First off, thank you Indie Writer’s Support for giving me this opportunity to air my dirty laundry, well not all of it. I’ll save something for next time.

           Every writer’s journey is fraught with humorous anecdotes, stumbles, pitfalls, and miracles. Yes, it is a journey that perfectly mirrors this adventure we call life, and just like life, you better hold on tight, because as the country western lyric says it’s going to be “one Hell of a ride”.

           I have always been a writer, or at least dabbled in it, whether it be speeches, short stories, poetry, screen treatments, but it was my sideline, not my profession. However, my serious journey began in 2010, when I published In the Face of Evil a historical novel based on my mother’s survival of the Holocaust. I should say self-published, as no one showed any interest in doing it for me. Much of that was due to the lack of editing, and not knowing the publishing business. It took me three years to write, and a stack of rejection notices wasn’t going to stop me from publishing it. Call it beginners luck, but that book became a Finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards. Not bad. Imagine if I would have had it professionally edited? To this day it is one of the highest rated books on Amazon and Goodreads, not easy to maintain with those angry trolls that cruise the virtual world and live and breathe to write abusive one and two-star reviews. Anyway, after toiling, suffering, through one of the darkest times in human history I needed to write something lighter, less taxing on my psyche.

            Just around that time I read this little book entitled Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, it doesn’t get lighter than that. Not a particularly well-written book, but it held my interest. I began to study the romance genre, reading voraciously, everything from paranormal to BDSM. Oh, my goodness those sweaty nights of reading, who wouldn’t be hooked. I was literally infected with the romance germ and the only cure was for me to pass it on through my writing. In February 2014 I self-published (at this point I was fairly turned off by the publishing industry) my first book in the Romance/Sexy/Suspense genre The One, which became the first in my The Only One series. In June, I published The One & More, bringing me to my release with Soul Mate Publishing One More Time is Not Enough. These three-feature explicit sex with very suspenseful stories.

            Then came a publishing contract with Hartwood Publishing and my next two books Escape and Vengeance about an uber Mossad agent and his art curator muse Layla. In this serie,s I toned the sex down and focused more on the suspense and thriller aspects.

            In between I wrote and self-published on June 1, 2018, a romance/thriller/paranormal entitled The Girl Who Knew Da Vinci, which is the first in my Out of Time series. Really excited about this book as its doing phenomenally well.

            Presently I'm finishing my third in my Tip of the Spear series, which will be titled Ransom, before starting the next book in the Out of Time series.

            What I’ve learned along the way could fill a book, however, I have no interest in writing that one. Suffice it to say, I’ve spent a lot of money on poor editing, PR, advertising, the list goes on-and-on. Yes, I’ve sold books in a vacuum, despite myself. What I wanted was a home, a place to hang my hat. Fellow authors to communicate with, share ideas, brainstorm, all of which had been lacking in my creative world.

            My goodness, what an inspiration it is to finally develop a writing family. I have a notebook filled with review site possibilities, book tour companies, raffle copter events, marketing tips, and a whole slew of new Facebook and Twitter friends and my very own, growing with leaps and bounds, newsletter. I’m learning what works and what doesn’t work from writers who’ve walked barefoot over the burning coals and are kind enough to share, preventing me from burning my Tootsies.

            I now have a fabulous critique group and most importantly I have a personal assistant who has changed my life. She’s my editor and marketer and I bless the day I found her.

            My thank-you to all who have come before and who continue to be an inspiration. It just keeps getting better, and the future looks ever so bright.

On 19 June 15, the Ancient Origins website published an article by Mark Miller entitled "Ancient Greeks apparently feared zombies so much they weighed down the dead".  In his article, Miller says ancient inhabitants of the island of Sicily feared zombies so much they used large boulders to weigh down the bodies of the newly buried dead. This, apparently, was the result of the fear of revenants held by the Ancient Greeks. Miller defines revenants as existing in a state between life and death, in which the undead would be able to "ris[e] from their graves to haunt the living."

Both Miller and an article published by Richard Gray on Mail Online quote heavily from a Popular Archaeology article which confirms that "necrophobia, or fear of the dead…has been present in Greek culture from the Neolithic period to the present."   These articles are the result of the excavation of a site in Sicily yielding close to 3,000 bodies. Two of the burials found were covered with heavy amphora fragments and rocks, presumably "to trap [the bodies] in the grave."

To read the full article, please visit http://eliseabram.com/revenants-are-real/

**image from: http://goo.gl/OW5oPG

Well, here I am about a month before the launch of THE XERCES FACTOR. I’ve been through the drill before but never get used to the ‘hurry-up-and-wait’ madness.

I’ve dutifully implemented the action items from my project management spreadsheet; they seem to come in bunches…a day or two of frenetic activity and then days of waiting until the next bunch comes along.

And there’s the frustration of waiting for someone else to do something…but no one’s fault. It’s the nature of the process. Oh how I would like to have the cover art and ISBN number now; I could update websites, put together promos and get ahead of the game.

And, how nice it would be to have the proof for line editing a little early. Although I’ve tried to mentally ‘put the book to bed’, ideas keep popping into my mind…not major revisions, but little things to make the book better. I dare not open the manuscript file and tinker…a sure path to disaster.

But, nooooooo…the process proceeds at its glacial pace, not designed with the author’s mental health in mind…perhaps the opposite?!

With this tirade complete I check the calendar. Less than a month till launch. It will come, but through a quirk of physics the passage of time slows.

By the way, an excerpt from THE XERCES FACTOR is found at  http://www.rodneypagebooks.com/#!the-characters-speak/csv5

Britbear’s Book Reviews is thrilled to feature fellow Black Rose Writing author, Mary Ellen Bramwell in today’s author interview.

When Brea Cass, a young mother, is awakened in the night by the news that her loving husband, Paul, has been shot during a robbery, she is stunned.  Arriving at the hospital to discover he has died shakes her whole world.  When she finally emerges from the fog of her life, it dawns on her that something is amiss in the way her husband died.  What was really going on?

As Brea searches for answers, she discovers things she never knew, things she’s not sure she wants to know.  Delving into the mysteries that surround her brings several questions to the forefront of Brea’s thoughts.  Can I move forward despite heartache?  Am I loved?  Is someone who has made mistakes redeemable?

To read the interview, please go to http://eliseabram.com/britbear/?p=270.

Are you an author or blogger who would you like to be featured in an author spotlight with a guest post, author interview, excerpt and/or cover reveal, contact me at britbear@eliseabram.com

Merle Temple's novel, A Ghostly Shade of Pale, Stirs Interest in Hollywood 

Tupelo, Mississippi, native Merle Temple has written his first novel, A Ghostly Shade of Pale. It has garnered warm reviews from readers and Southern Writer's Magazine calls it "suspense-driven and you will not want to put it down..., his personal experiences make it a compelling read from cover to cover..., memories have their way with him so those raw emotions would surface and be laid bare on page after page of remembrances, in order for his readers to feel what he felt." 

Criminal Minds' Jim Clemente says "Ghostly is a crime story as literature. Merle Temple is a great storyteller, writing to all of your senses. He weaves a story so detailed and complex, yet beautifully sinister, that the reader is immersed in the feeling of absolute reality." 

Producers are looking at Merle's novel for a possible movie or TV series, and Merle signed books for the casts of Criminal Minds and Major Crimes while in Hollywood to meet with producers. He also appeared on Media Mayhem in Beverly Hills. Host Allison Hope Weiner said, "Captures the South, the period in the 1960s...evocative of some of the great Southern writers...a taste and feeling for where you are...intriguing, a lot of layers in this fascinating book..." 

Signings from Tupelo's Gum Tree Bookstore to LifeWay in Hollywood, and Barnes and Noble in Las Vegas to Marlowe's in Memphis have been greeted with long lines of book lovers. The crime-mystery thriller is written as fiction but based on Merle's experiences as a narcotics agent in the first declared "War on Drugs" in the early 1970s.

History files on a bygone era are ripped open and rewritten in games of murder, betrayal, the macabre, and the supernatural in A Ghostly Shade of Pale. 

Michael Parker comes of age as the tranquility of the old South is shattered in the 1970s by civil unrest, the Vietnam War, and a wave of drug abuse that brings the war on drugs to his front door. Fresh out of Ole Miss, he joins the newly formed Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and enters a world he is not prepared for. A chain of events unfolds that lead him to become an unlikely player in a game of international intrigue and a clandestine struggle for the soul of America.

The remote crop-duster airfields of Mississippi become launching pads for soldiers of fortune hired by intelligence agencies to smuggle guns into Central America. They return with drugs to fund black operations and shape what their employers call the "Real America." These intelligence rogues employ Fredrick, a murderous psychopath, to manipulate protests against the war and as a contract assassin who has no remorse. They realize too late that his loyalties are not to them or to the communists he also manipulates as a double agent but to the voices in his head that speak to him incessantly.

An uneasy and complex alliance between these shadowy figures, organized crime bosses, and corrupt politicians form a matrix where Fredrick indulges his madness, slimy Mississippi politicians nurture their deviancy, and snipers ambush Michael and his agents on frozen fields of regret. A deadly game of cat and mouse threatens the life of the woman Michael loses and finds again as she washes down black beauties with champagne in the seamy Memphis nightclubs of the Dixie Mafia.

As he searches for an elusive peace and tries to resist the charms of his troubled lover, the Dixie Mafia tries to kill him, mob lawyers try to bribe him, and the Bureau of Narcotics is infiltrated and compromised. Parker, a modern paladin in search of just causes and dragons to slay, is a cop-philosopher commenting on the world in which he travels as he awakens at twenty-six to find that the whole of his life-his notion of right and wrong and good and evil-was all a lie.

The plan to alter America filters down to and corrupts government at all levels and claims the lives of those who could never know or imagine the origin of their demise. It all comes unraveled in the madness of Fredrick and the conflicted state police agent who unwittingly becomes the fly in the ointment to machinations he cannot begin to grasp until he is forced to fight for his life and the lives of those he loves against enemies seen and unseen. 

A Ghostly Shade of Pale, the first in a trilogy, is available in hardback and eBook (Nook, Kindle, and iTunes) at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble at bn.com, Gum Tree Bookstore in Tupelo, MS., Square Books in Oxford, MS., TurnRow Books in Greenwood, MS., Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, MS., Barnes and Noble in Tupelo, MS and Henderson, Nevada, and LifeWay Books in Tupelo, MS. and Brea, CA.

This article was also submitted (by Judd Miller) and published on all of the sites listed below on the same day (11/14/2013) to generate more views for the book and the author.

http://learnsomethinguseful.com/Merle_Temple%27s_novel,_A_Ghostly_Shade_of_Pale,_Stirs_Interest_in_Hollywood

http://66.228.32.62/wiki/index.php?

http://articles.miclad.com/article.php?id=36083title=Merle_Temple%27s_novel%2C_A_Ghostly_Shade_of_Pale%2C_Stirs_Interest_in_Hollywood

http://articles.toolz.co.in/article.php?id=23797

Want to be the next to take advantage of our news blogging service to 55+ websites to generate more online views? Go to http://bit.ly/18cxRgK to learn more

Want to be in the list of our next 'Book-of-the-Day' authors? Go to http://bit.ly/18UT7lD to learn more.

LOCKDOWN REALITY TV SERIES COMING SOON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhbV0My3NxE&feature=player_embedded

Another one of Glenn Langohr's stunning memoirs--a brave, unflinching account of life in prison~ Prison Killers Book 4

The California Prison System houses a mixture of Mexican cartel members, Mexican mafia, Bloods, Crips, and thousands of other street gangs fighting for control and the author turns this story into a pulp thriller of true crime.

The author of Underdog, Glenn Langohr, takes you on a journey back into prison as he remembers a prison riot days before his release date where he left his friend on the way to Pelican Bay.

The story follows the author years later as he visits his friend in Pelican Bay during a prisoner developed hunger strike against sadistic and cruel guards who get off on their isolation and enjoy adding violence to their torture.

A spotlight on the flaws at how Pelican Bay determines gang validation and solitary confinement.

"With lazer-like precision Glenn Langohr lays bare the festering under-belly of our criminal justice system in a driving, graphic narrative that somehow finds the humanity in this most inhuman setting." Phillip Doran, T.V. Producer and Author

For Glenn Langohr's complete list of books in print, kindle and audio book in the U.S. go here~ http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00571NY5A For the U.K. go here~ http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00571NY5A

Available for interviews and reviews at rollcallthebook@gmail.com http://www.audiobookprisonstories.com

Prison Riot, A True Story of Surviving a Gang War in Prison by Glenn Langohr is Available in Audio Book to Listen to Like a Movie

To listen to an excerpt for free or purchase go here- http://amzn.to/XByCbW

Another one of Glenn Langohr’s stunning memoirs–a brave, unflinching account of life in prison

Glenn Langohr’s New Books- Roll Call & Lock Up Diaries, Expose the True Story of How the Son of a Sheriff and His Buddies Videoed the Gang Raping of an Underage Girl

New Books-”Roll Call” & “Lock Up Diaries,” Expose the True Story of How the Son of a Sheriff and His Buddies Videoed the Gang Raping of an Underage Girl.

In Glenn Langohr’s novel Roll Call, the Haidl rape case unravels in gruesome detail and exposes all the dirty little secrets. The case drew national attention in part because Haidl’s father was the assistant sheriff of Orange County, California. In Glenn Langohr’s, Lock Up Diaries, he takes the reader inside of California’s hardest core prison where prison vigilante justice on sex offenders is a matter of honor for many inmates who have been abused in childhood themselves.

Glenn Langohr-Portrayed as B.J in Roll Call

Pelican Bay Prison art for Gladiator by Glenn Langohr with Kindle/Nook

Lock Up Diaries on Kindle/Nook

Roll Call book cover

“Those without sin cast the first stone” A district attorney receives video evidence of his son dealing drugs from a released Pelican Bay inmate.

Roll Call by Glenn Langohr takes the reader into the story behind the story of the Haidl rape case. In prison on drug charges during the writing of “Roll Call”, Glenn Langohr felt the rape victim’s pain and further embarrassment of being labeled, “a promiscuous girl who aspired to be a porn star”, by private investigators and attorneys intent to clear the son of the sheriff of rape charges.

“I was sick of the hypocrisy of our criminal justice system,” Glenn stated.

Though “Roll Call” is a drug war novel with the intent to bring compassion and smart on crime back to the Justice System, the thread with the Haidl rape case is one of many twist and turns of corruption uncovered for social justice in his books. $16.99 paperback or 2.99 with kindle on Amazon.

Kirkus Discoveries- “A Master Director of modern pulp thrillers and a harrowing down-and-dirty depiction of the War on Drugs, sometimes reminiscent of Solderburgh’s Traffic, by former dealer, California artist Langohr.”

Also by Glenn Langohr- “Lock Up Diaries- A California Pelican Bay Prison Story Series”

A depiction of life inside of prison and a look at the political landscape between races, segregated by cell after being released from the Pelican Bay SHU in California. The amazing details of prison life – code words that prisoners use, explanations of how they communicate from cell to cell – really make you feel you have entered a different world, or like you are watching a movie. 2.99 with kindle, 7.99 in print and 6.97 in audio book on Amazon and other outlets.

“A raw, breathless descent through the inner circle of the California Penal Hell. Fraught with detail that only someone who’s been there could know.” Review by Phillip Doran, author of A Reluctant Tuscan

After a decade in prison on drug charges, Glenn Langohr’s vision is to help other drug addicted and lost prisoners find their voice through writing and art. He uses prison art for some of his book covers and started a publishing company, lockdownpublishing.com to open a new avenue for prison authors. Past radio interviews include KSBR 88.5 in Orange County and Buy Back America in Utah

For Glenn Langohr's complete list of books in print, kindle and audio book in the U.S. go here~ http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00571NY5A For the U.K. go here~ http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00571NY5A

Available for interviews and reviews at rollcallthebook@gmail.com http://www.audiobookprisonstories.com

Glenn Langohr

about his book: I wrote Race Riot to show the world that by sending people to prison for being addicted to drugs, we are breeding bigger criminals where gangs and violence are the calling cards. In prison a drug addict is bred into a displaced human being once released. While in prison, it gets politically racial and everything is solved with violence and gangs are bred. Race Riots over things like drug debts, alcohol, disrespect and any trivial reason are regular things. In Race Riots, BJ, a young convicted drug dealer struggles to survive a race war between the Black and White inmates.

• “A raw, breathless descent through the inner circle of the California Penal Hell. Fraught with detail that only someone who’s been there could know.” — TV Producer Phillip Doran

Infamous convicts like Gary Gilmore, Jack Henry Abbott, and Charles Manson would agree with the rough-and-ready story that is this book. Glenn Langohr’s “Race Riot” ranks right up there with the best in nonfiction prison literature available today.

All of Glenn Langohr’s drug war and prison books are available in print, kindle and audio book to listen to a free sample here- http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00571NY5A

For Glenn Langohr's complete list of books in print, kindle and audio book in the U.S. go here~ http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00571NY5A For the U.K. go here~ http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00571NY5A

Available for interviews and reviews at rollcallthebook@gmail.com http://www.audiobookprisonstories.com

about his book: Lock Up Abroad contacted me to be on their show this year as they focus on Prison Life in the U.S. They want me to be in one of the final episodes to end with a redemptive theme. While being interviewed they asked me, “How much of your books are fiction?” I told them, “Society can’t handle all of the truth!” With this in mind, I wrote Prison Riot.

Prison Riot is a true crime memoir where BJ, a young and battle tested inmate serving time on drug charges, gets caught up in a Mexican gang war over gangland tattoos. The prison explodes into chaos as each building erupts in deadly violence. For BJ, the war isn’t over when he and over a hundred inmates get housed in solitary confinement, it’s just beginning. For getting involved, he’s labeled a southern Mexican gangster.

• “Wow! I read this book in one sitting, I couldn’t put it down. The way Mr. Langhor writes this book, made me feel like I was in that cell woth B.J. and Giant, I actually felt claustrophobic and trapped and could almost feel the pepper spray burning me.” — MSMAD 2009

• “I am reading all of this authors books and this one is incredible. I can’t even imagine having to survive through what this guy has lived through. Prison war riot, Solitary confinement, respect, pride, survival. Forget reality TV, this is much better, it is reality!” — JDOG

To check out all 8 of Glenn Langohr’s prison books in print, kindle or audio book ( Listen for a free sample ) go here http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00571NY5A