New London Day Article

April 20, 2019September 15, 2019

Of the rainy morning, drinking my coffee: heavy cream and coconut sugar. I am thinking about the week passed.

Due to PR efforts for the National World War I Memorial that Sabin is sculpting, there’s an article about me in The New London Day. Perhaps now it’s the The Connecticut Day.

The writer, Lee Howard, no relation to my husband, wrote a wonderful article about my participation in the WWI Memorial as a model in the relief. Howard is a skilled writer and the piece is lovely–warmly written and respectful. He quoted me correctly. He portrayed me with both kindness and some playfulness.

I particularly liked that he quoted what I said about appearing in Sabin’s amazing relief:

“All told, it’s pretty cool,” she said. “Perhaps (someday) one of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will stand in front of the relief and look at my face and feel our connection.”

5 star review | book promotion | Broken | business | guide to independent publishing

BROKEN on SALE via BookGorilla promotions

FOR A LIMITED TIME, Traci L. Slatton’s BROKEN on sale for $0.99!!

Get while it’s hot!

Free Kindle Nation Shorts
a free reader’s service from Kindle Nation Daily

April 21, 2015

An excerpt from Traci L. Slatton’s BROKEN

Paris, 1939-1942. A fallen angel who has taken the form of a beautiful woman is trapped in the web of Nazi occupation. Can she save her two lovers and the Jewish widow and child she has come to care for?

“…incredible…a beautiful, heart-wrenching tale of love, loyalty, betrayal, and defiance…”

Sensual, spiritual and elegantly written, BROKEN is enthralling readers…

“…stunning. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read..”

Experience BROKEN while it’s 83% off the regular price!
Alia takes full advantage of her human form
in this Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt from

Broken
by Traci L. Slatton

4.5 stars – 13 reviews

Special Kindle Price: 99 cents!
(reduced from $5.99 for a
limited time time only)
Here’s the set-up:
Power is pornographic. Can love sustain light when the forces of evil close in?

Paris, 1939-1942. A fallen angel is trapped in the web of German occupation. The deadly noose of Nazi control grows ever tighter, ensnaring her and two of her lovers, a bullfighter and a musician working in the fledgling Resistance. Can she save them and the Jewish widow and her child that she has come to love, or will betrayal take them all?

5-star praise for BROKEN:
“…a wonderful escape….exciting, intelligent…captivating…”
“Compelling and transporting…”

See the Facebook posting!

5 star review

Daniel Silva’s THE ENGLISH GIRL: Masterful Story and Excellent Read

There’s a particular joy in getting engrossed in a really great novel. I felt it for the first time when I was 6 years old. At that age, I progressed in a few months from reading “See Spot Run” to reading ‘big books,’ that is, chapter books for much older kids. My rapid evolution wasn’t due to anything special about my intelligence, alas. It was due to the joy…the delight and pleasure…of being grabbed by a well-told story.

That joy inspired me with a longing: the longing to write novels. It’s that joy and that longing that have led me through my life. Literally. I came from a family where no one had gone to college in generations, and I went to Yale at 17 because I was so motivated by the joy and the longing intrinsic to reading and writing.

I still read continuously. I also read indiscriminately. It’s all market research. Unfortunately, so much popular fiction inspires only boredom and the same kind of icky self-loathing you get after eating a Big Mac and a shake, or a Twinkie.

I say it regularly: there are good reasons why the legacy publishers are foundering. The poorly written, gimmicky popular books, and the unlikeable protagonists, faux depth, poseur angst, and, well, general self-important silliness of that which has been anointed as “literature,” are among the reasons.

But there are great writers writing great fiction: Sue Grafton. Greg Iles. Richard North Patterson, when his work isn’t too self-reflective and self-congratulatory.

Then there is Daniel Silva. I opened The English Girl yesterday and by the middle of the first chapter, all that juicy joy and longing had erupted within me. This reader was delightedly and gratefully in the hands of a Master.

The English Girl is beautifully written, line for line. It’s a pleasure to read on the level of appreciating well-crafted prose. Silva has a fine ear for music in the language, and his diction is thoughtful and often quite lovely.

Best of all, this novel works superbly as a story. It sets out the stakes right from the beginning, and then the screws tighten, and the suspense builds. The characters are three dimensional, unique, and unexpected. They don’t quite ever get what they want. Gabriel Allon, the wry and likable art restorer-spy, wants peace. I doubt he’ll ever get it.

Remember: those are two of my rules for writing novels: One, story is how your protagonist does NOT get what he or she wants, and two, what are the stakes?

So I recommend The English Girl. It’s an exciting five star read. It’s engrossing. It makes you think and it makes you care. It’s fun!

The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon)

Disclaimer: clicking on the links above takes you to Amazon via my affiliate link.

E.B. White & Winding the Clock

Of late things have been hard.

My heart is broken. Broken again, for the 3477th time this life.

“Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time,” wrote E. B. White, to a despairing Mr. Nadeau. The actual first paragraph of White’s letter said:

“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.”

I must say, on this journey, I have met some extraordinary people. Amazing, wonderful people. They hail from disparate walks of life, different races, different cultural backgrounds. Some are immigrants, no two from the same country of origin.

They share a love for Freedom.

They are passionate. They are quirky. They are independent. They tend to be wildly intelligent and creative and brimming with life.

They tend to be honest.

Right now some feel inconsolable.

I feel fortunate to have encountered these souls, who are all, as I am, beset with difficult feelings.

People I considered friends have shown their true colors. I know now who really has my back. It’s painful and it’s good.

I counseled some lovely friends: “We must think of ourselves as the Londoners during the War. They thought God had forgotten them. God-Goddess-All-that-Is hadn’t forgotten them then, and hasn’t forgotten us now.”

But E.B. White that masterful wordsmith said it better:

It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

So tomorrow I will rise too early, as always. Luminate coffee with coconut creamer and coconut sugar, beguiling and delicious. I will wind the clock.

5 star review | book reviews | friends | review | writing

C. Stephen Baldwin’s SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS

C. Stephen Baldwin’s SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS

I love New York. People here are fascinating. I start a discussion with someone and he or she turns out to have a dazzling, heart-palpitating personal story of love and loss, victory and humiliation, exalted communion and dark nights of the soul. Is there no one in this glorious, feral, bursting city who is ordinary?

Many of my neighbors in my apartment building are like this: possessed of extraordinary life histories. A decade ago in Steamboat Springs, my former husband and I and our two children got trapped on the top of a mountain in a white out. We made it into the restaurant near the peak and sat at a table with hot cocoa. Our downstairs neighbor Stephen Baldwin skiied in, looking for the same warm respite. He’d been the one to recommend Steamboat to us, and he was there with some of his teenage kids and his wife.

The three of us–Stephen, my former husband, and I–fell to yakking, sharing anecdotes to pass the time. At one point I looked across the table and asked, “What is it you do at the United Nations, Stephen? I don’t think you ever told us.”

Stephen grinned and started to talk. His dad was JFK’s ambassador to Malaysia. Stephen himself, as a boy, was lost in the jungles of Peru and tattooed by head-hunters in Borneo; as a young man, he wrestled a Bengal tiger and ran with the bulls; as an adult, he set up an underground railroad for Bengali revolutionary leaders to escape a brutal Pakistani regime…. What unfolded was the tale of a brilliant and peripatetic soul who held a vision of the world as a community, and who was committed to world service. My former husband and I were spellbound. It wasn’t just the adventures, it was also the keen and wondering sense of curiosity, of observation, with which Stephen so deeply engaged his life.

“There’s a book here, Stephen,” I said finally. And he took me at my word, and wrote the book. SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS Dark and Light: Life in a Large Outside World has arrived. I recommend it to everyone.

see Stephen’s website at www.cstephenbaldwin.com

Sculptor Sabin Howard and Architect Joe Weishaar win WW1 Memorial Commission

I am overjoyed to announce that my husband classical figurative sculptor Sabin Howard and his partner architect Joe Weishaar won the WW1 Memorial Commission.

There will be more on the World War 1 Memorial Commission website.

Vice Chair Edwin Fountain spoke beautifully about the team and their design and a few minutes was captured on Periscope. Watch for yourself!

I am the first to acknowledge Joe Weishaar’s unusual brilliance. His design conception has an extraordinarily graceful simplicity and elegance that bespeak his genius. However, I am Sabin Howard‘s wife, and I am incredibly proud of him. Here’s a quote from the Chicago Tribune:

Officials of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission, which approved his team’s design on an 8-1 vote, said Weishaar’s decision to include on his team Sabin Howard, an experienced classical sculptor from New York City, was pivotal to the win. The commission voted after an independent jury of seven experts earlier this month unanimously picked the team’s design.

The story was picked up by news organizations around the country, indeed, around the globe. Articles appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, and Curbed. The Twitterverse was alive with the news. By the way, if you’re on Twitter, Follow @SabinHoward and @WW1CC The WW1 Centennial Commission!