Welcome, Author Susan Roebuck!

Today I am thrilled to host author Susan Roebuck!

Thank you Regina for inviting me today onto your blog.

These last few weeks I’ve been part of a blog tour, along with Regina, that has culminated in the participants writing a short story of 250 words (oops, mine’s 270 – I can never follow rules) based on a picture. Here’s the picture kindly provided by Kayleigh Malcolm:

Blue Jay Way

Fog turns people into wisps of ghosts and the world becomes an almost silent place. I lick at the moisture droplets, tasting airy cleanliness, and watch the ripples on the pond, golden in the early evening lamplight.

I wait for him, my heartbeat quickening at the sound of scurrying footsteps. But they aren’t his.

I’m tempted to go into the bandstand to wait but he won’t like that, saying we’re too obvious there. One day, I swear, we’ll waltz to silent music in that bandstand and let the lamps illuminate us. “What a beautiful couple,” people will say. Until then we hide because I’m the third person in his marriage.

“But not for long,” he promises as we huddle under whatever cover we find. “One day…”

He’s never as late as this. I check my phone but there’s no message. “Don’t call me, ever,” he’s told me. “My wife will know.”

I wait as mist swirls ever thicker around me in a rhythm that turns to music in my head:

There’s a fog upon LA
And my friend has lost his way

George Harrison, I mentally tell the Beatle, this isn’t LA and fog won’t bother him. We both know our way here with our eyes closed after all this time. I swallow a ball of pain that’s risen to my throat as I contemplate what I’ve always suspected and dreaded would happen: he’s not coming.

I shiver in the cold and damp, my tears mingling with the fog droplets as I turn to go.

Please don’t be long the music continues. Don’t you be very long.

A footstep and, turning, I see a shadow appear through the fog. My heart sings.


*****

Susan Roebuck has a new book out. It’s a cosy suspense with a touch of romance and a hint of magic and is called Rising Tide.

I

Blurb of Rising Tide: Time, and most of Portugal, has almost forgotten Luminosa, a small fishing community on the Alentejo coast. A cluster of white and blue cottages huddle under the cliffs overshadowed by the great manor of Herdade Albatroz whose family has ruled the village since the days of Napoleon. Far off the tourist route, nobody visits Luminosa by chance.
When a ruthless American racketeer turns up, the peaceful village's way of life could be ruined forever. But will other visitors--Piper Pines, seeking news of her long dead Portuguese mother, and Leo Shine, bereft of a father and brother accused of terrible crimes--help or hinder his objective to drag Luminosa into the twenty-first century?

Buy Rising Tide: http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Tide-Susan-Roebuck/dp/1606598570/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437925728&sr=8-1&keywords=Rising+Tide+Susan+Roebuck&pebp=1437925732102&perid=1X567NVY54PC9TR7QV5K

Find Susan Roebuck here: Blog/website: www.susanroebuck.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuRoebuck
Twitter:https://twitter.com/suemonte

Follow the links below to read my fellow tourist’s stories. Remember, we all used the same picture and had to limit ourselves to 250 words.
Regina Andrews at http://kayleighmalcolm.blogspot.com/
Kayleigh Malcolm at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Tracy-Marr/114711658247?ref=hl
 Ann Tracy Marr at http://susanroebuck.com

Welcome, Author Ann Tracy Marr!

This week it is a joy to welcome author Ann Tracy Marr to Gina's World of Good! We share a lot in common, not only are we both writers...we are both survivors. Read about Ann Tracy's courage here. Thank you for visiting, Ann Tracy!

Ann Tracy Marr, my guest blogger, has published three Regencies with an intriguing splash of magic, with a fourth on the way. Faced with cancer, she took a break from romance and turned her keyboard to non-fiction.

Welcome to my blog, Ann.  What is your newest book about?

Dear Cancer is about breast cancer and its treatment. In 2011 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my life changed; I became the average cancer patient. Then the diagnosis tightened. I had two triple negative tumors, a highly lethal type of breast cancer. Suddenly, I was the high risk patient. To cope, I acted like the typical writer: I began a diary. I also researched surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Treatment was challenging; I slept, suffered, and wrote my way through half a year of pain.

Once I began to join the real world again, I realized my diary could benefit others, so I made plans to publish it. Dear Cancer will be born October 1^st.

Where did you get your inspiration for this book? Breast cancer treatment is gruesomely involved; it impacts the whole body, not just the breast. My compulsion to know, to understand, forced me to write things down. There are too many possible scenarios and too many solutions to those scenarios, to keep it all in your head. I ended up using my own writing as a reference book for procedures and when side effects attacked me.

Did you put real experiences from your research in this story? The diary is a blow by blow accounting of what happened to me. Mental anguish and physical stresses mingle. Mixed in is practical advice on different aspects of the disease. The reader will experience what happens in surgery, chemo rooms, and radiation labs, know what a biopsy feels like and what to expect from a chest port. She will be able to recognize side effects and have tips for dealing with them, know what Neulasta is and what it can do, and bone up on some of the latest research. Some of the information she can find easily herself, other things are difficult to discover. Instead of spending hours and days digging through various sources, with Dear Cancer, she can just read the book and know what is likely to happen.

What kind of research did you do for this book? I talked doctors and nurses into the ground. I read books, and I spent hours on top of hours on the Internet, going to medical websites, reading the results of clinical trials and research, and cruising chat rooms to learn what other patients experienced.

What intrigues you most about writing this story? It isn’t interest, but compulsion. Triple negative breast cancer is a killer; learning as much as you can in order to fight it in the most effective way is crucial. The patient has to react quickly to side effects and make intelligent decisions on how to care for her body. Knowledge is key, but gaining that knowledge is not always easy. I did the research for the next patient. Dear Cancer contains the information she needs to fight a killer.

That said, you, dear blog reader, may not care about breast cancer. Wander over to my website, www.atmarr.com to learn about my first love, the English Regency. But don’t settle down to read just another Jane Austen novel – romp through an award winning series where King Arthur once lived and Merlin’s magic spices life. There are three books published, with a fourth coming after the dust settles on Dear Cancer.

And for fun, take a look at my PInterest page: https://www.pinterest.com/anntracymarr/the-english-regency-inspired-house. I am building and furnishing my dream home Regency style.

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Thank you so much for sharing your story, Ann Tracy. You are an inspiration. I look forward to our week together and questions from visitors to my blog.

Welcome, Author Keyleigh Malcom!

Today I am thrilled that author Keyleigh Malcom is visiting and talking about inspiration.

Where do you find inspiration?

Inspiration is one of the most curious aspects of writing. What exactly causes it? Why can't we find it when we really need it? Like when a deadline is looming. LOL

My 3xtasy Lake series was inspired by a hike through Algonquin Park and then finding that there is a lake in the south west corner called Wolf Lake. Like that wasn't divine intervention since I was brainstorming a shifter series. Suddenly I found myself in a the middle of a small town called Ecstasy Lake, which was a safe haven for all sorts of shifters and magical creatures

The Midnighter Seductions series was obvious inspired by the impending doom of December 21, 2012. The day the world was going to plunge into a series of cataclysmic disasters all because an ancient Aztec calendar ended. Inspiration is fuelled by "what if" and that series was a direct result of my looking for something less depressing than the end of the world as we knew it.

I've listened to music and stared at clouds. My life is cluttered with hundreds of little notepads tucked in everywhere. My car, purse, nightstand, knitting bag, work. I've written ideas on the sides of cardboard boxes, napkins and receipts.

Because, that's how important inspiration is.

It usually hits at completely inopportune moments. Like when you’re sitting in a car listening to music while your daughter is putting resumes in a bunch of stores. Yup, that happened to me. I'd been working on a book for the Black Hills Wolves series and I had two characters who were stating to develop in my head and I couldn’t' figure out how to get them together and make it realistic. (Well, as realistic as the perfect happily ever afters you can find in a romance novel.)

So I'm sitting in my car, jotting down physical attributes about each character in my notebook, brainstorming about what might happen in the story when it suddenly hits me. My heart skipped a beat and then pounded for a second while everything unfolded in my brain. I understood WHY these two souls were meant to be together and WHY no one else would match. That's the trick of Mates, it's not enough to have this magical connection, not enough for me anyways. I want more, there has to be a reason why this person is the Yin to their Yang or the Peanut Butter to their Jam. However you want to phrase it.

Here I have two men who have been living a life without feeling like they have a home. And I don't mean a physical one; I mean the one that you have in your heart. That is what Seth needed to learn is that Home is heartfelt not physically felt and Josh needed to feel like he had a place in the world with someone who wanted to be his home. Josh is a little needy but I adore him, he's a sweetheart.

That's the part of writing that keeps me coming back book after book. I'll never jump out of a plane or swim with sharks. This is my adrenaline rush. The excitement of a first date that's going better than you ever imagined and you start to think, maybe this is "the one". It's that fresh and new excitement that I strive for in my writing and I hope I manage to convey to the readers. I want them to experience that excited rush too.

Kayleigh Malcom (aka Corinne Davies) is a firm believer that all love is beautiful and everyone deserves a Happily Ever After....well except for those involved with cancelling Firefly. She's still holding a grudge over that one. 

Sticking with one genre is a talent she hasn't achieved yet and can be found creating worlds as normal as our own or as fantastic as her dreams. Her characters have to face real life challenges, as many of us do, but love always finds a way to conquer all. 

A social media junkie, she can be found haunting many different sites and loves to hear from her readers.