New Release Spotlight: The New Mrs. Collins by Quanie Miller

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for the next book to add to your reading queue. Well, you don’t have to look far because Quanie Miller has just released her new paranormal novel, The New Mrs. Collins.

The cover alone draws you in but here’s a blurb to give you an idea what you’re really in for:

In the small town of Carolville, Louisiana, no one knows that Adira Collins inherited mystic powers from her great grandmother. All they know is that she’s beautiful, poised, graceful, and ruthless—especially when it comes to love. And no one knows that more than Leena Williams, who was all set to marry the man of her dreams until Adira swooped into town and stole the man’s heart.

Being left at the altar is bad enough, but Leena and her ex share custody of their son, so she has to see the new Mrs. Collins on a regular basis.

And it burns every time she does.

But soon, Leena starts to suspect that there is more to Adira Collins than meets the eye. And it’s not because she owns some kinky lingerie shop or allegedly insulted the pastor’s wife—it’s the strange way she can make a door close without touching it, or take one look at something and make it drop dead at her feet.

Leena starts digging for answers and soon discovers that, unlike her public persona, Adira’s true nature is somewhere on the other side of grace. She also learns, a little too late, that some secrets are better left buried.

Now, if that’s not enough for you, Quanie has so graciously given us an excerpt to get our juices going. Check it out.

          She was on her knees in the back yard when she heard the unmistakable sound of Johnny’s truck pulling into the driveway. She turned her head slightly to the right and got up just as calmly as Ronetha Powell had done the night she put a bullet in her husband’s head. She had done it so calmly. Walked in there while he was watching Wheel of Fortune, put the gun to his head, fired, put the gun down, and then went to Wednesday night revival and sang “Somebody Prayed for Me” with such vigor that the visiting pastor singled her out and shouted, “Woman of God! You are blessed!”

          It was two days before they found Mr. Powell. Before that, Ronetha had merely stepped over him like he was a bunched up rug that she didn’t feel like straightening out again. She was taking her meatloaf out of the oven when they surrounded her house. When Leena saw Ronetha on the front page of the Carolville Daily, being taken away in handcuffs, she thought to herself that Ronetha looked as serene as a river on Sunday morning. In some odd way, Leena felt the same thing. Serenity. It washed over her as she quietly opened the door and tiptoed through the ice cold house, which, for some reason, was blanketed in shades of yellow. She heard movement upstairs and knew that Johnny was in the bedroom. She walked to the kitchen and set a pot of water on to boil.

          She walked slowly up the carpeted stairwell thinking that she should have changed that beige carpet long ago. When she got to the bedroom and saw Johnny — putting a picture of them face down on the nightstand — the shades of yellow that had intruded upon her vision turned stark raving red. Still clutching the letter in her right hand she cocked her arm back and hit that son of a bitch for all he was worth.

Wow, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get started on this book!

Here’s where you can get your copy:

Amazon (US): http://www.amazon.com/New-Mrs-Collins-Quanie-Miller-ebook/dp/B00OAC362I

Amazon (UK): http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Mrs-Collins-Quanie-Miller-ebook/dp/B00OAC362I

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/483357

A little bit about the author:

Quanie Miller grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana. She fell in love with reading at an early age and spent most of her time at the Iberia Parish Library discovering authors like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike (she was often found walking back home from the library with a stack of books that went up to her chin). She holds degrees from Louisiana State University and San Jose State University. She has been the recipient of the James Phelan Literary Award, the Louis King Thore Scholarship, the BEA Student Scriptwriting Award, and the Vicki Hudson Emerging Writing Prize. She is the author of The New Mrs. Collins, a southern paranormal novel, and It Ain’t Easy Being Jazzy, a romantic comedy. She lives in South Carolina with her husband and is currently, as always, working on another novel. To find out more about Quanie and her works in progress visit quanietalkswriting.com.

Other places to contact Quanie:

Twitter: @quaniemiller

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/QuanieMillerAuthor

Blog: http://www.quanietalkswriting.com

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/QuanieMiller

Website: quaniemiller.com

Email: quanie@quanietalkswriting.com

 

Sifting Through Mud with Demetria Foster Gray

As the world of blogging goes, you tend to e-meet (yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that word used somewhere before) a lot of people. One such person that I have had the pleasure of getting acquainted with is Demetria Foster Gray. Her blog, Shaken But Not Stirred, often offers insight about everyday life. To describe it, in her own words, it “showcases human behavior in its purest form to unveil how we navigate around, under, over, and through our daily existence. Because the point is, even though we get shaken up by life, it’s up to us to not be stirred”.

Demetria recently debuted her novel, Sifting Through Mud, which I literally just finished reading, and I’m really excited to shine the spotlight on her today.

Sifting Through Mud is a superb story of friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness. Demetria does a fantastic job weaving together two characters’ unlikely friendship by telling both their points of view: Nyla, the widow who unknowingly befriends the pregnant mistress of her dead husband, Nathan, and Vivian, the said mistress who initially tries to fight off their impending friendship. These two women fall in “like” with one another and find themselves connected emotionally whether they want to be or not.

Here’s a peek inside the story:

      Nathan is in the family room watching sports on TV. My handbag and car keys are on the foyer table next to the flower arrangement I sent myself yesterday for our twentieth wedding anniversary. I grab my keys, my handbag, and open the front door. I pause in the doorway to look back over my shoulder, at the life I lived here. Then silently, almost invisibly, I walk out the door.

      I have no idea where I’m going. All I feel is the overwhelming burden of where I’ve been. The toll and heaviness of an undesired life. For now, a hotel will have to do. One where no one can find me, and has big, fluffy pillows to hold my tears and muffle my screams. Tomorrow, when Nathan’s at work, I’ll go back for a few personal things. All I have now are the clothes on my back—clothes which are hanging wearily from my marriage-torn body.

      The truth of the matter is, I’m a murderer. I’ve killed the one person who could’ve saved me—myself. I’ve traveled down this lifeless road for far too long, and now I’m stuck in blandness. I miss the flavor of life. The pleasure and joy of actually feeling feelings, instead of faking feelings. Faking joy, faking happiness. I’m living life without the spice of life and it’s taking its toll on me.

      But thank God the dead has now risen, and it’s time for me to take back my life. To absolve my death. Which is precisely what I did over dinner this evening while Nathan was eating in front of the TV, and I was dining alone at the kitchen table. I asked myself two questions: (1) How much longer can I play a role that’s no longer suited for me?, and (2) How much longer can I hold my breath when all I want to do is breathe? The answers to those questions are what caused me to rise from the table, grab my handbag, and walk out the door.

      The thing is, I don’t know how to love my husband anymore. Or if I ever loved him at all. It seems I did. I must have. But I just don’t know anymore. It’s exhausting spinning your wheels in a marriage that doesn’t seem to move. Not forward, not backwards, just stalled. Stagnant. A lot of bitterness accompanies stagnation. A lot of anger. A lot of slicing each other apart, and chewing each other up. It’s treacherous. It’s sad. It’s time to move on.

      After driving for a half hour to the next town, I find a nice hotel with clean, spacious rooms, a deep Jacuzzi tub, fresh linens, and a complimentary hot breakfast in the morning. Nathan will be calling me when it becomes the middle of the night and I haven’t returned home. He’ll wonder where I am with a slight bit of concern. Or perhaps he’ll sleep like a log through the night and never give my absence a second thought. Either way, I’ve turned off my cell phone. His concern or lack of concern is no longer an issue for me.

You can grab your copy of Sifting Through Mud here: Amazon.com

Congratulations, Demetria, on your release!

About the author:

Demetria Foster Gray is a novelist, freelance writer, and communications consultant. She earned a degree in Marketing Communications and spent the bulk of her career writing for the corporate world. Creating fictional characters and building stories has always been her first love. A native of the Chicago, IL area, Demetria now lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. Sifting Through Mud is her debut novel.

Places you can contact Demetria:

Her website: Demetria Foster Gray – Author

Facebook: Demetria Foster Gray, Author

Twitter: @DFosterGray

The Book Abduction

This past Saturday I took a book back to the library that I literally had checked out six times to finish it. Each check-out is three weeks long and you’re only allowed to renew a book twice. That’s nine weeks and I couldn’t finish the damn thing! I had to turn it back in—relinquish it to the library, let them check it in, and then stalk the reshelving area so that I could check it out again and again…and yet again. So, yep, I held the book hostage for a total of eighteen weeks. I’m not proud but at least I didn’t incur any fines.

It’s not that the book was bad but for some reason I couldn’t push myself to just sit down and read it. It usually doesn’t take me that long to read a book. Not even if it’s bad. And I’m quite embarrassed to even admit it took me over four months to finish one. The author wasn’t someone I had read before and I had gotten it because it was a top-ranked suspense/thriller. How ironic—a suspense that wasn’t exactly keeping me suspended. I would get through a chapter, put the book down and get caught up with other things for a few days. Then I would remember that I still needed to read this book for which time was ticking towards the due date. I couldn’t even blame it on reading another book at the same time, which I sometimes do.

I could have easily given up but I was determined I was going to finish it. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. Plus I didn’t want all those previous renewals to have been for naught.

Photo Courtesy: Flickr.com

I hit a good stride about midway to three-fourths through. Needless to say when I was finally finished, I was elated to drop that puppy in the return slot and walk away. Of course, I had no intentions of checking anything else out because I had already started reading a juicy romance, one of twelve books waiting in queue on my Kindle. It was a nice change from the intense thriller that I had committed my life to the last few months. Welp, (yes, I said welp) I couldn’t just walk away from the library without looking around. No harm in looking, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m a book junkie. That means I can’t leave the library without something in my little navy blue canvas bag with Friends of FCPL printed on the front. Why else would I have ever purchased said bag?

Before I knew what was happening, I was skipping out the front door with three books, all by another author I wasn’t familiar with.

Three weeks, three books. Should be easy-peasy, right? Hopefully I won’t be writing another blog post of how I held these books captive.

Have you ever had trouble finishing a book, good or bad? Have you ever held a borrowed book prisoner?

Make Your Journey A Good One

A few weeks ago I was driving down one of the main streets in my town and the marquee outside one of the carpet stores donned the quote “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one”. Considering New Year’s had just come in, I knew those words were meant to remind those who were wiping their slates clean to moving cautiously forward with their resolutions, having 365-days to do so.

Pic Courtesy of M. Kinnel

After a week of driving past this same sign, I really thought how as writers, we basically live by a similar code each time we sit down to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Granted, we don’t all write books. Sometimes it’s a poem, short story, a blog post, a non-fiction piece—well, you get the drift.

In essence, when a writer sets out to start a project, they are starting with a blank page, a fresh start. And it’s so invigorating when the creative words spill upon that blank page that it can make one giddy. To be able to bring our inner voices to life on paper is almost like some sort of validation our characters and their worlds are real. They are not just some imaginary friends we talk to on a daily basis.

Now, not everything that spills upon that page will be seen by the eyes of the world. I know personally I have a dozen or more pieces secreted away that will never see the light of day because they are just not that great. But I have to admit that those not-so-great pieces needed to be written in order for me, as a writer, to move on. Almost like a brain-purge. They are part of my writing journey.

Think about it, a basketball player may spend hours in her backyard practicing her jump shot on her homemade hoop. Chances are, no one will ever see her hitting or missing those shots but none of that matters. The efforts matter and are part of that player’s passage to becoming the best player she can become.

So, yes, every time writers pull up a blank page to begin a project, we are doing so with the intentions of writing the best whatever we can write and bringing those stories to life. And even if no one ever sees them, you can chalk it up as part of the path you are taking to become a better writer; whatever that means to you, just make sure your journey is a good one.

“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.” ~ Brad Paisley

Scratch That

Photo Courtesy: Google

Nine and half months. That’s how long it’s been since I posted here. Sometimes life takes you on an unexpected journey. Scratch that. Life is an unexpected journey. You never quite know what will pop up. There are constant potholes in the road but you just have to learn how to drive around them. Cliché, huh?

I wish that I could say the reason I’ve neglected my blog is because I was traveling the world headlining a book tour, eating exotic foods and living the life of a best-selling author. I wish. But, alas, I’ve just been living life, unsuccessfully driving around potholes. Potholes galore. Way more than I can handle. See, you knew that cliché was going to come into play here somewhere, didn’t you?

I won’t make excuses about being inattentive to my writing. All writers have life issues and they still manage to write through them. Since I’m not perfect, I can honestly say, I become easily distracted by

Photo Courtesy: RGBStock/lusi

my problems and therefore, my writing becomes somewhat secondary. But I recognize that there is a problem. That’s half the battle, I suppose. Recognizing the problem.

And although I haven’t been writing on a regular schedule lately, my characters have still been acting out their discord within my head. They never seem to go away which is such a wonderful thing for a writer. Sometimes they roar too loudly. Sometimes they whisper and I have to strain to figure out what they’re saying. But as long as there is something there, that’s all that matters. Because when their voices go mute, that’s when I really have something to worry about.

Have you ever taken an extended hiatus from writing because life threw you some curve balls? Or are you able to push through any crisis and write your heart out?