CHOICES, MY SECRETS by Thomas Bounds

Looking back I was not sure if I could do it. I was never big on writing and really was not sure where and how to start. I asked my sister, who loves to write, if she could write it for me. I told her my thoughts and she asked me to write them down and then send them to her. So I did that and before I knew it I had completed the story as a draft. Before I knew it my quest had begun. I did it or did I? It took me time to get up the nerve to ask someone to read it. I thought, of course, who would read something I wrote? Why would this help anyone?

On the day that I started Choices, I had a completely different title for it. I called it “A Front Seat View”.

Why? The purpose, I guess, in my mind, was what I wanted to give my son and daughter. Who wouldn’t want to give their child a glimpse of what life’s choices can bring? My daughter at the time was constantly asking me if she could sit in the front seat of the car when we go on drives or to the store and I always told her, not yet, wait until you are older. Then one day she asked me, “Why Daddy?” I explained, it was the law that when you are 9 you can sit in the front seat. She looked at me shaking her head, then she responded with a pretty strong question. “Daddy don’t you want me to see where I am going so if you get lost I can help you find your way?”

I thought about that long and hard. “Yes, I do want you to learn that. That is exactly what I want you to learn.”

Wow! A front seat view could be helpful. God offers us this with stories from the Bible. Indeed, we have clearer vision and insight from reading the Bible, but do we use that to our advantage?

Choices, My Secrets simply lays out a view of one’s choices and the consequences of them. So the readers can see where they may need to turn so they don’t make similar choices. Learning one’s path is not so bad when it develops a better understanding of that choice and its potential consequences.

For more information about this series, visit Heritage Values at www.heritagevalues.com.  

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CHOICES, MY SECRETS VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR ‘08 will officially begin on March 1, 2008 and continue all month. If you would like to follow Thomas’ tour, visit http://www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com/  in March. Leave a comment on his blog stops and become eligible to win a free copy at the end of his tour! One lucky winner will be announced on this blog on March 31!
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Thomas’ virtual book tour is brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours at http://www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com/  and choreographed by Cheryl Malandrinos.
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KISS ME, I’M SINGLE: AN ODE TO THE SOLO LIFE by Amanda Ford

When I was young, I wanted a golden retriever who played fetch in the back yard. I wanted the dog to be a boy. I wanted to name him Simon. I wanted Simon to sit, shake and speak on command. Instead of a golden retriever, we had a silver miniature schnauzer named Tinsel. Tinsel barked at anybody who came near our house. She chased cars down the street. She refused to walk on a leash. Our neighbors hated Tinsel. Of course they did. She used their lawns as her toilet.

I also wanted a father who wore a suit to the office and a mother who baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch. Just like the golden retriever, I never got these things and instead got a messier version of my ideal. I grew up the only child of a single mother and a “stepfather” who was not actually my stepfather at all, but my mother’s much older, nonconformist boyfriend who spent half the year on spiritual pilgrimages in India. When I was in junior high he was diagnosed with cancer and died at our house early on a Saturday morning. This, I thought in my fourteen-year-old logic, was extremely inconsiderate and typical of him. He would die on the weekend forcing me out of bed long before I was ready.

At age twenty-two, in an attempt to make amends with my messy childhood, I married my dependable, suit-wearing, golden retriever-loving college sweetheart. I was relieved. My life was finally evening out, cleaning up and taking shape to become much like the life of my dreams. I believed I would never again long for anything. I believed I would never again have a broken heart.

I learned, however, that marriage, just like the single life, is full of longing, and it is possible for a woman to have a broken heart even when she is sitting next to a man who loves her deeply and whom she loves just the same. When I was a wife I longed for the chance to be a single, for the opportunity to live alone, to date, to follow my own rhythm. I quickly understood what all those older women meant when they gasped upon seeing my engagement ring and declared, “You are too young to be married.” I understood what all those feminists of my mother’s generation meant by burning their bras and embracing birth control pills. In addition to fighting for equal opportunities and sexual liberation, they were fighting for a woman’s right to take a moment, free from the obligations of family, to find herself.

Two years after saying “I do,” I said “I don’t” and found myself standing alone in the center of an empty, basement studio, the only apartment I could afford with my starving artist salary. Excitement and fear overwhelmed me in equal parts. I was excited by the endless possibilities lying in front of me, but afraid of the vast uncertainty that seems a necessary companion of such infinite possibility.

Kiss Me, I’m Single: An Ode to the Solo Life grew from the stormy,excited-yet-fearful energy that has enveloped me in the years since my divorce. My goal with the book is simple: to help my readers, as well as myself, make sense of the constant, contradictory internal pulls that accompany human existence. I hope to be a voice of encouragement and support for those longing to build a life that defies category.

Amanda Ford is the author of the self -improvement/inspirational/memoir, Kiss Me, I’m Single: An Ode to the Solo Life.  You can visit her website at www.oholive.com.

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MONEY AND MANIFESTING: THE REAL SECRET by Dyan Garris

The telephone rings. It is my client “Carol” calling promptly at the appointed hour. I answer on the second ring and we embark on our journey of the clairvoyant psychic reading.

This has been a part of what I do for so long it is even hard to remember when it all really started. When the phone rings I am already in my trance. I have connected to Carol’s higher guidance and angels before she called; so when she asks me why she can’t manifest money, I am not surprised at the question.

But I do wish she could see what I see in her energy field. I wish she could see all of the blocks she has regarding money and manifesting. She can’t. So it is my job to interpret and bring the information to her in a way she can process, understand, implement, and integrate into her life.

Carol tells me that she has followed the advice she learned in The Secret and wrote herself a whopping check for several million dollars. She put it in a place where she can see it every day and think positive thoughts about it. She even wrote herself a deposit slip in anticipation of this particular sum of money coming into her life. And she’s waited and waited. But so far nothing has happened in this direction. In fact, she has even lost business.

This is part of why I wrote Money and Manifesting. It’s an extension of what I already do, bringing forth information in such a way that people can integrate it. But I wanted to reach a larger audience because in order to survive here we need to understand and remember the truths of who we are and what we’re really doing here. And I wanted to teach people the real secrets of manifesting. People have been sold half of the story. I wanted to give them the whole story.

There is no reason why we cannot create everything we desire. Often we are exactly what stands in our own way of achieving this. We cannot create from the ego-self, which is the place of wants, needs, and desires. We cannot create and manifest using just the power of our minds. There is much more to it than that.

And there is another story behind the book. It is actually a story that is inside of the book. I fictionalized parts of the book so that the brain could have an opportunity to shift from linear thinking to conceptualized thinking to integrative learning. This is what has the power to transform. While you are enjoying the story, you are also identifying with the characters as well as learning to integrate the information about how to manifest. This is the real secret.

Dyan Garris is the author of Voice of the Angels Spiritual Cards, The Book of Daily Channeled Messages, Talk To Your Food! Intuitive Cooking, and Fish Tale of Woe – Lost at Sea. In 2005 she created a series of music and meditation CDs for healing, Automatic Chakra Balance,™ and vibrational attunement of mind, body, and spirit.

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MISTRESS OF THE REVOLUTION by Catherine Delors

The story behind Mistress of the Revolution began with a conversation with my father, a retired history professor, a few months before his death. We were talking about Vic, the little mountain town in southern France where, like my heroine Gabrielle, I spent part of my childhood. He asked me if I remembered Coffinhal Street there.

Of course, I had known of Coffinhal Street all of my life. Only I never thought of the character after whom it was named. But then my father told me that Coffinhal had been an ardent revolutionary, a Jacobin, a friend of Robespierre. He had even finished his career as Vice President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. I was intrigued and looked up the man. And I found someone almost everybody hated! There was something fascinating about that.

It just happened that two other historical characters of the Revolution were from the same region. One of them, the Chevalier des Huttes, an officer in the elite corps of the Queen’s Bodyguards, had a mansion in Vic. It still stands there, close to the Coffinhal house.

In the novel, the Chevalier is in love with Marie-Antoinette, which is consistent with local lore. As my father pointed out, though, he would have shown the same devotion to his Queen out of a sense of duty, regardless of any personal feelings he might have had for her.

Another historical character, Carrier, a revolutionary and a man of extraordinary cruelty, was from a village only a few miles away from Vic. Of course Carrier too had to appear in the novel.

It was an irresistible conjunction: three men who had played an important role in the French Revolution were tied to my little mountain town of Vic. I must confess that, before writing the book, I had little interest in that historical period.

That changed in short order. I realized during my research that most of the political issues raised at the time remain current. People then began to discuss civil rights, in particular women’s rights and the equality of all before the law.

Soon I was engrossed by my subject, and my characters acquired a tremendous hold on me. I felt that they had come to life, that they were people I really knew. Some people say that writing is a “hobby.” For me, and, I suspect, for many other authors, writing goes much deeper than that.

The whole beginning of Mistress of the Revolution is set in the mountains of Auvergne, where I had not been able to visit in twelve years. I had to draw on my childhood memories to recreate the feel of the region. In fact I did not return to Auvergne until after the novel was completed. What a joy it was then to rediscover the place at last, as beautiful as I remembered it. My love for it has even deepened, because now it is the setting of my novel as well.

Catherine Delors is the author of the historical fiction novel, Mistress of the Revolution. Leave a comment below and you could win a copy of her book! All winners will be announced at www.virtualbooktoursforauthors.blogspot.com  on March 31!

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What Your Mother Never Told You by Richard Dudum

Richard Dudum, author of What Your Mother Never Told You: A Survival Guide for Teenage Girls, is touring with Pump Up Your Book Promotion this month.  When asked how he came up with the idea, this is what he shared with us.

What Your Mother Never Told You: A Survival Guide for Teenage Girls, has been on my mind for over twenty years.  In addition to having four children of my own, two of them girls, I have had the honor and privilege of helping and working with teens over the years and I have taken the time to actually listen when they speak.  I have heard and seen the same issues hurt both boys and girls so many times over the years that I decided to put my thoughts down on paper.  The result is, What Your Mother Never Told You: A Survival Guide for Teenage Girls.  

You can find out more about Richard and his writing at WhatYourMotherNeverToldYou.Net 

 

Outing the Goddess Within by Anita Revel

Anita Revel, author of Outing the Goddess Within, is touring with Pump Up Your Books Promotion this month.  When asked how she came up with the idea for her book, here’s what she told us. 

It was Christmas and I was feeling slightly homesick the first time I wrote a lengthy letter home to all my friends on the east coast of Australia. Having moved to the west coast a year prior, I was going through one of those moments of regret – I’d moved to the country to find a man, (it worked for a popular TV character in an Australian series called Sea Change, after all), but at the same time I was feeling insanely jealous of the Sex and the City girls living it up in New York City. I was torn between retuning to the exciting city life or sticking it out in the country for another year.  

The letter home was peppered with my frustrations at the lack of men and good coffee, but talked about the happiness I felt when experiencing the natural beauty of living beach-side, the easy drive to work, the affordable housing and room to swing my pet cow in the laundry. 

That letter home was the start of my writing career. I got such a thrill watching the words flow onto my laptop screen and an entertaining story develop. Each time a friend replied to my letter with a heartfelt and lengthy account of their own lives I realized the power of words – the more genuine the words the more effectively they connected the reader with the writer. 

Later, that letter was reworked to become the chapter “Self-reliant, like the goddess Circe” in the book Outing the Goddess Within, One Girl’s Journey With 52 Guides (Amazon.com)

Searchable Whereabouts by Tinisha Nicole Johnson

It took me about four years to write my mystery novel, Searchable Whereabouts. This book is actually my fourth book I wrote, if you count a poetry anthology. However, it is the first to be published. 

I have long loved mysteries. I first remember watching Kojak – that’s probably taking me way back. When writing Searchable Whereabouts, half-way through, I didn’t know what else to write about, but I pushed myself and soon ideas began to flow.  

Needless to say, after I did get the book finished, I was ecstatic, I was proud of myself and felt a sense of accomplishment. I thought this was my best work yet. I now know that writing a book can be the easy part. From the day I wrote the last word, it took me about a year to find a publisher. I was faced with many rejection letters. I almost gave up. However, with this book, something told me to keep sending it out, so I did. 

I’m glad I didn’t give up on my passion. Now all I have to do is go back into my computer and pull out the other books and get those published.

ACROSS TIME by Linda Kay Silva

I have always been fascinated by the concept of past lives. There are just too many inexplicable things in the universe that can’t be covered by “miracles” or science. A couple of years ago, on a lark, I had my past lives read. I was at the boardwalk and it sounded like something fun to do. I told the reader nothing about myself, so when we sat down for the reading I was a complete stranger who didn’t really take any of this seriously. The woman proceeded to tell me that I had once been a German warrior. I was a little amazed and surprised because I have a tattoo of a warrior on my back (that she could not see) and I was fluent in German. The language came up so easily to me, I had to take college German in high school. Anyway, as the reading went on, she looked right in my face and said, “There is a reason you hate circuses.” My friend who was with me almost fell off her chair. It was impossible for this woman to know that I hated circuses. I hate everything about the circus. I hate the smell, I hate clowns, I hate all of it, up and yet, I have never been. Not once.

When I was eight years old, my parents tried to take me to the circus, but I fought like a wild Banshee when they tried to get me into the car. I fought so hard, they eventually stopped trying and made me stay home. They never took me to the circus, and I never went, but I hate it nonetheless. I couldn’t even tell you why I hate the circus, especially since it is clearly an irrational fear based on…on what? So you can imagine my surprise when she went on to explain why I was afraid of the circus, but that’s a story for another day.

I was hooked.

This, in and of itself, did not win me over. I was a skeptic. I thought psychics and mediums were kooks who took gullible people’s money. It took a second reading in another state by a different psychic at another boardwalk before I was convinced that they saw something (or someone) in me that I never saw. One said I had lived 83 lives, the other said 82. Coincidence? I don’t know. I no longer believe in coincidences. Anyway, about that time, I began teaching medieval history, and we spent a lot of time on the druids. I fell in love everything about them. I have always had an affinity for nature, and so I appreciated their approach to spirituality and their connection to the land.

I think that was when Cate, the druid priestess in my story, began to unfold. Little by little, I could feel her rattling around upstairs, and I knew there was a story brewing. I call that the fermenting process. It happens when there’s a story cooking somewhere deep inside the recesses of my mind. I can feel it. I can see the fuzzy shadows of it, but it’s not yet ready. It took her about a year and ½ before she could bring the story to full bloom. Cate was ready to tell her tale, but she needed a narrator, and Jessie Ferguson was born. It was time to let Jessie run with the story.

I am fascinated by time. Time is the most important currency in my life. I love the fact that, as great as mankind believes itself to be, time is the final frontier we have been incapable of mastering. Writers like myself have more leeway when writing about time travel because no one has proof about anything where time is concerned. Oh sure, there are a lot of theories, but theories are nothing more than suppositions, and writers can run like the wind when there are no real facts or evidence.

I didn’t want to write a book that dealt with physical time travel, as I don’t have the necessary background in quantum physics to really give it a go. That’s when my two psychic readings came back and tapped on my forehead that I had a story to tell that would touch other people and help them remember their past lives. Instead of sending my characters through time physically, I decided to send their souls through instead.
You see, I have fallen in love with the idea of soul mates. I have always been fascinated by the concepts of love at first sight, of five year olds who can play Beethoven, of people who come out of comas fluent in a foreign language. What other explanation is there when we meet someone for the first time, yet they feel so familiar, so comfortable to us? This has happened to so many of us and yet we will pass it off as a coincidence. We have stopped listening to that inner voice that comes from somewhere; that voice that has more experience than what we’ve lived in this life. Suddenly, I had so many more questions. Where do our phobias come from? How is it we know some of the things we know, yet have never learned? Recently, a ten-year-old graduated from medical school. As a teacher, I can tell you that a ten-year-old is not developmentally ready to learn anything in medical school, and yet, more than one child under the age of 15 has done remarkable things that many people would call miraculous. In our culture, if something amazing can’t be proven by science, we call it a miracle. I think the word is a cop out. What’s miraculous to me is the fact that we bring with us residual memories of our past lives and don’t acknowledge them.

Jessie acknowledges them in Across Time and must choose to either hear the call for help from who she used to be or close forever that door to another time, when she was another being.

With my love of history, my curiosity about time, and the idea about past lives and the residual memories we hold from them, I wrote the first in a series of novels that will take Jessie Ferguson from the first century AD, to 16th century England under Queen Elizabeth, to ancient Egypt, and into the jungles of the Viet Nam War. What Jessie learns from the druids in the first novel is just a tiny piece of the wisdom and knowledge she is going to need to face the other tasks at hand.

It is my hope that when readers finish the novel, they consider all those déjà vu moments and inexplicable flashes of memories we each have and ask themselves whether or not they are courageous enough to travel Across Time.

Linda Kay Silva is the author of the paranormal novel, Across Time.  You can visit her website at www.lindakaysilva.com.