New Releases for May 2023 by BWL Publishing Inc.

NEWEST RELEASE

A Glitter Bay Mystery

 

 CLICK TO PURCHASE

When Laken Miller moves into the apartment above Vintage Sage, it seems all of Glitter Bay goes crazy, especially when Laken suspects her new home is haunted. Just when she thinks she’s the victim of mass hysteria, she finds her ex-husband’s body in the courtyard.

 

Can Laken prove her innocence before the local police cuff her with a different kind of glittering bracelet?

  

A Walk on the Beach by Eden Monroe

 

To purchase Sudden Turn click here

The romantic suspense novel Sudden Turn is set in the fictitious city of Franklin, in the real life province of New Brunswick, Canada. I know everyone has their own little slice of heaven, and for me that’s New Brunswick (Nouveau Brunswick), my home province. So forgive me if I brag a little.

Not that size matters, but New Brunswick is 72,908 square kilometres of mostly trees, lakes, etc. There are also plenty of cities and towns, although more than half of us live in rural areas, me included. But nature can be pretty exciting.  Like watching a river run backwards. It’s a fact! It happens twice a day and you can almost set your watch by it. I’m talking about the mighty St. John River, often called The Rhine of North America. It does its slow dance through the province from north to south until it meets up with the Atlantic Ocean and then things get really interesting. Rising tides literally shove this 450-mile river in the opposite direction with force, creating powerful rapids. I’ve ridden those rapids in a jet boat at their peak. Epic!

And speaking about the tidal action of the world-renowned Bay of Fundy, how about this? You can walk barefoot on the ocean floor, wet sand oozing between your toes where just six hours earlier you would have been taking that same walk under as much as forty plus feet of salt water. That’s about the height of a four-storey building! The tides of course are the result of the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon on the earth, which itself is in perpetual motion. The highest tide on record in the Bay of Fundy is 53.6 feet! It’s pretty phenomenal because about 100 billion tonnes of seawater makes its way in and out of this funnel-shaped bay in a gentle sway during its twice a day tide cycle. That’s equivalent to the estimated flow of all of the freshwater rivers and streams on the planet!

There’s also the spectacular Old Sow Whirlpool in the western passage of Passamaquoddy Bay, an inlet of the Bay of Fundy. It’s the largest whirlpool in the western hemisphere, second only in the world to the massive Saltstraumen maelstrom in Norway.

New Brunswick has tidal bores too, again because of the giant Bay of Fundy tides. One of the best known is found in the city of Moncton where the incoming wave can reach up to a metre high and rushes up the Petitcodiac River at about thirteen kilometers per hour. Surfers love it. It’s a rare natural phenomenon because there are only sixty tidal bores in the entire world.

Again along our rugged coastline, the Hopewell Rocks are probably the biggest stone flowerpots in the world. Some of these amazing sea stacks are as tall as seventy feet at low tide when you can literally walk among them … or kayak in this most unusual flowerpot garden at high tide. The choice is yours. The difference is about forty to fifty feet of seawater.

Moving inland a bit, New Brunswick has it’s own gravity hill – Magnetic Hill in Moncton where vehicles coast uphill. It used to be said the land was somehow magnetized, hence it’s name, but it’s just an optical illusion. There are actually sixty gravity hills in the world, but perhaps Magnetic Hill is one of the best known. I’m guessing there might also be more of them. I recall riding a bicycle from Saint John to my parent’s home on Darlings Island one time and I came to a long stretch of highway that looked like a steep upgrade. I thought I was in for a lot of heavy pedalling on my old school bike with no speed gears, but to my surprise I actually coasted the whole way. It looked like I was going uphill, but I never once pedalled. I’m serious! The funny thing too is before that highway was twinned many years ago, there were a lot of fatal crashes along the stretch where traffic from the Fox Farm Road entered the highway. I wonder if perhaps cars may have appeared to be further away than they actually were when people pulled out and tried to merge with the existing traffic flow?

In Saint John, Canada’s oldest incorporated city, there is a green space like no other, well in this country anyway because it’s the largest urban park in Canada. Rockwood Park is 2,200 acres in size and was designed by Calvert Vaux, one of the designers of New York’s Central Park. Rockwood Park is home to an 18-hole 70 par public golf course, 10 freshwater lakes and 55 walking trails and footpaths, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from downtown. I’ve spent many an hour in this pristine urban wilderness.

Are you into bridges? No? Well maybe you will be after this, given the romantic nature of covered bridges. Also called kissing bridges, you have time for quite a few in our Hartland Covered Bridge. Built in 1898 as an uncovered bridge, it got its roof in 1922 and is now the longest covered bridge in the world with a span of 1,280 feet. That’s just under a quarter of a mile long! In the early days you would be penalized with a substantial fine if you were caught travelling through it with your horse going faster than a walk. It was likely a resonance issue.

And of course prehistoric creatures also once called New Brunswick home and we have our own mastodon, discovered in 1936. There are said to be about sixty such specimens found across Canada, and the Hillsborough Mastodon is “considered to be one of the most remarkable.”

Speaking about fossils, we certainly have our share. The farm where I once lived had plenty because many stones found in that area have some kind of plant fossil embedded in them.

Among the countless fossils found in New Brunswick is the world’s oldest intact shark skeleton dating from approximately 409 million years ago. That makes it about twice as old as dinosaurs. This specimen was discovered in the Restigouche River basin. For the scholars among us, that’s Doliodus problematicus. Say that five times fast.

Now many of you at this point are probably shouting at your screen. Please! Eden! Tell us how New Brunswick got its name! Okay, it happened in 1784 in honour of the reigning British monarch, King George III who was also the Duke of Brunswick. So … New Brunswick. It’s not exactly original, but it stuck.

And New Brunswick is the only province in Canada that is constitutionally bilingual, with about a third of our population speaking French. I love the dual cultures.

If you’re taking notes here’s a couple of other interesting facts: The New Brunswick Museum is Canada’s oldest operating museum (that’s where we keep the mastodon and the shark), founded in 1842, and we’re home (in Rogersville) to two of Canada’s only three Trappist monasteries (one of monks and one of nuns). Also, just off our east coast lies the province of Prince Edward Island and linking the two provinces is the eight-mile long Confederation Bridge. It’s not only the longest bridge in Canada, but the longest bridge over ice-covered water in the world.

Oh and one more thing, if you’re into French fries, one third of the world’s frozen French fries are produced here. Just sayin’.

Thanks for letting me go on a bit about New Brunswick. Nothing but fun here in Canada’s picture province. Come on over!

 

https://www.bookswelove.com/monroe-eden/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catalog Stories

 

Amazon

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

We of a certain age remember (print) catalog shopping, beginning with the venerable Sears Catalog that once sat in homes all across America. "Wish books" folks called them. I remember the excitement when the Christmas catalog arrived from Sears. I could hardly wait to get hold of that, to search for toys that I wanted "Santa" to bring me. 

Things got complicated during the 60's when all sorts of catalogs, ones for clothes and for household goods and just about everything else you can imagine, arrived at the same time, the back-breaking bane of postal carriers' lives. But I want to talk about some advice my mother-in-law gave me, back when my husband and I were married students, with spare change for entertainment in short supply. She advised, from her own experience, that one of the easiest ways to get some no-cost reading material was to subscribe to seed catalogs. I found addresses for many within the pages of that required reading for New Englanders, The Old Farmers Almanac. 

"Catalogs are free and come in the winter," she said, "and they are filled with color pictures that will cheer you up and remind you that summer will come again." In Massachusetts, back in the 1960's, this was good mental health advice, which I took. Ever since then, January (even, now, December!) brings me catalogs, although at first I didn't even have a plot large enough for a tomato.

I was, however, just as my mother-in-law was, raised by people who gardened. Many people of that generation were not too far away from genuine farming. During the Depression, among some social classes, turning your yard into food was a life-supporting practice. That was the era of the backyard chicken, before we all had to pretend to be Louis XIV. 

Living in a rental property, I began raising -- you guessed it -- tomatoes -- in an abandoned flower bed. I dug up a corner with an old coal shovel I'd found near the oil burner in the basement. Fresh tomatoes were an inducement, and the seed catalogs were an inspiration for what else might be coaxed from the soil. From then on, spring time meant gardening.  

Messy late year garden

I've had some large gardens in my time, gardens that fed us through summers with tomatoes, carrots, beans, beets and melons, squashes, (winter and summer) as well as lettuces, herbs and spinach. Husband, kids and I learned to enjoy greens of all kinds. "Greens" is a large topic I'm still exploring. This year, when it warms a bit, I will try to grow Callaloo, which I first enjoyed years ago in the West Indies as soup, cooked up in a rich yard-chicken stock. 

I decided last year that in my limited box-garden space I would plant mostly greens. This year, I have some seed "cabbage-collards" already started in the house and lettuce and beets in the ground--fingers crossed because of the on-going Weather Weirding. Our year started with heat and drought during the first three months. Now, when it should be warm, it has reverted to March/April chill. At least, it's begun to rain...

My catalog choices are wider now, thanks to the internet and the advice of granddaughter Rachel who lives and gardens in GA. Southern seed catalogs have become my go-to, and lately I've had more success with these. This is because here, on the upper end of the Atlantic Coastal Plain, summers were always hot and humid, but now they are 100+ scorching, the way they are in the deep South. Over the years, I've switched from the big time seed suppliers to the little guys, who often have heritage and rare seeds. This sometimes leads to disaster--diseases and plant-chewing insects are fiercer than they ever were, thanks to over-use of pesticides and so many invasive viruses/ species entering this hemisphere. 

I have learned there is an Insect Apocalypse going on in tandem with all the others--just ask the pollinators, cicadas and fireflies if you don't believe me--but the die-off doesn't seem to be affecting garden pests. A new project just begun is my attempt to grow host plants for birds and the "Good" Bugs, which has meant a whole other set of catalogs in which to browse the bright images and dream. For me, catalogs are still wish books.   :)

(And Happy Birthday to Fraulein Gottlieb, too, today. Soon, she dances in the May with her Lover!)

Amazon

Kobo

Amazon  All My Historical Novels at Amazon

~~Juliet Waldron

 

   

When Your Main Character Organizes a Hostile Takeover of Your Novel By Connie Vines #Plotting a Novel", #Surprise Storyline #BWL Insider Author Blog

 Here I sit, night 3, in my cluttered office, excitedly plotting my contemporary novella.

I have the setting, the theme, and the plot points, and I'm fleshing out my primary and secondary characters. 

And then. Pow! I hear a voice. (Yes, writers listen to voices).

My main character doesn't like her name and is angry because I don't 'get' her. That's a bit combative, unlike the helpful information my characters give me. 

She also informed me she liked what I ate for lunch today. (That's a bit creepy 😲) FYI, She prepares her salad the night before, storing the toppings and dressing in separate containers.

Kale and Lettuce Salad w/ Smoked Salmon 
 rice croutons and almonds 

I wander into the kitchen to brew another cup of coffee.

Who cares if it's midnight? It's not like I can sleep anytime soon (probably for the rest of the week).

Fresh Start. Sigh 

Then it dawns on me 😒I listen to music when I write. I just know my primary character has a favorite artist 🎤🎹🎸🎼. Since I subscribe to Apple Music, I pick up my phone and look at what's featured.

Chanel, Gavin, and I now listen to Rosanne Cash: Deep Cuts Album.

My Heronie's theme song:" God is in the Roses." 

As the music plays on, I find her sharing her internal struggle.

Which is different from what I envisioned. An internal struggle that I didn't expect...it was true, what she said.  I really didn't get her.

I like my newest heroine. She made me laugh and cry a little.

Soon, I hope, she will share her name and secrets with me, too.

My current project boards

My blog post (in progress)

Chanel (Gavin sent himself to bed 🐾⏰)

Fragrance is a sensory signature, an extension of your personality, an aura of glamor and mystery, and ultimately feminine. 

What are your favorite Christmas scents?

What scent would you select if you could capture a fragrance in candle form? 

What fragrance do you wear during holiday events?

What fragrance would you love to try? Why?

.

A gift from my brother and sister-in-law.
Yes, I do run on caffeine and often sarcasm.

Remember, I have yet to answer any of the questions listed above. I'm eager to find out what my readers have to say. 

Please share your 'fragrance secrets' (good and bad) with me.

Due to problems with scamming, this blog can no longer allow comments.  

Follow me on Facebook to share your choices/ give me snippets of fragrance stories.

Facebook:

Connie Vines, Author 

Author Connie Vines

Find me on the Books We Love Author Page:

https://bookswelove.net/vines-connie/

Book links and more are listed here!

Happy Reading,

Connie Vines

Setting up the series - by Vijaya Schartz

FIND MY BWL BOOKS HERE

Creating an entire universe, with its inhabitants, its rules, its technology, is exciting but a lot of work. And as I create a universe for a story, I usually fall in love with it, which makes it difficult to let go of it to write something completely different. So, I tend to write series.

Although I write each book as a standalone, long series sometimes discourage the readers. Who wants to start with Book 8? And buying all the books that came before in one sweep may seem overwhelming.

Other readers want to wait until the series is finished to read all the books in one sweep. I understand that.

The Curse of the Lost Isle series, based on Celtic legends, has eight books. It can be a challenge or some readers.

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo 

The Chronicles of Kassouk science fiction series has six. Still too long for some readers.

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo 

So, I recently decided to limit each series to three or four books. But then, I start another series, set in another part of the same universe.

Sometimes, I fall in love with a secondary character in my story in progress, and I decide he or she deserves their own book. So, I use the secondary character from the current book as the protagonist for the next one. Or I introduce the next protagonist at the end of a story. It provides a link, and the reader feels grounded in the new series.

That way, I can enjoy writing new stories in the same universe I love so much, like the Azura Universe. Azura is the angel planet featured in the Azura Chronicles. 

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo 

But the Byzantium Space Station series is also set in that universe, where Azuran angels cross path with human, alien, cats, and cybernetic characters.

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo 

And the Blue Phantom series also stems from Azura, as the Angel Ship sails alone about the universe, rescuing the worthy and fighting the forces of evil. I'm currently writing the second book, ANGEL GUARDIAN, set for release in October 2023. 

From series to series, the Azura universe evolves. The forces in power at the beginning may be defeated, evil rises, an authoritarian regime falls and lawlessness follows. Evil never misses an opportunity to insert itself into the mix. We discover new corners of the universe, new planets, and special places, like Byzantium, The Land of Many Waters, or the Pandemonium Space Station, ruled by a powerful crime lord.

The advantage is that the universe is consistent for the reader, who, like me, enjoys spending time there. I noticed that, once hooked on one series, my readers will check out the other series in that same universe. All the books in the Azura universe feature cats. It’s evident on the covers for the Byzantium Space Station series. For the Azura Chronicles, and for the Blue Phantom series, all the titles start with Angel. The style of the covers may vary from one series to the next, but the theme remains. Angels, strong heroines, and cats, protecting the universe from evil forces.

Desperate to save her people from the Marauders swarming her space freighter, Kefira prays for a miracle. Blake Volkov, legendary captain of the Blue Phantom hears her plea and deems her and her refugees worthy of his help. Grateful for the rescue, Kefira finds his price shocking. Despite his glowing wings, handsome looks and impressive abilities, Blake admits he is no angel… although Kefira’s feline bodyguard strongly disagrees.

Meanwhile, an old enemy bent on revenge against Blake unleashed an unspeakable evil on the galaxy. Time to face past mistakes… time for innocent blood to flow. Nothing prepared Kefira for the upheaval ahead.

Can Blake find redemption? Can Kefira save her people? Can either of them ever trust again?

"Unique and memorable characters who travel throughout the galaxy battling the forces of evil in a truly epic novel. There are so many unique aspects to this book and not just the world building. The characters are well rounded, the description on point, and the surroundings are awesome. The plot of "Angel Ship" will grip readers from the first page and keep in a talon-like grip until the very last page... Fans of Science Fiction will love this offering and will be drawn to read more books from this talented and capable author." Ind'Tale Magazine

Happy reading!

Vijaya Schartz, award-winning author

Strong Heroines, Brave Heroes, cats

http://www.vijayaschartz.com

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo - FB