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This is my third review for the H.U.B. series and I have yet to be disappointed. From volume 1 to volume 3, you can tell that an all out war between humans and vampires will be erupting pretty soon. I LOVE the way Ben is writing this series, with a sense of modern times. His word choices are impeccable. It's almost as if I can visualize what is going on, as if the characters are jumping off of the page and performing in HD in my living room. All I have to say is that i'm waiting for volume 4 to drop because they messed around and kill Malachi's woman so I KNOW its going down. Good Job Ben! I rated this volume with 4.5 stars.
This was a really good read. Many women can relate to having that one hating ass female family member or associate that constantly competes with you when you had no idea that a competition was in play. In this book, that female was Nikki. I wished I could reach into the pages and pull her hair (though I'm not the violent type). Nikki was willing to screw any dude she thought was a "baller" just so she could show her cousin, Kira, that she could be wifey material as well. Nikki believed that Kira was always hating on her when all Kira was really trying to do was to keep her from falling flat on her face and looking silly in the end. Kira was real laid back and low key because she had her pit falls that comes with balling on illegal terms so the glitz and glamour weren't all the glamorous to her anymore. My only issue with this novel is the ending. Kira's fiance turned out to be a serial rapist and killer. Once she found out, she decided to blackmail him. It was mentioned that a blackmail letter was mailed to him when she actually confronted him on the phone. It's very important as a writer to make sure your story stays interlocked all the way to the very end. So with that goof, I rated this novel with 4 stars.
This was the first book I've read by Carl Weber. I must say that I was a bit disappointed. The ending was predictable halfway through the book and very unrealistic. My major turnoff was the homosexuality; a male cheating on his wife with her male best friend and the best friend loved turning so called "straight men" out. I mean, has it really come to this? It's already a sickening reality in my society so when I want to pick up a book and escape with a GOOD read, I don't want to be slapped with the same reality written between pages. Give us something that we can relate to but on an unexpected " well dayum" kind of level. I'm sure he is a good author and I may read something else that he has written but I give this one 3 stars out of 5
Julius Thompson grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York and attended Bushwick High School. The sixties in Brooklyn was an era that had a personality, a feel, and a life-force that changed a generation. Mr. Thompson felt this energy and experienced these fires of social change.
After high school, Mr. Thompson spent the next four years riding the "A" train to Harlem, in upper Manhattan, to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from the City College of New York. At CCNY, which was located just a few blocks from the famous Apollo Theater, Wednesday afternoons was hard on the undergraduates. The matinee performances of the major R&B groups of the times were more tempting than attending a boring college lecture. Most of the time Mr. Thompson succumbed to the temptation, but still earned a college degree from one of the best universities in the country.
At CCNY, literature instructors like Prof. Thomas Tashiro, fueled the fire in him to become a writer! Brooklyn, New York and attended
Mr. Thompson’s journey to compose a trilogy began in 1995. The fourteen year fictional journey of character Andy Michael Pilgrim from Brooklyn, to Philadelphia and finally Atlanta is now complete. In this pilgrimage, readers experience places that are filled with hopes, dreams, challenges and fears that make us human.
The novels that make up the trilogy are A Brownstone in Brooklyn which was published in 2001, Philly Style and Philly Profile in 2007 and Ghost of Atlanta which will be published the first week of January 2011.
Mr. Thompson received the Georgia Author of the Year nomination for Philly Style and Philly Profile, from the Georgia Writers Association, in 2007.
Mr. Thompson is writing his fourth novel, Purple Phantoms, which is a story about the haunting of a mythical high school basketball team.
Mr. Thompson is currently a Creative Writing/Publishing Instructor at Atlanta’s Evening at Emory’s Writers Studio. For more information please visit him at www.ghostofatlanta.com.
About Ghost of Atlanta:
In The Ghost of Atlanta, Andy Michael Pilgrim faces demons from his youth that haunted his life. These are the ghosts in the crawl spaces of his life; some are real and some supernatural.
After landing a job with The Atlanta Defender, Andy returns home and visits the place where he finally faces remembrances of his deceased abusive father. While walking around the grounds, he meets his mysterious cousin, Joe Boy, and finds out that the property is going to be sold by unscrupulous cousins.
While Andy fights this battle, he must confront the personal demon of a possible drug addiction, breaking the color barrier at the south’s largest newspaper, The Atlanta Defender, meeting his old girl friend and fighting the lingering effects of segregation in small-town Georgia life.
As the story unwinds, all these forces push Andy toward the breaking point, where he almost quits on life. Malevolent mortal deeds are committed and Andy could be next in line.
"The Ghost of Atlanta" is, overall, a superbly written book. 5 stars!~Readers Favorite
Dominique returns with her sixth book, second volume to her poetry collection The Tension Reliever. In this volume you get to see a different side of the author. Poetry has always been her first love. In The Tension Reliever; Another Side of Me you meet Almond Eyes Diva, another side of Dominique. Sit back and enjoy great poetry that pours out from the author deep within and meet the side of her she’s finally ready to reveal.
Author HD Hatcher is no newcomer on the literary scene. He is author of In the Heart of the Closet, a piece nominated for both the 2006 Stonewall Book Award and the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. He is an avid supporter of gay and lesbian causes, suicide prevention programs, as well as Animal Rights. Hatcher currently resides in the Grand Strand area of South Carolina, near his hometown of Conway, with his Life Partner of ten years, Jerry.
About A Cold Dark Place:
On a chance meeting, (at a mutual friend’s house) Luke finds the love of his life. Andy is what Luke has been longing for all of his adult years: the perfect man. But, this perfect man is not only straight—he is married to a woman who is more devilish than Satan himself.
In a bittersweet journey that will change his life forever, Luke must reach deep inside and find the strength he never knew existed. A Cold Dark Place is the story of a man who must pick up the pieces of his broken heart after a lifetime of heartbreak and betrayal.
Who the heck am I? My name is Lisa Rusczyk Hazard and I’m a writer and freelancer. I publish books under the name Lisa Rusczyk. I like to write in a variety of genres and try different things out each time I write a book. My latest novel , Chasing the Dark , published by Passionate Writer Publishing, was quite experimental for me.
I wrote the book in a week of furious typing. Most of my books take at least a year to write. The first draft was a mess. Over the years, I’d pick it up and fix stuff, and finally felt like it was ready to be published last summer. I wrote it in 2003. My editor did a wonderful job of fixing it up even more.
The thing I’m most excited about these days is my cat, Spooky. I have six cats, and one boy and one girl are not “fixed,” on purpose. Spooky, the girl with the long, soft tortie fur and the big green eyes who charms every person and cat in the world, is newly pregnant. Could our boy Osho be the dad?
Cats really do fall in love. Osho follows Spooky around wherever she goes. They sleep together. They prowl the yard together. If another boy cat comes near Spooky, Osho gets between them and howls. He is so madly in love with her – it’s adorable. When she walks in a room he’s snoozing in during a rare time they aren’t already together, his eyes light up, he jumps off the couch or bed, and runs to her, rubbing his face all along her cheeks and side.
Here’s to hoping one of the many suitors who came calling for Spooky isn’t the dad. I can’t wait to have kittens in the house! It will be great fun. And if you live near North Alabama, you can have one of these adorable kittens! They are destined to be epic.
About Chasing the Dark:
Melanie’s a budding artist always looking for the next high. She finds it one night when Sora and Josh take her on an ambulance-chasing ride. They watch a gruesome scene as the bodies are removed from the wreckage. Melanie doesn’t know why, but she is both attracted to this new pursuit and afraid of where it will take her.
The chasing brings Melanie closer to the mysterious Sora, his secret past, and the darker things that happen in the city at night. Along the way Melanie must face her own demons while escaping the drug dealing business.
Join Melanie and her friends Shara, Manny, Max, Sora and Josh as they confront and chase away their own personal demons.
Bullying was once considered a harmless rite of passage. Some were either bullied in school or they were the bully. What was once considered an acceptable practice has now been drawn into the limelight by the national attention of highly publicized suicides due to bullying.
Bullying can take on different forms. Bullying is not just a physical act but can also be an emotional, written, or verbal act as well. Bullying can take place in the workplace, school, online, and even while we are traveling in our vehicles on the road. Bullying is a form of abuse that has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and civilized nations across the globe.
When bullying goes too far, the end result is sometimes suicide. Suicide should never become an option. One life lost to this senseless way, is one too many!
Seven authors (Jo Davis, HD Hatcher, Omegia Keeys, Autumn Prince, Lisa Rusczyk, KJ Thompson, and Vogue) have joined forces to send one message. That message is, “You are not Unloved!” Unloved is an anthology dedicated to those who have been the victim of bullying, or know someone who has been bullied.
All proceeds from Unloved will go to charities in support of Bully Prevention and/or Suicide Prevention.
Shanda Sharlow began writing short stories from the time she could hold a pencil. Through the years, she's scribbled down thousands of pages of random stories and unfinished novels that were eventually abandoned or forgotten about. In 2005, she set down to finish a full fantasy novel in the form of the Psyonic, which she managed in a few months. For awhile, she shelved the book without any way to get it realistically published. After Amazon Kindle came out, she found the opportunity to release the Psyonic to the public, and is now working on another full novel. Currently, she lives in Vancouver WA with her father and brother, and edits novels for other people when she's not writing.
The original plot of the Psyonic was meant to be a short story. At most I expected it to be two chapters, and thus the story itself is a simple one. Once I wrote it, however, things changed and a short story simply wouldn't do. An entire novel's worth of plot and characters and twists and turns unraveled as I went along, and before I knew it there was an entire novel and a world around that story sitting complete.
The Psyonic is Fantasy, and classic, medieval setting, in fact. It is not, however, a classic Fantasy. It takes bits and pieces of concepts commonly seen in Fantasy and changes and mixes them about. Magic users aren't really 'magic' users at all, and they're reviled rather than loved. Princesses can scheme just as much as the seediest adviser or Queen, and there's nothing glamorous about inter-kingdom politics. And there certainly are no prophecies. The people would drive out a prophet long before he could say anything they'd remember.
The Psyonic took about four months to write, from July to October. It was my first completed novel, and was written when I was fifteen years old. It wasn't the first novel I ever started, but it was certainly the first I finished, which makes me a bit fond of it for that reason. After all, it's something to start a book...but it's a completely different thing to actually finish it.
Sometimes when I write books, I consider what actors and actresses would best fit the characters should they be made into movies. Sometimes they're ridiculous idealistic or impossible choices that could never actually be chosen, even if the books were ever made into movies, sometimes they're choices that I could believe would work even age-adjusted. With The Psyonic...I have no choices picked out. This isn't a lack of faith in the book, but the fact that the images I have of the characters in my head don't seem to line up with any actors or actresses I've come across before.
So, I suppose, if there's ever a casting call, they'll have to pick an entire cast of unknowns.
I listened to one mix-tape sound track over and over again while I was writing the book. Listening to music while writing helps to grease the writing wheels and allows me to actually write at a much quicker speed. Of course...while I was writing The Psyonic, I didn't really have access to much music to listen to, and wasn't all that motivated to look to more, so one long tape is all I listened to. Over and over and over.
It's entirely possible there are parts of the book which, if you knew the songs on the mix tape, you would find they synched up well with it.
Synopsis - Hale lived his entire life in hiding, traveling through slums and nondescript villages, never staying anywhere long enough for the people there to recognize his face. Never staying long enough for anyone to ferret out his secret.
When he comes across a woman who recognizes him, he becomes the confidante of a Princess. Yet the halls of the palace hold far more danger than that of the streets, for within its shadows lurk dark mysteries and murderous intent. Desperate to remain hidden from those who hunt him, Hale must unravel the hidden machinations of the gathered royal families before it's too late, or it will be more than his life that he loses.
