Glowing Reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING
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Glowing Reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING

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Glowing reviews of The Year of Loving

Two great review sites recently put up excellent reviews of my latest novel THE YEAR OF LOVING.

The first site is Mrs. Mommy Booknerd’s Book Reviews. What a cool title for a book enthusiast’s site, and what a terrific model for her children! She’s publicly proud to be a Booknerd. Kudos to Mrs. Mommy.

Mrs. Mommy Booknerd wrote,

This book is a realistic romance that will have you guessing and touches on many areas…love, motherhood, life, struggle, romance, friendship, betrayal and so much more.  The main character is raw and harsh, but also funny and smart.  This book is one that romance readers will certainly enjoy.
The other review was posted by reviewer HCharju on a big review site called Night Owl Reviews. I like Night Owl Reviews, a lively, appealing site with great integrity and great reviewers.
 
HCharju selected THE YEAR OF LOVING as a Top Pick and wrote a beautiful review, saying,

The rawness of this story pulls at your heart and fills you with so many conflicting emotions. Her first ex-husband, and the father of her children is such a hateful and petty man. The way he turns the children against her and lets them do whatever harmful thing they want makes me want to strangle him. I would think his current wife would get tired of all the court cases and BS but she seems to be of the same ilk as he is. The second husband doesn’t seem too bad, just a little narcissistic and immature–Pretty much a perfect rebound guy, but not great husband material. It does sound like he has an awesome talent which leads me to believe that he will be going places.

The struggle with the daughters is heartbreaking. I’m not sure how things will end there but, I felt bad when Sarah tried so hard with no positive response.

Whenever I finish a novel, I email HCharju and ask respectfully for her to review my new book. She’s a thoughtful reader and a reviewer who sees to the heart of a story. I’m lucky to have discovered her.

Night Owl Reviews

Chris Strickland’s Story: My Article in Parent Survival Magazine
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Chris Strickland’s Story: My Article in Parent Survival Magazine

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Chris Strickland’s Story

Chris Strickland is a lesbian mom in Mississippi who was a target parent for parental alienation. Her story was complicated by the fact that she wasn’t listed on the adoption papers for her older son nor on the birth certificate for her younger son. She and her partner married in Massachusetts, and their marriage wasn’t legal in Mississippi.

Chris got caught in the lag between marriage in one state and her marriage’s recognition in her home state, where she and her wife were raising their kids. Then her wife left her for a man.

In a few months, her wife moved with the kids and the new man, and Chris didn’t see her sons for almost fourteen months. The former wife told the kids to stop calling Chris “mom.”

Parental alienation is the severing of a child’s bonds with a parent by the other parent, and it is unutterably cruel. Dr. Amy Baker has done a lot of work in the subject and she says, “It’s when one parent gives the child permission to break the other parent’s heart.”

What results is a child who refuses, without good reason, to see a parent, called the target parent. If the child grudgingly sees the target parent, the target parent is, in the child’s mind, the lesser parent. The target parent’s feelings do not matter: the child has been trained to believe that. The child often is coldly cruel to the target parent.

Often the alienating parent is personality disordered: a narcissist, a borderline. Anyone who has worked with or studied these disorders knows how difficult they are to deal with.

Parental alienation isn’t an accident. The alienating parent uses a number of strategies to accomplish the divide between a parent and her beloved child. Amy Baker identifies 17 of them. It’s not just about badmouthing the target parent, and often an alienating parent can claim that they don’t do so. There are other, subtler forces at work, such as when the target parent is from a different ethnic, educational, or socio-economic group. To whit: “You dad isn’t Catholic like us,” or “Your mother didn’t go to college and isn’t French like us.” Alienating parents use identity against the target parents.

Alienating parents do whatever they can to destroy the target parent’s moral authority with their children. “Your mother’s rules don’t apply at my house,” is a classic line that an alienating father uses.

Parental alienation devastates the target parent. It does the same to the child, though the child probably won’t recognize it until he or she is much older–maybe not until his or her 30’s. Children who have been alienated this way often suffer from self esteem issues and terrible anxiety. The parentectomy she pursues to please the alienating parent leaves her scourged with anxiety, and the child doesn’t know that coming back into rightful relationship with the target parent is a crucial step in healing the anxiety.

I also wonder about a child’s relationships when they have been taught by the alienating parent that the target parent’s feelings don’t matter. This is a setup to create broader heartlessness and even narcissism in the child: other people exist only to serve the child, and other people’s needs don’t matter; when someone asks for their needs to be honored, the child sees them as a bad person.

I wrote about Chris Strickland because she was a target parent, and her complicated case took her all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Chris Strickland's story

Paranormal Romance Guild: Scamming Authors Who Pay in Good Faith
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Paranormal Romance Guild: Scamming Authors Who Pay in Good Faith

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Paranormal Romance Guild Scamming Authors

Note to authors who’ve paid for membership in the Paranormal Romance Guild: check to see if your reviews of the last few years are live on the site. If not, email the PRG.

Be aware that the board members of the PRG will launch a vicious personal attack against you if you point out that you paid for a service which they abruptly dropped without notification. Ask yourself if you really want to do business with a group whose idea of customer service lacks respect and courtesy and instead depends on ad hominem attacks.

**Update: The PRG board made a big fuss about how they are a volunteer organization. However, the Vice President is paid $400 per month. Did the PRG cut author services in order to pay the board? Is the board using the membership fees as their own private slush fund?**

I have been a member of the Paranormal Romance Guild for several years. As an author who is both traditionally and independently published, I seek always to publicize and promote my novels. This is imperative because I can write the best books in the world but if no one knows about my books, no one will buy them.

It isn’t always easy to promote a book. There are many book PR sites and companies that promise a lot and deliver little. I scour the internet for opportunities to introduce readers to my novels. Readers are usually glad to have found my books–I get a lot of good reviews online and I receive regular complimentary emails about my books. Anyone can check Amazon or my website to see what I mean.

So several years ago I discovered the Paranormal Romance Guild, probably through a book publicist. They started running reviews of my novels, especially my dystopian novels Fallen, Cold Light, Far Shore, and Blood Sky.

In 2011, a PRG reviewer submitted Fallen for a Reviewer’s Choice Award, and I rallied my family, friends, and readers to vote for Fallen. Fallen Won! Yay!

I started paying for membership to the site. It wasn’t a lot but it was something, and there were two tiers, and I budget carefully for book promotion. I bought the membership in good faith that my awards, books, and reviews would stay live. That’s what I’ve been paying for. I’ve been paying every year. I’ve been paying in good faith.

A month ago, the founding member of the PRG who was also a former board member and webmaster sent out a disturbing email. This email spoke of her experience of being unceremoniously dumped from the PRG, a book review site that she had helped to build.

She had devoted a great deal of time and energy to the PRG over several years and they arbitrarily dumped her.

Her email made me uneasy. Of course there were two sides to the story, but it seemed that she had been treated unfairly. I will copy her email to the bottom of this post.

Then a few days ago, I, a paying member of the PRG, discovered that the reviews of my award-winning books had been stripped from their new site.

I emailed to inquire and was told that this was a decision by the PRG. There was a lot of condescending hooey from the PRG in the emails that followed.

The bottom line is that the “new” Paranormal Romance Guild arbitrarily cut the reviews of my award-winning novels without even telling me that would happen–despite the fact that I am a paying member of several years.

This is a way to scam authors. It’s bait and switch: taking money and then suddenly changing the terms.

The Paranormal Romance Guild has behaved disgracefully.

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Letter from the founding member dumped from the PRG:

Many of you know me fairly well by now. I am a founding member who helped create PRG 7+ years ago. I was webmaster, a former President & VP, and a board member, who worked all these years as though PRG was my 2nd job, even though for most of the time I was an unpaid volunteer. My largest fault has been that I work too hard and want things done right – because I believe that if we expect authors to pay for membership, they deserve a site that is done well and looks professional. I have taken great pride in all that I’ve done for PRG.

I have just been informed that I have been unceremoniously removed from my roles in the organization today. After 7 years of hard work (and friendship, I thought) I was not given a phone call for discussion of this major change, nor was the Board of Directors given opportunity to vote as they properly should have. This decision was made by President Kelly Abell & VP Fred Feeley because they have “decided to go in another direction”. I was not given an opportunity to speak on my own behalf about this important change and the Board was insulted by having this decision made for them as though they are incompetent for the roles they were elected to and their opinions are worthless. I did not even receive a professional email informing me of this executive decision until 10 hours after I was unexpectedly locked out of the PRG Reviewer’s Choice Award preparations I was working on for all of you. 

I have only ever wanted what was best for PRG. Our recent webhost problems were beyond my control, but I had prepared a new website and worked hard to ensure our members would experience minimum interruptions in service. A webhost change may ultimately be deemed necessary, but as elected WebMaster I had hoped to be part of the conversation and transition, rather than stepped over and kicked to the curb. Our elected Officers and Board Members are supposed to have opportunity to voice their opinions, and changes are supposed to be voted upon as a group – because we created a community founded upon group spirit. Please be aware that apparently, that is no longer the case in PRG.

I am disappointed that the organization I worked so hard to help create and grow over the years has so mishandled this transition. For all the times I dropped everything to quickly help members and co-workers with problems, or help with emergency site changes and review postings…for all the times I put my own writing career aside to help better PRG, this is an extremely unfair and cruel turn of events. In 7 years of emergencies and last minute projects, I have never let PRG down. However, PRG has let me down terribly. 

I have many wonderful memories from my time with PRG and have made great friendships that will continue on. I do not know what new direction The Paranormal Romance Guild will be taking in the future, but I wanted to let you all know that I will not be taking part in it, because for an organization to treat a hard working, loyal, founding member this way is disgraceful.