Pandemonium surrounds the fate of the U.S. presidency after the president-elect is assassinated

When president-elect Arthur Davis is assassinated shortly after Election Day, the first Tuesday in November, the nation faces grave uncertainty about who is to become president in this unprecedented situation. According to the 20th Amendment of the Constitution the vice president-elect is to become the president, but the 12th Amendment says no one can be declared president until the Electoral College officially casts its votes, which occurs in December after the election. Since Electors have the constitutional right to vote for whomever they choose, the death of the president-elect propels power hungry groups and individuals to seek ways to manipulate the Electors toward their own ends—including a cabal of super-rich, ultra-patriotic Americans and even the sitting president, Peter Hampton, who wants to retain power although he lost the election. Simultaneously, Carlos Martinez, a member of the homegrown Marxist-oriented group, the Front—which is working to incite society-wide revolution—is accused by the authorities of assassinating the president-elect. He contacts lawyer Jack Banner, who unexpectedly gets swept up into the role of defending Carlos. In the process, Banner tries to untangle the mystery behind the assassination, assisted by Alison Stevens—a smart, beautiful attorney. Soon their lives are threatened, and while on the run they develop a complex romantic relationship. Can they stop the Electors from being manipulated to serve the ends of a hidden and powerful few? Does the vice-president elect become the president? Is the president-elect’s assassin identified and brought to justice?

Devotees of action-adventure novels with a political twist will be gripped by this truly original and harrowing story that deeply explores our Constitution and the powerful, hidden forces at play in our current political system.

OREN TASINI is a practicing attorney and shareholder of the law firm of Haile, Shaw & Pfaffenberger, P.A., in North Palm Beach, Florida.

Good news. Amber Entertainment has selected a screenplay writer as the next step in producing my legal thriller novel, NEON DRAGON as a feature movie.

The vampires don't like to give much information when they issue jobs so when their notice says use extreme caution you pay attention.  The warrant read simply "Wanted Dead Tammy Stone. Use extreme caution.  Reward $200,000.00, Call Department of Parks and Recreation Agent Gentry."  It was only a few minutes before I had her rap sheet; Tammy was a very bad girl indeed.  There are 42 dead vampires; most of them pure bloods and one coven elder.  She is known to have "exceptional" magical ability, that's vampire talk for really powerful.  I can see I'm going to have to get a mage or two for this assignment.  I have a shooter already but sometimes with these mage types they have a sixth sense about danger.  I guess that's why they live long enough to be dangerous.

Gods I love a good hunt.

Okay, you've written your book. It's a great story. It has endless potential. You send out your queries. Days turn into weeks, and weeks into months. You start to wonder, what's the problem?

That was me. However, my wait was much shorter than others. I was finally finished with my novel in May, and I resolved to find an agent by the end of the summer.

When you're dealing with the publishing industry, you start to get used to the fact that the only thing you might hear for months at a time is the ticking of your clock or the beating of your own heart before you hear anything back from your queries. But if you've waited a really, really long time and you don't have an agent yet, don't despair. There is still plenty you can do in the meantime that will help you in the end.

Before I describe my simple tips to bide the time, let me tell you about my agent's partner. He worked on his book for fifty years. Yeah, the one with the five and the zero, not the one and the five. One day, he told his wife that he was finally fed up, so disgusted, as a matter of fact, that he was going to stop writing forever. To clear his head, he went for a walk. When he returned from his walk, a little calmer, his wife gave him a message. A publisher was finally interested in publishing his book!

So, first and foremost, don't despair, because you can have your book published at any time, even if it takes a little longer than expected.

In the meantime, there are a few productive things you can do, good things to help you get that publisher or agent. Here are my suggestions:

1. Work on your query letter. I need you to burn this one into your head. Your query letter is your one and only chance to talk someone into buying your book. I burned through about five versions before I really got it down right. Check out the latest Writer's Digest book of publishers because they have some great articles in there to help you with your query letter. You have to be able to put your whole story into one page, with all the main elements, including the ending.

2. After you set your book aside for a length of time, two or three months, pick it up again and read it again. It's a great thing to edit your book every day as you write it, but you need to do this part also. Everything you wrote, those little mistakes such as missed quotation marks, overlooked repetition, saying something twice (haha, see what I did there?), they all become much more obvious when you've gained some emotional distance from your story. You might have the best story in the world, but if your writing is riddled with mistakes, errors, inconsistencies, etc., it will be rejected because the whole point is to write well.

3. Make sure your manuscript is double spaced. My agent claimed I was almost responsible for blinding her, so it's something agents and publishers alike appreciate. Plus, it helps agents keep track of page count (250 possible words per page). And by the way, ignore Word's word count, because your agent or publisher will always look at it in terms of page count (250 words times number of pages).

4. Do yourself the biggest favor ever. Hire an editor. I work as an editor, and I have been lucky enough that my agent is part editor, part agent. My agent hires an editor for his own work, and he's a retired English teacher! Your book will have a polished, professional read to it. You need that set of eyes to look at your work for you. Even if you are self-publishing, you need to take this step also. You'll be happy you didn't neglect it.

So, some quick tips for you, and before you know it, you'll get that publisher or agent to say yes to your work.

The Confessional

My little boudoir held magical powers at times, it seemed to draw out gentlemen’s innermost secrets. Much like your local hairdresser or bartender, clients feel that they are in a place where they won’t be judged. The only difference here is that all secrets are told post coital and completely naked, thus all vulnerability and bullshit are stripped away. Oh, the things I have been told……. I’m secretly stealing money from the bank in which I work, apart from my wife I keep a boyfriend in a unit up the the road for the last 16 years. Some secrets I almost felt compelled to report; once a sitting judge told me that he had been dabbling with drugs to make the day more interesting. Stealing, cheating on their wives, insider trading, money laundering and drugs were the most common theme from these white collar criminals. A day didn’t go by that I wasn’t offered free drugs “to enhance our time together”. Darling I’m not here to ‘enjoy’ I’m here to pay off my latest mortgage, pay Poppies school fees, just live basically. Those words recited like a mantra in my head, never spoken out loud unless someone became persistent in their request. Why tell me? Because trust me I would rather not know. The thinking was that they would find a kindred spirit in me a simpatico with me, as I was in their minds living on the edge of legal and on the corner of ‘gangsta’. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my entire career I had never touched drugs. I established long ago in my teen years that drugs made me lose control, and life was far too arduous to go through it stoned. I had been violated too many times stone cold sober, if I had to navigate this life alone I would need my wits about me, so drugs were a fog haze that I did not need, and seemed to offer no benefit. Drugs contradicted everything my life represented, my life was about financial independence, drugs seemed to drain it’s victims of their financial means. My life was about raising Poppy to be the best adult she could become. My mum had already threatened to strip her of me once so I was not going to give her one scintilla of reason to have another crack at custody. So for many a good reason I never touched drugs. But that is not to say I didn’t take advantage of these sweetly whispered stock market tips that my naughty clients were telling me about. One year I made over 50K just in stock market investments. Over the years the figure would be close to three hundred thousand. But never once did I ever tell a client that I had taken advantage of his secret whispers, or drunken ranting’s. I will never be beholden to a client. I would be crazy not to take advantage of their illegality. Butchers would bring me forty kilogram boxes of frozen product, jewellers would slip me a couple of piece that they claim weren’t selling anyway, and chemists would bring makeup and perfumes, even dumomine if I asked. The list goes on infinitim. Poppy was always curious “mum why do you need 40 kilos of meat?” “It was a gift darling”. She was and is the most observant person I know, you can’t wear a new pair of knickers without her keen eye observing. She couldn’t understand why a single women got so many gifts from so many different sources with no apparent boyfriend that she ever met. “Oh Darling they are work gifts”. She is the queen of questions, and never bores of boring down on any topic. She has always had a nose for virtue, she can sniff out suspect from a mile away. Here lies the irony of a sex-workers life; we work on the edge of legal, on the border of moral (to some) yet to our children we need to represent paragons of virtue, honesty and morality. Some days you feel like Sybil with her multiple personalities. Naughty, raunchy, sexy, hedonistic, but come five pm you are virtuous, humble, patient, stern at times but above all loving. Because I was soo young when I had Poppy, we were almost growing up together. She viewed me as the coolest mum on the block (I was the youngest mum in her entire school so that obviously played a part in her assessment). “Cool” can mean so many things but it did not mean that I was in anyway disrespectful of the police and the laws in front of Poppy.

While I may not agree with them all I maintained a healthy respect of the police for her sake. So it was when Poppy came home escorted by two officers in full uniform, she was about ten at the time. “We are bring your daughter home to collect her helmet, she cannot ride the streets without one, it is dangerous and against the law”. “Poppy you have a helmet why aren’t you wearing it?” “I’m very sorry officers, please give her the $25 fine, and I will see to it that she pays”. They looked at me blankly, I can’t be bothered with the paperwork seemed to radiate from their foreheads. “Look we are going to knock this up to a first offence and a written warning”. But I needed Poppy to learn early that there are consequences to her actions and that if she was going to wander about publicly protesting her disapproval for the laws, she would have to pay the price. So that Saturday I dropped her at the local police station with a bucket, a sponge and a car cleaning kit. She spent three hours there cleaning all the police cars. But more importantly she never again rode without a helmet.

The police knew who I was, I was allowed to work from my own home privately, I was not allowed to have any children living there. So as long as I worked quietly and didn’t draw to much unnecessary attention to myself I was ignored by the constabulary. It was funny the neighbours were completely at a loss as to what I was up to. Everyone in our private little street worked 9 – 5 so no one noticed the march of penguins to my door every day. The endless car park of Audis and other imported cars lining the street. They just knew the weekend neighbour, the after five Annika, the mother Anniika. No one ever met Cleo, and no one ever would believe it. That’s if you are doing your job right.

http://annikacleeve.com/2013/11/your-bedroom-is-a-confessional/

 Hello,

 My novel The Tragedy of Fidel Castro, published by River Grove Books  was chosen the third best translation published in America in 2013 by the literary magazine ForewordReviews. https://botya.forewordreviews.com/books/the-tragedy-of-fidel-castro/ 

Please see some reviews:

Welcome to Halloween on from Damian Bloodstone as a Trick or Treat.

I have selected a little tale of terror for you.  It is not the bloody gore fest of most by one of the mind.

It is called...

Image by: © Paleka | Dreamstime.com

Marsy Beron’s book examines how to prevent the “labels” often attached to us in childhood from becoming self-fulfilling behavior. Her thesis: some actions (e.g., not cleaning your room) lead to being labeled (“you’re sloppy”) and then to belief (“I’m sloppy”) and finally to acting that way. Thus, the early labeling not only damages a child’s self esteem and confidence, it influences his or her future behavior.

Beron, a former journalist who now practices Gestalt psychotherapy, presumably in Bulgaria, where she attended the National Institute of Gestalt Psychotherapy, draws extensively from her own life and from her patients’ stories. In her view, parents are the first culprits in assigning labels; later the perpetrators may be teachers, schoolmates, employers, intimate partners and mothers-in-law (for whom she shows a special antipathy). She cites the odd nicknames given by children to their peers, including “lumpy, booger boy, blob, splinter.”...

...Beron mentions a number of potentially helpful strategies to rid readers of negative labels. Some require exercise and physical exertion; a tenet of Gestalt therapy is that emotional pain resides in the body, so the pain needs to be released literally.

Near the end of the book, the author summarizes useful ways for readers to “straighten the crooked mirror” and evaluate themselves more kindly. They include rewriting your life story, reducing the power of authority figures...

The full review in BlueInk

Not exactly...
Ok giving myself less than a month to edit that book I was working on until I'm comfortable with putting it away for awhile wasn't long enough. Close there, looking at what I have left to polish on it, I should be satisfied with my new draft of The Illumination Query in less than 4 days.
And you know, while working on it I came up with the new story to work on for NaNoWriMo. I 'discovered' a good bit of action that occurs in the background of my story that is actually quite important even though I don't directly mention it. You may ask how it can be important if it never even tickled my mind before.
That would be because it doesn't directly involve either one of my story tellers in the book. How I have things written, I don't see any way to squeeze it in. As the story would probably be good to have written down so I can refer to it in the future for Illumination Query/Speed of Darkness sequels I'm going to try putting it together, even if it keeps me writing past November.