Two cool reviews of FALLEN!
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Two cool reviews of FALLEN!

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Two cool reviews of FALLEN

Gothic Mom’s Book Reviews had fun with FALLEN. “Packed with danger and excitement, twists and turns, and an amazing love story, Fallen is one of those books that you just have to have!”

Check out the review here.

Gothic Mom's book reviews button by parajunkee

Me-Mommy Etc. had some fun with FALLEN also: “It really picked up and was a nice quick read.  It is part of a planned trilogy and I am eagerly awaiting the other two books.“

I finished Fallen a long time ago but have never gotten around to writing its review.  The first thing I will say is I almost gave up on this book.  I really was not into in the beginning, but I figured I would give it 100 pages and if I still hated it I would move on.  Well there hit a point and I was sucked in.  This book is a story about the world post end of days.  It centers around a mother who is traveling with her own daughter, and several other children she has picked up along the way.  Each child seems to have a special ability (well everyone does it is a side effect of whatever brought the end of the world as they knew it).  She comes across a tribe of men and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her band of children safe.  This quickly turns into a love story, but it much more than that.  It is a love story and a story of survival.  What I think I loved most as although it was a love story, it wasn’t your simple boy meets girl.  It was much more complicated than that.  The main character was still technically married and didn’t know if her husband was alive or not, the man she fell for may or may not have helped bring about the end of the world, and there is the constant threat of death and destruction at every corner.  It really picked up and was a nice quick read.  It is part of a planned trilogy and I am eagerly awaiting the other two books.

Check out the review here.
 
 
 
My New Post on the HuffPo: The Bleak Necessity of the Dachau Tour
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My New Post on the HuffPo: The Bleak Necessity of the Dachau Tour

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Business in Milan with my Italian publisher, Marco Tropea Editore, afforded me a timely opportunity to take a train into Bavaria.

I’m working on a new novel set in Munich and Berlin during the Second World War. For detail and realism, I need to experience a place. Reading books, listening to on-line lectures, and watching videos are no substitute for trudging through a city, absorbing through my pores the buildings and people and language, the smell of wurst and rich taste of Augustiner beer and slant of light through chestnut trees.

Munich is a lovely city in which to practice the writerly art of osmosis. Its buildings rollick through the ages, from the Romanesque Peterskirche to the neo-Baroque Justizpalast to the modern skyscraper Hypo-Haus. In the center of town, the Marienplatz bustles with a heterogeneous mix of people. It’s easy to get around because of the dazzling array of public transportation choices: the bus, the tram, the S-bahn, and the U-bahn–all very efficient.

In this world of dialectic, dichotomy, and duality, where there is beauty, there is found ugliness, and where there is light, comes the darkness. Lovely Munich’s history harbors astonishing cruelty. Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and the deadly prototype for all others, lies twenty kilometers outside of town.

A story set in Germany during this time necessarily references concentration camps. Germans seem to agree. When I joined a tour to Dachau, which had been a munitions factory during the First World War, Tom the Welsh tour guide commented, “Germans study what happened here, they face it honestly. I regularly see school classes.”

Indeed, I spied a group of young people who looked like high school students. They listened carefully to their teacher, a bespectacled woman who spoke with a fierce thoughtfulness that elicited from them a corresponding intensity of focus.

Read the rest of my post here on the Huffington Post.

.Dachau

Traci L. Slatton at The Reading Cafe
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Traci L. Slatton at The Reading Cafe

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This content-rich, fun, and immensely lively blog featured an interview and reviews of FALLEN and COLD LIGHT. Check it out; I enjoyed the questions and Sandy’s reviews were laser-sharp and sparkling, both at the same time.

The Reading Cafe would like to welcome back Traci. We previously spoke with Traci in the summer of 2012 with the release of Cold Light-the second book in her After Series.

Traci L SlattonTRC: Hi Traci and welcome back to The Reading Café.

Traci: Thanks for having me back! I’m glad to be back.

TRC: For anyone who does not know Traci L. Slatton, would you please tell us something about yourself?

Traci: I am the author of 9 books and the mother of 4 girls, three and a step; I practice yoga daily; I live in Manhattan with my husband Sabin Howard, who is a classical figurative sculptor. I was a Navy brat. I like horses and chocolate and Renaissance art and travel.

TRC: It has been a little over a year since last we talked, what have you been up to?

Traci: Writing during the day and posing at night for Sabin, who is using me as the model for a bust. Posing for my husband isn’t strenuous, but it is challenging. I have to hold my head at a certain slight tilt, and maintain a small smile, and keep my shoulders relaxed down my back, for several hours after dinner every night, unless Sabin is teaching. Sabin is polite, but when he’s sculpting, he’s very demanding and clinical. There’s no funny business. And he doesn’t reimburse me in cash for posing, but he’s supposed to pay me in something else I can’t mention because this is a G rated blog. Unfortunately, by the time we’re finished sculpting for the night, I’m too tired to ask for payment. :)

Of course, I’m always raising my little one, who is 8.5 now. I’m also researching WW2 for two historical novels set during that time period.

Far ShoreTRC: FAR SHORE is the third instalment in your After series focusing on the ramifications of a weapon of mass destruction-literally-gone wrong. Would you please tell us something about the premise?

Traci: The premise is that most of humanity, and our physical structures, has been wiped out by a global ecological cataclysm. The survivors are struggling to stay alive as best they can. They’re beset by danger on every side, and inflicted with psychic gifts that presage madness. Within that context, a woman who is very strong develops a healing gift, and she falls in love with a man who is hiding a terrible secret.

The Reading Cafe
Lip Service by M.J. Rose
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Lip Service by M.J. Rose

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Lip Service by M.J. Rose
Recently I was in Portland, Oregon for a wedding. I went alone because my husband had work stuff and anyway, someone had to stay with our little one.

Early in the afternoon, with several hours to spare before the much-anticipated headline event, I wandered down to the university area to check out the farmer’s market.

The sun shone, warm and yellow, through a high sibilant canopy of rich emerald leaves. The air was playful on my skin. I meandered through stalls of glistening red raspberries, juicy bursting blueberries, and gleaming purple blackberries ready to squish open on my tongue. There were heads of pale green fennel so fragrant and sweet, and rows of perfect round tomatoes, and long ripe squash… I was soon a little soft in my knees.

I found myself breathing faster and deeper. I felt both vaguer and keyed up, all at once.

A fantasy like a ball of yarn unraveled in my mind. I say ‘mind’ not ‘head’ because my whole body was involved, in the most emollient way.

I was walking indoors with a man I know, someone I hadn’t thought of in this most interesting context. We were inside and we were alone and he leaned down and wove his fingers through my hair. Then he pulled me close to his body, which was warm and taut.  When he kissed me, his mouth tasted salty but also sweet.

There was more, which led me back to my hotel room and some private moments. After a luxuriant nap, I texted my husband: “Really REALLY wish u were here.”

This lush diversion led me into some pleasant reveries: a memory of lying on a couch in the sun in Cape Cod, with the smell of bayberry thicket and sea on the wind, and the wonderful release I’d enjoyed then; a night early in our relationship that I’d spent telling my then-boyfriend-now-husband funny stories that were not G-rated, and which evolved into the kind of sweaty, rollicking good time I usually only read about; a sense of wonder at the pleasure and power inherent in sensual fantasy.

Reading MJ Rose’s delicious and often poignant and always intelligent “Lip Service” has brought all this back to me.

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New Service at Telemachus Press: Spark eBooks for Authors

New Service at Telemachus Press: Spark eBooks for Authors

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I had a great experience with Telemachus Press. For anyone who doesn’t know, Telemachus Press turns manuscripts into POD and eBooks. Authors keep all their rights and royalties. Telemachus does a great job; they care. In the brave new world of ePublishing and Print-On-Demand, with Amazon threatening B&N and traditional publishing houses afraid to publish, well, almost anything, Telemachus serves a vital need. More and more established authors are turning to Telemachus.

Today I am happy to announce that my friends at Telemachus Press now offer a streamlined ebook service at an affordable price. This economical service is called SPARK.

Telemachus Press quality at an affordable price. Spark could be your path to success as an author.