SCATTERED LEAVES by Richard E. Roach: “…I had no story in mind when I started.”

Our guest blogger today is Richard Roach, author of the suspense/mystery novel, SCATTERED LEAVES.

You can visit his website at www.richarderoach.com.

I started writing one foggy night back in 1957. The rig was making a trip (changing the drill bit) and I sat alone in a lab filled with gas detection equipment that was so small you had to turn sideways to enter. The unit, as we called the lab, sat on the end of a drilling barge that rested in about ten feet of water on the bottom of Lake Calcasieu located in South Louisiana about spitting distance from the Gulf of Mexico . The lake is large enough that in daylight you think you’re in the gulf because you can’t see the shore line. I decided to pass the time by writing a western.

After I had about thirty pages written, I showed it to my wife and a friend. They laughed! This upset my gentle nature and I threw the pages into the garbage and vowed never to write another page.

As time moved along and sanded my rough edges smooth, I began to have the itch to write once more. In 1974 I started my own company producing gas detection instruments that I had invented (designed). I had a small building jammed against a convenience store in which I had the operation plus an office, a typewriter, and an ammonia-type printing machine…the writing bug bit again and SCATTERED BLOODY LEAVES was born. In a future draft the name was changed to SCATTERED LEAVES.

I had no story in mind when I started. I wanted a John Wayne type of character for my male protagonist and a female star as beautiful as Lana Turner and tough as Bonny Parker. Beth Ann Pettijohn filled the bill perfectly. She had the looks, the brains and the mental fiber to match my expectations. I had lots of bad guys in the story but the super-bad guy, the one that murdered poor June, the woman who loved everyone, was part American Indian and he loved no one. He was a psycho; his daily thrill came by torturing his wife (Joy), I won’t go into the details at this time, some innocent person might read this. Since I’m part Indian, I know how mean they can be, but no, he isn’t based upon one of my insane family member.

Because the super villain felt he was so tough, I allowed him to escape to The Big Thicket and fight it out with McCord using dynamite and a BOW AND ARROWS. That’s a no-mans-land between Louisiana and Texas near the gulf. I’ve hunted and fished there and know the terrain well.

Thanks to the help of Sarah Schwersenska, Multi-Media agreed to publish my blathering. Everyone needs a little luck and when she read SCATTERED LEAVES she became my angel.

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DEAD RINGER by Mary Burton: “…characters that just grab me and seem to demand their own story.”

It never fails, when I’m wrapping up a novel, there are characters that just grab me and seem to demand their own story. That’s the way it was with DEAD RINGER and Christmas Past which is in the SILVER BELLS anthology with Fern Michaels, JoAnn Ross and Judy Duarte. The two female characters in my first romantic suspense I’M WATCHING YOU that needed their own stories were Kendall Shaw and Nicole Piper. Kendall Shaw was an over the top reporter in I’M WATCHING YOU and she was such a force that I knew if I paired her with Detective Jacob Warwick and gave them a great mystery to solve I had the makings of a great story. And Nicole Piper, who was also in I’M WATCHING YOU and DEAD RINGER, really needed her storyline wrapped up. She teams with Detective David Ayden in Christmas Past to solve a mystery. And I must say, Christmas Past turned out to be a sexy, exciting book.

Mary Burton is the author of the romantic suspense, Dead Ringer. You can visit her website at www.maryburton.com.

THE SIGHING OF THE WINTER TREES by Laura Grossman: “This book is guaranteed to make people happy…”

Many many things inspired my book –The Sighing of the Winter Trees. The change of season, winter, spring, summer, and fall. Romance, holidays, seasons change, seasons begin. Love warmth, etc. mystery, sunset days beautiful mystery in life, Seeking warmth with a cup of tea in bed on a winter’s night. .Dreamin about beautiful things to come. Autumn leaves, romance the season of autumn etc. Clocks go round n’ round. Meeting people along the way also inspired me. Meeting friends and lovers, watching children play at the beach etc.etc.

Also I write about flowers, chocolates and romance along the mystery of life. How wonderful a gift of chocolates and flowers are and how they have a language of their own. Flowers and chocolates for any occasion. Flowers –spring, summer, winter, fall have a beauty of their own. How flowers can cheer anybody up for the occasion. How beautiful life can be for all of us. Fall flowers are especially beautiful. They come out in the fall but they highlight the beauty of autumn and bear meaning to an autumn day.

The season of autumn is especially beautiful with its falling leaves and colder weather coming on. The fall holidays –Halloween, and Thanksgiving bring cheer and warmth for the fall season. There are many many things to appreciate in life.

Seeking warmth in the colder weather to come a bowl of hot farina on a cold winter’s day the sun melting like sugar in the sky. Finding warmth and joy on a winter’s day by the fireplace waiting for love to come with a calico cat besides you named Friday. I took the word winter and personified it and gave it meaning.

There is just so much beauty and warmth in The Sighing of the Winter Trees if can fill one’s heart with joy. I write about the holiday season Christmas which has much joy for all of us –candy canes and stockings by the fireplace, taste of eggnog on one’s breath, the warmth, the joy of the holiday season is near and Santa making his rounds so diligently on Christmas Eve.

This book is guaranteed to make people happy especially around the holiday season. The Sighing of the Winter Trees is about better days to come. A hot cup of warmth or should I say cocoa by the fireplace this book has many many poems to enjoy. It’s okay to be alone until better days arrive in life. Clocks go round n’ round. There is a certain mystery in life -beyond the trains, pastry shops, beyond Woolworth’s. Beyond!

Laura Grossman is the author of THE SIGHING OF THE WINTER TREES.  You can visit her website here.

HEART OF DIAMONDS by Dave Donelson: “…the terrible plight of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Heart of Diamonds is a high-concept romantic thriller about blood diamonds in the Congo. The plot involves the White House, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and an American televangelist in a diamond smuggling scheme that is uncovered by a TV reporter, Valerie Grey.

The idea came from research I did that was prompted by Michael Fay’s fascinating 15-month, 2,000-kilometer megatransect of the Congo basin for National Geographic. What a great achievement that was! I’ve done some pretty hairy trips myself, but nothing like that. I became fascinated with the Congo and delved into the politics and history of the country.

The concept for Heart of Diamonds sprang from an item I came across in Time Magazine about the cozy relationship between Pat Robertson, the famous American televangelist, and Mobutu Sese-Seko, the dictator who raped the Congo for thirty years. When I found out Robertson owned diamond mines and timber concessions in the Congo—making profits from slave labor, no less—I simply had to write a book about it.

The Robertson-Mobutu connection makes for quite a story. Mobutu was essentially put in office by the CIA. He ran the country—which he renamed Zaire—with an iron fist and stole literally billions of dollars. He also had one of the worst human rights records in Africa, which is saying a lot.

Pat Robertson, on the other hand, is one of the most successful evangelical preachers of all time. He founded the 700 Club, ran for President of the United States, and has millions of followers who subscribe to his version of Christianity. You wouldn’t think these two men would be buddies, would you?

But they were. Robertson was deeply involved in business dealings in the Congo. The Time article reported that once, in the late 1980’s, Robertson and his wife and their entourage were flown from Paris to Kinshasa on one of Mobutu’s personal Boeing 707s. In Zaire, Mobutu personally took them on the presidential yacht on a ride up the Congo River to visit one of his estates.

Robertson had a relief program in the Congo–Operation Blessing, which is still operating today—as well as a private concern called the African Development Company, which made investments in mining, lumber, agriculture, transportation and power generation, supposedly with an eye to plowing the profits back into humanitarian efforts. One of those investments was a diamond mine in a small town south of Tshikapa near the Congo’s border with Angola. That’s where I placed the diamond mine in Heart of Diamonds.

One of the men who ran ADC for Robertson was Bill Lovick, a former minister who was dismissed by the Assemblies of God church in 1985 for questionable fund raising practices. Readers of Heart of Diamonds may find some interesting similarities between these men and some of the characters in the novel, notably televangelist Gary Peterson, the missionary Thomas Alben who runs the diamond mine, and Moise Messime, the President of the Congo.

As I read more and more about these guys and the things they were doing in the Congo in the name of Jesus Christ, the more intrigued I became. Heart of Diamonds obviously isn’t their story—the smuggling scheme, the connection to the White House, the U.S. military involvement, and so on are completely fictional. My heroine Valerie Grey and the other characters are figments of my imagination, too, although they certainly have personality traits similar to real individuals.

What is not fiction in Heart of Diamonds is the terrible plight of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the direct result of the unadulterated greed exhibited by people eager to control the vast natural resources of the country. Mobutu may be long gone and Pat Robertson’s business interests gone with him, but the brutality continues.

Dave Donelson is the author of the romantic thriller HEART OF DIAMONDS. You can visit his website at www.davedonelson.com or www.heartofdiamonds.com.

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