Author Introductions 2021

This is the author introduction thread for 2021.

Please tell us about yourself, what you're working on and any interesting facts about you! (I.e. what hobbies do you enjoy.)

We are interested in who you are, where you are from, what genres you write in, and why you write about what you write. But do remember that you are introducing yourself, not your book. If you just copy and paste a book blurb you will not be added to the index.

There is also a reader introduction thread.

I'll start by introducing myself. My pen name is L. Shelby, but the L doesn't stand for anything much, I actually go by Shel, or Shelby. :)

I am the Hobnob Group moderator, but even though it says I'm the creator of the Group, I'm not. I was actually elected by the group some years back, when the original creator disappeared.

I am a 'pro' author with three sales of short works to traditional markets, and have also self-published five novels and a novella. I write fantasy and science fiction because I love worldbuilding. I also sing, play a concertina, designed and coded my own website, enjoy art, and do tatting. I have six children, all grown now, I love nature, and I also unfortunately suffer from CFS/ME which causes me to disappear from the group randomly. (Sorry about that!)

I'm a Canadian, but I live in Ohio.

And I love, love, love talking about writing, which is why I'm here. I look forward to meeting you all.

Hey everyone, my name is John Willkom, and I'm the author of Walk-On Warrior, an autobiography about my life and basketball.
I've also written for several sites about sports, adventure, and the power of a winning mindset. My wife, two young children, and I currently live in Minneapolis, MN. Looking forward to meeting everyone!

>3 Jwillkom:
Hey, John! Nice to meet you!

You appear to have created two accounts for yourself, though. Jwillkom and JohnWillkom. The second one has a picture and you added your book to it and all, so you may want to stick with that one? If so you may want to add a link to the correct profile to you introduction. Put an @ sign in front of your username to turn it into a profile link.

Either way, I highly recommend adding more books than just your own to LibraryThing. The system tracks which books appear in libraries together. So the more books you have in your library the more "friends" your book has, in social media terms.

I used to live across the river from you in Saint Paul. People there tried to impress me with how terrible and awesome their winters were, only I'm from Canada, so it sort of didn't work. :D

What sports are you particularly fond of besides basketball?

I've added you to the author index under non-fiction and Minneapolis. Welcome to the group!

Hey, y'all!

My name is Jack LaFountain. I am an author and partner in a small publishing company called House of Honor Books. My writing is all over the map at present which is probably a holdover from my years as a traveling nurse. Most of the time my stories lean to the supernatural with a Christian flavor. My latest book is a western and the Christian influence is anything but subtle. I am currently working on a nonfiction book about Christianity, a paranormal romance, and a supernatural crime novel. Yeah, it's a juggling act.

I am a collector of hometowns from Nashville to Seattle. I am at home now on the banks of the Tennessee River in Decatur, Alabama. I retired a year ago and began writing full-time. I'm a bit of a Jack of all trades. I spent seven years in the Air Force before going on to careers as a minister and a registered nurse.

Looking forward to meeting fellow authors.

>5 HouseofHonor:
Hi! Nice to meet you!
Your life certainly sounds adventurous. I hope you stick around and share your stories with us. :)

Normally I give newcomers advice on setting themselves and their books up on LibraryThing, but before I can do that for you, I need to know if you are also the member sandbarjack or not? (I'll wait to add you to the author index until after I get that cleared up.)

I'm curious how much of your experience as a traveling nurse directly leaks into your books. From your intro it sounded like it could be a whole lot, or maybe only just the taste for variety that leaks.

I'm fond of variety myself. But because I love world-building so much, most of my writing since I was twenty has been set in imaginary worlds. Murder mysteries, political maneuvering, steam-boats and car chases... in my hands it all ends up being technically fantasy or science fiction, whether it has magic or spaceships or not. :)

Another thing I'm wondering about -- when you move to new places, what sorts of locations do you end up familiarizing yourself with first? (I've been settled for twenty years now, but before that I moved fairly often, and the first thing I always wanted to know was where the closest public library was.)

I would like to encourage you (and all the other new arrivals) to scroll down the list of topics on the Hobnob group page and pick some discussion threads to participate in. (They are a bit buried at the moment, because I've been ill. Sorry about that!)

Welcome to Hobnob!

Hello
I enjoyed writing ever since I was in high school and took a creative writing class. I have written short stories and poems and gathered them together in a book. I finished writing a chapter book during the pandemic. My writing kept me busy while in isolation.

As far as reading goes I love mystery, thrillers, horror, historical fiction, history, DIY books.

>7 Amanda36:
Hey, Amanda! Great to hear from you!

I am jealous that your high school offered creative writing courses. I don't think mine did. Although maybe it was just that I was so busy signing up for art, music and didn't rama classes that I overlooked it?

I have always had stories in my head. I started writing in Jr. High, when my English teacher made us write Journals, and one of the things we could put in it were "Character Sketches". So I made up some characters, and then realized that I could also write down the story that they belonged to. As I wrote, I discovered the story in my head became a better story. After that I was addicted. :)

The last on your list of book interests is DIY... do you have any do it yourself projects you've worked on recently that you'd be willing to tell us about?

I notice that you have added no books to LibraryThing, not even your own. I searched the site, and didn't find a copy of your book (I used the title showing on the picture in your profile for the search) in the system. This means you really need to add your book, or it won't be here.

There are two usual reasons why authors don't add their books. The first is that they tried searching for their book on the add books page, and the page search function couldn't find it. If this is the problem you had, then what you should do is look near the bottom of the add books page where it says "Other Options" and click on "Add manually". You will be take to an "edit book" form that will ask you for the Title, Author and so forth. Fill it in, and click save. :)

The second reason is because they think adding their own book to LibraryThing is pretentious. That means they don't really understand what LibraryThing is all about. LibraryThing is about cataloging books. You own a copy of your own book, right? Then go ahead and catalog it. It's only an ebook and not a "real" book... that's why there's a spot on the manual add form asking what media type your book is... ebooks are on the list.

Make sure that whichever way you add your book, that you tag it (tags are one of the fields on the edit book form) with the genre, and maybe the mood or the major tropes. On LibraryThing there is a module called tagmash that shows members what books are being listed with certain tags or tag combinations. It is one of the ways that members find new books to read. :)

After you have added your own book, it's a good idea to add a bunch more books that you own. In theory you should add everybook that you own, but I'll confess that I never have. I don't usually have a hard time remembering or finding books that I own, so I actually use LibraryThing to track books I read, and I've listed more library books than books I actually have on my shelves. But that's a valid use of LT also. :)

I will wait until you have added your book to LibraryThing to add you to the Author Index, because that way I can include the link to your Author Page. (You don't have to make an author page, it gets automatically created when someone adds a book that you have written. But it is worth it to visit your own author page by clicking on your name as it appears as an author in the "Your Books" list. Once there you can add all sorts of information about yourself, and also click on the "Is this you?" link in the sidebar to claim the page.)

When I add you to the index, I will need to know what genres you write in to add you to the subject section, and roughly where you live to add you to the location section (we usually go by "closest major city").

If you need help with anything, you can ask me here, or drop me a note on my profile.

Welcome to the Hobnob Group!

Hello!

I've been writing for over 30 years, mainly short stories and non-fiction until now, and some translation work as well (I'm French).

As a reader, I'm a huge fan of Roger Zelazny though other favorites over the years have included Isaac Asimov, Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss and a bunch of French writers no one here is likely to know LOL.

As a writer, I've written both Science-Fiction and Fantasy, though I've found over the years that I tend to be more comfortable (and enjoy more) fantasy, especially of the epic variety. So that's what I'm currently working on--a series of epic fantasy novellas that I'll be launching at the end of the month.

This will be my first venture into self-publishing... well, sort of, there were two previous experiments but I never really did any promoting for those.

Outside of reading and writing, I love movies, TV shows and progressive rock.

>9 slarken:
Bonjour, Steffen. Bienvenue!

I was born in Montreal, but you are probably right that I wouldn't recognize the names of your favorite French authors (unless we're talking Dumas, Verne or Uderzo and Goscinny) because my parents were only living there so my father could attend McGill University, and natively I'm an anglophone.

It's a good idea to add your favorite books to LibraryThing, yes the french ones too, and not just your own. Putting other books in your library creates connections between those books and yours. Since you are not the only bilingual LT member, adding both french and english books might make your library (and thus hopefully your writing) more interesting to other bilingual readers. :)

Also, any of the other works you have published: short stories and articles and translations, you can get credit for those here too, and have them show up on your author page. This is done by adding yourself to those works as an "other author". I'd be happy to talk you through that process if you need the help.

I really think it is worth it go to the effort of getting your other work listed on your author page. One of the hardest things to do as a self-published author is to get people to take you seriously as a writer. If you have multiple "other author" publication credits, they will know at once you aren't some over-enthusiastic teenager slapping the first thing you ever wrote up on amazon.

As a fantasy and science fiction author I approve of books featuring dragons and dwarves, but I have to admit I'm a bit bemused to see the phrase "epic fantasy novellas". I usually think of Epic Fantasy as a genre with very long stories. My own 'epic fantasy' will be composed of five to six volumes in the 100K word range. (I'm not sure exactly how many volumes, because I've only gotten up to about a third of the way through book 4.) But I guess if you do a whole series of novellas, you can still accumulate some respectable wordage, and lots of shorter products can be a boon to promotion and marketing efforts.

What kind of movies and TV shows do you like?
I used to like movies, and then I got too sick even to read for a few months, and I discovered that movies are too short for me when I'm trying to fill up 16 hours a day. So now I watch Asian dramas, which give me stories that last 16-40+ hours each. (And lots of material to appeal to my fantasy-loving heart!) :)

About the progressive rock, do you play or sing, or are you just a listener? Do you listen to music while writing? Someone posted a "pick five songs as a soundtrack for you book" challenge here a while back. Does that sound doable to you?

I have added you to the Author Index under Fantasy, and Non-fiction, but I haven't added you to the Location section because you didn't say where you live. (For the index aren't looking for precision, so we just go by closest major city.)

Best of luck with your venture into self-publication, and welcome to Hobnob!

Hi Shelby ;) Thanks for the response.

Lots to unpack here LOL.

Yes, I will be adding some of my favorite books to my library, just haven't had time to dig into that yet. Been pretty busy getting everything ready for my upcoming launch ;)

Honestly though, I don't plan on adding my previous releases as they were done under a different name and I'm trying to keep my pen names separate, at least for now.

I get what you're saying about the "over-enthusiastic teenager" thing, but that book I listed on my page is actually a short story available for free download through my website which, hopefully, should put minds at ease on that front ;)

Regarding epic fantasy book lengths, yes, I agree with you, I love big books too. But regarding my series, it's structured kind of like a TV show, so that it's actually an ongoing story that will spread across multiple stories. So in the end it will be the equivalent of a multi-volume epic haha. Already got 109k words of the series done (the first 7 stories).

Basically, it's the structure that is different, not the content. Instead of having three sprawling novels, you'll get 3x12 sprawling novellas, but the result will be the same ;) well, actually, more like 1x12 + 3x8 LOL

Admittedly, the downside is that epic takes time to build up to, which means not all of the stories will be 'epic' per se (although there are some epic scenes along the way, but it gets more epic further in).

Movies and TV shows: I agree with you, though instead of turning to Asian dramas I just watch more TV shows haha. I found a long time ago that the quality sort of shifted from movies to TV, so I tend to watch move TV. Favorite shows include "Game of Thrones" (of course!), "The handmaid's tale", "Lost", "Prison break", "Lucifer" and so many others! As for movies, I'm still a big fan of Spielberg, but also Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. Can't go wrong with those guys. Though my two favorite movies are by none of the above, amusingly: "Dark City" and "Sucker Punch".

Oh and since you mentioned Asian dramas... I haven't watched any of those, but I do like Bollywood movies LOL.

Progressive rock: I'm mostly a listener though I'm also a lyricist. I was also briefly a singer, but I'm no good at that (sadly). Favorite bands include Kansas, Blue Oyster Cult, Shadow Gallery, Duran Duran and Toto (yeah, those last two are not prog, I know LOL).

I did see the "pick five song" thread last night but not really my thing... I mean, I don't think of my writing in those terms. And while I usually do listen to music when I write, it tends to be the radio turned really low, just so I have some background sound as I dislike silence. But it can't be anything too catchy or anything I really like or I'll find myself focusing more on the music than my writing LOL. That's why radio usually works well for me (typically an 80s station, disco, or classic rock).

That said, there have been specific albums or songs (or even lines in songs) that have inspired me, but that's a whole other topic ;)

Author Index: Fantasy is perfect, thank you, but non-fiction is not really appropriate for this particular pen name, if you could fix that ;) Thanks.

>11 slarken:
I'll take off the non-fiction since you want me to. :)

But you should be aware that here on LT, combining pen names together with the legal name is standard operating procedure. People here tend to be very facts-and-figures fanatical (it is a cataloguing site after all). It is actually a very anti-marketing and anti-promotion site, so the usual market reasons for separating books by pen-name are sort of pooh-poohed here. We are not here to help you sell books, or to help the right readers find the right books, or even primarily to share our delight in reading books (although we do do that quite often anyway) we are here to record data about books. What books one author has written under multiple names is legitimately part of that data.

We do try not to be impolite about it, though, and can be quite sympathetic to causes like trying to keep children's books and porn from being listed together, etc. But it won't occur to anyone that just happens to stumble over the fact that you also write non-fiction, (or translations or whatever,) under another name to not combine the names. So if you have a really strong reason to keep them separate you may want to explicitly say so should you ever happen to mention your other persona while on the site, just in case one of the people who sees it has spare time on their hands and is feeling like being helpful. (Author combination is one of the ways to earn a "Helper Badge" here.)

It sounds like your current writing has the same structure as your current viewing. That's cool! I do that too! (Your tastes seem to tend to darker stuff that mine, though.) I original posted more comments and questions about your story's structure, but I decided my message was getting too long and all over the place for this thread, so I moved that discussion to another post.

I used to watch Bollywood shows back when Hulu had ad supported viewing, but now that I've decided that 20 hours is a nice length for a story I haven't gone looking for a new source. I was particularily fond of the fact they did musicals.

If all your favorite musical groups fell under the exact same genre, that would be boring. ;) One of my frequently listened to playlists playlists includes Styx, Enya, Pavarotti, Lindsey Stirling, Jeanette McDonald, Wallace Chung, and Woorim Ko. Anyone who recognizes all of those wins a virtual trophy. :)

But I agree that songs that inspired me is another topic. Why don't you start it? :)

>12 LShelby:

I don't think it's likely anyone will combine my two names (there's no obvious connection between them) but if it does happen, it's not the end of the world. Anyway, we'll see how things go... one day at a time ;)

And yes, I do read (and write) darker stuff LOL. It's kinda funny cause I'm a rather optimistic kinda fellow in real life (well OK maybe not so much anymore considering the last few years we've had haha).

Thanks for that other thread. I love talking about structure, so I'll go post there too in a bit.

I'll have to try some of those Asian dramas someday. I have to admit the fantasy-heavy themes they have, have tempted me for some time. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to find them with subtitles though? Is there a specific site where you go to watch those?

Regarding your playlist... I love Styx, enjoy Enya (though to be fair I only know a few songs by her), I know *of* Pavarotti (opera ain't my thing!), Stirling sounds vaguely familiar... don't think I'd ever heard of the three others though (are those last two K-Pop?)

>13 slarken:
I don't know that there is that close a correlation between the ambiance of a person and the ambiance of the stuff they read. I know a lot of cheerful optimistic people who like dark... and an equal number of cheerful optimistic people who don't.

I primarily use Viki. It uses volunteers to do most of the the subtitling, so they can be slower than some sites on that front, but I just don't bother starting anything that hasn't been fully translated yet. :) Lindsey Sterling is a classical fusion violinist who dances while playing the violin. Wallace Chung is C-pop (although I think maybe he's technically Taiwanese?) Woorim Ko is Korean, but classical rather than pop. Jeanette McDonald appeared in black and white era musical movies.

About being an 'opera person': As the story goes, (I don't have clear memories) my grandfather for a while had season tickets to the philharmonic, which included both orchestra concerts and opera, and he'd take any of the grandkids who were interested enough not to cause trouble to the matinee performances. I apparently was a regular for both... I couldn't have been more than four or five years old at the time! But now that I'm older, most operas are too dark for my tastes. :D

We should probably take any more discussion to other threads now. :)

I write science fiction, fantasy, and and assorted other things. At one time I thought I might be a scientist like many in my family, but I found my runaway imagination more suited to writing fiction than factual lab reports. I admire those who do that, we need a lot of real science done! My main goal is to entertain, give a release from reality, but i sneak in some themes to think on such as the ethics of cloning and human enhancement.

In my stacks of books I have a lot of fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, spy, mystery, as well as romance, non fiction. I read all the Star Trek episodes before I ever saw one on our snowy TV. So James Blish's adaptations have a special place in my collection. Robin Cook's medical thrillers were also an inspirational find. I ate them up and looked for more.

I was a quiet child, except when I was screaming. I was considered odd, but luckily for me, so was the rest of my family. I wasn't a total geek, though. I did track and field all through middle and high school and collected the ribbons in a special box. Later I joined karate with my son when my husband got a bad back, and found I loved it. I went on to get a couple of black belts. At university i studied biology, then I married an engineer and did my creative endeavors while raising a family. I love using the knowledge I've gained in my sports and studies in my work.

Hello!

From your introduction and a glance at your profile, I think we ought to get along really well. I also write fantasy and science fiction, studied biology, and am a mom. Also, I come from a family of engineers, who thought I should go into computer programming, but here were are. When I was little I was very active, but life interfered and now I just take lots of walks and do a little disk golf. Also, according to your book listings, they are published with Canadian ISBNs. So are mine. (I was born in Montreal and raised in Calgary.)

I think you may want to claim your author page. It's not a required thing, but it gives you this nice little badge and link between your author page and your profile page. All you have to do is click on your name as it appears as the author of a book in your catalog, and then look for the "Is this you?" over in the sidebar. However, if your are going to claim it, then you really, really, really should add more books than your own to your library, just in case someone other than you (and me) actually clicks on it.

There are other reasons why it is a good idea to add more books. LibraryThing is actually a book cataloguing site, and many of it's "social" features revolve around comparing libraries. (Hmm... the only other person who has listed any of your books besides yourself is apparently an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan.) For example the "Books you Share" box, one of the first things I look at when visiting someone's profile, says the two of us share no books at all. That's just wrong. We ought to have a ton of books in common. (Although I have no Dick Francis cataloged. Sorry, my negligence. I have read at least four or five of his horse-racing mysteries -- that is the same Dick Francis, right? -- just not recently enough. Maybe I'll pick up another one soon and correct the oversight.)

Normally I try ask people about their hobbies and so forth, just to try and get to know them a little better. What do you like or dislike most about the place you live? What about your kids -- do they take after you or your husband? (For us its a bit hard to tell because I'm the writer, and he's the one with the degree in English, his father is a mechanic and mine is a structural engineer, and so on. So if all six of our kids end up being creative geeks, whose fault is it?)

I have added you to the Author index under Science Fiction, based on the books I saw entered into your library. If you want to be added to any other genre, please let me know. Would you like to be added to the location section? We usually go by closest major city for that.

Hi, Shelby - and everyone else hobnobbing through this group. I've just joined LibraryThing, filled out my profile, and am now here after introducing myself to the new members group.

I'm a retired civil trial attorney located in the Los Angeles suburbs, with a wife, her 96 year-old mother and an adult son who has been with us temporarily since Thanksgiving. He was working remotely with Microsoft from his one-bedroom home in Seattle without socializing, which wasn't ideal, so we invited him to stay. I vacated my home office to let him do his work without interruption. However, that's where all my books are shelved, so adding them to this website will occur a little at a time until he heads north again.

I have one published book to my name. I only began to write fiction in 2015, on a part-time basis while still consumed with work as a litigator with my own practice. That debut novel published last August (2020) and became an award-winner three months later, to my utter surprise. I thought I was writing a magical realism story but it turned into a supernatural romantic suspense novel. That's what happens when your female main character starts talking to you and gets the hots for the male main character.

I read a lot, fiction and non-fiction. Genres don't matter but I read fewer literary novels than genre fiction because I crave action. Speaking of which, these are my hobbies: I'm an avid golfer; watch baseball and hockey whenever I can; listen to music (rock, country, Latin rock, Irish, Americana, more) constantly, including while I write and edit; and of course I read. Hobbies like travel, movies, restaurants and other social gatherings are on temporary hiatus, and you know why.

Did I cover everything? Probably not. Look at my profile, go to my website or hit me up here if you want more information. I'm an open book, so to speak, written in English.

>16 LShelby:
That's so cool, LShelby, our similar backgrounds. i could talk about my kids all day, lol. Son is a Trekkie like me, recently graduated and got a computer science job. In highschool he directed a play, got a prize. Into D&D like I was, etc. Daughter is headed off to do a Masters in neuroscience when the pandemic allows. She's been home cooking, proofing for me, reading science papers, tutoring (and playing computer games). At her U she won the short story division in the school VOX she was published in. Had a poem in another year. But she plans to be a real scientist.

Too bad you don't still live in Montreal, it's only five hours from me.

Speaking of gaming and D&D my kids are into, when I was at U I helped run the games club. I was helping at a gaming convention and got a free sweatshirt I love but can't wear because I'm sure it would be illegal. There was a board game called "Supremacy" I tested out, and that was printed on the free shirt, with an image of a bird. Even soon after I first innocently wore it around thirty years ago I got a weird look at a store. Then someone told me people would think I was a white supremacist. The worst part was, the shirt had "field marshal" printed down one sleeve, because the shirts were for people running things at the con. So that killed that shirt enjoyment. I can't throw it out though. I know it was about a fun but overly complex perhaps board game.

That reminds me, I probably got on a watch list sending a letter to Larry Nemecek at Star Trek Magazine about saving Enterprise. I put the three digit mag issue number and mag title, which happened to be "War.", then because I felt we needed to fight for Enterprise, I put -- we need one. in the email header. Well, it wasn't that long after 9-11. I got a message from the server saying there was a delay in sending it, and I stared at my email title, something like (123 War-- We need one!) and thought how much it looked like a flight number and call for war. There were rumours of government agencies checking emails via keywords around that time...I'll never know for sure. Some agent might have had a laugh at my fervent call to save the show. Larry did publish the letter, and later I was pleased to work under him in an on-line SF magazine he oversaw. What a cool guy.

So those are my adventures in being a radical.

Thanks so much for your tips on the author page. I'll go see if I can fix it up.

re "I have added you to the Author index under Science Fiction, based on the books I saw entered into your library. If you want to be added to any other genre, please let me know. Would you like to be added to the location section? We usually go by closest major city for that."

I'd be happy to have you help me out and put me in "medical fiction" and/or "medical mystery" or "medical thriller" if those aren't categories, as well. Major City might be Fredericton. I'm in Edmundston, not too huge.

>17 JeffPollak:
Hey Jeff! It's great to meet you!

You have a very good reason not to have gotten far on adding your library, and your author page looks great. Congratulations! :) Now that you've mastered the basics, you might want to take a few minutes to fill in some of the Common Knowledge (CK) section. This is totally not required, but since the average LTer loves data, it doesn't hurt. Also, you said you won an award. That really ought to be added. (It goes on the book page, but after you add it there, it will also show up on your author page.) If you take the time to add other winners of the same award while you are at it, that would be a great contribution to the community. (Here is a page you can check to see how Awards should be filled in: Polaris: A Celebration of Polar Science). :)

Just as a general warning, try not to get carried away and put every character and every place in the book into your book's CK. I usually add the main three characters, two or three most important locations for each of my books and then maybe one major event, if it seems particularly relevant. That way the page looks nicely filled in, without it seeming like I'm overdoing things.

The main appeal of the character, place, and event CK is that this information is cross-referenced between books and across the entire site. So if it is set in a real world location, you add that location, and when people are interested in reading books set in that location, yours will be on the list. Also, if you are writing a historical (or time-travel book), and the book involves some major historic event or person, then it's worth it to add that event or person. On a less global basis, when you get the rest of your series out, you can use the CK to let readers know which books feature which characters as a pov or whatever. :)

Having a book turn into something quite different from what you expected is not an unusual event. We've been discussing this issue a bit in the How much free will do you allow your characters? Perhaps you would be interested in chiming in?

You have a great list of hobbies. I golf too! Disk golf. (But mostly just as an excuse to get out in nature and move around.) :D

Which is your favorite hockey team? (Inquiring Canadian minds need to know). I was raised in Calgary, so I had to be a Flames fan, whether I wanted to be or not. When I left home I discovered I actually preferred football. (Traitor to my nation, clearly.)

I know a lot of writers who listen to music while they write, because they say it helps them. Is that the case with you? Do you find particular types of music are better for particular types of scenes.

Recently I have started listening to music while I write, but it's actually because I'm trying to create some structure to a very unstructured situation. I have set my iPad up so that at various times of the day it starts playing a particular playlist. Instrumental music means it's time I should be thinking about getting some writing done. Vocal music means that I should stop writing and maybe do some artwork. :)

I have added you to the Author Index under Romance, Suspense and Fantasy. Not a bad spread for just one book.

I hope you will join us in chatting on some of the discussion threads we have going. (Or you can start your own, if you have a topic of general interest you would like to discuss.) Also, we'd love it if you would update us on how the next book is coming along on the Authors what have you been working on? thread. :)

>18 WendyGamble:
It is indeed quite the coincidence that we have so many similarities. I'm sorry I moved away from Montreal. But maybe when Science Fiction conventions become face-to-face thing again, we could arrange to meet at one. (And you could feel free to wear the Supremacy tshirt around us, we are total boardgame geeks around here, and we wouldn't misunderstand. My husband and son are official playtesters for Fantasy Flight games, but they usually pay in in game credit, rather than in Tshirts.) :)

Maybe it's lucky I never did anything that could be misconstrued, since my eldest son and my eldest daughter's husband work for military contractors. It's bad enough that I'm a foreign national. If I was a radical foreign national... Actually, I seem to call my son's work lifted some eyebrows at his email address, which is at chaoscircle.com. Chaos Circle is a term originating from the filk (science fiction and fantasy music) community referring to a musical circle in which people jump in as they feel like it rather than each performer going in turn, as in a Bardic Circle. But truthfully, my son doesn't go to either kind of filk circles, and when I offered him an email address he picked that domain because it "sounded cooler". All my other kids opted for one of my other domains.

I don't have a "medical" category in the Author Index (frankly, if we saw more than one or two "medical fiction" authors here in a year, I would be astounded.) But I have added "Medical Thriller" to the genre description after your name, and I added you to the mystery/thriller section as well as the location section. I hope that works.

>17 JeffPollak:

Hi Jeff and welcome ;)

I thought I'd let you know that most of your "Also on" links are broken. Only Spotify & Twitter are working (though for the latter you might want to remove the @ to make a clearner link).

Facebook is the easiest to fix, as you just need to enter the last part of your profile's URL (ie what appears in the address bar).

Goodreads is more tricky as GR doesn't give you a username by default. You have to go into Goodreads and set one up before you can use it here.

As for Amazon... I don't know! I still haven't figured that one out LOL. Maybe Shelby knows... but I suspect the code is broken (possibly using an older formatting).

>14 LShelby:

BTW, Shelby, I noticed I'm still listed for "non-fiction" in one spot (under the Fantasy header).

Also... I'm not sure where to ask about this, so I'll try here. I noticed that looking at one of my books from a different computer (where I'm not logged in) brings up the page without the cover illustration. How can I fix that?

>19 LShelby: Hi, Shelby - Thanks for that extensive response. It's a pleasure to meet you, too. I'll try to answer all your questions here and follow up on your follow-ups.

I figure that the most burning question you want answered is the hockey one, so here's that answer: I first found hockey when I was about ten, give or take a year. I was flipping through TV channels - there were only seven at the time - and saw these guys skating up and down what looked like ice, with sticks in their hands. The announcer, none other than the famous Marv Alpert, kept announcing one particular player's name as, phonetically, "Jeubeer." The name on the guy's back was "Gilbert." So that introduction to hockey was also my first experience with the French accent. Anyway, I was immediately taken by the sport and avidly followed the Rangers thereafter - until I moved to my current location, anyway. Here I follow the L.A. Kings and the Anaheim Ducks, both of whom are in the competitive wilderness at the moment.

Your next question was about free will given to characters. I'll be happy to chime in on that. I began to hear Brendali, the female main character, which was jarring at first since I'm not female and I don't speak or think with a Latina accent. But she does. Eventually we worked out a deal: she would stop waking me up at 4:30 to get the next chapter started, and I would give her free reign to tell me exactly what was taking place in her POV chapters. She understood that editing would occur later, and was find with that. This is how the romance aspect of the novel turned from a minor sub-plot to a main one. She and Ram had the hots for each other.

Okay, next, music. I use it to get closer to my characters. Ram, who is an amateur guitarist, is a big fan of Eric Clapton and actually owns a Fender Stratocaster Eric autographed and gave him. So in the chapters with Ram's POV, I'm listening to Clapton and his various bands and affiliations. Bren, on the other hand, loves Latin music, mostly rock and pop. She actually turned me on to Gaby Moreno, who is extraordinary. Anyway, I listen to that when working on chapters written in Bren's POV. With all that said, your way of using music is intriguing - I've never heard of someone using it in the way you describe.

I'll respond to the various chats you've mentioned as soon as I can. Obviously, cataloging all the books in my library will be time consuming, and at the moment time is in short supply. But I'll get there.

As for Common Knowledge on my Author's Page, I'm having trouble finding that page. I know its in here somewhere . . . I have to get used to the format this website uses. I'll add the award to the book page, and just yesterday I learned that my book has been short-listed to the RONE Award for fantasy, so I'll include that. I can add names of other authors who won the award I already have, and might be able to do the same for the RONE one - they must have a list somewhere.

Thanks for the tip about the number of characters to include. I'll limit to three. Most of the action occurs in L.A., so I'll leave it at that.

Finally, the next book: I'll get that on the thread designed for it. Just for you're edification, book 2 of the New God Series has the working title of Earth's Peril. That one may or may not be the next book out, as it requires a lot of research. I'm also working on what I call a "spin-off" from the series, which is much less research oriented, so that might get published first. That one's called The Recycling Center,but it has nothing to do with plastics or other recycled substances.

Did I respond to everything? I think so. but if I missed anything, call it to my attention. Best wishes, Shelby - and good luck on the writing and the artwork.

Hi all!

My name is T.M. Bruce. I am a new author, penning my first book Small Town God, a Crime Thriller I wrote while bored out of my mind during the recent lockdown. The is my first foray into the world of writing, my main education and employment being within the Software Development industry. I currently live in Northern Ireland. I also just started the beginning planning stages of my next book in the Trelawney series as yet untitled.

As far as reading goes, I grew up on Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia. My favourite series include The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Inheritance Cycle and the Dresden Files. Favourite genres are obviously Sci Fi, Fantasy and Mystery Thriller. Huge fan of our dear friend Mrs Agatha Christie and that is probably pretty evident in my own writing!

As far as movies go I’d say I’m a bit of a movie nerd, if it is in some way decent, I’ll give it a go. That generally means I spend a lot of my time watching bad to mediocre films and enjoying every second of it. Favourite films include The Silence of the Lambs (The book is even more incredible), The Mummy (1999 and 1932), and Kill Bill.

I’ve seen a few people mentioning music alongside their writing and I can say without a doubt that without James Taylor, The Band, Newton Faulkner and Kate Bush I never would have found the motivation to finish my manuscript!

Really excited to join this community and meet fellow authors with a lot more experience than I in the field!!

>20 LShelby:
Thanks for your help!
That's hilarious about the chaos circle. I'm familiar with filking, but hadn't heard that particular term. Really, though in today's environment using terms like that outside the geek community could cause serious problems. It's a shame, but a reality.

>17 JeffPollak: JeffPollak
Welcome! My son, too, is working from home, in his computer science job. I asked if he wanted to work from here, but he's still in a shared house he moved into for his final studying year. He's happy there, as there are like-minded students and young professionals to chat to.

>21 slarken:
I confess to not knowing how to fix the amazon code. I will try look into it, and if I can't figure out how to get it to work, I will post a bug report. :)

I am also not seeing book covers for two of your books, on the book page, although I can see them when I go to your library. If you only added the covers recently, then I would normally assume that they haven't "bubbled" up into the general info yet. How long ago did you put them up?

And sorry for missing that other Non-fiction reference. I have now deleted it. :)

>25 LShelby:

"I am also not seeing book covers for two of your books, on the book page, although I can see them when I go to your library. If you only added the covers recently, then I would normally assume that they haven't "bubbled" up into the general info yet. How long ago did you put them up?"

Those numbers are interesting. I'm assuming the cover you DO see is the one for "For Fog Adorns Her"? Cause that one I entered differently, so that might explain it.

I entered "Fog" manually, whereas the other two I added after searching for their ASIN.

Those two were added when I launched the pre-orders on Amazon -- so March 23 for "Dragon Bones" and March 30 for "House of Wizardry".

So I'm guessing doing it the ASIN way messes things up somehow? How can I fix that?

And thanks for fixing the Index ;)

>22 JeffPollak:
Actually with hockey, you don't have to serve it up right away, you can always leave it on ice. :P That's cool that you discovered it entirely on your own, and said "hey, I like this!" Also, although I faithfully do my national duty and ask anyone who mentions hockey what their team is, I think this is the first time I have ever bumped into a Ducks' fan. So that made my day.

That's really cool that the music was a characterization for you. I never write anything set in the real world, so that hadn't actually occured to me. But I did teach myself to tat, because one of my characters was a tatter. I balked at teaching myself to spin, though -- because wool gives me a rash -- and screwed up a description of spinning horribly, as a resault. Fortuantely one of my beta readers caught it.

I see that you eventually found your author page. The info you put under date of death, burial location and so forth cracked me up, but I'm not sure how well it will go over in the community as a whole. CK is a cross-referenced system. If you click on a place name as it appears in an author's CK, you will see a list of all the authors who lived, died, or were buried in that place. For example authors Marian C. Diamon, Ione Washburn, and Dallas Schulze lived in La Crescenta, and Author William F. Smith was born there. The same thing goes for the dates, the awards, the organizations, etc.

So even if you leave the death entries alone. There is one thing that either you or I really need to change. When you enter multiple organizations, multiple awards, and so forth, instead of separating them with semi-colons or commas, you are actually supposed to give them their own separate line. This is so it can be clicked on to go to the list of matching entries. The way that this is done, is that when you go in to edit the award, organization, etc, there is a button that appears underneath saying "Add item". You click on that to additional lines to fill in.

I have already split off the awards as best I could, but they all really need a year added in parentheses, and not just the last one that I made an assumption and filled in myself.

What you write in each line is very important, because, for example, if each instance of an award isn't written in the exact same way, the system can't automatically generate the list of award winners. This is why the year should be added in parentheses, and for awards with multiple categories, the category as well. When you click on the Award name, and go to the big list of award winners, the information in the brackets will be appended to each award winner, so that people viewing the list will know what category and year each book on the list won.

...Just as an aside, I always like explaining things here, so that other new authors can read it, and maybe not need me to tell them. (It's a hope anyway). But this is the first time I can remember having an opportunity to explain how to enter awards. Congratulations! :)

I am tempted to resurrect a research thread, so we can talk about what all research you are doing, but we should probably not go into that here.

>23 tmbruce:
Hi there, nice to meet you!

Your author page looks okay except for "problems" that are almost certainly actually just the servers not having caught up yet. You might want to read the post above this for advice in filling in your author and book Common Knowlege ("CK"), since you seem to be on top of everything else. :)

You're a programmer? My father wanted me to be a programmer, but I just built myself a website as a hobby instead. :) But all of my brothers are programmers, and one of my sons. Am I allowed to ask what sorts of software you develop? (Well, one can always ask, of course, but at least two coders of my aquaintence are not allowed to answer. That's what I get for living close to an Air Force Base.)

You read a lot of science fiction and fantasy -- do you have any plans of branching out into those genres as a writer ever?

I know someone who wrote a song about the 1932 The Mummy, apparently she had the hots for... well, the mummy. (Those heroic leads are all so samey and dull?) Myself I am only familiar with the 1999 version. I hardly ever watch movies anymore though, because after being sick in bed all day every day for far too long, I now find movies too short for my needs. ::rueful::

Do you think your movie watching influences your writing at all?

As for music, you have picked some fine classics to be motivated by, but I have to confess I am uncertain how exactly one uses music to motivate writing. It just helps you achieve "Butt in Chair and Hands on Keyboard", or is there something more?

I have added you to the Author Index under the Mystery/Thriller/Suspense category. :)

Most of the discussion that happens in this group happens in other places besides this thread, so I hope you will check out some of the other topic threads and join in. That's the best way to meet the regulars. :)

>26 slarken: "So I'm guessing doing it the ASIN way messes things up somehow?"

I don't remember it messing things up before, but they do seem to be messing up right now. Aparently someone's posted a bug report about it. (I just ran over to the Bug Collector's group to check.)

As it happens, using covers as pulled off of Amazon is never ideal anyway. Because of the use agreement for Amazon's data, if you use an "amazon cover" then if amazon changes which cover belongs to that books ISBN, your cover here on LT will also change. This never bothers me when I didn't own that book anyway, but when I do own a book, it irks me. I want my listing to show the cover that is on the book I own. (And I'm not the only LTer who hates this.)

If you upload a cover directly (or "grab" it off the web) it will never change on you. (And it will also sidestep the current bug.)

Every so often I check which of my books have amazon covers, and go through switching them to "member" covers. When I can't find the one I want, I go grab one... usually, ironically, from amazon. But because it has been "grabbed" the image now resides on a LT server, and Amazon can't arbitrarily change it.

Uh, tmbruce, if you are reading this, you may want to directly upload a cover image for your book too. Just so you don't have to wait for the bug to get fixed for your book to look nice to other people.

Hello,
I'm J. Daneway. I've just published my first book, Sing the Mice. It's a science fiction novel about a medical research ethicist who uncovers a government genocide plot to exterminate people with alien genes (transgenics).

I started writing the book in 2017, after mulling it over for years in my head. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and have only just begun using social media for my book. I worked in research ethics (IRB) for years reviewing drugs and, specifically, pandemic vaccines. So, I incorporated a few horror stories and examples of corruption based on reality. I imagine some of the subjects in my book may upset people, and I didn't foresee another pandemic. My only option is to discuss the issues in a fictional format and call it social science fiction. The main part of the idea for the book came in 2002 when I worked in a lab creating transgenic mice at a university. The halls were full of traps to catch escaped transgenic mice to prevent them from polluting wild mouse populations. I did sing to the mice; it was the least I could do.

I live in Tucson, with my husband and our blind Brussels Griffon. My husband works from home too, so we take advantage of the freedom and try new cities whenever we can. We have lived in New Orleans (for the music), Seattle, Salt Lake City (for the skiing), and we both grew up in California wine country. Many of my family members lost their homes in the CA fires, and we inherited my surviving grandmother from the ashes. We've traveled around the world twice (before the dog-baby anchored us state-side), and I really hope we can travel again in the future.

I have mixed feelings about Tucson so far. It's not a good time to judge a city. We arrived in time for shutdowns and have been holed up in the house since. Almost no one wears a mask here, and we aren't looking forward to battling serpents, scorpions, and heat again this summer. We haven't been to a grocery store or spoken with anyone, except in passing on the road, in over a year. On the plus side, I don't think I will bother with grocery stores ever again. I love Instacart. We've seen more meteors and stars than we have since we were kids. We got a telescope and saw the Great Conjunction!!! Quarantine is like an extended, all-inclusive vacation with cocktail hour by the pool and nighthawks swooping in for a sip. The land is studded with Saguaro monoliths - the only plant I have ever known to have two different flowers bloom at different times and with different colors (right now their flowers are white). And we're surrounded by mountains. Someday, I will get to try all those fabulous restaurants I've heard about, assuming they're still in business.

I look forward to meeting other writers and readers. Thank you for allowing me to join your group.

Sincerely,
J. Daneway

>30 jdaneway:
Your book sound fascinating, J! It sounds like another candidate for that "medical fiction" category they don't have here lol. It is an Amazon keyword, but an expensive one. Not quite as expensive as "medical thriller."

Anyway, I used to take toilet paper rolls in for my lab mice, they liked playing in them and chewing them. I had to inject them with antigens. Later, the TA did the dirty work so we could study the antibodies they'd made. I'm glad I'm writing fiction now, though real science is vital and at times exciting.

I look forward to travelling again too.

Good luck with the book!

>21 slarken: Hi, Slarken. Thanks for the welcome and the heads-up about the broken links. That's what I get for trying to fill out the profile while watching the Angels game against the White Sox. Please excuse the inattention. I'll get those links fixed ASAP.

>27 LShelby: Hi, Shelby - thanks for the explanation about the awards - I feel like you deserve an award for doing that! Something like an "Angel of Patience" Award, maybe. Or an "I Know The Formatting best" Award.

I'll fix those things in accordance with your instructions ASAP - which may mean by Friday as this is a very busy week for me - so much so I'm missing hockey, although I know the Ducks will be the losers of whoever they're playing. I'm going to leave the humor in those death questions for now. I'm showing a bit of my personality through those responses.

I did manage to get two shelves full of hardcovers books listed in my catalog, and my son is now back in Seattle so I have free access to my personal library. Now, as mentioned above, all I need is the time to continue and finish that catalog. And I have to get into those other discussions you mentioned in your earlier message. All in good time, when there is time.

Happy to discuss research with you. Just let me get to all these other things us newbies have to do to get fully active here. Meanwhile, best wishes, and no rashes to you.

>30 jdaneway:
Hi! Welcome to Hobnob!

And congrats on being the first ever transgenic mouse breeder I have ever welcomed to this group. :)

I totally approve of (and sympathize with) singing to mice. Did they have any favorite tunes? (Or maybe that should be, what sorts of tunes did you sing to them?)

I guess if one is going to get tied down, now is the time to do it, when everyone would rather nobody is going anywhere anyway. (But I have to travel this summer, no matter what everyone else would prefer, my daughter is getting married.)

Arizona must be a great place for star-gazing. Here in Ohio, even in the places where it is reasonably dark, there is often too much haze in the air for a clear view of anything. :(

I remember taking my kids to a family reunion in Idaho, and when we got to the mountains they got out and looked up at the night sky, and were awestricken. They'd never seen half so many stars before. My younger son declared his intention of staying awake all night just so he could look at them, but he actually went to sleep pretty quickly. (He's always been a morning person.) But the thought was there. :)

Your author page and profile are all looking good. I've added you to the author index under Science Fiction. If you think any other genres are also applicable, just let me know. :)

And now, (if you haven't already) I hope you will join in some of our discussion threads. It's great to have you join us!

>31 WendyGamble: "It sounds like another candidate for that "medical fiction" category they don't have here lol."

Yes, as I was reading her description, I was thinking, "Wow, that sounds right down WendyGamble's alley."

I'll tell you what. If we get four "medical fiction" authors showing up in one year, I will create a category for it. :)

>33 JeffPollak: "I feel like you deserve an award for doing that!"

I was awarded with the "We want you to be our group 'owner' " award. That's good enough for me. :)

But I actually don't know the formatting best. I've been here for a looonnnngggg time, but I guess I like welcoming and talking to people better than I do spending long hours fixing bad data. So every once in a while I have to go ask the real experts for help with stuff.

But the time I've spent "in the system" counts for something -- I pretty much always know where to go for help.

I actually clicked on one of your answers to the death questions, BTW, to see if anyone else had answered the same. Alas, no. :) (Personally I think the world can use all the humor it can get.)

Please do take your time! LT tends not to be one of those fast and furious type places. (Unless you are trying to keep up with the 75 Books Challenge group. Personally, I fled the 75 Books group as being waaayyyy more than I could handle, even with absolutely ruthless thread x-ing, and I am a member of the 100 Books Challenge Group instead.)

Just as a tip, if you download the LT app for your phone, you can enter books by scanning their ISBN with the phone's camera. This can really speed up the process for some people. (Personally I always use ISBNs to add books rather than the title if at all possible anyway because the results seem to pop up faster and more accurately when I do.)

>31 WendyGamble: Cool! I just saw your book on the giveaway page. I'm adding mine too. I'll have to check yours out - I'll buy it! The categories thing - Ugh. I did an Amazon campaign, and I must have screwed something up, because I'm still getting rodenticide and wireless computer mice with my product search results. Anyway. . .
Good luck to you as well.
J. D.

>34 LShelby:
Thanks, LShelby,
Yes, we're hoping for UFOs but more than satisfied with shooting stars:-)
I'm still learning this platform, so slow to respond.
My Amazon categories (they select) are Science Fiction/Genetic Engineering and Fiction / Metaphysical/Visionary.
I second Wendy's suggestion of the medical category too, if it becomes available.
Thank you for the welcome!
J.D.

>16 LShelby:
I know this was your response to Wendy, but I wanted to say thanks for the Dick Francis reminder. Loved those. I grew up with horses and read Dick Francis then. My cousins are into raising Polo Ponies.
J.D.

>38 jdaneway:
Um, it's just an index for people showing up in this group. If I started making my categories that granular, we would end up with more categories than people to put in them.

>39 jdaneway:
Last time horses came up in the conversation with my mother, now quite elderly, she went on about how much she enjoyed riding "her" horses as a child -- in other words, those of her cousin's horses that she had been given permission to ride. She confessed to feeling a bit put out that her father decided to be a lawyer, instead of going into the family business of ranching -- all her cousins owned horses but not her. (I used to complain about this same thing myself, only, of course for me it was "all my second cousins get to ride horses when they visit their grandpa, but my grandpa lives in a boring city!") I did learn one new fact this time, though. Apparently my grandpa's family so disapproved of lawyers, that he couldn't admit he was studying law, and told everyone he was studying dentistry instead. Ironically, at least a couple of his nephews did later become dentists.

(I will tell you, the whole dentists asking you questions when their hands are in your mouth, goes up to entirely new levels of absurdity, when one's dentist is a member of the extended family, eager to catch up on all the latest family news.)

...
I actually did put a hold on a Dick Francis book, just like I said I would. I'm picking it up from the library tomorrow. :)

The horses were kind of "our" horses, but I get what you mean with your mother. People get attached to horses. We had all my cousins' horses that went lame. My cousins started with race horses and now train and raise polo ponies. One is a hoof specialist. I'm very small, and back then I was the only person who could ride the retired/injured horses for exercise without hurting them - so our place was the retired horse ranch. I was supposed to go to jockey school, but put my foot down. I do not like the racetrack scene, except as a spectator. And, well, all the injured horses.
My favorite horse was the 40 yo Appaloosa - I considered her mine. She knew all the trails in the canyon, and she never tried to get me off on a tree - nice and slow. I have to say, having horses growing up did not make me want to ever have them again. We did most of our own veterinary care. Hay is expensive. It's hard to go on vacation. I shoveled a lot of sh-t. And I've grown not to want domesticated animals or any captive animals. I have an old dog, but after him, we're not doing domesticated animals again. He's an 8 pound lover, but he's so tiny we have to watch for hawks, and coyotes, and snakes and . . . .
Enjoy the Dick Francis - I may pick one up myself :-)

>36 LShelby: - Shelby, thanks for the ISBN tip, I'll definitely use it. I have so, so many books to cycle into my library catalogue on this website. Might still be doing it around Thanksgiving.

And congrats on that "award" you received. Or condolences, if that's a better fit. You don't have to answer that.

Now, on to fixing a few links that I'm told don't work on my profile. And then back to work on the sequel to First Second Coming. Unless I add a few of my books to the list first. This website can be a procrastinator's dream . . . but I don't procrastinate much.

>24 WendyGamble: WendyGamble - sorry for the late response, I missed your message entirely when I was last checking for new ones. Thanks for the welcome!

Nice to hear about your son. Computer science is certainly the way for the younger generation to go, work-wise, if the aptitude is there. Glad to see that your boy's got that. Being around friends and like-minded professionals will help him more than spending time at home with mom and dad at this point in his studies, but in a few years he'll be more open to returning home - but let's hope a pandemic isn't the reason he does.

>43 JeffPollak: & >40 LShelby:

Guys... I found out how to fix the Amazon link LOL. It occurred to me a few days ago (though I hadn't tried it until just now) that a simple html trick might do it... and it did ;)

So first you have to go to your Amazon Author Central profile page, look at the address bar and copy your unique ID or whatever they call it (it looks like an ASIN -- a series of 10 letters and numbers that always starts with a B).

Then switch back to your LT profile, go into the editing page, and in the Amazon field, paste that code you copied.

Now, here's the trick... to make it work, you need to add this just before the code:

../../../-/e/

That's it ;)

>44 slarken:

Noted, and thank you so much! I will be trying this soon!

>41 jdaneway:
I would actually like to do the dog thing again. But my health needs to be a little more reliable first.

>43 JeffPollak: "This website can be a procrastinator's dream"
You mean all that stuff we can do here instead of actually writing? My usenet writer's group back in the day called that particular form of procrastination "cat vacuuming". As in, "Well, of course I will get some writing done, but first I need to mop the floor, rehang the blinds, and, oh yeah, I ought to hoover the cat".

>44 slarken:
Okay, that's really clever!

But... what happens if the staff ever get around to fixing the amazon link code?

Haha - Shelby! I stand by my characterization . . . regardless of how many cats get hoovered. :-)

>44 slarken: I'll try it, Slarken - thanks for doing the legwork!

>46 LShelby: "But... what happens if the staff ever get around to fixing the amazon link code?"

Well, we'd have to edit the link at that point haha. Hopefully we'll find out when/if they do.

Thing is, it could be a long while before they ever get to it, so...

I guess it's a choice every author will have to make for themselves, whether they want to include it now, or just leave it out until it's eventually fixed by LT staff.

>37 jdaneway:
I'll buy yours, too, I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
The Amazon ads are hard to figure out. I haven't succeeded yet, but I've learned some things from their tutorials that might help when I get around to implementing them. It really is a whole learning curve. I mean when you think of it, people study years to get degrees in marketing for a reason. Amazon is good though, putting out free webinars and info. I need to go through it properly.

>50 WendyGamble:
I highly recommend trying out Bryan Cohen's 5-Day Amazon Ads Challenge. It's free and extremely instructive. I joined it back in January and joined it again now.

He does it 4 times a year, I think, this session just started on Monday... you might still be able to join?

https://bryancohen.lpages.co/april21/

I learned *a lot* from this course.

>46 LShelby:

I just had a light bulb moment LOL. That Amazon code? It's not broken. LT will never fix it. We've just been looking at it the wrong way, thinking it was intended for authors.

It just struck me that LT is, before anything else, a *reader* community. So that Amazon link is NOT supposed to link to an Author Central but to a public reviewer profile. I double checked, and if you compare the URL's it's a near perfect match (there's one little difference, but the link still works despite that).

So, bottom line... if you're a reader, then just look at your public profile page (if you have one, not everyone does), grab the bit between 'profile/' and '/ref=' and stick that into the Amazon username field (*without* the trick mentioned above).

If you are an author, however, you can use the trick I mentioned above without worrying about it breaking when LT fixes the code (they won't, since it's not technically broken).

It could still break someday, mind you, but only if Amazon made changes on their end. If it came to that, though, it would break for everyone--readers and authors alike.

>50 WendyGamble: I got your book one on the Med-Sci series. Will try to read in the next month or so. I'm excited! Not many medical fiction writers out there. Yours sounds a lot more action oriented than mine. Mine has a lot of corporate/government corruption stuff - so it's kind of heavy. I'm sure it won't be for everyone.
I used Kindle Rocket app made by the Kindlepreneur guy - it was $100. I went through all the videos and researched all the keywords and categories, created the campaign exactly as he said, and got nada. I can't decide if it was worth it or not. My keywords are better, but the app costs a lot. Maybe I didn't wait long enough. It might be my book topic. Who knows? I decided to do an automatic campaign and see how that works.
Best of luck!

>52 slarken:

Thanks again. I tried it, and it works like a charm.

>53 jdaneway: jdaneway
We should probably move any more conversation to a separate thread, but I'll just say I started your book Sing the Mice. So far very intriguing. I'm happy with intrigue vs action. If I get any good info about sale categories etc. I'll send it to you.

51slarken
Thanks, I actually did listen to his webinar. I'm confused because some of it conflicts with what Amazon recommend in their own free webinars. I'll have to experiment. I'm really just getting started with advertising. I was told book 2 is the best advertising for a book 1, so I didn't do much yet. But now I'm doing some.

>55 WendyGamble: "I was told book 2 is the best advertising for a book 1, so I didn't do much yet. But now I'm doing some."

At the very least, yeah. For my own series, I've decided to wait until the third or fourth installment. But it's easier for me to do this because I have two releases a month ;) For novels, that'd mean a longer waiting period.

Unless you wait until you have all the books written before you release them all together--some authors have been known to do this. Though that might not be an option if it takes you a year to write one... YMMV ;)

>52 slarken:

Oh, duh! You are totally right, and I even knew that at one point.
Well. It's nice to know the fix will keep working. :)

>56 slarken: "Unless you wait until you have all the books written before you release them all together--some authors have been known to do this. Though that might not be an option if it takes you a year to write one..."

I do exactly this even though, yes, it does take me about a year to write a book. (At least, I averaged a book a year for over ten years, breaking my record only recently.)

When I started publishing my own books I already had a backlog of books I'd written earlier, while I was submitting (and even a few times selling) to traditional publishers, including two books each in four different series. Then I wrote a trilogy in one go. So I released the trilogy first, and then books one and two of the third series which were standalones (it's a shared world series). In theory I was going to release books one and two in the fourth series next, because they had complete beginnings and ends, even if there was a gradual accumulation of carried over plot threads. But instead my health did a dive, and for the next five years I managed to write three more books, but not get anything copy-edited or (biggest issue of all) any covers painted.

With this big a gap already having happened, I'm not seeing much of a point in rushing the release of those two books, or the standalone we are also prepping for release. If I take my own sweet time on the covers, I should have the first series (my High Fantasy Epic, I'm in the middle of book four, now) completed in time to go out fairly quickly after those three do.

(But what I really want to do is write two books a year. In theory it should be possible, four months to write the first draft, and two months for editing and etc. But to keep up that kind of schedule I would have to have no health relapses at all. What are the odds?)

Hi, I recently joined the group and wanted to introduce myself. I am a semi-retired physician (physical medicine and rehabilitation) in the Chicago area. But I do love Tucson also - give it a chance! I recently self-published my first historical fiction novel based on Benjamin Franklin's time in France (1776-1785) and his involvement heading the commission that investigated the medical practice of Mesmerism. I noticed that there seem to be some medical history buffs here. Anyone interested in the history of science or the history of medicine will hopefully find my book entertaining and educational! It is called The Wisdom of the Flock: Franklin and Mesmer in Paris. It is available in multiple formats on Amazon if you are interested. Also, due to cost, I was not able to include many of the illustrations that I found while researching the book. I have been writing a blog on my website www.stevegnatz.com/blog where a lot of additional material can be found. I will look forward to contributing to the discussion here and in other forums on LT.

>58 SteveGnatz:
Welcome, Steve!
When you said you were a physician I thought you might say you were following in the footsteps of Robin Cook, but what you're doing sounds good. I took a history of science class one time, and it was interesting. I'll check out your blog!

No, not along the lines of Robin Cook - although I remember reading Coma prior to medical school and wondering what I was getting myself into! Maybe more along the lines of another famous physician-author Michael Crichton. But no dinosaurs in my novel - I promise. I just enjoy telling a good story and infusing some medical history into it.

>58 SteveGnatz:
Hello there, Steve! Nice to meet you!

And it's really nice to have an author of historical fiction show up. We usually have a decent crop of those dropping in, but so far this year you are the first.

I see that you have successfully added your book to your catalog, but it is best if you could add a bunch more books as well. (LibraryThing is a book cataloging site, you see, and a lot of its social features revolve around comparing libraries, so your book as the only book in your catalog here is a bit like being on Facebook but not having any friends.) You also might want to 'claim' your author page. (To get to your author page, click on your name as it appears as the author of your book in your catalog.) Claiming your author page doesn't give you any special powers, it just gives you an LT Author badge and creates a handy link between the author page and your profile page. :)

I'm curious, is Benjamin Franklin the protagonist of your story, or do you just have him as a side character? Either way, you should probably add him to the "Common Knowlege" section of your book page. (Click on the title of the Book to get there.) Scroll down until you see "People/Characters" and click on the pencil button. A field you can fill in will appear, put Benjamin Franklin in, and then hit save. Benjamin Franklin will now appear on your book page as a link. If you click on the link, you will land on a list of all the books that have Benjamin Franklin listed as a person/character... including yours.

I'm kind of hoping you would be willing to talk about any fun research resources you've found over in the recently started and so far not much posted in "What research have you been doing?" thread? (Nobody ever seems to want to talk about big thick non-fiction books with me.) That thread would be a great place to tell us all about the illustrations you found and didn't get to use. (Something I definitely would like to hear more about.)

So did you live in Tucson previously, or is it just somewhere you like to visit?
(I think I personally would prefer Tucson to Chicago, but I've never lived in either place. I did get married in Chicago, though, so you would think it would hold fond memories -- but I'm afraid mostly all I remember was driving through heavy traffic at four in the morning, and thinking 'the next time I do one of these east-to-west marathon drives, I'm going around Chicago'.)

I have added you to the Hobnob Author's Index. Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you'll stick around and talk with us. :)

>59 WendyGamble: , >60 SteveGnatz:

So what is the consensus here? If SteveGnatz writes stuff more like Michael Crichton than Robin Cook are we one author closer to me adding a "Medical Fiction" category to the group index, or not?

.

>62 LShelby: "are we one author closer to me adding a "Medical Fiction" category to the group index, or not?"

LOL. You really want to do it... come on, just admit it :D

>58 SteveGnatz: Very cool. I live for this stuff. I second Medical Fiction genre. Wendy's book is next on my list, then I'll have a look at yours:-)

It's great when they find a use for old wisdom. I relied heavily on this old text to research the properties of an hallucinogenic Datura plant in my book:
Wood, H. C. (Horatio C.)., Wood, H. C. (Horatio Charles). (1908). Therapeutics: its principles and practice. 14th ed. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. p.94.
There's a group researching old medicinal texts for clues to herbal antibiotics to develop more antibiotics that aren't resistant. Red raspberry leaf was one prospect. Go figure. I have toured a few historic medicinal gardens. The most interesting was in Torun, Poland at the home of Copernicus. And I personally have found that topical Castor Oil, recommended by Edgar Cayce, a purported psychic, to be somewhat of a miracle. It works as well as one ibuprofen for some joint pain, and is most useful, topically, for lymphadenitis, lipomas, fibrocystic breasts, and generally clearing inflamed locations. It's sticky, of course, and everyone knows what happens if you ingest it. It also makes very fine soap.

We're sticking out Tucson for the summer and then we'll decide if we're staying. If you can have two homes (one coastal), Tucson is perfect. Unfortunately, the pandemic has caused a very unreasonable run-up in home prices. It's now almost as expensive as CA.

>62 LShelby: Also, Michael Crichton wrote Andromeda Strain, which is up our alley.

Hello, everyone! I am Charles K. Jordan. I am really excited because I just released book one of my six books series yesterday. But after being absorbed in my work for 10 years, I realized I don’t really know many of peers.

I plan to change that starting today. I hope I get to everyone. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

A little bit about me. I love fantasy, love to read it, love to write it. I also enjoy Sci-Fi, history, and comedy. One of my biggest role models was the late Robert Jordan. But there are some many writers I respect.

Anyways thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Charles

>60 SteveGnatz:
I'm not sure if I've actually read Crichton or just seen the movies! I've been planning to.

>62 LShelby: Well Crichton fits medical thriller I'd say. Something like Greys Anatomy is generally called medical drama. I'm not sure myself where "medical fiction" fits in.
>64 jdaneway: My list of to read, including yours is getting very big, but I'd like to look at Steve's too.

By popular demand, I have added a "Medical Fiction" category to the Author Index. It currently has three people in it, which makes it tied with Mystery/Thriller/Suspense, and ahead of Romance. :)

(We're having a surprisingly light year for romance.)

>hi, my name is sara. one of my poems was once published in a local book. I normally write poetry but am attempting a story inspired by Alice in wonderland.
I enjoy reading poetry, I like to try world building even though I'm not very good at it.
I have gotten into dungeons and dragons. I enjoy videogames as well as reading.

>69 vegetarianveggie:
Hello there Sara, I'm glad you dropped in.

I noticed that you have a very broad selection of Poetry in your library -- what sorts of poetry do you like best? (I'm a fan of narrative verse, myself, and I also write song lyrics.)

Recently I have been playing Stardew Valley on the Switch. My daughter is having tendonitis troubles, and she can't play games, so I started playing on her behalf, with her telling me what to do -- but then of course I had to get my own game going too. ::rueful:: For D&D, what kinds of characters do you like to play best?

Is the book your poem was published in entered into your library? Did you know you can add your name as a contributor to that book? You don't have to if you don't want to, but a lot of newcomers don't realize that they can get their own author page here for having done things like doing illustrations, writing forwards, translating, or contributing songs, poems, stories or articles, so I thought I should ask to be sure. If you want to get that set up, I will wait to add you to our author index until that is done.

It looks like you've already joined in some of our ongoing conversations. That's great! Welcome to the group. :)

>70 LShelby: i like a variety of poetry honestly. stephen crane is my favorite though. his satire is amazing and still relevant today. i play stardew valley as well as many other games as i have everything from atari to switch and xbox one. for d&d i enjoy fighters or basically one with the abiltiy to really hack n slash versus magic.

>71 vegetarianveggie:
I wasn't familiar with Stephen Crane's poetry, so I just put a hold on some at my library. :)

I have been wanting to start a poetry based discussion thread for a while, but I haven't come up with a good discussion-worthy topic. If anyone thinks of one, let me know. (Or just start the thread yourself.)

For D&D, we all assumed that my youngest daughter would prefer some kind of mage, because we thought it would match her personality... but in the end we discovered she does best with hack & slash character, like you. Me, I am acknowledged by all to be a bard myself... which means I'm an all-arounder who can happily play anything. But it also means I like variety -- I end up never playing the same class twice in a row. >:)

>68 LShelby:
Thanks! I hope it will prove to be a useful classification.

Hey there! My name is William Melden, and although I've been writing for publication for most of my life, I've only recently self-published my first book, a YA novel entitled The Abduction of Cassandra. But I don't know how much or how little to say about it in this introduction, lest I be guilty of promoting it in the wrong place. So, on with the personal introduction . . .

I was born (here's the David Copperfield stuff) in Nashville, but moved to Los Angeles when I was six weeks old, and where my father was an executive with a major airline. I returned to Tennessee when my folks divorced, at the age of nine. I mean, I was nine: my folks were considerably older. I lived there for the next 25 years or so, then started skipping around a bit, to Ohio, then Florida, then Nevada, and finally back to North Carolina, where I live today.

I had many jobs, the most important of which was as a teacher, of everything from K-12; in Ohio, I worked as a writing "coach" in a pilot program much despised by the English department, because it was unaffiliated. (I will not identify the university, but it was part of the state system.) I taught, not because my mother had been a career teacher, but because I liked kids; which, I suppose, is why I've been drawn toward the YA genre in my, um, "late middle age." If writing YA fiction at my age sounds counterintuitive to you, it sounds that way to me, too. But I'm enjoying it, and if the work is well-received, I'll continue. I have to: I'm in love with my characters, and have many others loudly demanding to be set free onto the page.

Someone can help me with this quotation. It was either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (I get them mixed up) who said, "Children's literature doesn't have to be as good as adult literature. It has to be better." That goes for YA literature, too, or it should.

Anyway, that's the start of an introduction. If I haven't said much about my literary tastes, they should be obvious from my author cloud. I've always leaned toward nonfiction. Well, except for when I'm reading fiction. Alas, nowadays, nonfiction is becoming more weird than fiction . . . but we won't go there.

Now, back to cataloging the books . . . thanks for taking the time to read this!

>74 WilliamMelden:
Hello William, nice to meet you!

I'm afraid that although I'm sure I've heard the quote you are thinking of, I have no idea who said it. But I don't understand why people are not supposed to like a book just because someone who is younger than they are, also likes it. That just seems silly to me. I read a lot of YA, and all of my pro sales were for younger readers.

But you don't actually seem to have added much YA fiction to your library. Including your own book. I searched for it in there, and couldn't find it.

It is totally okay to add your own book to LibraryThing. It is a book. You have read it. I'm sure you even own a copy. Therefore, it rightfully is a part of your catalog. If you tried adding it, and the search tool couldn't find it for whatever reason, then look down on the bottom left-hand side of the add books page, and there is a link under "Other Options" that says "Add Manually". That one always works. :)

You may also want to claim your author page, (which I found by doing a site-wide search.) To get to your author page, either do a site-wide search, or add your book and then click on your name as it appears as the author of your book in your catalog. In the upper right of that page should be a link that says "Is this you?"

I like kids too, BTW, but instead of opting to be a teacher per se, I opted to be the mother of six. But other than liking kids I'm not sure what else we have in common, over four hundred books added so far, and not a single one in common with me. That's almost impressive. I've been wondering if I should peruse your catalog for something I might be interested in reading (I read a fair bit of non-fiction, although not as much as I read fiction) or if it would be better to wait and see how long the complete non-correspondence between our libraries can last. ;)

Which of the many places you lived did you like best? Do you do have any other particular interests besides books and writing?

I have added you to our author index, as an author of YA fiction. If your book belongs to other genres as well, historical or thriller or whatever, I would be happy to add them.

I hope you will stick around and join the discussions going on in some of the the other threads. Welcome to the Hobnob group!

Thank you so much for your gracious and detailed reply! I appreciated your suggestion that I add my own book to my library; I had felt funny about it. I found my author's page with a single click, and all is well.

Hmmm . . . I haven't been tagging my books. I'll have to start doing that . . .

The reason you don't see any YA fiction in my library is that I don't own much: I only catalog books that I own, or have owned. I've read quite a bit in the "classics," like Hinton, and I read scads of YA books from Kindle Unlimited or from the public library. I just don't keep them. Also, for a man my of my "era," it's hard to know, on occasion, what's supposed to be YA, and what isn't. When I was an adolescent/teen, "Catcher in the Rye" was regarded with general distaste by the gatekeepers, because its hero was "rebellious," and it wasn't taught in schools, as it is today. "To Kill a Mockingbird," which is now on every middle school reading list in the country, would never have been in a school library back then, because of the theme of rape. Books about rebelliousness or rape were ignored, if not forbidden: "children" simply weren't supposed to know about those things! The YA landscape has been utterly transformed.

You asked about other interests. I mentioned in my "About Me" that I'm a Bible-believing Christian, which is the center of my life, and which informs everything else. That's not exactly an "interest," but more an identity, and it explains all the "religious" books in my library. Even my fiction is written from that perspective, but is extremely realistic and, where needed, gritty. My fiction is "too worldly" for the Christian publishers, and "too religious" for the mainstreamers; so, I'm self-publishing. My fiction is not evangelistic in nature or intent; it is, rather, an attempt to view Christian and non-Christian teenagers as they are — not as they're stereotyped.

I also like gardening, especially sunflowers, marigolds, and castor plants: in other words, things that pretty much grow by themselves! And I obviously have a lifetime preoccupation with politics, but that's beginning to wane, from sheer disgust.

I also have four children, and (at last count) ten grandchildren, scattered across the country most inconveniently!

I looked at your library. Nope, I didn't see much commonality. Since you asked, I'd recommend any of Tom Wolfe's four novels, especially Back to Blood; and his collections of essays, covering everything from fashion to NASCAR to the fine arts, would be a fun way to dip your toe in nonfiction. Joyce Carol Oates is a truly great novelist; her book Marilyn is a fictionalized account of Monroe's life, and a heartbreaker; and My Sister, My Love is a fictionalized account of the Jon Benet Ramsey case. A fun little book, Mrs. Caliban, is kinda racy, but very enjoyable.

My favorite places to live have been Tennessee and Nevada, for very different reasons, but Florida has its charms, as well.

The Abduction of Cassandra is listed on Amazon as Coming of Age Fiction, and Thriller and Suspense Action Fiction.

Thanks again. I've taken enough of your time!

>76 WilliamMelden:
You are not the only person who has "felt funny" about adding their own book to their catalog, and I say the same words of encouragement to each one of them.

As for what YA is and isn't, I believe the general rule is that as a book stays on the 'notable' list for longer it is more likely it is to slip down an age group. But the differences never mattered to me at all, because I would read any book that found its way into my house since I was six or seven. Until I had to start picking marketing catagories for my own works, I really truly didn't care. When I published my trilogy Across a Jade Sea, people would ask me "Did you intend this to be for teenagers?" and I'm thinking, "I wrote it to please myself, and I'm middle-aged."

I do understand the too religious for one and not religious enough for the other issue. I hope self-publishing works out for you. Personally I always appreciate when characters' religious beliefs are handled with understanding, without it becoming heavy-handed preachiness.

I also hope you stick around. Frankly, you remind me of my mother, who seems to have a lot in common with you (even to her favorite flower being marigolds!) and whose taste in literature is probably much more in alignment with yours than mine is. (Although it was always very much her position that instead of trying to censor what her children read, she should just try to read as many of the same books as she could so that if there was something that she felt needed discussing, she would be able to -- as a result she was surprisingly 'up' on Childrens/YA fantasy until the nineties or so.) I value my mother very highly, but I have more in common with my father, an engineer, and an avid consumer of action-adventure, thrillers and mysteries. (That's the way it happens, sometimes.)

I like your tastes in living spaces -- Tennessee and Navada, those are both really pretty states. (Maybe Florida is pretty too. I don't know. The only time I went there it was summer, and I just couldn't handle the heat, so I went from the motel to the convention center and back, and that was it. My visit to Louisiana didn't go much better. I have always been heat intolerant, I used to get heat-stroke growing up in Canada.) My dream is to be able to split my time between Ohio and Alberta. (That's a bit like wanting to live in Tennessee and Nevada, only further north. I'm willing to take Michigan instead of Ohio if my husband prefers.)

After I post this, I will add you to the Mystery/Thriller/Suspense section of our Author Index.

And don't worry about taking up my time. I invented the "official greeter" job for myself because I really enjoy it. As long as it isn't getting in the way of my writing (and I made my word goal for the week again, woot!) then it's all good. :)

You're very understanding, and we seem to have quite a bit in common. Your father is an engineer; mine graduated Texas A&M, and used his engineering degree to become a pilot. After they divorced, my mother became a career English teacher. But they were both tremendously interested in politics (my father sent me political books for my birthdays, with a $20 bill tucked inside), and neither of them attempted to censor or even monitor my reading. (My grandfather, a preacher, gave me my first collection of Shakespeare when I was ten. When my mother protested that I was too young, he said, "Hush, daughter, give him a chance." He was right: I loved Shakespeare immediately — and, on the other side of the continent, Shakespeare was my father's preferred leisure reading!) And the differences between my parents undoubtedly informed my own spiritual journey. I quit attending church in adolescence, and became a typical smart-assed teenage "atheist," until my own conversion at nineteen. My father took me to Europe when I was seventeen. As we stood in Vatican square, listening to Paul VI droning on from his balcony, I asked him, "Dad, can ALL these people be deluded?" He replied, "You'll have to figure that out for yourself." My point is that there was real balance, almost to a comical degree, in my upbringing.

There will be those who find "preachiness" in my books, of course. Some people (I was once among them) find any mention of God or the Bible to be intolerably polemical; these people would consider "Narnia" to be ham-fisted propaganda. I'm aware of this, and must shrug and say, "You can't please everybody." There will also be those, I hope, who react by saying "Huh, I never thought of it that way before!" I've been writing (nonfiction) for a long time, and have only allowed myself to be swayed by an anticipated response when I wrote something that could be misconstrued. Without discussing the plot of the first book in detail, I can say that the portrayal of both the Christian and non-Christian characters is utterly true to my everything I've observed as a teacher and parent. The villain(s) in the first book are very villainous indeed, but I went out of my way to explain WHY the main bad guy is so bad: the tragedies that shaped him/her. Some of the incidents are lifted directly from my own or others' experiences, as when a desperate character says, in a moment of uncertain prayer, "God, I am SO fucked up!" It's like that.

And there's a dog. You can't go far wrong with a heroic dog.

It sounds as though you're as heat-intolerant as I am cold-intolerant! Even the winters of Ohio were too cold for me. And yet, I adored Nevada, where it got down to the minus-zeroes . . . and in the summer, the streets would be sweating with temperatures topping 100, but one could still see the snow atop the nearby Sierra range. Nasty little Reno, town of gamblers and divorces, but so, so charming, and with such wonderful, down-to-earth people. . . .

Once again, I appreciate your time!

Hi, I’m Jane Elzey, author of the Cardboard Cottage Mystery series that features four (ahem) post-middle aged women who are anything but cookie-cutter sweet. They like to play games - board games, and travel, and are always bumping into a murder. The second book in the series just published this month (May) and I’m working on book 3. I’ve worked in media as a journalist my entire career and I’m loving writing fiction! I live in the mountains of Arkansas, love to kayak, camp, garden, entertain, travel, and drink wine. I’m looking forward to meeting readers and writers on the path to uncover whodunnit.

>1 LShelby: Hello,
My name is Mael Brigde and I live in Vancouver, Canada. My focus is on Brigit of Ireland, both the saint and the goddess. I run a couple of blogs, Brigit's Sparkling Flame, which is general interest, from news to book reviews, and Stone on the Belly, which is devoted to poetry and prayers. I also teach classes about Brigit and head a flame-tending group. My book, A Brigit of Ireland Devotional - Sun Among Stars will be out late this summer.

I am expecting to be the only person here with this sort of writing interest, so if not, I'd love to hear from others.

>80 MaelBrigde:

I don't know how broadly you conceive "this sort of writing interest," but I too write liturgy and devotional materials, with several books related to the (Thelemite, post-Christian) Gnostic Catholic Church.

>79 JaneElzey:
Welcome, Jane! Your books sound intriguing! It's garden season, so I'm not on the computer as much but cool you do that too.

>79 JaneElzey:
Hi Jane!
Your series sounds like a lot of fun. (I read a lot of cozies.) I love that they travel, and so aren't having a mysterious rash of murders in the same small town that ought to reasonably have only one murder every 10 - 30 years. Also, boardgamers! That's new. I like it!

Did you chose boardgames because you also boardgame? I come from a family of boardgamers. (Most of the games we play are a bit more hard-core than dominoes though.)

I was in Arkansas a few years ago for a family reunion. (At Petit Jean -- which by the way totally freaked my parents when they showed up, because they are not only from Canada, but my mother speaks pretty fluent french, so what they thought "Petit Jean" should sound like and the way the locals actually pronounced it were soooo different that when they lost phone service and thus their gps, they would never have found the right place if my third daughter hadn't been travelling with them and so was available to provide translations of the local's directions.) My youngest daughter totally fell in love with the country there, btw. She thought it was the prettiest place she'd been, way better than the big "bare" mountains that I and my sons love. :)

Your Author page looks good, but I would like to encourage you to add more books to your LibraryThing catalog. LibraryThing is a book cataloging site and many of its features are built around library comparison, so adding books to your library is like giving your own books a circle of "friends". A selection of your favorite mysteries would be perfect. (Try not to focus on best-sellers. In the site's library comparison routines the effect of bestsellers is very diluted because so many people have those books, so lesser known books that are excellent matches for your own are a more valuable source of connections.)

Also, LibraryThing has just recently added the ability to assign books directly to a genre. You will find the genre selection box on the right sidebar of your book's page. You might want to make sure that gets filled in. :)

I have added you to the Author Index. I'm sorry it took so long to do so, I haven't been feeling well. I hope I can manage to lure you back to talk to us, I would love to hear more about you and your writing.

>80 MaelBrigde:
Hi there Mael! Nice to meet a fellow Canadian!

We don't have any other Brigit specialists (wouldn't that be overkill?) but we have had other people who are interested in saints and goddesses.

And I, for one, am always interested to hear what people with widely divergent interests have to say about writing. I think it keeps the conversation more interesting than when everyone does mostly the same sort of stuff and has mostly the same outlook. :)

Do you have any other hobbies besides blogging? Anything about Vancouver you particularly like or dislike? Do you think the climate is similar to Ireland? Does your interest in Ireland expand beyond Brigit?

Your catalog looks excellent (have you noticed the "similar libraries" feature, it can help you find other LibraryThing members that share your interests) but when I go to your Author Page, your book isn't showing up. Since it was added, presumably, a few weeks ago at the latest, and there is another member (although it looks like maybe that other member is also actually you?) with the same book, that means there is some kind of problem. I looked into it, and your book has two authors listed, one is "Brigde, Mael", and the other is "Mael Brigde".

You claimed the Mael Brigde version as your author page, but only the Brigde, Mael version had your book actually showing on it. So what I did is I combined the two names together into a single author. This appears to have worked just fine except for one thing. The author badge on your profile now goes to the right page, but that page doesn't have a badge that goes back to your profile. I'm not sure if this will fix itself when the servers update, or if you need to re-click on the "Is this you?" link or what. You should keep an eye on this, and ask for help if you need it.

I have added you to the Author Index, I apologize for it taking so long, I wasn't feeling well. I hope I can lure you back and get you to talk with us more. :)

>78 WilliamMelden: There will be those who find "preachiness" in my books, of course. ... these people would consider "Narnia" to be ham-fisted propaganda. I'm aware of this, and must shrug and say, "You can't please everybody."

Agreed. After I get caught up on this thread, I hope to start a discussion thread on the topic of what pleases who. :)

And there's a dog. You can't go far wrong with a heroic dog.

You can if you kill it off. In one of my stories I killed off an animal and worried that I might have tripped over this taboo, I carefully warned my children in advance. They didn't get mad at me, but I still don't know if its because I warned them in advance, or because I handled it right in-story. I may need to find some more beta-readers to find out.

It sounds as though you're as heat-intolerant as I am cold-intolerant!
My daughter leans in your direction on this one. I told her she should go ahead and live wherever makes her comfortable, but that I am only going to come visit her during the winter. She thought that was fair.

>81 paradoxosalpha: Sorry not to see this reply earlier. If not for >1 LShelby: LShelby I would never have realised it was here.

Thank you for your response. I will swing over to your profile to find out more about your books.

Cheers!

Greetings! I am the author and illustrator of the Dragon Lad children's fantasy trilogy. My books are about a dragon who discovers his magical past in Roman Britain, with highly entertaining adventures in what are now Ireland and Canada. This brief description doesn't do it justice, so if you want to learn more visit http://www.dragonseggbooks.com.

Curious about me personally? Well, my past lives include journalism, public relations and teaching. Now, aside from art and writing, I am interested in the environment. I belong to multiple environmental groups. For the past couple of years, I've been turning my Southern California home an oasis for birds, bees, butterflies and lizards. In the process, I've unintentionally attracted raccoons and gophers, as well as my neighbors' cats.

I like walking and birding and frequently combine the two. I'm also finally learning how to read music. I took piano lessons when I was in elementary school, and studied guitar and voice as a teen and in my twenties, but never quite mastered the arcane language of musical notation. With the isolation of the pandemic, I finally tackled it again and this time it seems to be sticking.

>2 LShelby: Hi Shelby!
My name is Carol Mitchell. You say the L does not stand for anything much to you, but Shelby by Mustang is a beautiful car. In fact, it's a car that I long to have. I am a mother of two grown sons. I raised them in Oakland, California. I just reached retirement age (66) and have lots of time to read and see what others are writing about. I actually use Amazon's author page for my own website. I too sing and listen to Englebert Humperdinck, lol soothing music for the old, lol. I am specifically interested in crossing genres. One day I want to write about law. The next day I want to create a great love scene. Thanks for allowing us this forum to greet and meet other writers.

I hope I've selected the right way to do this....
Introducing myself: Lou Kemp. I'm in the PNW near Seattle, and I write cross genre speculative fiction....a little bit of adventure...a little fantasy... bigger doses of magical realism and history.
I do admire Shelby mustangs but red cloth top MGs even more. I'm old, and we do not need to be more specific than that :). I am a retired engineer and project manager who many people mistake for a man in my writing-- I take that as a compliment because I strive to be genderless in my writing.
Right now, without violating rules, I'm on the upswing of marketing my recently uploaded books on Kindle. To do that, I'm actively doing giveaways and looking for reviews.
I've also crawled out from under a rock after 15 years and joined social media, oh the fun. On the plus side, I've hired a social media person to deal with some of that.
I've not been able to go back to writing book 6 of my series ever since I became my own personal marketeer, but hope to in a few days.
If anyone would like to contact me, my site LouKemp.com has a contact page, and I'd love to hear from you.
Right now, I'm waiting for this site's support people to help me with a little hiccup in setting up my book giveaway.
What are you doing today to clear time to write, or avoid writing?

Hello! I'm Kella Campbell, and I'm in Vancouver, Canada (or at least a suburban part of the Greater Vancouver area). I write romance, and thus far my published books have been contemporary rock star romance about a band called Smidge (two published, and I'm writing the third one, with a planned fourth one in the plotting stage). I usually describe the heat level of my books as medium, since they do have open-door bedroom scenes but aren't as graphic as some.

Let's see. I read almost anything except gory horror, but prefer happy or at least optimistic endings and no dead animals. This may be why I write romance. Happily-ever-afters guaranteed, and all that.

Other than writing and reading, I have a second-degree black belt in ATA style taekwondo and am working on my instructor certification. I'm married with two children. I'm into doing my own ebook formatting (by which I mean hand-coding, not automated), and I collect teacups.

Hi everyone! I'm Rick Barry. (NOT the famous NBA Rick Barry basketball player who used to do underhand free throws! :) Although my degree is in Foreign Language Education and I speak Russian, I began freelance writing in my sophomore year of university. Since then, I've been privileged to have hundreds of articles and short stories published, plus 4 novels (soon to be 5 novels, in September 2021).

Most of my writing is faith-based with a Christian worldview, so you'll never see evil triumphing in my books. Three of my novels star U.S. airmen in World War II; one is a YA fantasy; and the upcoming one will be sci-fi. A recurring theme you'll spot in my novels is "Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances."

I've been published by Kregel Books, JourneyForth Books, Focus on the Family, Answers in Genesis, and other publishers. Any questions? I'll try to check back and answer. But if you don't want to wait, the fastest way to ask is via the Contact page on my author site: rickcbarry.com.

Blessings!
~Rick

Hey, Everybody! My name is Mark. I *also* have never been in the NBA—though, I have played and coached the sport, and I am a huge fan of that particular sports league (Go Jazz!). :-)

I'm a recent "empty nester" and, even more recently, retired. Previous lives include: Attorney, IT Professional, Non-Profit Manager, and Classroom 6-12/college Teacher. Originally from the Midwest, I now live in the Seattle Area with my wife and the Master of the Keep: Murray A. Goodness (the cat).

My first novel (epic, contemporary fantasy), and my first comic anthology (based on my own short works) are due out later this year. Both are self-published.

I'm especially interested in interfacing with other first-time Spec-Fic novelists who were/are being published this year (as in "the class of '21"). It's such a unique experience, anyway—and I reckon even more so, with everything that is happening these days. Would love to compare notes!
...My website is www.coffeebeatcafe.com //

Stay Safe, Everyone!

Best,
:-{D)
_Mark

Hello!

My name is Krista and I am a traveling fiend. Well, I guess that I should correct myself that I used to be traveling fiend. The global health pandemic kind of took all the fun out of traveling, but it did give me a good excuse to stay home and work on my writing!

I'm a Gen-Xer, but I'm not the most social media savvy. I am fairly convinced that I was born in the wrong era and would have lived my life perfectly fine without the aid of a computer.

I will try my best to participate on this website and get myself out (or is it inside?) in the virtual world.

Cheers!
Krista.

>93 kmarson: I am fairly convinced that I was born in the wrong era and would have lived my life perfectly fine without the aid of a computer.

I too am a Gen-Xer who identifies more with the 19th and 20th centuries than the 21st. Oscar Wilde defined my Facebook posture: "I am not a gentleman and I have no friends." I do have friends on LibraryThing, though!

>94 paradoxosalpha: I too am a Gen-Xer who identifies more with the 19th and 20th centuries than the 21st.

Gen-Xer here, as well. Hi to both of you. :-)

IMO, 21st Century = Dark Ages (Redux). It's hard for me to complete a sentence with either of my kids without appending "and I apologize for the world we've left you." on to the end.

Best,
_Mark

Oh, you said it.

Hi! My name is Tamara, I'm a self published author, a registered vet tech, a dog owner, and I have hobbies that range across a fair number of interests. I live in the beautiful Midwest where we experience every season, good and bad. Haha

My novel is a Christian fantasy that is written to appeal to those just entering high school to adults of all ages. I also dabble in science fiction, mystery, action adventure, and supernatural genres as well. I was excited to release my first novel just a few days ago.

My website is www.tamaraekraft.weebly.com

What are your favorite genres to read or write?

>93 kmarson: What's your favorite place to travel (Pre-Covid)? I went to Alaska recently.

Hi all! I am Pranavi. I am from India and I recently published a poetry collection titled "The Kaleidoscope Called Life". It is available in almost all major e-stores.

I am a student of English Literature and I have recently graduated. I am a poet, author, blogger and a bibliophile. I hope to find people interested in poetry... Cheers!

My websites are:
https://www.goodreads.com/avs_pranavi
https://www.instagram.com/avs_pranavi/
https://www.facebook.com/avs.pranavi/
http://creativityextreme.home.blog

All those interested in poetry, do reach out. Thank you!!

Hi, I'm Kimberly Anne Bell, a speaker, minister and author. Through my work, I hope to use my life story and personal experiences to raise awareness as well as empower and inspire others who may have also gone through a painful journey.
My website is https://kimberlyannebell.com

Hi there, I am Elizabeth R. Andersen. I am a new author living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest of the United States. I focus on historical fiction, primarily set in the middle ages (I'm very focused on the 13th century at the moment). I love medieval history because it is fascinating to discover how we are the same now as we were back then - we just live in different societies with different norms and rules. In particular, I enjoy writing about people outside of the typical royal/western European narrative.

Because I live in the PNW, I spend a lot of time outdoors hiking, snowshoeing, and exploring the wild landscapes around me. I also just fulfilled a lifelong dream and added a small "library" to my house: a room dedicated only to shelves of books and cozy chairs for reading.

If you're interested in seeing some of my work that is focused on 13th century Palestine, you can check out 'The Scribe' and the sequel, 'The Land of God' (launching November 2021).

https://elizabethrandersen.com

Hi, Elizabeth. As a onetime medievalist, I have to ask, who are your favorite historians for research purposes? I'm a fan of Mary Carruthers, Robert Lerner, Richard Kieckhefer, and Barbara Newman, among others, and I was lucky enough to take courses from several of them.

Hi, I'm Jennifer.
I've published a few things, including a bio titled Dorothy B. Hughes: The Woman in Black, available on Kindle. I'm going to make it available in paperback soon.
My most recently published is a paperback, The Maple Motherload: A Guide to All Things Maple.
Years ago, I wrote newspaper columns about local history. So my writing goes all over the place.

>103 mstrust:
Hello Jennifer, Welcome to Hobnob!
At least I assume you are a newcomer to Hobnob, as you are introducing yourself. You certainly aren't a newcomer to LT... you've been here as long as I have.

You obviously know your way around, so the newbie advice I usually hand out isn't needed, but I do notice that your author page lists four books, but that you yourself only own three of them. So I'm going to check just in case. Is Celebrating Storytellers! 2002 also by you?

We have a score or so of books in common, most of them mysteries it looks like. Although you say your writing is all over the place, from what's listed here on LT it looks like it would be most appropriate to add you to the Non-Fiction and Mystery for the topical sections of our author index. Does that sound right? Is there another topic you'd like to be listed under?

If you tell us where you live, (closest major city) I can add you to the locality section also. (Besides it's always fun to know where all people are from.) :)

Is there any story behind you becoming an anglophile? What do you do for fun besides write? Do you hang out anywhere online besides here?

Thank you for the welcome!
Yes, I'm new to Hobnob but I've been around LT for a very long time. Somehow I'd never looked in around here.
Thanks for asking, I have nothing to do with the storytellers book. I consider myself lucky to have that mistakenly listed as mine here, because on GR I used to be listed as the author of several bodice rippers, ha!
Yes, those categories you listed would be fine for the author index. If you wanted, you could also list "cookbook", as the maple book has many recipes, and "noir", as my short story collection and the Hughes bio would fall into that category. Thank you for asking.
I live in Phoenix. If it fits, the "location' for the maple book would be New England and Canada.
I think I started reading English literature at the same time as the classics, and I'm blaming it on a high school literature teacher who happened to spend each summer studying at Oxford. She introduced me to Shakespeare and the Cavalier poets, and I started on Agatha Christie through my mom. Besides writing, I do a lot of baking and enter the state fair each year. My husband and I are also very into tiki and attend events and go to tiki bars. I've been carving tikis for many years but haven't finished one in a while.
I'm not on a lot of social media, mainly LT for socializing.

>105 mstrust:

If the storyteller book isn't yours, then I guess I had better head over and split your author page. (Done. I made you the first Jennifer Marrow, but your LT Author link will need to be fixed. That can take a few days. Sorry about that.) But I think you are right that you had a fairly innocuous stray. I haven't had any stray books appear on my author page yet, even though I was warned that this dire occurrence was especially likely to occur since I use just an initial for my nom de plume.

I don't actually have "Noir" and "Cookbooks" in the By Genre section of the Author Index, but I have added them to your entries as descriptors. :)

I remember that the English teacher I had in grade 10 actually noticed that I had finished the book that we had been given class time to read, and deliberately picked out some reading material for me to occupy myself with instead. (So that I wouldn't be reading "trashy" fantasy novels in his class, perhaps?) He picked out The Tempest. Which I had not yet read, and very much enjoyed. But I can't say he introduced me to Shakespeare... in school I started studying Shakespeare in Jr. High. Most of my reading of the Classics happened on my own, though. I've always been eclectic in my reading tastes and open to trying new things. But as a Canadian, it's pretty normal to be a little more familiar with British Authors than the average USian. For me it wasn't Christie, though, it was Dorothy Sayers for mysteries, and Georgette Heyer's historical romances, both introduced to me by my older sister.

I can't say that I know any Cavalier poets, either. Do you have a favorite poet or collection that you can recommend to me?

All I know of State Fairs I learned from the musical, but it sounds exciting, too bad we can't beg for a plate of samples online. ;) I don't know anything whatsoever about tikis and would ask for enlightenment, but I don't like to clutter up the introduction thread too much. :( I hope you will join in the discussion threads, and also make use of the "Authors, what are you working on?" thread to keep us up to date on what you are up to. (Including, if you'd like, your State Fair triumphs and when you finish another tiki.)

Thank you for splitting my author page! I hadn't even looked at it.
The Cavalier Poets are often lumped together under that title, as they wrote romantic poetry and sided with the king in the English Civil War. I'm afraid I don't have a particular book to recommend. My books of poetry just have them mixed in.
Stand-outs are Richard Lovelace and his poem "To Althea, from Prison". You might recognize the line, "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. "
Sir John Suckling is another popular poet, his most famous being "Ballade Upon a Wedding".
I'll just mention real fast that if you're interested in learning about tiki, a good place to start would be Smuggler's Cove, which is a beautiful book of history, cocktails and photography.

>107 mstrust: "Thank you for splitting my author page! I hadn't even looked at it."

In the interest of fairness, staff member kristilabrie did more than I did. :)

Whenever someone posts in this introduction thread, I like to go over to their author page, and check to make sure everything looks good, and then I try to fix any problems I can and offer suggestions for improvements. Your page looks pretty good, but adding a picture of yourself might be nice way to make the page look even better. (You probably already know this, but I'm saying it anyway because a lot of the peopled who show up on this thread are brand new to LT...)

Author pictures must be a picture of the author, not the author's significant other, pets, coat-of-arms, library or book covers. They don't have to be a photo however. Artistic depictions are allowed as long as they are recognizably representations of that particular person. :)

I found an anthology of Cavalier Poets to check out, and while I was at it I did an interlibrary loan of a scholarly discourse on the cultural setting of Suckling, because I'm researching the period for a theoretical upcoming novel. I also put a hold on the Tiki book, but I'll have to wait for that one. :(

I hope to keep seeing you around!

>100 Kimberly_Bell:
Hello Kimberly, nice to meet you.

Since you didn't mention being the author of historical romances, I'm going to assume that your author page needs to be split. (Thank you for not claiming a page that had other people's books on it, it makes the splitting process easier if the combined page isn't linked to another author.)

Before splitting the page, I would like to verify: the only book you have written is The Epitome of Kimmy, right?

I normally ask newcomers some getting-to-know-you questions, but since you said so little about yourself I'm not sure where to start. What kinds of books do you like to read? What do you do for fun? What are the things you like best about the place you live now?

When we have fixed your author page, I plan to add you to the Author Index under Non-fiction, with the descriptive tag "self-help". Does that sound right? If you let me know what major city you live closest to, I will add you to the location index as well.

If you'd like to chat with other authors we have a some discussion threads going that we'd love to have you join in on.

Welcome to Hobnob!

>99 Pranavi_A.V.S:

Hello Pranvani, welcome to Hobnob!

My husband is an English major also. And if you check out the people who have posted above, one of them also mentions English liturature and poetry. Also, if you check out the Author Index, there are a couple other poets listed, besides yourself. Also, I've personally read both their collections, so it's probably safe to say I am also interested in poetry. :) I'm curious, how would you describe your poems?

I would like to strongly recommend that you add more books to your catalog than just your own. This is especially important when you are the only person who has listed your book so far. Putting other books in your library will create connections between that book and your own. (It also makes your profile look better to LT users.) If you have some favorite poetry collections, that would probably be an excellent place to start. There is an LT app that can be used to scan barcodes in order to enter books more easily.

Other than reading, do you have any other hobbies? I clicked on your blog link because of the url (I call my own blog "Confessions of a Creataholic") and was a bit disappointed that I scrolled for forever before finding any stuff other than about your poetry book. I know some people think that sticking to the one topic is more professional, but if I'm going all the way to someone's website, that probably means I'm curious enough to be interested in learning a bit more about them.

You say you have a degree in English Lit. Have you ever travelled to England? If not, would you like to? Who are your favorite classical authors?

I have added you to the location section of the Author Index under India, but I usually include the name of the nearest major city. If you let me know what that is, I will add it.

I hope you stick around and talk with the people here. Most of the activity in the group happens in the discussion threads, that's where you can meet and get to know the other people who hang out here.

Nice to meet you!

Hello everyone
I am L. Helen Gress- self published author of Suitcase Secrets. I am a retired English teacher who lives and breathes books. Well that's an exaggeration, but like many of you here, I love to read and write.
I live in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Nature walks, sunrises and sunsets are a part of my normal routine. When our children were small, we enjoyed lifting up rocks to see what little creatures were hidden under them. Writing in a way is like that. If we lift the heavy issues, what else will we find squirming around?
I am a quilter, a gardener, baker, mother, wife, and traveler (when permitted). I look forward to interaction with other writers.

>102 paradoxosalpha: Hi there - I am so sorry I didn't respond sooner! I specialize in a very specific time and place, so I've spent a lot of time with my head buried in books by Ira Lapidus, Michael Chamberlain, Robert Irwin, and Jonathan Rubin. I also have a decent collection of translated primary sources, such as The Travels of Ibn Battuta, The Templar of Tyre, The Contemplations of Ibn Munqidh, and William de Rubrick's journals. In addition, I have been working with some current professors of Mamluk studies, who I mention in my acknowledgments. One of these days, when I can come up for air, I will finish posting my full bibliography, and I am ALWAYS looking for more great scholarly works to read :-)

>112 ElizabethRAndersen:

That's great, thanks for answering! I also see you recently added Moore's Formation of a Persecuting Society which was a key early study for me.

>111 HelenGress:

Hello, Helen, welcome to Hobnob!

I'm always love welcoming a fellow Canadian. (I currently live in Ohio, but I was born in Montreal and raised in Calgary. One of my sisters lives in Saskatoon.) You're also the second author in a relatively short time, who has actually been on LT for a while. :)

We have fifteen books in common, but I don't think our reading tastes match that well. But that's okay because it gets boring talking to people who are exactly the same as us, and we already have a lot in common. I do think the concept for your book is very interesting. You may want to add some tags to your book though, even ones that you wouldn't otherwise use, just so that they can be seen on the book page. It would be nice to have some idea of what genre it is, so I will know where to put you in the topic part of the Author Index.

I love your author picture. (Balloons! Yay!) I won't ask where you got the book idea, since its kind of obvious from the review you posted, but did you do much in the way of writing pre-Covid? How many kids do you have? (I have six.) Are you in the middle of a quilt now? What pattern? Do you hang out in any of the other groups here on LT? What about elsewhere online?

I hope you will post to some of the other threads in the group, that's where the writer interactions mostly happen. :)

>97 TamaraEK:

Hi Tamara, nice to meet you!

I love the robe and the sword in your author picture. :) It looks like we might have some similar reading tastes but I can't really tell, because you've not added many books to LT yet. I would like to strongly recommend that you add more books. Doing books will create connections here on LT between those books and your books, it will help people get a better feel for your tastes and will make you profile look better should any other LTers happen to check it out. If adding your entire personal library is too much, the best books to add (from an authorial viewpoint) are less popular works with strong connections to your own books. Best-sellers are seen everywhere and have too many connections to too many other books to do your books any good. And just to make sure you know, there is a LT app that will allow you to scan your books' barcodes, which is very helpful in adding a lot of books quickly.

...So, inquiring minds wish to know, is the sword just a prop, or do you do any SCAing or LARPing or anything like that? What breed is your dog? (Our dog's vet papers said ChowX.) Are you wiling to let us know what the closest major city to where you live is? If so I'll add you to the Location section of our Author Index. (I've already added you to the alphabetical and topical sections.) I also live in the Midwest -- in a very small town in southwest Ohio. :)

As to your question, my favorite genre to write is fantasy. I also write science fiction, and have dabbled in historical romance and historical adventure. The genre that I've been reading the most of most recently is actually cozy mysteries, though. I also read a fair amount of non-fiction.

I hope you will post to some of the other threads in the group, that's the best way to meet the people who hang out here besides me.

>113 paradoxosalpha: Yes, and as a matter of fact, as an interesting companion to Moore, I also recently purchased 'Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture', which is an anthology of really interesting articles detailing medieval forensics (but it was bloody expensive. I had to save up my Amazon Prime points for months to afford it!). It's been fun to read those two side-by-side ;-)

>116 ElizabethRAndersen:

Yikes!

>116 ElizabethRAndersen:
I am also interested in this discussion, but I hope nobody minds if we move it to the What research have you been doing? thread? I have asked Elizabeth some questions there. :)

But, since it is pretty on topic for a this thread, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly explain touchstones. Touchstones are used to create links to book pages when we mention a book in talk. They are pretty easy to use, just put square brackets around the title of the book, land LT will do its best to match those up to the book you want.

Sometimes it makes mistakes, so as you are typing in the message, after you put the end square bracket at the end of the title, look below the text box, to see what book LT has chosen to link to. If the link doesn't look right, click where it says "others" and pick the correct book off the list that pops up.

Touchstones not only create a handy link to a work so that other users reading your post can use to find out more about it, they also go in the opposition direction. From a book's page, you can find out where it is being talked about on the site. (This information is found on the top of the book page, right after Members, Reviews, Popularity, and Average rating under "Mentions". Click on that number and see a list of all the places the book has been touchstoned.)

>114 LShelby: You are very prompt and thorough in your responses! A great trait in a moderator. :)
I like to read a little bit of everything. I like historical fiction- unless it's too romancy. I love books which have strong, intelligent characters- even if they make stupid mistakes. Stupid mistakes lead to great learning and plot twists. I took a look at what LT thinks I could borrow from you- and found some that look good.
I used LT extensively in teaching- loved to search by tag and then display on the large screen all the books I had read about a specific topic- say sports, taxidermy, war, or medicine. Then I would showcase a non fiction, or books about abuse, or a particular country. I would blow 10- 15 min. a class over the course of a week while I was getting to know my students and then hopefully I could get them to ACTUALLY read. It was time well spent.
Most of my writing before retiring was for work- I wrote plays to produce in our little schools- that way I could match up the numbers and talents with roles. Some of these I wrote with the students. I also wrote examples of what I was assigning- sometimes purposely planting errors (yeah- we'll say they were planted) to challenge students to provide critical feedback- a skill they often shied away from. They loved to find my mistakes!
My book- toggles back and forth between WW II time frame- told through letters, diary entries and an autograph book; and contemporary times - shown through dialogue, phone, text and narration. So it could be called historical fiction - or contemporary fiction. I have always been drawn to epistolary novels- so it was fun to create one. I did put tags in for it- don't know why they don't show up??
It is dangerous to ask a quilter what she's working on- this thread could go on all day while I spool out my projects.... don't get me started.- but if there's someone interested in that they can search me out on Pinterest. Same user name.
I have two lovely grown children - no grands- but hope springs eternal. 6!!!! good for you. I am exhausted just thinking about it.
I have dabbled in some of the talk topics on LT- I would say I'm hot and cold with it. I will dive into the hobknob threads- nice title by the way.

My name is Michael J. Brooks. I just completed my latest sci-fi novel, Republic Falling: Advent of a New Dawn.

jqs1029

Hello Jackie, welcome to Hobnob!

You didn't say a lot about yourself, so I guess I'll have to ask. What do you do for fun besides writing? What is your favorite thing about Maryland? Have you ever lived anywhere else? Do you share your residence with any little furry (or not so furry) friends? If you could meet up with one particular author (living or dead, because we're fantasizing here) who would it be?

Even though you've only added 18 books, we already have one book in common... which isn't enough for LT to make recommendations for me from your library, so I picked one to ask about: The Power of People looked interesting, what's it about exactly?

I have added you to the Author Index under poetry and non-fiction with the tag memoir, I hope that sounds right. I also added you to the Location Index under Maryland.

I hope you will stick around and join in some of our discussion threads!

>119 HelenGress:

Sometimes I am prompt. Sometimes my health issues cause me to disappear for months, which isn't so great for the group. :(
I wouldn't mind having a co-moderator, so I don't have to worry so much about what might be happening to the group when I'm not there.

I approve wholeheartedly of time spent trying to convince youngsters to read, but in spite of all my best efforts, only four out of my six children are readers. The other two do still like literature, though, they just prefer to listen to it. That's not so bad, right?

I went back to check on you author page again, and the tags still aren't there. How long ago did you enter your book, maybe it's just taking a long time for the tags to show up? I've noticed, now that I'm looking more carefully that other new authors are showing the same problem. If it persists, I'm going to make a bug report. Anyhow, I have added you under both contemporary and historical fiction. Why not?

I don't have any grandkids yet either, but with two daughters married off this year, maybe that will change soon, who knows? And yes, I know talking to fellow crafters about crafting can be like falling down a rabbit hole, but... I often find a wonderland at the bottom, so I keep asking. :) I checked out your pinterest page, and discovered that you have 400+ tatting pins. I'm a tatter too! Maybe we could revive the long neglected off-topic thread Over by the Buffet to talk about tatting? (I also checked up some of the quilt pins, of course. I am seriously in love with the dinosaur charity quilt. I know it isn't as intricately pieced as some of your other quilts, but I have a thing for dinosaurs I guess.)

I use pinterest on occasion myself, (the easiest way to find me is probably to use the "also on" link in my profile) but I use it to pin inspiration and reference photos for my books. (See, that's even on topic!) So my boards are divided up into my different story worlds, and some of the combinations of pins might look a bit strange.

>120 MichaelJB08:

Hello Michael, welcome to Hobnob!

I went to check out your author page, and it has three books listed on it, only one of which is currently listed in your library, so I thought I should check -- is Exodus Conflict also by you, and did you ever Edit a book called Shape from Shading (Artificial Intelligence)? If either of those books are not by you, then I'd like to split the author page before adding you to our author index.

It would also be nice to get to know you a little better. Whereabouts are you from? Other than writing, is there anything else you do for fun? Do you hace anywhere online that you like to hang out? Any pets? Are you a socialble sort, or more introverted?

No matter who you are, I would like to strongly recommend that you add more books to LT. LTers connect through shared books. Right now you don't share any books with anyone. (Not even me, and I am also a SF writer.) LT also creates automatic book recommendations by comparing libraries, so the more other relevant books are in the same library as yours, the better the chances of someone happening across yours. (But don't just add bestsellers. Because they are so common their connections with other books are very diffuse.) There is a LibraryThing app that can be used to scan barcodes with your phone to make adding books off your shelves easier. :)

I hope you will also join in some of the group's discussion threads. That's the best way to start getting to know the other members of the group.

>118 LShelby: Thank you! I have moved over to the Research thread and answered your questions (but be careful...I can wax on about weird things that I discover in my research for days, lol!)

1560-1650 British Texts Were the Product of Six Collaborative Ghostwriters:
Free Series PDF Review Copies Available and Comments/Discussion on this conclusion is warmly invited

Dear LibraryThing Reviewers: I hope you will be interested in reviewing or purchasing on Amazon one or more of the volumes of my history-changing, newly-released “British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series”: https://anaphoraliterary.com/attribution. This site includes the full description of the volumes and articles I wrote or others wrote about this series in the Wichita Falls Times Record News, Vernon Daily Record, Quanah Tribune-Chief and Armed with a Book blog. “Volumes 1-2: The Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus” (979-8-49958-765-2) describe the computational-linguistic authorial-attribution method I invented to re-attributed 284 texts (the largest corpus of texts ever tested) from the British Renaissance, together with other types of proof to support these re-assignments to a Workshop of only six ghostwriters: Benjamin Jonson, Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, William Byrd and William Percy. Volumes 3-14 present William Percy’s (the main tragedian ghostwriter behind the “William Shakespeare” pseudonym) never-before translated dramas, poetry and historical sources with annotations, introductions, staging diagrams, handwritten manuscripts and other visuals, and discussion questions designed for adoption of these books into college classes. Each volume includes extensive introductions that explain the establishment of the theater enterprise in Britain that is entirely different from the traditional narrative propagated in history books. Volumes 3-8 are uncontested creations of William Percy, none of which have ever been translated into Modern English before. “Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia: Volume 3” (1594; 979-8-49959-524-4) is the only actual collection of sonnets written by William (Shakespeare) Percy. “The Cuck-Queans’ and Cuckolds’ Errands: Volume 4” (1601; 979-8-49959-947-1): An anti-warfare, anti-marriage, and pro-free-love closeted satire. “The Thirsty Arabia: Volume 5” (1601; 979-8-75007-065-7): A closeted first attempt to present the complexities and elegance of the Islamic faith and the prophet Muhammad on the English stage. “The Aphrodisia: Volume 6” (1602; 979-8-75007-396-2): A rare marinal about disguised identities and loves among the Greco-Roman deities under the Mediterranean Sea. “A Forest Tragedy in the Vacuum: Or, Cupid’s Sacrifice: Volume 7” (1602; 979-8-75007-754-0): A farcical satire about the Laws of Tragedy and irrational morality that presents a Vacuum of death. “The Fairy Pastoral: Volume 8” (1603; 979-8-75008-614-6): A pastoral satire about homicidal women- and men-haters being forced into marriage. Volumes 9-14 are either anonymous or pseudonymously-credited texts that my study re-attributes to Percy. “Fedele and Fortunio, the Two Italian Gentlemen: Volume 9” (1585; 979-8-75009-111-9): An adaptation of an Italian anti-comedy into an English formulaic-comedy. “Three Lords and Three Ladies of London: Volume 10” (1590; 979-8-75009-442-4): An allegorical morality comedy about criminality and the rivalries between London, Lincoln and Spain. “Look Around You: Volume 11” (1600; 979-8-75009-705-0): The neglected actual first part of the Robin Hood series. “Hamlet: The First Quarto: Volume 12” (979-8-75011-325-5): The censored satirical or “bad” version of the “Shakespeare” classic that features a homosexual affair between Hamlet and Horatio, and Ofelia’s deflowering to feign heterosexual normalcy. “Nobody and Somebody: Volume 13” (1606; 979-8-75011-664-5): A comedy that juxtaposes fame with anonymity, and tyrannical abuse with fair governance. “Captain Underwit: Volume 14” (1649; 979-8-75012-043-7): A country comedy about the absurdly corrupt purchases of military titles. I have a PhD, occasionally work as an English professor, and have been directing my independent Anaphora Literary Press since 2009; I previously published “Rebellion as Genre” and “Formulas of Popular Fiction” with McFarland and Google Scholar lists 32 citations of my research by other scholars. You can contact me with a request for free review copies or with questions or comments at director@anaphoraliterary.com. Connect with me on social media at: https://www.facebook.com/anna.faktorovich
https://twitter.com/AnnaFaktorovich
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-faktorovich-6063812b

>125 faktorovich:

Hello there! I think maybe you didn't notice that this is the Author Introduction thread, not a book promotion thread. Would you like to try again, and this time talk about yourself a little?

It looks like you've been on LT for a while and have quite a few titles listed on your author page. I'm sure we'd all like a chance to actually get to know you. :)

>93 kmarson:
Hello there Krista, welcome to Hobnob!

You have some interesting looking books listed. Unfortunately LT couldn't figure out which ones I should "borrow" from you. It thinks that from my own reading you would like The Lost City of Z, The Path Between the Seas The Creation of the Panama Canal and The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest. Using those as a reference point, have you read any good books lately to recommend to me?

Also you did say you wrote, so please don't be quite so reticent about that, since it's a thing that most of us have in common. What kinds of things do you write? Have you finished anything?

As for the whole technology thingy, I happen to know I that I really can live without computers, because I'm a bit of a camping buff. I am also one of the few "holdouts" on the subject of smartphones. I don't own one. :) But nobody is going to hear any statements from me about how I belong in an earlier age -- without relatively recent advances in medicine one of my children would have died at age 7. Besides, computers may not be necessary, but they sure are handy at times. :)

Do you write longhand? My debut trilogy Across a Jade Sea was written by hand. (I went through so many ball-point pens!) But I only do that occasionally.

What corner of the world did you get stuck in by the pandemic?

I hope you will join in some of our discussion threads. To get to the other threads in this group, you can click on the name of the group as it appears at the top or bottom of this thread, that will take you to the group page. :)

>92 Mark_Harbinger:
It may seem a little pointless, since I've been chatting with you on other threads, but I finally worked my way back to this post, and I'd like to officially welcome you, even if it's really late.

You mention comics, does that mean you are an artist also? Me too!
Maybe you could post a sample to the Art and Music and Writing thread, so we could have some idea of your style?

If you started out an Attorney and ended up a teacher you went the opposite route of my grandfather, who started teaching in a one-room-schoolhouse and then went on to take his bar. The last time I saw him, he was reliving his "big case" that apparently went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and which I had really never heard about before myself... before my time. Is there any story behind your changes in professions?

I wish you luck in finding other class of '21 ers. I'm afraid I don't qualify. My first publication was way back in... um... I can't ever remember any more. '94? I am a spec-fic writer though, so we might have a few notes worth comparing.

Before I add you to the Author Index, there is something that about your author page I want to check on. You said you had authored two books, and sure enough there are two books listed on the page... but you said comic anthology, not poetry. So is You Can't Think About it Too Much really written by you, is it by someone else?

If it's by someone else, we need to get it split off of your page. I can do that for you, or I can talk you through the process if that's what you prefer.

>128 LShelby: Hey L,

Originally, I was an art major, which helps me when doing comic scripts and in collaboration with artists—but, no. Alas, my rendering skills have deteriorated over the years (decades). I write all the stories and hire the various artists.

My IT Teaching career was the 2nd of 3. Attorney is the most recent. I have many, *many* tales, of course; this is especially since I typically worked 2 or 3 jobs at a time. One person looked at my CV once and said, "What are you, 84?" (a funny line, I thought, given the randomness of selecting that particular number...I was about half that at the time).

Before I started, I clerked for two attorneys and a Chief Regional state Judge. They had a combined 130 years experience. This mostly meant that my archaic (and, frankly, more professional) way of doing things irked my fellow attorneys. And I can assure you, the reverse was also true. ;-)

As for the last, I think I can explain. The poetry chapbook is on Amazon; but, the comic is not. It's featured only on drivethrucomics.com at this time. So, I'm not on the author index? Hm. Not sure what I did wrong that I'm not already on it....but okay. I would appreciate you adding me when you get the chance.

I look forward to more interactions with you. I do admit, I find the entire notion of cataloging and sharing our reading lists *en masse* something close to an (willing) abdication of privacy here, not so much--but Goodreads is truly obnoxious. For me, reading is such a personal thing. I'm always happy to discuss particular authors/works; but, every time a website asks me what I'm reading, I'm always like: "*Who wants to know*?!?" ha ha

But I very much enjoy talking about the writing process, within the larger context of storytelling. In that respect, philosophically, I'm very much in the Gaiman camp.

Thanks!

Best,
_Mark

>129 Mark_Harbinger: "I write all the stories and hire the various artists."

Nothing wrong with that. ...One of our intermittent participants was wanting to look into hiring a comic artist not too long ago. Maybe you you would be able offer him some advice.

For that matter, I have a script or two wandering about that I would love to hire an artist for, but I don't think I can afford it.

As for the graphic novel I did myself, my rendering skills were irrelevant, because the whole thing came about because I was playing with some CGI software. I used some characters from a story idea from my juvenilia as inspiration for some images, and the next thing I knew I was on a webcomic community announcing that I was going to do an entire graphic novel in cgi. (They said, "Don't start out with such a long project, you'll never finish it" and "Ew, uncanny valley!" But I did it anyway. I can be stubborn that way) :) I drew the story boards of course, and once they were done, I discovered I missed that activity. So I started working on a second comic, just so I would have an excuse to draw things. I haven't managed to get beyond inking over all the pencils though. I've never really developed a comic coloring style, and my writing takes precedence, so it keeps getting put off. Everytime I think of trying to get back to it, I find myself going... "Oh, but first I have book covers to paint".

"I have many, *many* tales, of course; this is especially since I typically worked 2 or 3 jobs at a time. "

I don't know whether to envy you or not. I've always wanted to be a workahholic, but most of the people I know with multiple jobs aren't doing it for fun.

I hope you stick around for a long time and share lots of stories. :)

I learned recently, that my grandfather's choice to become a lawyer was so unpopular with his family (ranchers) that he told them he was studying to become a dentist! He probably would approve of your "Old-fashioned" clerking, but I don't know that he would have approved of your writing. He would look at me quite bewildered, and ask me why I didn't write stories about things that were actually "real".

"The poetry chapbook is on Amazon; but, the comic is not. It's featured only on drivethrucomics.com at this time."

Whether your book shows up on LT is entirely dependent on someone on LibraryThing adding it to their catalog. So the reason we have The Be(k)nighted here is because you added it, and the reason we have the poetry anthology is because a "private member" added it, (at least, that's the usual reason to have a copy listed, but no members listed). In order to get the comics listed on your author page here, someone will need to add it to their catalog.

I usually recommend that authors add all of their own books (and then check the entries carefully, fixing any mistakes), because that ensures that LT has at least one copy of the work in this system with all the information on it correct. But, unfortunately, just adding your own books and not any other books both looks bad to other LTers. Also, if your books aren't very popular yet, it means they are left out in the cold when LT does it's library comparison routines to identify connections between books. So after you add your books, then I usually suggest adding at least a dozen more books that aren't bestsellers, but would strongly appeal to the same audience that your books would appeal to.

...It is possible to have a private account on LT, BTW, where you catalog your books *without* revealing them to the world. I don't know how that would interact with LT Author status though. Generally the whole point of being an LT Author is to allow people to connect from your author page to your profile.

As for not being on the Author Index, I am talking about the thread pinned to the top of the group that says "Hobnob Author Index 2021". It is a little of project of mine, where I track the authors who show up here, and you weren't there because I hadn't added you yet. But I have added you now. :)

I used your descriptor of "epic contemporary fantasy" in your listing, because I love it. It's so unexpected. I would love to talk to you about what epic contemporary fantasy means, exactly, but we should probably take it to another thread. (I don't see any other threads that look suitable so I have started a new one.)

Mike Jimerson aka Micheal E. Jimerson. I'm a lawyer in East Texas, however I prefer to talk about raising cattle, writing mysteries, and reading westerns. My novel, Where No Man Pursueth won a Silver Medallion Inspirational Fiction Will Rogers Medallion Awards. I'm an Elemer Kelton and Scott Turow fan though I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers on Kindle Unlimited.

>98 TamaraEK: Ah, Alaska! Such a great place to visit. I went on a cruise there once but spent way too much time on the water! My favorite place to travel to is France (pre-covid, of course.) I miss traveling internationally.

>131 MichealJimerson:

Hi there Mike, nice to meet you!

I regret that I cannot talk about raising cattle with you because, as mentioned above, my grandfather left the family ranching business to become a lawyer. (My family is from Alberta, Canada.) I used to visit my Great Uncle Lonnie's "retirement ranch" to go berry picking, but we kinda just ignored the critters and concentrated on the bushes.

On the other hand I'm perfectly happy to talk about writing mysteries and reading westerns. (Although, to be honest I've mostly only read L'Amour -- the next time I'm at the library I will pick up a Kelton and give it a try.)

Does being a lawyer help you come up with mystery plots? Do you know the solution to the mystery beforehand, or do you work it out as you go?

I have added you to the mystery and the historical section of the Hobnob Author index. Your author page and library look great. But you might wan to add a couple more tags to your books, most especially Where No Man Pursueth which didn't appear to have any tags yet.

I hope you'll stick around and join us in our discussions. Welcome to Hobnob!

>132 kmarson:
I'm super jealous of people who have "travelled internationally" in spite of the fact that technically I'm "living internationally". Somehow Canada to the USA doesn't feel that foreign.

What is it about France that appeals to you the most?

>133 LShelby: Thank you for the warm reception. I don't know how to "tag." I always outline and then outline again and again as the story takes shape.

>135 MichealJimerson:
Adding tags to books on LibraryThing is done by editing your copy of that book (Click on the pencil icon) as it appears in the "Your books" tab.

Although the tags you use for are your data, specific to you, and cannot be edited by any other member, they are also displayed on the main book page and the author's page, so they can be a useful way to convey information bout your books to LTers who have do not read them yet.

If you visit the page for my Serendipity's Tide, for example, you will see some pointlessly personal tags such as '!She' and 'da', but you will also see (and usually in much larger type) more useful information such as 'adventure', 'dieselpunk', 'fantasy', 'pirates' and so forth. :)

...
As for outlines, one of my mentor writers seems to work like you do, she would outline, start writing the book, have the book veer away from the outline, write a new outline, follow it for a while, veer off of it, write a new outline...

I am ambidextrous when it comes to outlining -- sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. When I use an outline I seem to stick to it pretty closely, but by the end of the book I have often accumulated enough unanticipated details and minute changes that I have become slightly out of sync with it.

Diane Asther. I am a 15 year old girl who loves writing and getting lost in her own worlds. I started writing with a writing project in fourth grade. I started working on my debut novel, Without Flaws, when I was thirteen.

I love to paint and not only with words. I like creating any piece of art.

I enjoy dancing, getting carried away by the beautiful music. I loves reading and watching films and spending time with her adorable golden retriever, Stark. Yes ! I am a Marvel superfan

My debut novel Without Flaws is available on amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0981G19H4/.

It is a young adult sci action adventure with a prison break, mutant twins and so much more

I am now working on my second novel. It is a young adult dystopian fantasy

>137 dianeasther:
Hello Diane. *Well Done* on finishing a novel!

I was just asking around for an Urban Fantasy 2021 Debut Novel, so I'll have to check it out.

Best,
_Mark

Hello Everyone!

I'm Rolando Garcia. I also go by "R. Garcia", and in the past I've written under the the pen name "Phantomimic". I am scientist currently working in the biotech industry. I grew up living in several Latin American countries, but now I live in the U.S. in Maryland. I enjoy visiting the cool unusual places listed in Atlas Obscura, reading books by Indie authors, and eating bacon, eggs, and home fries for brunch. My interests in music range from classical music (Strauss, Wagner, Beethoven etc.) and soft rock (Beatles, Monkees, Beach Boys etc.) to heavy metal (Led Zeppelin, Balck Sabbath, Deep Purple, etc.). I love the classic comics (Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side etc.) and more contemporary ones such as Pearls Before Swine.

I write a blog about science, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and antiscience (RatioScientiae), and you can find me promoting and defending science and reason on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. But I also write fiction. My fiction ranges from family-friendly stories to science fiction, psychological, supernatural, and horror stories. The authors that have influenced my writing range from Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Dan Simmons, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Alan Poe to Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould.

I have self-published two books of short stories on Amazon, The Sun Zebra (https://www.librarything.com/work/12344641) and Spirit Women (https://www.librarything.com/work/27529025), and I hope to publish science books based on my blog and more fiction short stories in the future. I joined LibraryThing to meet readers and other authors.

See you around!

Rolando

>1 LShelby: Hi, I am Alyson Maier. I have written a herbal adventures series for kids (age 3-10). As a Naturopath and Herbalist I am passionate about encouraging our kids to learn through outdoor play, imagination, and gathering important herbal and environmental knowledge. I hope you will enjoy reading these to your kids. Dandelion Medicine, Plantain Medicine and more to come!

I'm J. Dallas Brooks, and I write a lot of 1980s style science fiction novels, short stories, and the occasional novella. I also enjoy historical stories told from a unique perspective. I've had a handful of short essays published here and there, but I'm mostly a self-published writer.

As a 7th generation Georgian, and a member of Generation X, I really enjoy writing about different perspectives across the generations. When not writing, I work as a Systems Engineer and (on rare occasions) as an adjunct professor of Cybersecurity. My wife, our 7 children (some of whom are grown), and I live on a farm in southern Colorado where we raise poultry and donate pasture to neighboring cattle in need during the growing season.

I'm an Air Force veteran, so I've had the unique experience of working at the Pentagon, NORAD, and US Space Command (among other places) throughout my career.

Interesting fact: A bullet fired in the Civil War almost wiped me from existence.

Hello, Shelby
Thanks for this opportunity.

My name is Grace, I'm a writer and I just published my first book on Amazon last two months. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RF7S9WJ/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_a_8GXKZWC3HZCHCWX5NX4...

I love writing African stories and I just want people to read our stories. It really hasn’t been easy starting as a self-publisher from Africa. But I can't stop myself from writing and publishing no matter how hard it seems.
Well, I love reading and writing romance novels and thrillers.
I'm Nigerian, and I have always loved to write as a child. And I'm happy to be a part of a community of writers and readers.

Hello, My name is Heather

I did not see a 2022 intro started so adding to the 2021 list.

I am a mother, children's book writer, mother and many other things like all of you. I enjoy social activities (coffee dates, park dates, skiing, rafting, parties etc) I am originally from NY but have lived a few places now and currently in North Carolina, USA. I love traveling both locally and over seas. Having a degree in interior design I love architecture and helping people make spaces that they find functional and pretty or handsome.

I started writing children's books because I found that there was a gap between what was available and what I wanted my children to read. Adults have so many books on vision boards, dream building, goal setting and how to go after such goals and children do not so I have started to change that. I would like advice on how to market it better though so feel free to reach out.