This third and last book of the Egypt trilogy is on tour with RABT tours from now until Apr. 13. You can follow the tour and enter to win one of three copies of this compelling book. But that’s not all. In the Promised Land is now discounted from $3.99 to $1.99 for the duration of the tour. So, if you have been waiting for the price to come down so you can pick up your copy, here’s your chance.

To give you a little insight into the story, here’s the blurb:

Based on a true event, In the Promised Land wraps up the lives of the characters in a neat and satisfying way, according to some readers. Like the rest of the series, the story is set in the beautiful twin – island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The two main characters, Marva and June, have come out of an abusive childhood (Egypt) and are now adults. Marva is a nun at a home for delinquent girls. Marva is known for being strict and well disciplined, but when her adoptive father is killed in a Muslim coup, the family relies on her levelheaded calm to help them get through their crisis. But little do they know that Marva has a crisis of her own, one that her discipline and her faith seem inadequate to handle.

You can follow the tour here.

In time for Sexual Awareness month, Coming Out of Egypt, the first book in the series will be featured in a Book Cave promotion all month long, beginning tomorrow April 1. at the low price of .99c. You can follow the tour here.

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Recommended Resource

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Excerpt:

Sara Vevang, Freedoms’ Dance

Your Love

Your love is like a summer wave
A winter’s cool crisp breeze
It makes me laugh
It makes me cry
It brings me to my knees
Your love amazes me
Drives me to peace
Renews my mind again and again
My worship is extravagant when I look at You
No matter what my life brings
It’s all I live to do

You Take Pleasure in My Every Prayer

We are never separated
You vindicate me as I walk in all integrity
Redeeming me in Your gracious love
Purity is what You seek
Refining fire burns darkness out of me
Your blood You shed on Calvary
Paid the price
Now I’m forever
In communion with
My Jesus Christ

In the spotlight today is An Open Window, a debut novel by P. B. Harrison. Enjoy!

Have you ever wondered how an author comes up with pages and pages of content that keep you absorbed for hours or even days? How do they edit it so it’s error-free and worthy of being read? In this guest post, J. F. Pandolfi, author of Mr. Pizza, a mainstream novel, takes us behind the scenes and shows us what his writing and editing process is like. Enjoy!

My Writing Process—Still a Work in Progress

by

J. F. Pandolfi

Writing fiction pretty much involves coming up with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it’s how we choose to get from one phase to another that can be all over the map.

In writing “Mr. Pizza”, my first novel, I synopsized every scene before penning the first word of the first chapter. Some people are just more comfortable planning every step of the journey upfront. In my case, I think that resulted from having practiced law for many years, which has a tendency to induce chronic anal retentiveness. That said, during the course of writing there were times when the story decided it wanted—even needed—to veer off the pre-determined path. Those detours turned out to be the most exhilarating part of the experience for me.

So for my new book—a sequel that takes place twelve years after the first book ends—I decided to toss out the old game plan. I knew the general storyline I wanted to pursue, but that was it. I just started writing. I’m currently about a quarter of the way through my projected page count. Has it been unsettling? You bet. Like being adrift on a raft in open seas. Or how I felt when my parents took away my pacifier when I was eleven. (What, like you don’t have any issues?) Another thing that required getting used to was taking time after a chapter to figure out what comes next. Other than those occasional detours I mentioned, I didn’t have to deal with that in writing “Mr. Pizza”.

On the whole, I think the occasional angst, and the sometimes lengthy post-chapter interludes, have been a fair trade-off for the excitement of making new discoveries as each chapter comes into focus. But that may change as I get deeper into the book. I’ll have to see. If I find it’s turning out not to be the ideal route, I’ll tinker with some hybrid middle ground.

Another subject I wanted to touch on is: revising your work, i.e. self-editing. It’s something we all need to do, more than once, before having a professional editor take a look. There’s a theory that says you shouldn’t edit on-the-fly. Get through your first draft, then go back to the beginning and start editing. Supposedly, editing as you go disrupts your artistic flow.

But I need to do my first edit of a chapter as soon as the chapter is done. It has to feel right to me before I can move on. I don’t think it’s blocked up my creative aqueduct. (Although I’m not a psychologist, neurobiologist, or plumber.) I’ve also found there’s a practical benefit to how I work. If you change something substantive in a chapter, it could impact a subsequent chapter. By editing each chapter as I write, I can limit—to a degree—that potential domino effect. I may make additional changes when I re-edit, but they’re usually not as significant.

Writing doesn’t lend itself to one-size-fits-all. Explore the self-editing process until you find the method you’re most comfortable with.

Keep writing, and good luck!

Polio and Me, written by Ken Dalton, is a memoir that provides a view of the past, present, and future—the saga of one boy’s pain, fear, and loneliness—the long struggle to develop a vaccine and effective treatments—the world-wide goal to eradicate the polio virus, and in some twenty-first century cancer research trials, the polio virus eliminated cancerous tumors.

Ken Dalton was born in Los Angeles in 1938. In 1943 he contracted polio and spent the next eleven years of his childhood in and out of hospitals.

Fifty-nine years ago he married his childhood sweetheart and is a father of three, a grandfather of four, and the great-grandfather of nine.

After a thirty-eight year management career with Pacific Telephone Company, Ken retired to write golf and travel articles for Golf Digest, Golf Illustrated, Fairways and Greens, and Golf.com.

During two NBC-TV Celebrity Golf Tournaments at Lake Tahoe, he interviewed Olympic Decathlon Champion, Bruce Jenner when he was Bruce, not Caitlyn, the mischievous Chicago Bears quarterback, Jim McMahon, the iconic Vice-President Dan Quail, and NBC Today show anchor, Matt Lauer.

Ken has published six mystery novels. Polio and Me marks his initial foray into the world of non-fiction.

Presently, Ken is working on his seventh mystery, The Heretics Hymnal, and a comedy of manners novel, Casper Potts and the Ladies Casserole club.

Contact Information

Website: www.kendaltom.com

Facebook: KenDalton MysteryWriter

Purchase Links

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Polio-Me-Ken-Dalton-ebook/dp/B01M697TDW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503876702&sr=8-1&keywords=polio+and+me

Excerpt

Today, seventy-two years later, as a father of three, a grandfather, and great-grandfather, the idea that an ambulance team could walk into my doctor’s office and rip my son or daughter from my arms is an appalling notion. But this was 1943, decades ago, when polio epidemics killed and paralyzed an average of 12,000 children and adults each year.
I understand that having your child taken from your arms sounds draconian, but in Los Angeles, during the summer months of the annual polio epidemics, as many as one hundred patients a day were admitted to Los Angeles County Hospital. Once the patient’s illness was confirmed as polio, those patients were moved to the Communicable Disease Building where they would remain isolated until all possibility of passing on the polio virus to a non-infected person had ended.
And Los Angeles was not alone. Public health professionals throughout the country had learned to act swiftly because when it came to a polio pandemic, the end justified the means. So the abrupt actions of the Los Angeles ambulance crew may have seemed cruel, but the fear of polio, both real and exaggerated, caused even rational professionals to overreact. The moment any patient’s illness was thought to be polio, that patient would be rushed to an isolation facility where he or she would remain for weeks if not months.
One of the major reasons a diagnosis of polio was so frightening for my parents and the medical professionals alike, was that no one could predict the eventual outcome of a polio infection for an agonizingly long period of time. While I was in the Communicable Disease Building at the Los Angeles County Hospital, my parents struggled with a list of frightening questions without a way to learn the answers.
Would their son lose his ability to breathe and die in isolation?
Would their son spend the rest of his days living in an iron lung?
Would their son remain paralyzed?
Would their son recover some use of his limbs?
Looking back, those weeks apart were among the most traumatic days of my life. But during that summer of 1943, as the summers before, and the summers that followed, children with polio, and their parents, learned to endure.

In the spotlight this week is Web of Lies, a Romantic suspense thriller by J. G . Sumner. Web of Lies is on tour with RABT Book Tours from Oct. 16th – Oct. 27th.

J.G. is a Registered Nurse who went rogue. As good as she was at starting IV’s, she enjoys writing the down the stories in her head even more. Most of the time the characters won’t stop pestering her until she has them down on paper.  J.G. can often be found with a glass of red wine or prosecco in front of her computer. She has a very dry sense of humor, and should never be taken too seriously. She loves to hear from her fans, and even those who aren’t especially fond of her work.  J.G. writes romantic suspense/thrillers including: A Shot in the Dark, Into the Light, The Surrender Trilogy including Surrender, Shattered, and Saved, Web of Lies and Wrecked.

My perfect life is falling apart.  My wife is leaving me, and I’m fighting for our marriage, our kids—for her. Then she walks through the door, and everything changes. Beautiful, sweet Beth. She’s much too young, but I can’t stay away.  Despite our secrecy, someone knows. They’re using the information to destroy me. It’s not a matter of if my marriage will survive, or if I’ll be able to find happiness with my new love…it’s a matter surviving at all. I have to unravel this web of lies before it’s too late.