LETTER OF LOVE FROM CHINA by Bonnie B. Cuzzolino: “…I wanted to delve into the hearts and souls of the birth moms of our children.”

I am the adoptive mom to a beautiful 7 year old daughter from China.

I wanted to write a book dedicated to my daughter to help her and other children adopted from China understand why their birth families were not able to keep them but yet loved them.
I also wanted the nonadopted child to understand this too about their adopted friends, classmates, neighbors and family members.

To write “Letter Of Love From China” I needed to delve into the hearts and souls of the birth moms of our children.

I came up with the idea that the best way to express feelings is to write a letter to the person.

That’s It! My book will be a letter from a birth mom to her birth daughter explaining her love for her, reasons for not being able to raise her and hopes of a new forever family for her.

How does one do this without knowing the person?

How do I know to tell my daughter sincerely that her birth mom and family loved her?

I turned to my stepfather for help, a retired homicide detective.
After all her had the training to come up with a profile of a crime suspect without knowing who they are.

“Clues”, he told me. It’s all in the clues left behind at the scene. Thats how lawinforcement gets a profile for the personality of the person they are seeking.

“So lets look”, he said at the clues left behind by birth moms in China since it is a crime to abandon ones child. If a child is left in a public place with possibly a note and money this tells him birth mom is a person who loves and wants her child cared for.

If the child were left in a remote field, woods or dump yard then this would tell him the parents were looking for the elements to take the childs life for them so they would not have to commit the act themselves.

If I look at the reports of the places children in China have been abandoned then the majority are left in a public place. The children left in remote places are in the minority.

As parents we need to look at the information we have as to our child’s finding place. For most it will have been a public place.This is good news. If the news is grim and your child were left in a remote place unlikely to be found I believe it is still better to portray a positive image of birth mom and family.

This is my own personal opinion.

I feel it is not healthy for a child to think they were unloved by their birth family as they grow. This is sad for the child.

Our daughter had been found in a very public place with a note of her birthdate and money. Had she not been found under these circumstances than my husband and I would approach her story in this way and my book would have read a bit different.

We would tell her that her birth mom and family had problems that made it difficult for them to feel love but the love was there for you deep inside their hearts. They just didn’t know how to make it come out. Lets often think of them and pray they will get the help to learn how to express love. We would ask our child to forgive them as we have forgiven them.

With my stepfather’s expert advice under my belt I sat down and wrote my book to my daughter about her story of her loving relinguishment.

Jillian Mei loved my book from the moment I read it to her. There were tears and a mourning period for birth family but the tears have dried now and she only smiles now when I read the book.

She has come to terms with it and is secure in her thoughts.

We believe that the preteen years will bring on another time for grieving her birth family as all the changes begin to occur. At that time I believe I will write another book with a more in depth look at China’s customs as this will be an age appropriate time for Jillian to understand more about China than she needs to know now such as the preferance and need for boys and government practices.

I hope my book is a useful tool to open up discussions with your child about their beginnings in China. It is also my hope that my book will become reading material for the mainstream multicultural children’s market. I look forward to introducing it to schools and libraries in my local hometown area.

Our book has won the Moms Choice Silver Award for Best 2008 Children’s Book in Family Life and winner of the Pen Of The Writer Award for Children’s Books.

Please visit our website
http://www.plumblossombooks.com.

Award winning author Bonnie Cuzzolino and her family live in New Jersey. Bonnie and her husband Ray are the parents to a beautiful daughter adopted from Hubei, China in November of 2001 at 12 months old. She and her husband are now waiting for a referral for their second daughter from China through Holt International Children’s Services. Bonnie has had a lifelong passion to write children’s books. This book is her first and is dedicated to her daughter, Jillian Mei. You can visit her website at http://www.plumblossombooks.com/.

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ONE FOOT OUTSIDE THE DOOR by Vina St. Fran: “…timing was the inspiration for me.”

I have always loved to write, even as a youngster. The opportunity to create poetry or write stories was a big part of my junior high and high school years. Life takes us on many detours, as I have been rerouted on my journey as an author.

I must admit that timing was the inspiration for me to write “One Foot Outside The Door”. I initially made so many excuses because my schedule was pretty hectic. When everything in my life calmed, it was a natural progression for me to begin writing again.

I wanted to embrace relationships between people across culture lines as I experienced in my neighborhood subdivision growing up. Often, in mainstream fiction, you find stories that represent one group with maybe a minor character that happens to be another race but they don’t impact the storyline. My goal was to set out and change this because for me, that wasn’t reality. My reality wasn’t found in print at the local independent or national book store chains. I had to bring it to life and give it a voice in my own words.

This light bulb like catharsis fed my inspiration which drove me to complete “One Foot Outside The Door” while remaining focused the majority of the time. There isn’t a greater joy than expanding your audience with readers who grow with you as they get to know you. Timing continues to be a great source of inspiration for me as I work on new material. Ironically, timing is something I used to hate because I found it hard to prioritize, but now, it is my best friend.

35 MILES FROM SHORE by Emilio Corsetti: “…this wasn’t going to be an easy project.”

In May of 1999 I had the good fortune of being hired as a pilot for a major airline. I was a happy camper. Flying for a major airline had been a goal of mine ever since I first started flying. My initial training included several weeks of ground school followed by a full week of flying in the simulator.

While in ground school, during emergency procedures training, I was required to don a life vest and jump into a pool. I had put on and inflated life vests before, but I never had to jump into a pool with one on. It made you think about what it would be like to have to do it for real.

Later that day we watched a video concerning an actual ditching of a DC-9. It had all the earmarks of a boring training video: crudely drawn graphics, cheesy music, and a monotone narrator. But this video wasn’t boring. This was a story full of drama.

That night when I got home I searched the Internet hoping to find a book about this accident. Surely someone had to have written a book. But there was no book. I put the story aside and spent the next several weeks concentrating on finishing my training.

It wasn’t long after I completed my training that I decided to do a little more research on the ditching story. In less than an hour on the Internet I was able to track down the captain of the flight. I contacted him and was shocked to learn that he had not piloted another aircraft since the accident. He told me a few details about the ditching and rescue which piqued my interest even further.

It was around this time that I read The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. I loved the book. I knew from my research that the story of the DC-9 ditching was every bit as compelling as the one in The Perfect Storm. Additionally, my story had survivors. The crew of the Andrea Gail didn’t survive to tell their story. Sebastian Junger had to recreate events that may or may not have happened.

I still wasn’t convinced that I should be the one to tell this story. I felt qualified to tell it. I was a professional pilot with several thousand hours in an aircraft similar to the one that ditched. I had also spent eight years as a regular contributor to Professional Pilot magazine writing on various aviation topics. But this wasn’t going to be an easy project. It had more characters than most stories: the flight crew, the cabin crew, the passengers, rescuers, investigators, airline personnel, and a host of other important participants such as the flight controllers. And tracking down these people thirty-plus years after the accident wasn’t going to be a simple task.

What really set the ball in motion is when I discovered that there were two little girls on the flight who didn’t survive. I was never able to track down any of the family members, including their mother who did survive the accident. From speaking with others on the flight, though, I knew that the girls were between the ages of three and five years old.

My wife and I had lost a daughter six-and-a-half-weeks after birth due to complications from a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Anyone who has lost a son or daughter will tell you that they continue to age in your mind. My daughter would have been almost three years old at the time I was contemplating writing the book. So I asked her. She told me to write the book. So I did.

Emilio Corsetti III is a professional pilot and author. His work has appeared in both regional and national publications including the Chicago Tribune, Multimedia Producer, and Professional Pilot magazine. This is his first book. He and his wife Lynn reside in Lake St. Louis, Missouri.

You can visit his website at http://www.emiliocorsetti.com/.

BEHOLD YOUR MOTHER by Heidi Hess Saxton: “…I felt that protective mantle draw over me again and again…”

Miracles happen. I’ve seen prayers answered, inexplicably and incontrovertibly. The little kid healed from cancer. Groceries materializing on the doorstep of an out-of-work mother and her three hungry kids. Footsteps in a hallway that stopped my friend’s abusive husband from following through on his threat to kill her.

And yet, when I became Catholic, and a good friend suggested that I “tell Mary about it” the next time I felt lonely, or scared, or overwhelmed, to be honest I thought it sounded a little kooky. Why would I do such a thing?

But then I did. At first a trifle apologetically … “Oh, God, please don’t let anything happen that I could misconstrue as an answer if I shouldn’t be doing this…” Then puzzled, “God, why would you allow such a thing?” Then, finally, with conviction, “OK, Mary, I’d like someone to sit with me in church again today, if you can manage it.”

Three weeks in a row, the same request. Three weeks in a row, a different stranger appeared. And, like a child, I found myself being drawn to the protective skirts of the Blessed Mother. As the years passed and I became a mother myself, I felt that protective mantle draw over me again and again … And, through those children, I began to understand that God sometimes works in ways we never expected. Frankly, He sometimes answers not because of our prayers, but despite them.

Behold Your Mother is the fruit of this gradual awakening – first drawing from my own experiences, then enlarging on the titles that have been attributed to Mary by Christians through the centuries. “Star of the Sea,” “Seat of Wisdom,” “Mother of God.”

But to me, she will always be “the one who never lets her children sit alone in church.”

Heidi Hess Saxton is the author of Behold Your Mother: Mary Stories and Reflections of a Catholic Convert and adoptive parent columnist at CatholicExchange.com and CatholicMom.com. To order her book, go to http://www.christianword.com.

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EMBITTERED JUSTICE by Michaela Riley: “a labor of love…”

Writing my first book Embittered Justice was what some would call a labor of love. Inspiration for the book started when I had the personal misfortune of spending time in a court room. I listened carefully as cases were presented and the fates of defendants were left in the hands of the defense, prosecution and a judge. The types of cases were diverse but the single common element was about making a deal or plea agreement. I watched in horror as the conversations in the hallway were whispered about what a defendant would accept and how lives would be changed forever. It didn’t seem to matter what the elements of the cases were; only that the outcome was based on the networking experience of the attorney. The secretive proceedings would cast doubt in my mind on the legitimacy of the system that had no respect for the defendant, innocent or guilty. Legal or administrative bodies with strict ruling and secretive proceedings metaphorically are sometimes called star chambers. This term is intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of proceedings in the judicial system.

“A LIE GETS HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD BEFORE THE TRUTH HAS A CHANCE TO GET ITS PANTS ON.” SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

Journal entries and statistics turned into a story of one woman’s courageous fight against a judicial system that had failed her in many ways. It was important to tell the story in a way that would shed light on the personal trials and struggle an innocent defendant must endure to speak against corruption.

Michaela Riley is the author of EMBITTERED JUSTICE.  You can visit her website at www.michaelariley.com.

HOW TO SAY IT: BUSINESS WRITING THAT WORKS by Adina Rishe Gewirtz: “I was writing a book, and didn’t know it…”

James Thurber used to tell a great story about himself. He’d be standing at a party, I guess staring off into space, and his wife would say to him, “Damn it, Thurber, stop writing!”

I can relate. For almost two decades, I was writing a book, and didn’t know it.

It started back in Journalism school at the University of Maryland in the late 1980s, where I had the good fortune to study my craft under some fantastic teachers, one of whom was two-time Pulitzer-prizewinner Jon Franklin. He had pioneered an outlining system that transformed standard news pieces into narrative gold – real stories that people wanted to read. In school, he taught that system to his students as the best way to take advantage of how the brain naturally takes in information – in traditional story form.

I drank those lessons up, because until meeting Jon, I’d relied on inspiration and gut to get me through as a writer. Those are two essential ingredients, but they’re not enough. When you’re dealing with complicated ideas, you need some way to get a grip on them, some way to see the story before writing it.

So I learned. And after graduation, I used Jon’s system in my freelance work. It just made sense. I learned to add to it, too, remolding parts so I could use them better. Then one day a friend asked me if I might help her son, a learning-disabled high schooler, with writing. I said sure, and decided to try showing him how I approached my own writing. I worried that the system wouldn’t work for him. I thought maybe it was meant just for professional writers. But he looked at the steps I laid out for him, and I could almost see the light bulb switch on over his head. He loved it!

Not only that, but it worked. It worked better than I could have imagined, and more quickly, too. In no time, he had the sense of it, and his writing improved dramatically. With this early success, I started teaching writing on a more regular basis, first at a community college, then for the accounting giant Arthur Andersen. The system never failed to work. Whether I was teaching senior citizens, high school students or accountants, they all loved it for its sheer logic. Most of all, the system took the fear out of the writing process.

After a while, I began teaching high school students one-on-one, often in the evenings, sometimes at school. And that’s when the gentle pushing began. A learning specialist overheard my lesson one day and asked to see my system, saying she’d never heard a better way to teach writing. Most of all, my husband launched a campaign with the refrain: “You ought to write a book, you know. Nobody teaches writing that way.”

I worried a book about writing would bore people. But that’s where, after all my years working on the nuts and bolts of craft, inspiration kicked back in. One day, I started to hear the book in my head, and I was amazed to find out it was funny! Even more astonishing, it came fairly quickly, because, in fact, I discovered I’d been writing it in my head for more than fifteen years.

So I wrote it, laughing a lot of the time, found an agent who was interested in it, and watched in sheer wonder as she sold it to Prentice Hall, a division of Penguin. They gave me a great editor who appreciated my sense of humor, and in no time, it was in the bookstore. So that’s the story behind How to Say It: Business Writing That Works!

Adina Rishe Gewirtz is the author of HOW TO SAY IT: BUSINESS WRITING THAT WORKS. You can visit her website at www.writersroadmap.com.

EMOTIONLESS SOULS by David S. Grant: “Jerk-offs, ex cons, new cons, pranksters, and one hit wonders…”

Emotionless Souls, my new short story collection published by Brown Paper Publishing, contains twenty stories of troubled characters finding themselves in dark places and fighting to redeem themselves in unconventional ways.

Short stories White Christmas, Gag, Tease, Inc. and Boardroom Romance are a few of many using a corporate environment as a back drop for disturbing predicaments. In White Christmas, Hansel finds himself accusing a co-worker of stealing his cocaine, Gag details an office prankster who gets dealt the final joke, and in Boardroom Romance, the age old question of what happens when you accidentally pop ecstasy prior to a board meeting.

I have spent a lot of time inside offices and find it an interesting place a lot happens in the background we may not be aware of. Naturally, a lot of my ideas are triggered by co-workers and then embellished, or may be the end product of some mundane conversation over office supplies.

Not all of the stories are set in your conventional office environment.

In the story Money Shot redemption is in the form of shock, the main character committing suicide in order to preserve his space in the adult movie industry. For “Open Mic” where a comic gets laughs in a non-conventional way by adding hallucinogen mushrooms to the food the crowd is eating. Each of these story ideas came from pondering other careers, typically between my first and second coffee I dream about other jobs and the wrong turns to be made.

Lucy’s Place, begins in New York City at a roof-top party where Stephan is shooting heroin and overdoses. The next morning he wakes up in Idaho, which just so happens to also be the afterlife. The next few hours is a game of trying to figure out whether Idaho is Heaven or Hell. Haven’t we all been there?

Other stories are more autobiographical, The Dublin Trip and Berets and Bendy Straws are based on trips I have taken with friends. Mostly non-fiction, the story in Dublin reads at break neck speed, capturing a magical trip of sight-seeing mixed with debauchery mixed with a prank for the ages.

Disaffected tourists idle through the streets and bars of Paris and Dublin. Human Resource officers interview the stripper they frequent for a position in the firm. Pickpockets get pick pocketed. Nobodies stage emergencies to save the day. Jerk-offs, ex cons, new cons, pranksters, and one hit wonders are the Emotionless Souls that populate my new collection.

David S. Grant is the author of Corporate Porn. His new short story collection, Emotionless Souls and novella The Last Breakfast are now available from Brown Paper Publishing. His new rock and drug fueled double novel, Bleach|Blackout, is now available from Offense Mechanism, an imprint of Silverthought Press.

David S. Grant is the author of EMOTIONLESS SOULS.  You can visit his website at www.davidgrant.com.

JANEOLOGY by Karen Harrington: “…homicide is the leading cause of death for children under four.”

• More than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death for children under four.
• Eleven women are on death row in the United States for killing their children

These statistics, which I learned about through a news article from the American Anthropological Association, stopped me on a dime. They were reported in relation to a Texas news story about a mother who’d just killed her two children. I couldn’t shake those numbers or the inevitable question that follows: What would make a mother turn against her own child?

That question was the start of my journey into the fictional story of Janeology. Originally, the ideas were just a curiosity about what that mother was doing just hours before she committed the act. Did the Cheerios spill all to hell? Did she have a fight with her husband? Was she simply in a psychotic moment, and if so, were there any signs leading up to that moment?

Sometimes when an idea lodges in your psyche, you can’t shake it. So I began making notes for a larger story. I had already been writing about a man whose estranged wife was stalking him. I began to combine these ideas by asking the question, why is he so afraid of her? What does he know about her?

And because everything informs the writers’ life, I brought my own personal passion for genealogy into the story. I never knew my own grandparents. Growing up, I was always looking at the pictures of my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother (pictured here) and wondering about their personalities and what I might have inherited from them. I wondered what were their childhoods were like and in what ways did that shape the way they parented my mother and father, which might have influenced the way they would parent me – and ultimately, how I might parent my own children.

So I finally landed upon the idea that I could write about a character – about one troubled woman – from the perspective of her genealogy. I could somehow research her nature and nurture and get to know more about her through the people who shared her gene pool. And in doing so, I would unearth some of the answers about how she could go from suburban housewife one day to headline-making criminal the next. Thus, Janeology is a cautionary tale about one man struggling to achieve an understanding about Jane, the wife who murdered his son.

If you’d like to view Jane’s full family tree chart, or see more of those old photographs of my descendants that spurred my curiosity, take a look at my “About Janeology” photo album at www.karenharringtonbooks.com.

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY. You can visit her website at www.karenharringtonbooks.com.

Happy Mother’s Day!

To my mother who left this realm 35 years ago and to all mothers still sticking it out and trying the best they can to become the most wonderful mothers in the world…

Happy Mother’s Day!

THE WINDS OF ASHARRA by R. Leigh: “…the only way to fail is if you give up.”

There has to be a better way. That’s what I thought to myself for years when reading all manner of strange and sundry articles about assorted upheavals, unrest and turmoil around the globe. Isn’t there somewhere where people are naturally in harmony with their environment and with the creatures around them? The concepts of naturalness, balance and harmony are all interwoven into the complicated plot threads of fantasy, romance and adventure, so evident in the 600+ pages of The Winds of Asharra. The book is not just a story of an epic adventure or a otherworldly romance. It is a journey of self discovery not only for the characters but for the author as well (and hopefull for the readers). The creation of Asharran culture, so rich and complete including language, rituals and worldview, enabled me to create my place that indeed has “a better way.” This mystical world of the purple sky, under twin suns, is the backdrop for an exploration of what it means to change one’s way of looking at oneself and the universe. I spent many years studying a variety of diverse cultures ,religions and societies. Frequently, I would rejoice over the discovery of some little “nugget” of wisdom or example that people could really be in harmony with their world and be happy. However, the more tidbits I amassed, the more I felt ultimately unsatisfied, since the result was a crazy patchwork that didn’t quite fit together. Asharra changed all that. This strange and sensual alien world, seen through the eyes of two American teenagers suddenly transported there, was my backdrop. The term “Asharra” to the native Asharrans means “the home around us” and applies to their planet and every living thing on it. They believe you don’t even have to be born there to be Asharran, so long as you are natural and “true” (in their terms). Thus, when one native Asharran tells the two main characters (from Earth), “welcome home”, it is because Asharra is simply the home they have never seen yet. Superimposing an entertaining adventure and romance story upon accounts of semi-utopian philosophy and fantasy alien culture was the proverbial icing on the cake for me. The fact that the story contains fanciful elements like telepathic trees, musical dragons and evolved felines made the creation of The Winds of Asharra a pure joy to write. The combination of the ecologically friendly mystical Asharran philosophy and culture, with the unusual characters and setting is a fusion which pleases me greatly. To me, The Winds of Asharra stealthily addresses many present day concerns while managing to tell an unusual and complex story. For each bit of adventure, humor or sex appeal, there is an integrated “nugget” of my own which I unashamedly share. James Hilton told us in the 1930’s that there was a better way, in his classic work, Lost Horizon. It was something I read several decades ago and which subconsciously influenced me when setting out to chronicle the adventures of the strange creatures of Asharra (and their Earth-Asharran immigrants). For me, The Winds of Asharra is not only an exciting fantasy/romance novel. It represents a new possibility for the readers of today, just as the land of Shangri-la, to Hilton’s audience represented that same half remembered vision to his generation. I wrote not only to entertain but also to reassure the reader and inspire him or her to never give up hope for a better tomorrow. I ask each reader to stretch the line between myth and mundane when they read this book and perhaps, echoing the experiences of Victor and Zoe, the two teenagers from Earth, to discover that there is a better way. Things might actually get better if we look at the world differently. As the Asharrans say, the only way to fail is if you give up. By that definition, since I plan on continuing to write other stories about the world of Asharra, I have already succeeded.

R. Leigh is the author of the fantasy romance novel, THE WINDS OF ASHARRA. You can visit her website at www.thewindsofasharra.com.

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