Monday, April 30, 2012

Make a Difference to Others



New York Times Bestselling Author Brenda Novak's Annual Online Auction for Diabetes Research beginning May 1st at Auction For Diabetes.

You could win an advanced reading copy of your favorite author's next book, gift baskets, trips & stays, jewelry, lunch with a big name author, hand-crafted items and much more!

If you are an aspiring or published author, you could take advantage of fabulous opportunities to advance your career--while making a difference to others.

Register now!

Monday, April 23, 2012

Introducing Guest Blogger, Debie Esmeralda, Author of The Angel Series: Fallen




I'm Debie Esmeralda. I'm 18 years of age. I started to discover my love for writing at the age of 13. I started by writing music lyrics and at the age 15 started the idea of my book. I was currently a nursing student and on my third year now. I love animals so much. I also love singing and my favorite genre is country, pop and theatrical. I'm a bookworm. I love to read. I also love the TV. I love watching series, especially those young-adult TV series like Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle.

The Angel Series: Fallen is about an angel who was punished for breaking the rules of the Heaven. She has to live with the humans but there she learns all the things humans do. She is known as Penelope Reef, an average girl with dreams of being on Broadway. Then she met the rich, wealthy Swaiz brothers, Drew and Xander. She falls for both but was really in love with Drew. But Xander made her situation confusing. Which makes it more complicated was the return of her ex-boyfriend, Jeremy. Aside from the love life, she has. She’s also being haunted by dreams. This came to a decision that she had better find the answers in her hometown. In the end, she has to make a decision that will change one of her lives.

The inspiration I have for this book is a song of 98° entitled Heaven’s Missing Angel. My original inspiration for the Drew was Zac Efron because I had a crush on him during the HSM days. And Xander is after Damon Salvatore of the TV Series.

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Thank you for allowing One World Singles Magazine Blog to host your virtual book tour and for taking the time out of your busy schedule to share your writing success with our readers. You are certainly a creative and prolific writer at such at young age. Moreover, the fact that you are studying nursing, while pursuing your writing career is a great inspiration to others who wish to follow their dreams.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer? I never really dream of being a writer. I wanted to be a singer or actor. I write lyrics that I had created out of nowhere every night before I hit the bed. But, I was able to construct short stories from my mind, even I was young. Music also was part of my stories, every music I listen to I can make a story out of it. There came my novel. When I had started, the main idea of my story out of song I had been listening one night I decided why not make a novel out of it. This was my very first novel and I was happy that I had it published.

What genre do you write and why? I write fictional fantasy romance; actually, it’s a love story not romance because it has a milder storyline than romance novels out in the market.

Why fictional fantasy romance? Fiction because my imagination was very wide and unpredictable, thoughts came popping out of my head. Fantasy, because I love characters out of fairytales and superstitious beliefs. I think their unique. Romance, I love a happy ending and I believe no one can live without love. Even it’s love for oneself, love for others or love for the common good. I also wanted to write adult fiction someday.

What formats is the book available in? It is only available in Paperback.

What do you like to do when you're not writing? Reading novels. I am really fond of reading; actually, I can finish a book more than a hundred pages in one day. I have read all the twilight books in two weeks. I also do my Hunger Games trilogy reading for a week. It’s like my comfort zone. I never really feel happier than finishing a good book to read.

Who are your favorite authors? I adore Nicholas Sparks; he is a great romance novelist. He makes tragedy and love story a better pair than anybody else. He makes Romeo and Juliet’s tragic love story relive over and over again. I also love L. J. Smith, and his supernatural novels like The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle.

What advice do you have for other writers? Each idea is unique after the others. So if you have a great story to tell, why not share it to others? And never stop doing what you want, even if others said that you can’t. Write, write and write.

What's your favorite quote about writing/for writers? The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain. George Buchanan

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish. Monica Dickens

What's the best thing about being a writer? Making my own world revolve. I can make up characters after the personality and traits I want them to be. I can tell what will happen and whom they’ll be with. I can put up my own world out of imagination, which I enjoy most.

Where can people find out more about you and your writing? My book has a fan page. The Angel Series: Fallen. I also have a twitter account where you can follow me. I’m also deciding about putting up a website or blog but I never even started one yet.

Anything else you'd like to add? My novel is out in Amazon.com now, you can get your copies there and if you had one tell me, I love to hear it. And I want to say, Thank you.

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For more information, and to order her book, please visit the author’s sites

Monday, April 16, 2012

An Erotica Author Who Never Goes Midway


Guess what? Bridget Midway’s contemporary interracial BDSM (can you hear the whip crack?) erotic romance novella "Carried Away" through Whispers Publishing is now on sale through All Romance eBooks! Her story is the third story that completes the series along with authors Yvette Hines ("Stealing the Bride") and Aliyah Burke ("If You Dare"). If you haven't already gotten their stories, don't wait! Be sure to get all 3! And yes, all 3 stories will be in 1 anthology called Taken, and it will be available in ebook and print in late April or May.


Synopsis of Carried Away

What happens when you can’t face your perfect man?

Summer Carter faces that dilemma as her two best friends, Kathryn Maynard and Leya Greenwood, convince her to honor their pact and take her adventure. She flees to a tropical Hawaiian paradise when she can’t face her online Dom, Xander. The reality of the relationship and what she really wants in a man is too much for her to face.

Xander Houston never saw himself as a Dom who would need to look for a submissive on a personals site. But when he encounters a witty and intriguing profile for a submissive named End of Summer, he strikes up a fast friendship with her. Months later, she still refuses to meet him face to face, and he tells her he’s going to take a break.

Coincidentally, both end up in Hawaii on separate vacations. When Xander finds her and figures out who she is, he cooks up a plan to sweep her off her feet, not as a Dom, but just as Xander.

When Summer discovers the truth, will she run away from her secret Dom or will she allowed herself to get carried away?

Author’s Sites:

Monday, April 09, 2012

Featuring Akinyi Princess K'Orinda-Yimbo, Author of Bound To Tradition



Akinyi Princess K'Orinda-Yimbo, Author

One World Singles Magazine Blog would like to welcome Akinyi Princess K'Orinda-Yimbo, Author of Bound To Tradition. She was gracious enough to take time out of her busy schedule to allow us to dialogue with her; she will discuss her latest short story, The Proposal, and talk about how she sees the world when it comes to her writings.


What inspired you to write your first book? Thanks for asking and for the interview. This was a personal and private experience that affected the relationship between me and my husband, so in a way Bound To Tradition is largely autobiographical. My short story, The Proposal, which I culled out of Bound To Tradition has been nominated for the 2012 Cain Prize which will be announced in April 2012.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp? That we may look at others outside our culture with cultural spectacles but we should never judge their culture with the same cultural specs. And that cultural bias need not be relegated to one cultural group or one corner of the world – it’s universal.

Do you have any words of wisdom for future authors? Keep on writing because that’s what you live for, cry for and pull out from that place inside you that only you can comprehend. And write what you’re most passionate about, not what is in publishing vogue or just sold for a six figure sum – unless this falls in line with what you’re passionate about.

Why should we buy your book? This is a book that’s unique in itself for the reasons I state above. But even more important, readers have not many authentic writers of continental African books, so that the books normally slip off their radar before they even sense it.

Is there a special place that you prefer when you write? Well, we’ve turned two rooms in the house into offices and mine has a huge French window through which I stare for miles into the dark Black Forest. It both calms me and gives me ideas. The very best is of course going for a long walk in the forest – alone.

How or when did you become a writer? I don’t remember the exact point in time when I decided to be a writer. From Mum’s belly or so. But I remember the subsequent when and why. I was in my preparatory school in Yorkshire and my English teacher asked the class to write a detective story about a towel missing from one of the dorms. So I said to myself (age 10 or thereabouts), “All right, Watson, let’s get down to work.” I named my detective Skylark Homes. And ended up with red marks and crossings all over my story – for the simple fact that I kept on writing: And the dick asked… The witness told the dick… The thief, after the dick had caught her red-handed… Finally the dick… I thought I was being really creative and so cool, with that diminutive. Not so my English teacher! I soon found out what other meanings are attached to that four-letter word.

What genres do you enjoy writing in? In fiction I’m really fond of the contemporary literary women’s with psychological insights. I’ve just written my first crime / suspense work which is being “handled” at the moment. The African element is always present in all my stories. No, no, I don’t have blonde heroines being bitten by poisonous snakes or catching malaria while trying to teach the Khoi-San of the Kalahari Desert how to utilise the post office. But a lot of my own makeup which is African-European or Western (you can’t escape that sort of nature when you’re placed in an English boarding school at age nine, being groomed into a hybrid English African aristocrat) are endemic in my writing. I’m a child of both cultures, so I’m more into relationships standing the test of cultural clashes. How the couple and their children (who tend to be affected by their being “neither nor” from the earliest stages of their development, especially following contact with the world outside their home) do or don’t overcome their unique problems. Recently, I had such a positive rejection from an editor at Penguin who was kind enough to read four of my works. I thanked the editor for spending all that time reading my stuff, and actually posted this killer rejection on the ’Net and earned a lot of support from some forum members, urging me to keep on reaching for the stars. I’ve thought about the romance genre and actually sent excerpts to Harlequin M&B. They told me to concentrate on the emotional conflict and the steamy bits rather than cultural aspects and their psychological nuances. I suppose I’ll give it a try. Some day soon, hopefully. My non-fiction writing, such as the book Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare: A Critical Observation of Neighbouring Continents, is also inundated with “Africa and the rest of the world” in terms of history, cultures, modern politics, the women of Africa and socio-economic issues.

Can you tell us how much of the marketing you do for your published works or indeed for yourself as a ‘brand’? This is where I’m most frustrated. I do my best in my website and monthly newsletter, I organise local readings and book-signings. But I’m a techno-ignoramus when it comes to the so-called social media networks. Copy and Paste, that’s me. When I accidentally hit the wrong button and the page suddenly looks alien, I’m out of it. I do have some presence there and my fair share of followers and fans, but one needs to invest so much time in these networks daily because whatever you post has such a short lifespan. Shorter than short. So one has to be a techno geek or hire one – which is an expensive route to take unless your name is Brown, Cornwell, Grisham or McDermid. I also started a couple of blogs but found that I had very little time to take care of them, and that, for a blog, is worse than having none at all. I cringe when I think of how many readers have called me names when they check for new postings for weeks and months and find only the same old same old. My sincere apologies!

As a writer, what has been your biggest challenge, trials or tribulations that you have overcome? I have received negative comments from two of my German readers of Bound To Tradition – KHIRAS TRAUM – which I could well understand. They had chosen the right book but were expecting the wrong literature; they were expecting that wrung dry clichéd Africa of diseases and misery and FMGs and child soldiers, etc. I don’t cater to that. Besides, the German version of my book doesn’t have the last chapter, making the readers miss the “happy end” bit. That’s something readers can’t forgive their author for.

Could you please give us a blur about your present or upcoming book? Golden Helena, twenty-two years old, is a Greek Cypriot endowed with the beauty to launch a thousand punches. A successful marketing executive at the Limassol Palace Hotel, her career is on the rise. Until she meets two cousins, Enrique and Ramón, thirty-three and twenty-nine respectively, from an old Catalonian family. It seems to be love at first sight. But in a triangle. However, Helena has a secret buried deep inside her that she wants to keep away even from herself: When she was five years old, she discovered that her parents, an aristocratic British mother and Greek architectural engineer father, are actually her adoptive parents. They have no idea who her biological parents are because they adopted her from a convent in Nairobi in 1982 when she was only three days old...

Please feel free to add a question that a reader might ask you, and answer that question. Well, I remember over Christmas 2011, I was invited to read at a Seniorenresidenz (a residence for seniors) as we prefer to call them here in Germany. And there I had up to multi generations of nearly each family present from 7 to 70, all packed in a dance hall to listen to my views. Then a lady stepped up to the mike and asked me if we also have Christmas in Africa (the western world tends to think of Africa as one land, not a continent). I told the gathering that Africa celebrated Christmas since the Copts in Ethiopia and Egypt in the 1st century. Christianity is Afro-Orient, not “European”. We had a lovely long discussion ranging from Europe never having ever had a religion that became a world religion to the Lalibela Cross and monolithic churches in Ethiopia. Lots of Aaaahs and Ooooohs. That’s what I meant at the beginning of this interview – the cultural specs we keep on our noses can be hindrances so that we refuse to see what’s right there on that very nose.

Please tell our readers something about yourself. Born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kisumu, the capital city of Luoland, Kenya, to the Luo royal houses of K’Orinda and Yimbo; then I was sent to a public school in Yorkshire, England, when I was nine. I’m a graduate journalist  and economist from the London Schools of Journalism and Economics with firsts. I moved to Bavaria, Germany, where I studied Germanistics and German specific economics. I’ve been writing as a freelance journalist since 1980, columnist with various dailies and monthly magazines in Africa and Europe. I give lectures and seminars in various German universities, colleges and high schools on topics ranging from socio-economy in Africa, Business English, African literature and the socio-ethnological conflicts in the traditions of Africans and Europeans in particular, and the West in general. I’ve written and published articles, papers, books and a novel in German: Khiras Traum. Then came my two novels Bound To Tradition and its sequel The Separation. My non-fiction book “Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare: A critical Observation of the Neighbour Continents” published in 2008 by a New York publisher. Bound To Tradition came out in Nov 2010 in the USA. The AuthorMe.com Group judges have just nominated my work, THE PROPOSAL, and submitted it for the 2012 Caine Prize which will be announced in April 2012 in London.  Full CV -  www.akinyi-princess.de. More works as yet unpublished and a children’s fantasy/thriller, crime and romance are in my website at this link http://akinyi-princess.de/326/Home/Book_Order.html I speak seven languages and live in Bavaria with husband, son and grandson.

How can our readers get in touch with you? They can join me on my website, register for free to receive my monthly newsletter on writing and my personal observations, they can join me on my Facebook to like me, read free chapters, like me and comment or follow me on Twitter.




Bound To Tradition is on:

Monday, April 02, 2012

Join the 5th Anniversary National Black Book Festival




Who will be there?

Dozens of Authors
Thousands of Readers
All Under One Roof

When:

June 8-10, 2012
Doubletree Hotel
400 Dallas St.
- Downtown
Houston, Texas

Contact Information:

National Black Book Festival
14300 Cornerstone Village Dr., Suite 370
Houston, TX 77014

Toll-free: 1-800-340-5454
In
Houston: (281) 444-4265
Fax: (281) 583-9534