You Never Know What Tomorrow May Bring by Nancy M Bell

Well, I must say things have changed drastically since last month. I have spent the holidays in Winnipeg, Manitoba at the Health Sciences Centre. Not exactly how I planned to spend Christmas, New Year's and all of January up to this point. My oldest son, who is respected Equine Surgeon, was admitted to ICU on Christmas Eve suffering from some strange symptoms. He has been in ICU ever since and up until last Monday we had no diagnosis. It is without a doubt one of the scariest things I have ever experienced. A huge team of doctors, encompassing more areas of expertise than I can remember, were stumped. Many procedures and tests followed, some of which were sent to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. While they waited for results to come in they began treating him for what they believed was most likely to be the cause. A lot of very terrifying conditions and diseases were talked about, most of which did not have good outcomes. We faced the fact that our son might never leave the ICU alive.
Then last Monday night, January 11, which is actually his birthday, one of his doctors came into the room and said he had some news. A test came back positive for a condition that was treatable! It is a surreal feeling to be overjoyed to be told that your son has a rare form of encephalitis. It was the best news we could have gotten, because it was a treatable thing. The chances of full recovery are very good. We are not out of the woods yet and there is a long road to do down yet, but at least there is a road to walk down with a light at the end of the tunnel.

So, the point of me telling you this is....? Never take anything for granted, ever. Hug your kids, tell them you love them, no matter how old they are. Tell your friends what they mean to you. There are no guarantees in life and this has been brought home to me very clearly. Who would ever guess that a healthy successful thirty-five year old would become incapacitated so quickly. In the space of a few days he went from a highly functioning professional to being hooked up to a machine that breathed for him. Take the time to appreciate the glory of the sunrise, the magnificence of a sunset, the diamond points of the stars on a clear night. Dance in the moon shadows on crisp white snow under the full moon. Don't hate Mondays or wish away the cold winter months longing for spring. Live in the moment of each and every day. Come Hell or High Water live life to the fullest to the best of your ability. Wishing you Peace, Joy, Love and Happiness each and every day of your lives.

You can visit my website, follow me on twitter @emilypikkasso and on Facebook

I am currently working on the next book in the Arabella's Secret series. The Selkie's Song is the first book and is available at Amazon and where good books are sold everywhere.

I Write Because I Read - Janet Lane Walters

Our marveklous publisher thought we should let the readers know a bit about us. So here's a bit about me. I've just entered my 48th year of being a published author but not all those years were spent writing. Some of the time was spent being a nurse and storing up material for when I returned to writing.

Now to my original bit. I read at an early age. Now this I don't remember but my mother told me the story. From the day I came home from the hospital, once a week or so my grandfather would read to me. He ran a finger under the words as he read each one. What I remember is sometime between my third and fourth birthday I began to read to my mom and dad. I quidkly went through all the children's books and those mom would find at the library. I wanted my own card. At that time to have a card you had to show you could read. I passed and began a systematic, alphabetical journey through the children's section. When I went to school I thought reading class was boring. When my turn to read from Dick and Jane, I read with expression. Was my teacher happy? Not one bit. She acused me of memorizing the book. My father didn't like this when I told him. He went to school and snagged the principal and told her,no one calls my child a liar. Pick any book off your shelf and open it and tell her to read. I passed that test and was allowed to read books during reading class. Never did learn much about Dick and Jane.

By the time I reached third grade I was reading any book my parents had on their shelves. They were also readers. I read Anna Karenina and gave it as a book report, shocking the teacher but she remembered what had happened when I was in first grade. She did object to the way I ended the book report since I found ways to change the ending. That was when I decided to become a story teller.

Writing plays to put on in a friend's garage was my first venture into fictional story telling. We had a great deal of fun and the neighbors came to our shows. There were many pages of these first efforts that were lost when we moved. But I could make up more. During high school other things came into my head. I liked all my subjects except Geometry and Typing. There was little time for writing stories but I did scribble away.

My father was a steelworker and strikes were common. I knew I couldn't spend my life trying to be a writer. I went to school and became a nurse. Occasionally I was called by one of my instructors not to be so descriptive in my nurses notes or in my case studied. The good thing I I added observing to my skills and I continued reading.

I worked as a nurse, married and had pneumonia. My sister-in-law brought me a bag of books to read. They were all nurse romances. By about the fifth book, I knew I could do better. The writers new little about nurses, doctors or hospitals. I began making notes. But selling that first book took time especially since I decided to start with short stories. In 1968 I sold the first short stories and wrote and sold more. The magazine marked for short stories was going dry. I sold two stories that I recieved money for but the magazines folded before the stories were published. So I set out again to learn how to write longer. In 1972 I sold my first romance - a nurse romance. I wrote some more, raised four children, returned to work as a nurse as they neared college age and writing went on the back burner.

I returned to writing in the late 1980's and had to learn things like queries and the like. In 1994 I was published and since then I've added a few books to my shelf. I'll put some of the covers here. By the way, I still read and write.

Books We Love Spotlight - Author, Roseanne Dowell

Roseanne Dowell wears many hats - wife (married 50+ years) mother of six, grandmother of fourteen, great grandmother of three, Avon Representative,  author, and former school secretary,  she writes a variety of genres  from romance to mystery to paranormal and suspense, all with romantic elements and a bit of humor. Her heroes/heroines range from their mid twenties to their seventies. Yes, old people need love, too.

In her spare time, Roseanne enjoys quilting and embroidery, especially combining the two and making jewelry as well as other crafts, Her favorite past-time is spending time with her family, her second favorite thing to do is write. She's currently working on Book 3 in her Family Affair Series.

The Musical Extinctions

The word “extinction” evokes images of dinosaurs and dodos, animals once plenty, but now existing only in the historical record.

Civilizations go extinct as well. Ancient Egyptian, Roman, Aztec and other societies have died off, either by violent conquest or cultural exhaustion. Along with them, artistic expressions—whether literary, dramatic, musical or otherwise—die off.

Another form of artistic extinction occurs when one culture becomes so pervasive and powerful that other cultural forms of expression become overwhelmed. This is the current situation.

Manipuri lady playing the Pena

I had the experience of this many years ago, when visiting the Indian state of Manipur, which is nestled in the north-eastern corner of the country, bordering Myanmar, near the Chinese border. As I was returning to my host’s home one evening, I had the surreal experience of being blasted with the strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” coming from a small roadside dwelling. Manipur is a rural society, whose traditional instruments are soft-sounding bamboo flutes, the pena (a lute played with a bow) and the pung, a two-headed drum. Indeed, the contrast was jarring.

Drum market in Zimbabwe

Traditional societies have an astonishing variety of instruments. For example, Zimabawe, a relatively small country in Africa, boasts the Ngome and Ingunga, just two varieties of several dozen types of drums of various sizes. Other percussion instruments include a peculiar drum played by rubbing and scratching that produces an unusual scratching sound, and the kanyeda, an instrument made of bamboo strips strapped together and filled with small seeds for percussion. Some traditional instruments facing extinction are the chinzambi, chipendai, tsuri, mukwati and wenyere.

And it is not just instruments that are fading away, but also musical forms and idioms. Traditional musical forms are very much tied into the spiritual narratives and mythologies of these societies. In many cultures, music is not regarded as a performance designed to make money for the artist but as a means of connecting with the sacred, which has reward in itself and is focused not on the artist, but on the object of the art.

The introduction of Western education, mostly by missionaries, effectively cut traditional cultures from their roots and thus provided the means for Western musical attitudes and idioms to enter. Indeed, youth in many traditional societies are trading in their instruments for guitars and drums and the musical idioms of their ancestors for rap and rock-and-roll.

Yo Yo Honey Singh

Examples abound: Yo Yo Honey Singh, a Punjabi rapper, whose explicit lyrics shock local sensibilities; K-pop music featuring Korean boy bands with hair dyed blonde blasting rock-n-roll in the Korean language; and Bollywood, the Indian film industry, which at one time featured exclusively Indian instruments, now giving way to Western music.

Music is distinguished by creativity and variety. Its diminution strikes at the very heart this artistic enterprise, leaving all of us poorer in its wake.

Mohan Ashtakala is a the author of "The Yoga Zapper - A Novel," www.yogazapper.com 

Published by Books We Love.

WHO am I really? by Sheila Claydon

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My publisher has suggested that I and my fellow authors start the year off by introducing ourselves properly on the Books We Love blog. It's a much taller order than it seems. It depends is the only answer I can give about who I am and what I do.

Although I'm always a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a colleague, and a neighbour, I'm also a writer, a reader, a gardener, a cook, a dog owner, a traveller, a walker, a carer, a Yoga practitioner, and a whole lot of other things besides, and that's before I get on to control freak, micro-organizer and (you might already have guessed this) list-maker! Then there's my working life  - the jobs I had, the things I learned - but I'm not even going there.

I'm no different from anyone else of course. We are all made up of the little bits of  everything that are our day-to-day lives. It's how we form the memories, some bad, some good, that we reminisce about as the years go by. Oh hang on a minute...I'm a writer (it said so in the list) so I am a little bit different after all. Its why I store all those experiences in my sub-conscious until I'm ready to retrieve them and download them onto the pages of my latest manuscript.

I'm not proud of it, but it's how it is. When I travel most of the details of the journey remain lodged in my brain. A new environment is uploaded to my sub-conscious lock, stock and barrel and sits there until I need it.  Time spent with my grandchildren, visits to family, walking the dog, talking with friends, shopping for a neighbour, even visiting someone in hospital...it all goes into the swirling cauldron of memories that I call upon when I'm writing.

Sometimes an experience will trigger an idea for a story and when that happens, it will, if left to its own devices, weave itself around the memories I have stored in my head, rejecting some of them and trying others for size until the outline of a new story emerges with very little conscious effort on my part. It's not until I fire up my lap top that the real effort of joining it all together begins.

In Reluctant Date the trigger was a place I stayed on a holiday. This somehow wove itself into another landscape 3,000 miles away, picking up a hero and heroine on its journey. In Mending Jodie's Heart the idea for the story was prompted by an actual event involving horses and disabled children, which, before I knew it, had turned into the When Paths Meet trilogy. Then, in my latest book, Miss Locatelli, half-forgotten memories of Italy forced themselves back into my consciousness as soon as I realized my heroine had to visit Florence. A magazine article about a jeweller triggered that one.

When I look back at the dozen or so books I've written so far there is a real bonus, however, because every one of them has special memories woven into the story. None of them are about me or my family although, inevitably, some of the characters will display traits I've observed in the people I know, but the story still resonates with me on a personal level. The children in my books often behave in the same way my own children and grandchildren did when they were small, and then there are the animals. Dogs, horses, birds...even the wild ones...all trigger a memory. The grown up characters too. I rarely spend long describing any of them. They are just part of a continuing story of memories that I like to think helps to make my stories real.

So that's who I am. Someone who is made up of little bits of a lot and who never knows which bit she is going to wake up to.  Today it was the micro-managing/list-making persona. Tomorrow it's grandchildren day, so cooking, cuddling and playing games will dominate along with supervising homework and listening closely to whatever they want to tell me.  With any luck I'll wake up to my writing persona the following day and by then I'll have more memories to call upon, so when the book I'm writing at the moment, Remembering Rose, is published at the end of June, I will be able to read it and remember.

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All of Sheila's books can be found on the links below:

Books We Love

Amazon

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She also has a website and can be found on facebook