National Read Across America Day is March 6 and the celebration is starting early.
My science fiction adventure novel, O’Ceagan’s Legacy, is part of a big speculative fiction giveaway hosted by author Kimberly Iverson. It is live as of today, so hurry over to pick up some great reads for free. It will vary by author, but most of us are asking for a sign up to our mailing list in order to download. My short story, The Wizard’s Gift is also featured in this giveaway.
I also ask, nay- beg, you to consider writing an honest review of my book if you download and read it. You can post your review on Amazon, Goodreads, Instafreebie, or any other location you prefer. Reviews are very important to a writer. In order to get exposure from sellers, such as Amazon, Apple, or other books sales sites, you need to have reviews. The more positive ones, the better, but I just ask for your honest opinion. Please consider writing one or at least rating the books you read. Thank you.
Follow this link to the giveaway:
In the next few days, I will be posting short interviews with three of the writers participating in this giveaway, including Kim, so look for those.
Don’t waste time. Get to the page above and grab some good reads! Happy reading, my friends.
Two years ago, on November 1st, I participated in NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – for the first time and completed my novel, Funeral Singer: A Song for Marielle, which I went on to rewrite, edit, and publish in September 2015. While I’ve written other novels, this was the first one that I published and it is the first novel of the Funeral Singer series.
As I begin my third NaNoWriMo writing frenzy, I am celebrating by making the Kindle version of Funeral Singer FREE for the first five days of November.
Available FREE from November 1 through November 5, 2016 at Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014QXQKSM
Gillian Foster is an energetic, bright young woman in her mid-twenties, who is trying to build a career as a musician and singer while paying the bills with a dog-grooming job. She’s pretty, sassy, and a hard worker. With her band, Spicy Jam – Ferris and Digby, musician pals from college – she plays parties, fairs, events, and clubs whenever she get a booking. When an accidental fall results in a concussion that triggers a paranormal talent, things begin to change. While singing at a funeral, she suddenly can see and talk to the deceased in an ethereal graveyard without missing a beat on her performance.
Convinced she is having hallucinations, she looks for a physical reason for the problem. While she won’t tell her bandmates or the handsome doctor she’s started dating, she does confide in her best friend, Janna, who believes in all things paranormal. As Gillian gets more jobs to sing at funerals, she encounters more deceased who need her assistance. One of these clients needs more than an assist to the next life. She demands that Gillian find her murderer. Can Gillian find the man and what will she do if she does?
While I don’t have many reviews on Amazon for it, the ones I do have give it a 4 1/2 star average rating. A few of the comments about the book:
I liked this story very much. It’s very well written and has great character development. The author just made Gillian’s journey easily comprehensible. The use of two point of views (Gillian’s and the detective’s) paid off well. The suspense that was build kept me intrigued despite the plot being a bit foreseeable. – Amazon Reader Coral Fang
I’ve been reading this book as what I call my “lunch time book” but yesterday, I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer and read it straight through although I must admit, my curiosity got the better of me by chapter 18 and I swiped to the last two chapters, read the ending , then went back to where I left off. I once read that a good book or movie is defined by the ending whether one cares about what will happen to the characters when it’s done. “Funeral Singer: A Song for Marielle…” gave me that feeling and therefore I recommend this book to anyone and everyone and can’t wait for the next installment!!! – Amazon Reader Cindy Western
This is what a book should be, well-written, well plotted, with engaging characters. It was a privilege to visit this world. – Amazon Reader PRBC
If you enjoy a suspense story with a paranormal twist, here’s your chance to take Funeral Singer for a test drive. If you’re on Kindle Unlimited, the book is available there also, even after the five day promotion. Find the book here.
Don’t forget that if you sign up for my mailing list, you will have a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card in my quarterly promotion.
When I went scouting around the cemeteries in the Reno, Nevada area before writing my Funeral Singer novel, I spent some time on the outside of one near the University of Nevada Reno campus. The cemetery appeared run down, forgotten, and forlorn with crumbling or missing monuments, no greenery to speak of, and a general feeling of utter neglect, particularly on the south side of the bluff that overlooked the city. A dirt road ran between this side and the other side where the monuments were newer and a smaller section to the northeast that flaunted a Nevada state historic marker.
Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Reno, Nevada.
This is the Old Hillside Cemetery that dates back to the 1800s and is the final resting place of many of the early settlers and prominent members of the community in the Reno-Sparks area. But is it final?
Now the owner and a developer plan to exhume the bodies, relocate them, and possibly build student housing or some other dwellings on the property. This has caused an uproar with the relatives of people buried in the south section, who see this as disrespectful of their ancestors and for some, a violation of what they hold sacred. According to this article in the Reno Gazette Journal, the plan the developer proposes is to re-inter the bodies on the northern side.
Monument in the Pythian Cemetery.
However, there are over eight hundred remains in the south side and I don’t believe they have enough room to move them. The other cemeteries are the Pythian Cemetery, which is maintained well, and the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, which holds the remains of eight-two Civil War veterans from Nevada.
Before I learned all the details of the cemetery, I decided to include it in the second Funeral Singer novel, A Song for Menafee and began researching it further. I learned that the cemetery was willed to the University, and the authorities had hoped to build student housing on the site, but they soon realized the hurdles of trying to clear and move the graves would be more than they wished to endure. They sold the cemetery to Sierra Memorial Gardens and the new owners fenced the property and began to clean it up some. From my perspective, it provided the ideal location for my book. Shortly after I published in August, 2016, the issue blew up with the plan to move the bodies, clean up the property, and then decide how it would be used.
Confederate trench honors the fallen in anonymity.
For me, it struck a discordant note. In my research, I’d taken a trip to the Shiloh Battlefield, a national monument and cemetery that preserved as many graves from that battle as they could, including discovering and marking the several burial trenches where the Confederate dead, the losers at Shiloh, had been interred in mass. I’d felt a sense of connection with these people from the past and their history. Other cemeteries that are hundreds of years old also honor the dead and provide a link. Yet here, in my city, in a cemetery not even one-hundred-fifty-years old, people want to dig up some of the founders of the city and move them to a different place breaking the connection, and the energy, that exists in the burial ground.
Ghosts have been sighted at the Hillside Cemetery, or so many people report. Whether you believe in such happenings or not, there is an energy at burial sites that you can feel. For me, I’ve encountered enough odd events to make me think that ghosts are quite probable. From that standpoint, you can move the bones, but that doesn’t mean the spirit will go with them. Someone living in an apartment in a building constructed on the site may still encounter paranormal activity. Would you want to live there?
Releases on August 28th in both Kindle and paperback on Amazon.com. You can still pre-order to be among the first to get the book for your Kindle.
About the Heroine:
As a musician, Gillian Foster hopes to make a career of it, but so far, she’s settling for local gigs with her three-piece band, Spicy Jam, in her hometown of Reno, Nevada. By the way, she tells you to pronounce her name with a “g” sound like gill, rather than the British way with a “j” sound like Jill. Most people get it wrong.
Following a gig at a wedding, an accident occurred, she hit her head, and after she healed, she discovered she had a new “gift”. On being asked to sing at a funeral, she found herself in an ethereal graveyard, face to face with the newly departed soul and singing praises of the deceased’s life as she escorted the spirit to the exit gate and into the tunnel of light that led to the next plane. She assumed the whole incident must have been a hallucination. Only it didn’t stop happening and she found herself in demand to sing at funerals.
In A Song for Marielle
In Funeral Singer: A Song for Marielle, one of Gillian’s “clients”, a preteen girl, enlists her aid in finding the man who brutally murdered her. As Marielle’s spirit guides her through the events via visions seen through the child’s eyes, Gillian questions her health and her sanity while pursuing a serial killer. She’s in the wrong place more than once and draws the attention of Sheriff’s Office detectives, Egan Moss and Dave Hernandez.
Book Two is A Song for Menafee
Returning in the second book of the series, A Song for Menafee, Gillian is now more used to the “spirit escort” task, as she’s come to think of it, but her gift also appears to be expanding in its scope. While leading an accident victim’s soul to the gate, she detects another spirit nearby watching them, but he disappears before she can approach. She’s made a promise to the soul she just escorted to help his son, who is a student at the University of Nevada in Reno and underfunded for his education.
This connection carries her to an encounter with the spirit from the cemetery, a lingering soul with a Civil War history, a possible treasure, and a mystery in his past. The ghost is the triple great grandfather of Thomas Willits, the young man she agreed to aid, and he needs her to assist him to put his spirit at ease. Seeing a way to help both Thomas and the unsettled ghost, she agrees to a quest that will lead her and her best friend, Janna, across the country to Tennessee.
One of the mass burial sites at Shiloh Battlefield.
Moss and Hernandez keep in touch as she’s a witness slated for the trial of the serial killer from the first book, but Moss, the skeptic, seems to be coming around as he seeks her assistance with another case. Her band mates are unaware of her new gift and almost everything that’s happened to her in the past few months, but there is tension growing there as they plan to record an album.
If you enjoyed Funeral Singer, I think you’re going to love A Song for Menafee. If you haven’t read Funeral Singer: A Song for Marielle yet, I definitely suggest that you read it first as the second book builds on it.
A Song for Menafee releases on August 28, 2016 on Amazon.com. It is now available for pre-order for the Kindle. The paperback will release on the same date. If you are on Kindle Unlimited, the book will be free to subscribers. Visit my book launch page for more information and a short book trailer.
Please feel free to share this with anyone you think might enjoy my books. I rely on my readers to help me get the word out, so I appreciate anything you do to help me. Thanks.
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Lots going on as I’m working on editing the second “Funeral Singer” book and starting to rewrite my YA novel while plotting the second book of that series. Keeps me busy and my mind is spinning with ideas. But for now, the news is that A Song for Menafee, the second Funeral Singer book is on track to be released near the end of August. I am so confident about that target that it is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
Now for the opportunity! How would you like a chance to read a free digital copy of A Song for Menafee before it is released? All you have to do is post in the comments on this page that you would like a chance to read a pre-release copy. I will randomly select 10 people to receive a free download of a PDF version of the book, which will be sent around the beginning of August. Naturally, I would appreciate an honest, good or bad, review of the book on Amazon when it goes live, but it isn’t a requirement to win the opportunity.
So if you’d like to get the book for free, just post a comment and maybe you’ll be one of the lucky winners of A Song for Menafee!
Exploring barriers between reality and other realities… Is it fantasy or just a step through a dimension portal?
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