian ever since I can remember. Taking photos of the family and friends has been my first passion. Looking back at the photos of when our son was born and other important moments, brings a smile to my face. I'm glad I have all of the photos.

 

As far as taking photos of birds and outdoor scenes, it calms me. Each time I go outside, I see something new. We live in a beautiful world. The birds that inhabit our part of the world, sing and add a new dimension. Going out with my camera and enjoying the glorious world we live in has taught me patience. Can you sit or stand and watch a bird or butterfly for minutes on end so that, when it moves, you see how it moves? Does it return to where it was? This is animal behavior. I have learned a lot of animal behavior. It's been a moving experience. A calming experience.

 

How are you able to photograph wildlife when you're confined to a wheelchair?
 

I sit and take photos whenever possible. Sometimes, my husband helps me stand and move. If I see a bird coming or in a location that is impossible to see in my chair, my husband supports me while I shoot. Being able to take photos has helped me stay relaxed in a body that's filled with physical pain.

 

 

If you were teaching photography to youngsters, what would you tell them are most important aspects of the art form?

 

Photography is what you make it. It's what you see when you look around you. Your camera is a tool. No matter what camera you have, you can take beautiful photos. Knowing your camera is all it takes. All cameras have limitations. Work within those limitations to take photos.

 

How do people get in touch with you to order your prints? Do you have a website?
 

 I do not have a website. If you would like to order prints or blank note cards made with my prints, simply email me:  judithsparkles@gmail.com. Or visit my website: http://judylovestoread.blogspot.com.
 

 

 

Thank you, Judy, for allowing me to share a few of your beautiful photographs!

 

 

Carolyn Hart's Ghost Gone Wild

Carolyn, what prompted you to write about Bailey Ruth, a redheaded ghost?

I grew up loving Topper and Blithe Spirit. I always wanted to write a book with a happy fun ghost.

I had an idea about a young woman, rather prim, who was in the attic not long before her wedding. She finds an old trunk and while exploring it, discovers that she was a twin but her twin died at birth. This realization brings back her twin, who is feisty, unconventional, and a bit on the wild side.

I was sure that I could write a delicious story about the tug of war between the twins over the future and the feisty twin decicing her sister had picked the wrong man.

But then I realized I needed to think about ghosts. Who are they and how could this ghost appear? I pondered the fact that a ghost is the spirit of someone who has died and gone to Heavan. That led to thinking about Heaven and before I knew it, I'd popped in my mind to Heaven and around a cumulous cloud came a freewheeling redheaded ghost and her name was Bailey Ruith Raeburn and she wasn't anyboy's twin and here was her story . . .

That was Ghost at Work. Now Bailey Ruth appears in her fourth adventure and she's still having fun. 

Thank you, Carolyn. Here's what
Thank you, Carolyn. Publisher's Weekly has this to say about Ghost Gone Wild:

Carolyn Hart’s “irresistible cozy sleuth” is back—good-hearted ghost Bailey Ruth Raeburn just can’t say no to an earthly rescue, even when maybe she should.

Bailey Ruth loves to return to earth as an emissary from Heaven’s Department of Good Intentions. Problem is, she’s a bit of a loose cannon as far as ghosts go—forgetting to remain invisible, alarming earthly creatures—so she’s far from the top of department head Wiggins’s go-to list for assignments.

That’s why she’s surprised when the Heaven-sent Rescue Express drops her off at a frame house on the outskirts of her old hometown, Adelaide, Oklahoma, where a young man is playing the drums. What kind of rescuing does he need—drum lessons? But when a window cracks and a rifle barrel is thrust inside, only Bailey Ruth’s hasty intervention saves Nick Magruder from taking a bullet. When she materializes to reassure him, she finds she can’t go back to vanishing. What gives?

It turns out she’s been tricked by Nick’s late aunt—Delilah Delahunt Duvall—to come to the young man’s rescue, which means she isn’t back on earth in service of the department. Wiggins has no idea where she is—and now she may be trapped in Adelaide forever. Unless she can help Aunt Dee snare the person who wants her nephew dead.

Nick's doting Aunt Dee engineered this mission on the sly, Bailey Ruth must operate on earth without her otherworldly powers. When Nick is accused of a murder, she must rely on her wits alone to clear him. Though not fully developed, the secondary characters have some amusing quirks, and even the villain, who's not readily identifiable, has a certain charm. The well-constructed plot offers an ample supply of red herrings. Fans of benign ghosts such as those in Blithe Spirit and Topper will find a lot to like.  

Catch and Release

by Lawrence Block

Subterranean Press has begun shipping hardcover copies of my new short story collection, Catch and Release, and a beautiful book it is. While the entire edition is essentially sold out, you may be able to secure a copy, if not from the publisher then from an online bookseller or mystery specialty store. But don’t drag your feet; Subterranean’s printing is a small one, and when they’re gone, well, they’re gone.

I’ve just published the Catch and Release eBook, expertly formatted  by Jaye Manus, with Ken Laager’s great cover art. It’s eVailable right now at Amazon (for Kindle) Barnes & Noble (for Nook) and Smashwords (for virtually everything else—Kobo, Apple, Sony Reader, and your pop-up toaster.)

This is the book that led Publishers Weekly’s reviewer to enthuse, “If Block were a serial killer instead of one of the best storytellers of our time, we’d be in real trouble.” The book’s a big one, with 17 previously uncollected explorations of the dark side, including 13 short stories, two novellas, a one-act stage play, and a newspaper op-ed piece, and I have to say I’m pleased with it.
Will there be a paperback?

There will indeed, same size as the Subterranean hardcover, same cover as the eBook, and it’ll be coming soon to an online bookseller near you. Rest assured I’ll let you know about it.
And that’s all for now. I’ve got packing to do, I’m off to Bouchercon in Albany in the morning, but I wanted to get this to you first.

LB

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A Guest blog by K. M. Rockwood

I’ve worked in a variety of settings, including a steel fabrication plant, a fiberglass manufacturing facility, correctional institutions and alternative schools. In my writing, I try to give a voice to some of the people I’ve known who struggle to live on the fringes of society. Protagonists in popular fiction are the beautiful people, and often the villains are those who never had a good chance at a middle class life or who made mistakes early on and will pay for them for the rest of their lives.

Sendoff for a Snitch, released in e-book by Musa Publishing on August 22, is the fourth in the Jesse Damon Crime Novel series. After nearly twenty years in prison on a murder conviction picked up when he was sixteen, Jesse Damon has been released, a home detention monitor strapped to his ankle. Determined to make it and mindful of his parole restrictions, he struggles with life outside prison. He finds a basement apartment, a job on the overnight shift at a steel fabrication plant and a few people who treat him like anybody else. With a murder conviction already under his belt, Jesse is a natural suspect whenever a crime is uncovered anywhere around him.

 

Jesse is a fictional character, but he is based on prison inmates who were on my work crew when I was employed at a large state prison. Many of them were convicted as adults at ages 14 through 17, and worked hard in an attempt to become decent people and have a future when they are released. The deck is stacked against them, especially if they have no family or support system when they are released, and just earning a living is an uphill battle.

In Sendoff for a Snitch, Jesse's trying to make it, but nothing comes easy. He's always broke and the police figure he's a natural suspect for almost anything, even without his coworker Aaron trying to set him up.

Jesse can't catch a break. His forklift at work is wrecked. His sometimes-girlfriend is furious with him. Heavy rains and snow melt have flooded the rustbelt riverfront city. His basement apartment has a few feet of water in it. And it's still raining.

Wait until his parole officer finds out he's been caught driving Aaron's pickup truck. Without a license. That alone might violate his parole and send him back to prison. Then when Aaron's body is found floating in the flooded stairwell of his apartment, prison looks like a foregone conclusion, unless Jesse can manage to steer the police in another direction. 

Jesse is first introduced in Steeled for Murder, when a forklift driver at the steel fabrication plant where he works is found dead in the warehouse, and he is the first suspect. In Fostering Death, he goes to a funeral home to pay his last respects to his foster mother, only to discover she has been murdered and the police think he had something to do with it. His sometimes-girlfriend Kelly is assaulted in Buried Biker, and he has to convince Kelly's father's outlaw bike club that he was not the rapist, then, when the real culprit is found dead, everyone is sure he is responsible.

In Brothers in Crime, the police tell Jesse he has been caught on video surveillance committing crimes he did not do, including breaking into an ATM and killing a man Kelly has grown close to. It is due to be released in spring of 2014.

 

---------

 

KM Rockwood draws on a varied background for stories, among them working as a laborer in a steel fabrication plant, operating glass melters and related equipment in a fiberglass manufacturing facility, and supervising an inmate work crew in a large medium security state prison. These jobs, as well as work as a special education teacher in an alternative high school and a GED teacher in county detention facilities, provide most of the background for novels and short stories.

Carolyn Hart Revisted

A bestselling author with more than three million books in print, Carolyn Hart is best known for her Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins (Henrie O) series. Her most recent series features red-haired ghost Bailey Ruth Raeburn of Adelaide, Oklahoma, who returns to earth to help solve murders.


Carolyn, your latest book, Escape From Paris, which will be released this coming week. Was it actually thirty years ago that you originally wrote it?

This month, to my great delight, Oconee Spirit Press is publishing the original manuscript, which has a newly amended copyright. It has been 30 years in coming but now Escape From Paris is available as it was written.

A war story?

I was a child during WWII and the war dominated our lives.Two American sisters risk their lives in Nazi-Occupied Paris to save British fliers from arrest. Family members served in the Army or Navy. We followed the faraway course of the fighting in  huge black newspaper headlines. Food and gasoline were rationed. The war remained vivid in my memory and, as an adult, I wrote several WWII suspense novels. To sell Escape from Paris, I cut the book from 93,000 to 55,000 words. That  version was published in 1982  and 1983.

I hope readers will share the struggles of brave men and women who defied the Gestapo during the bitter winter of 1940. They knew fear, found love, grieved loss. Their lives and deaths remind us that freedom survives only when the free are brave.

 I hope you may be interested to remember a year of war when England awaited invasion and the Nazis devoured Europe. I believe this is a book that will appeal to book club readers, highly intelligent women, often of a certain age, who will bring their own memories or memories of their parents into play.  

 I look forward to reading it. You also have a recent Bailey Ruth Raeburn novel out, Ghost in Trouble. Please tell us about it? 

Bailey Ruth Raeburn has the best of intentions when she returns to Adelaide to save a life but she never counted on that life belonging to a woman she loathed when she was in the world. Moreover, her charge stubbornly insists on playing hunt-the-killer. Bailey Ruth deals with young love, a mother's heartbreak, a fraudulent psychic and a dog's rawhide bone in her quest for a wily murderer.

 Your ghost series is my favorite among your books. How did your impetuous red-haired ghost Bailey Ruth Raeburn of Adelaide, Oklahoma, come about?

 I loved the Topper books and films when I was growing up. I see ghosts as reflections of the person who lived. I always wanted to write about a fun-loving, energetic, impetuous ghost returning to earth to help someone in trouble and Bailey Ruth answered the call.

When did your Death on Demand mystery series originate?

In 1985, I attended a meeting of the southwest chapter of MWA in Houston and visited Murder by the Book. I had never been to a mystery bookstore and I was enchanted. I had just started a new mystery set in a bookstore. I immediately decided to have a mystery bookstore named Death on Demand.

Tell us about your latest Death on Demand mystery,  Dead by Midnight.

Annie Darling refuses to believe in her new employee's suicide. To save a woman from a false charge of murder, Annie unravels the mystery of a towel hidden at midnight in the gazebo, the lack of fingerprints on a crystal mug, blood on a teenager's blue shirt, and the secret of a lovers' tryst.   

You’ve received an amazing number of awards including the Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Award. Has the recognition resulted in increased book sales and reader awareness of your work?

 I hope that the awards, which I very much appreciate, help to attract readers. It’s hard to know whether such awards increase sales but any mention of a book or books is helpful to an author.

What's your writing schedule like and do you aim for a certain amount of words each day, no matter how long it takes?

 I try to write five pages a day (approx. 1,500 words) when working on a book. Some days I meet that goal. Some days I don’t. When I am stuck, I take a long walk and usually something will occur to me.

 Tell us about your writing background.

I worked on school newspapers and majored in journalism at the University of Oklahoma. When we started a family, I didn’t return to reporting but decided to try fiction. I wrote juvenile fiction, then YA, and in the 1970s began writing adult suspense and mystery.

How much research do you conduct before you begin a novel and do you always visit the locale?

The novel dictates the amount of research. I wrote several early novels, preceding the Death on Demand books, which had World War II backgrounds and required extensive research. I’ve visited the locales of all the books written since Death on Demand. Once I set a book partly in the Philippines which I have never visited and a woman who grew up there asked me how many years I’d spent in the islands and I knew my library research had been successful.

Advice for novice writers?

Care passionately about what you write. If you care, somewhere an editor will care.

Thank you, Carolyn.

You can visit Carolyn at her website: www.CarolynHart.com

Sandra Ramos O'Brient's Sandoval Sisters' Secrets of Old Blood

Sandra Ramos O'Brient

On May 30, 2013, The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood received two awards from the ILBA in NYC: Best Historical Fiction and Best First Book.  Fifteen years ago I wrote the following line in an Introduction to Fiction class at UCLA:  “Human dreams had been written in archaic Spanish, and terrible sins described in faded brown ink on whisper-thin paper.” The journey to completed novel was chock-full of twists and new beginnings.       

My maternal ancestors were Sandovals. In my grandparent’s home in Santa Fe hung a giant portrait of a tall aging man with flaming red hair. My blue-eyed great great grandfather stared down at me throughout my childhood. The story goes that the Sandoval sisters, both spinsters and reputedly witches, adopted two Anglo boys who’d been orphaned when their family was crossing into New Mexico on the Santa Fe Trail. The boys were Anglo, but they became Sandovals.  How would la gente, the people, react to an Anglo Sandoval?             

Surnames have played a role in my life: I was bullied in school for being a gringa, even though my mother is Hispanic.  It’s the O’Briant surname (Ramos is a pen name.)  Initially, I tried to find an answer to why cultural and ethnic antagonisms existed in Santa Fe.  In the process I learned more about New Mexico and America than I'd ever been taught in college. But my goal was not to indict anyone, just to understand.  My book originally told the story of those descendants with flashbacks to their ‘aunts’, the Sandoval Sisters.  My agent said I had the makings of a family saga. I refocused all the flashbacks and brought the past into the present to tell the story of the sisters who were already a blended family: the eldest sister, Oratoria, was a peasant from Mexico, captured by Apaches and bought for a sack of flour by the Sandovals.  She’s the only one who has read all the Sandoval diaries and is compiling a history of her adopted family while parenting her younger sisters, Alma and Pilar.

   
Witchcraft and superstition floated in the crisp mountain air we breathed in Santa Fe. My mother didn’t hesitate to tell me scary demon stories at my bedtime as if they were sweet fairy tales. The parish priest asked my aunt to stop conducting séances, and rumor had it that my grandmother became paralyzed because a friend who brought daily tasty treats to her was a witch who desired my grandpa. Where I grew up, religion and superstition walked hand-in-hand.         

 The novel reflects Santa Fe's unique position in history: it was the first foreign capital conquered by the U.S. The war is the backdrop for the sisters' individual love and coming-of-age stories in which they cope with racism, sexism, political intrigue and the power of  superstition in that time and place.  Thousands of Anglo soldiers entered the town, but not a word has been written from a female perspective. Until now.

 Book Summary:

When Alma flees with her young lover to Texas to escape an arranged marriage with a much older man, she sets in motion a drama that will put the sisters and their legacy at risk. Pilar, a 14-year-old tomboy, is offered as a replacement bride, and what follows is a sensuous courtship and marriage clouded by the curses of her husband’s former lover, Consuelo. She will stop at nothing, even the use of black magic, in her effort to destroy the Sandoval family. The Mexican-American war begins and the Americans invade Santa Fe. The sisters are caught in the crosshairs of war from two important fronts--New Mexico and Texas. Their money and ancient knowledge offer some protection, but their lives are changed forever.

 ________

Sandra Ramos O’Briant's short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in both print and online.  A complete list and excerpts from the novel can be found here: www.thesandovalsisters.com

Read Chapter 1 by clicking on the BookPulse tab on my Facebook Author Page.  Please give my page a Like while you’re there: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sandra-Ramos-OBriant-author/435665283128378

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sramosobriant

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/sramosobriant/boards/

An Rver's Dream Vacation Resort

After years of staying in crowded, graveled RV parks, we discovered a resort that is very close to paradise. Rancho California is located in the southern desert 18 miles east of Temecula in wine country, an oasis guaranteed to fill most RVer's vacation dreams.

 

 

The 503-lot resort has a number of waterfalls, ponds, multitude of palm trees, swimming pools, tennis and pickle ball courts, grocery mart, restaurant, chapel, laundromats and bath houses, fenced dog park, coastal mountain views as well as a golf course which meanders through the gated facility. It's a community unto itself.

The view of one of the waterfalls was taken from our 40 x 80 lot, which features an outdoor galley kitchen, 25 palm trees and a rose garden that most flower enthusiasts would die for. The large club house behind the waterfall regularly hosts plays, dances to live music, church services, club meetings and a variety of activities available to both renters and lot owners.

A view of the golf course with the coastal range in the background. Visitors regularly travel from Germany, the UK and other countries to stay here as well as RVers from every state in the union. And, surprisingly, it's relatively inexpensive.

 

 

Sunset viewed from the back of our lot, while seated with a glass of California wine to relax from the day's activities. The only drawback is that I don't take time to work on another Logan and Cafferty mystery because there are so many activities, new friends to visit with, and great views to gaze upon. It's truly an RVers paradise!

Disclaimer: This is not a paid commercial, but an invitation to fellow RVers to discover this amazing place.