I am very thankful to MuseItUp Publishing for taking a chance with The Wickware Sagas. There are five stories in all.  Billy Cooper's Awesome Nightmare, Book 1 - Ride of a Lifetime, Book 2, Flash to the Past, Book 3, Bumped Back In Time, Book 4 and Riches to Rags, Book 5.  All five stories are also available in the printed version of The Wickware Sagas.

http://museituppublishing.com/bookstore/index.php/our-authors/55-our-authors/authors-e/146-author-19

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wickware-Sagas-Penny-Estelle/dp/1499179502

I also have two other middle grade stories out, Hike Up Devil’s Mountain and A Float Down the Canal. I also have stories out there for the…”young at heart”.  More about me and my stories can be found....

http://www.amazon.com/Penny-Estelle/e/B006S62XBY

www.pennystales.com

www.pennyestelle.blogspot.com

https://twitter.com/Pennystales

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5820078.Penny_Estelle

http://pinterest.com/pennyestelle/pennystales/

I would love to offer a PDF copy of my stories in The Wickware Sagas to somebody that leaves a comment.

Thanks again, Iva, for having me today!




Thanks so much for the visit today, Penny! Great to have you on the blog!

Denver is a fabulous city. What is your favorite place in the world?
Home.  Favorite place to visit would have to be Las Vegas.   It’s so quintessentially American – money, privilege, bread and circuses.  An entire city built on false hope and poor math skills.  Every building—every brick—in the city, every one, is all that remains of someone’s dreams of wealth and success, and people still come.  Millions of them, every year, year after year, because hope is stronger than reason and logic and math and reality itself.  How can you not admire that? 


What is your favorite song?
Too many to narrow down, But Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is one of the top ones.


(Taking a quick moment to listen to the song online.) Ah ha! YES! I know this song. Very inspirational! So now, please tell us… when and why did you begin writing?
In grade school, right after I finished my first 1,000 word short story.  It was a piece of Pern fan fiction and to date I’ve been successful in making sure no one but my mother ever reads it.


What influences your writing?
Music, coffee, world events, games… anything can serve as inspiration under the right circumstances.  

Coffee is my very good friend as well! So delicious and motivational. What do you do when you're not writing?
That would be when I’m sleeping, so I’m probably dreaming, flouncing around, snoring, and fighting with the dog over the covers. 


I live with a very large German Shepard mix. He would love to fight me for the covers if he got a chance! Thankfully, he now has his very own, super comfy, orthopedic dog bed. What do you look for when you sit down to read for fun?
Memorable characters, an inspiring vision, command of the language, and an involving story.  You don’t need epic storylines, mass slaughter, or indecipherable intrigue to tell a story people will remember all their lives; Dr. Seuss did it with nothing more than, “A person is a person, no matter how small”. 
Of course, Dr. Seuss was the greatest writer in the history of the English language,  so your results may vary.


If you could meet anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you say to them?
There was a guy named John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American aviator who died in 1941 while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  He wrote this little poem called High Flight…
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."  
He was nineteen when he wrote that, and he did it in the cockpit of a Spitfire flying over Wales.  I don’t know what I could say to him that would mean anything, but, as long as we’re dreaming, I’d love to see what he comes up with after a ride in an SR-71 and a couple of days looking out the windows of the International Space Station.

Tell us about the current book you’re promoting.
The Land Beyond all Dreams is the sequel to Life With a Fire-Breathing Girlfriend.  Our narrator, David Fraser has a world of trouble on his hands. Well, more like three worlds of trouble…
His mother is dying of lung cancer. His employer’s experimental weight-loss drug is turning people into flesh-eating psychopaths. And Ingrim Thain, an undead necromancer, has murdered the program’s research director and taken over his body. If all that weren’t enough, a cat with working thumbs just moved into David’s house.
Thain doesn’t even want to be enemies—he offers David wealth and power beyond anything he’s ever known. He even offers to cure David’s mother and spare those he loves from the coming war. All Thain wants is for David to stay quiet about the drug’s side effects.
Do the right thing and his mother dies. Do the wrong thing, and his mother lives while billions of others die.
For David, the solution is simple. Thain’s appetite for conquest endangers not only Earth, but Rose’s world and every other world Thain learns about. Thain must be stopped.
But how is he going to kill someone whose will has already proven stronger than death itself?



 

Woo hoo! I can't wait to read the new book! How can we find you? Website, Facebook, blog, etc?
https://www.facebook.com/BryanFieldsAuthor

http://laughingotterslair.blogspot.com/


Okay, now for an excerpt from "The Land Beyond All Dreams":

The vet tech’s name tag said, ‘Robin’.  She took her stethoscope out of her ears and said, “Mr. Fraser, this cat shouldn’t be alive.” 

“Oh, good,” I said.  “If he’s dead, I don’t have to pay for shots, right?”   I gave her the most obnoxious used-car-salesman smile I could muster.  “Do you think a zombie cat would be enough to get me on Letterman?”

“He’s not actually dead,” Robin replied.  “Not completely, anyway.”

“So he’s only mostly dead.”  I shrugged.  “Well, that’s good, because otherwise I’d be stuck with going through his pockets for loose change, and he doesn’t have any pockets.”

The tech put her stethoscope away and backed out the staff door to the exam room.  “Please stay here,” she said.  “I’ll get Dr. Byers to come in and talk to you.”  She pulled the door closed behind her, leaving Rose and I alone with our temporary (and only mostly-dead) cat.  For his part, Thirteen folded his paws under himself and began doing a great impression of a meatloaf.

“Why are you teasing that poor child?” Rose asked.  “She’s already terrified of Thirteen.”

“I don’t like doctors who think they know everything,” I said.  “I had to deal with people like that over and over again when Mom first got her diagnosis.  All these doctors telling her what she was doing wrong and how long she was going to live, talking about treatment protocols as though she were a small variable in a huge, static equation.  It took her a year to get the team she has now together.  It may just be for pain management, but they treat her like a person instead of a case number.  They don’t agree with her decision, but they respect it and take care of her.”

A middle-aged woman wearing Hawaiian scrubs with a red bow tie and mismatched suspenders festooned with buttons came through the staff door.  She smiled and said, “Hello.  I’m the Doctor.  I hear we have a zombie cat today.  That’s just fab, I’ve got to see this.”

I smiled-for real, this time-and asked, “Just, ‘the Doctor’?”

“The one, the only, and the best,” she replied.  “At least until Dr. Warren gets here at noon.  Then I’m the best but not the only.  So, let’s see this big fella.”  She coaxed Thirteen into a sitting position and listened to his chest.  She pressed on his hips, shoulders, and stomach, looked at his teeth, and waved a light in his eyes.  She did a double take looking at his paws and pulled one up to get a better look.  Thirteen grabbed her finger, but she didn’t jump or pull away.  She got a closer look and shook her head.  “I hope your friend here is fixed, because we are in for a world of pain if his physical characteristics enter the general feline population.”

That got a response.  Thirteen backed away from Dr. Byers, making a wailing, full-throated battle cry.  His claws came out with an audible ‘snickt’, poised and ready for slashing.

Rose snickered.  “I think that’s a ‘no’ on becoming a eunuch.  Can’t say I blame him.”

“Doc, I doubt your liability insurance is up to the damage he’ll do to this place if we try to have him snipped.  How about a general wellness check and nothing else?”  I looked at Thirteen and asked, “Will that work for you?”

He retracted his claws and settled down, but his tail was still lashing and his eyes were locked on the doctor’s hands.

Dr. Byers held her hands up in surrender.  “We don’t do anything without the customer’s consent.  Just a wellness check it is.  Let’s start by checking for a microchip.”  She took a hand-held scanner out of a drawer and passed it over Thirteen’s back.  She paused, tapped a few buttons, and shook her head before smacking the side of the scanner.

I said, “You know, Doc, percussive maintenance is something best left to tech support professionals.  You have an IT person around somewhere?”

“No, but we have Lisa.”  Dr. Byers opened the staff door and called out, “Lisa, could you come here a minute?  The chip scanner is on strike again.”

A redhead with sleek, narrow-framed glasses and more hair than Rose and I combined leaned into the room.  “Are you using the AVID or the Trovan?  The AVID has issues with the old Home Again chips.”

“The Trovan, and that’s not the issue.  I’m getting a signal.  Have a look.”  Byers handed the reader to Lisa and stood back.

“Hmm…”  Lisa flipped a few switches, tapped a button, and said, “I think I’ve got it.  The chip may just be really slow to power up.  Let’s see what we’ve got.”  She studied the readout for a few seconds more before shaking her head.  “The coil is powered up, but the chip itself is fried.  All I’m getting off of it is garbage.”

Byers asked, “What would cause that?”

“Physical damage to the integrated circuit, but anything that could damage the chip would leave scars on the animal.”  Lisa set the scanner down and donned latex gloves.  “Let’s see if we can find anything.”

She reached for Thirteen and a small key fob dangling from her watch started shrieking.  Lisa pulled her hand back, muttering, “That’s not good.”  She took her watch off and pulled a leather case out of one of the pockets on her lab coat.

“Angry cat detector?”  I asked.   

“No,” she replied.  “Personal radiation detector.”  She took a device the size of a box of breath mints out of the case and plugged it into her phone.  “And this is an analyzer/dosimeter that came out in Japan after the Fukushima release.  Yeah, there’s an app for that.”

Lisa placed the detector next to Thirteen and the radiation graph on her phone display started spiking up.  She watched it until it settled down to a steady range and tapped the median line.  “Your friend is giving off about two millisieverts an hour.  That’s about as much as getting a mammogram every fifteen minutes.” 

“No wonder he felt odd,” Rose muttered.  She cleared her throat and asked, “Is that level dangerous to us?”

“The annual safety limit for people who work with radioactive materials on a daily basis is five hundred millisieverts.  A year living with him will put you over three times that.  If you want him as a pet, I suggest you buy some lead underwear.” 

Meet My Characters Blog Hop~Meet Gemma Mayfield from “Black Cats and Ballet Slippers.”


Hi everyone! I was invited to participate in this blog hop by Pamela Turner.
You can read her post here: http://www.pamela-turner.com/2014/08/meet-my-characters-blog-hop.html

First, here's a bit of info about Pamela Turner:

Author Bio:

Pamela Turner drinks too much coffee, and wishes she could write perfect first drafts. Influenced by shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, and Twilight Zone, she writes paranormal suspense. Publications include the short novels Death Sword, a finalist in the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ Blue Ribbon Paranormal Awards 2013, Exterminating Angel (both from Kensington Publishing’s Lyrical Press imprint), and The Ripper’s Daughter (BlackWyrm Publishing). Her short, dark suspense story, “Family Tradition”(MuseItUp Publishing), was a finalist in the EPIC 2014 EBook Awards, and her short screenplay “Cemetery” placed second in The Writers Place Short/Teleplay screenplay competition. She’s a member of RWA, Sisters in Crime, EPIC, and a supporting member of HWA. Besides coffee, she likes cats, cemeteries, and old abandoned buildings. You can find her at http://pamelaturner.net

Thanks, Pamela, for the invitation!

Now, I’m supposed to choose one character from a work-in-progress or a recently published book and answer seven easy questions. Here goes!

What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?

The name of my fictional character is Gemma Mayfield, from “Black Cats and Ballet Slippers.”

 When and where is the story set?

This story takes place in present day. Gemma spends most of her time at Middleton Middle School, at home, or at dance class.

What should we know about him/her?

Gemma loves ballet! She lives with her parents and little sister, Becky. She also has a black cat named Mungo. Gemma wishes she could have a good hair day once in a while.

What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Gemma is convinced that her teacher, Ms. Pruett, is a witch. Gemma thinks that Ms. Pruett is casting spells on kids at her school. She gets especially worried when her crush, Trevor, has a huge spell cast on him.

What is the personal goal of the character?

Gemma is determined to save Middleton Middle School from witchcraft! Especially since she would like to have Trevor safe and sound so he can take her to the Halloween Dance.

Is there a working title for this novel and can we read more about it?

The title of this book is “Black Cats and Ballet Slippers,” from MuseItUp Publishing. Here is a blurb:

Gemma Mayfield feels like middle school is a lot to bite off and chew. School, ballet classes, and planning on how to get Trevor Davis to ask her to the Halloween Dance are a tough balancing act. On top of that, Gemma is convinced that her science teacher, Ms. Pruett, is a witch.

When things start getting fishy at school, Gemma knows that Ms. Pruett is behind it all! Students are getting spells placed on them and start to go missing. Gemma and her best friend, Izzie, vow to stop Ms. Pruett from doing any more damage. Will they be able to save Middleton Middle School from witchcraft?

MuseItUp Publishing: https://museituppublishing.com/bookstore/index.php/now-available-in-ebook/black-cats-and-ballet-slippers-detail






Next on the Meet My Characters Blog Tour will be Sheri Chapman!


 

Author Bio:

Sheri Chapman lives in southwest Missouri with her husband, four of their eight combined children, and their many pets.  Pomeranians are a special love of Sheri's.  She raises them as part of her obsessions. 
 
Sheri currently is a high school teacher in Missouri Public Schools (Ozark).  She works with freshman English students and students with mild disabilities.  She graduated from Missouri State University with Bachelor's and Master's degrees.  Then, thinking she wanted to go into administration, obtained a second Master's and a Specialist Degree from Lindenwood University.  After playing with her fluffy cotton balls (Poms), Sheri's career goals changed from becoming a principal to Pomeranian-raising.  Her new ambitions include retiring early (in five years) to write books and raise Pomeranians. 
 
Sheri enjoys many things in life.  Aside from reading and writing, she enjoys jogging with friends, watching sporting events of her children's, jewelry making, drawing, Face Booking, and many more things.  She loves hanging out with friends and doing things in nature.  Floating is a special love. 
 
You can find Sheri at:
 
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSheriChapman?ref=hl 
 
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3936670212999729963#allposts/src=dashboard
 
http://sherichapman.weebly.com/

In the beginning, there were cats and tutus. (Not to be confused with cats IN tutus.)

This past Sunday, my mom came over to have brunch at our house. In the spirit of Mother's Day, she brought over a bunch of old photo albums of me as a kid. It's probably not a surprise that there were plenty of me in some sort of ballerina outfit! Plus, there were lots of photos of the various kitties I had while I was growing up. 

I have to say that I LOVE looking at photos of me as a kid! Some people cringe and think they look horrible dorky in their childhood photos, but I have no problem with this. I even enjoy looking at my middle school pics, where dorkiness was the norm and life was a pile of awkwardness. 

This is a photo of me with my first kitty, Misty. This was in 1983 and I was three years old. Misty moved with us across the country, from Ohio to Arizona!

Here is Pretzel, the only white cat that I've ever had. Pretzel was ALWAYS trying to eat my food.

The kitty that was with me the longest was Klaus. I had him for seventeen amazing years! This is one of my dorky middle school pics…I think I'm about twelve in this photo. I used to love that tie-dye t-shirt! It was one of the ones that changed color when your body temp changed. Ahhhh…the 90's!

In this photo, I was getting ready for my performance at the Dance Factory. This was one of my first dance recitals. I was about seven at the time.

Here I am in 1989, leaping for joy at France Dance Academy!

This is my first pointe shoe performance in 1992. Another awkward middle school photo. What is up with those socks?

Thanks, Mom, for sharing these awesome photos. Great memories and lots of inspiration!

"So, what inspired you to write the book?" This is a question I've been getting a lot since Black Cats and Ballet Slippers was released a month ago. 

I don't mind this question at all. It's a great question! I mean, just thinking about the word…INSPIRATION!!!…makes me feel pretty inspired. So, here's all the stuff that made me want to write the book:

First of all, I'm a cat person. And a dog person, too. Okay, let's just say I'm an animal person overall. (I keep telling my husband I am going to open up a shelter for crazy rescue animals in our home and that he is going to love it!) So, that's where the black cats part comes in. You gotta love the cats.

Now, for the dance part. I've been dancing since I was a kid. First it was ballet, with the tutus and recitals and pink slippers. Then I moved on to modern dance in college. Now, it's anything, really…hip hop, Zumba, Afro-Brazilian, Nia, DJ Dance Cardio. I love it all! As long as I get to dance a few times a week, I am a happy camper.

The idea for the story really came about when I was teaching middle school many years ago. The book's main character, Gemma Mayfield, thinks her teacher is a witch and wants to prove it. Her teacher, Ms. Pruett, has a bunch of weird witchy ingredients in her prep room and casts spells on kids. 

Well…I had a prep room once with a lot of old wacky stuff in it, too. Over the years, teachers who had been in the room before me had added to the collection of jars, flasks, old lab supplies, unidentifiable objects, you name it. No one ever cleaned it out, so it just kept accumulating. Then I came along. Of course, I didn't clean it out, either, and just added my own junk to it. I didn't have any organizational motivation whatsoever. However, what I DID have was imagination! Ta da! All of the boring, dusty layers of junk turned into "witchy" ingredients before my eyes. Add this to the cats and the dance, and Black Cats and Ballet Slippers was born!

I'd also like to add that I like ice cream, sunsets, castles, and the color green. And cheesy popcorn. Those are a few of my favorite things and excellent sources of everyday inspiration!