This is a Heartfelt Creations card. I embossed the stamp with silver embossing powder. I colored the card with watercolor pastels from Stampin Up. Added the jewels and TADAAAA!!!
Stay tuned for more from this stamp and die!
Thanks for stopping by!
A Wolf On The Loose
By Daniel Straka
Genre: Thriller, Adventure, Military
OVERVIEW
A Wolf On The Loose is a weekly e-serial, containing 36 parts spread over 5 episodes. One part is released weekly, free, on Amazon for 5 days (Monday-Friday). Completed episodes are available for purchase.
Amid struggling with his addictions, former Marine Andrew St George goes AWOL from his rich family and lavish lifestyle. He appears months later in Miami with one intent; convince his friend, Emilio Cortez, to start a Private Military Company with him. Having left the Corps after his brother was killed in a drive-by, Emilio’s been stuck working three jobs to support his extended family, all of whom he lives with in a small apartment.
While Andrew and Emilio enter into the security business looking for an escape from their civilian lives, both struggle with their demons. From the slums of Miami, the glitzy South Beach nightlife, to Cartel controlled Mexico, the boys will learn that despite their best intentions, no one job is the same and that there are battles to be fought outside of war zones.
REVIEW
This is a great mix of action and insight. Andrew and Emilo are brothers in arms. After their stint in a war zone, they come together for form a security business.
I am not a huge fan of war reads, so I was hesitant to start this one. I really was not sure what to expect with this tale. This is not a war read as much as it is an action and adventure. It really keeps you on your toes.
These two Marines have experienced many things together and carry a lot of baggage around with them. Life is hard especially when we carry stuff from the past. This section is packed with interesting information about each character. How the past has influenced their life and their decision-making. Also, how the past changes their future.
A highly engaging and compelling read from start to finish. Can’t wait to see what these two decide to do next!
This is a very unique way to write a book. If I understand this correctly, each section is free for 5 days and anew section is released weekly. Now I have to go get the others to follow what these guys are up to!
Author Bio
Dan achieved a BFA in photography and metal working and since graduating, has done neither. By day he works in manufacturing. By night, often very late into the night, he writes and stalks America’s sub-cultures on the vast internets.
https://www.facebook.com/awolfontheloose
http://www.awolfontheloose.com/
Author Central: http://amzn.to/1VtVS8l
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12541256.Dan_Straka
OVERVIEW
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Alice Clayton brings her trademark blend of funny and sexy to this second contemporary romance in the brand-new Hudson Valley series!
Manhattan’s It Girl, Natalie Grayson, has it all: she’s a hot exec at a leading advertising firm, known industry-wide for her challenging and edgy campaigns. She’s got a large circle of friends, a family that loves her dearly, and her dance card is always full with handsome eligible bachelors. What else could a modern gal-about-town wish for? The answer, of course, is…cheese.
Natalie’s favorite part of each week is spending Saturday morning at the Union Square Farmer’s Market, where she indulges her love of all things triple cream. Her favorite booth also indulges her love of all things handsome. Oscar Mendoza, owner of the Bailey Falls Creamery and purveyor of the finest artisanal cheeses the Hudson Valley has to offer, is tall, dark, mysterious, and a bit oblivious. Or so she thinks. But that doesn’t stop Natalie from fantasizing about the size of his, ahem, milk can.
Romance is churning, passion is burning, and something incredible is rising to the top. Could it be…love?
REVIEW
Natalie is a true New Yorker. She hates the country. But when she gets an opportunity to do an add campaign for the charming country town of Bailey Falls, things change and definitely HEAT up!!
Natalie oozes confidence and intelligence. Her sarcasm and wit keep the laughs coming. And then the brooding Oscar steps in and more than laughs flow throw the pages. Oscar is a cheese making, fine looking, cow chasing farmer. He and Natalie become a hot, hot, hot item! A long distance romance, an ex-wife which is still in love and dairy cows….yes I said cows…are just a few obstacles in their path. Somehow, these two make it work!
I love how the reader gets to travel to the different parts of the city and the amazing areas of the country all in one book. This really added so much to the tale!
This is a hilarious tale of love, romance and yes….cows!!!
I fell in love with Alice Clayton when I read Wallbanger(it is still my favorite). She never fails to deliver and delight!!
I received this novel from the publisher as part of Simon and Schuster XOXperts
PURCHASE HERE
OVERVIEW
Jason B. Ladd grows up in a military family with loving parents but spends his young life filled with spiritual apathy.
Ladd enters the US Marine Corps, becomes a fighter pilot, and sees combat in Iraq before life events align to nudge him into profound spiritual inquiry. Digging deep into his quest for truth, he realizes the art and science of fighter pilot fundamentals can help him on his journey.
Filled with stories that contrast his spiritual apathy with his post-Christian worldview passion, One of the Few is the compelling life story of a spiritual seeker engaged in a thrilling profession combined with a strong, reasonable defense of Christianity.
For fans of Ravi Zacharias, Lee Strobel, and Frank Turek, Ladd’s remarkable journey shares the transformative power of faith during a time when belief in God is dismissed and religious liberty in the military is attacked.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason B. Ladd is an award-winning author, US Marine, and Iraq War veteran. Ladd has flown as an instructor pilot in both the F/A-18 and the F-16 fighter jets.
He and his wife, Karry, are the parents of five children.
EXCERPT (CHAPTER 1)
Chapter 1 — The Worst Day
Phoenix, Arizona
March 2015
“…it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.”
—Sam Harris
“Keep your protection of your wife strong and know in your hearts our Lord will carry you through whatever happens.”
—Ravi Zacharias
“This is a horrible, dreadful day. No good news at all.”
The words came after a quiet entrance with little eye contact. The dimly-lit ultrasound room had already grown old since we entered it over an hour prior. The time between the technician’s departure and the doctor’s arrival was enough to worry ourselves to death.
The doctor extended his hand to my father-in-law and asked his last name. He assumed I was the husband. The doctor was dressed in a purple shirt with a plaid design mixed with grey, split by a paisley tie of purple swirls and flowers. His hair was grey and slightly waved, moving from front to back, slightly rising to form an almost-pyramidal cap to an overall solid structure. On his left hand, a gold ring, a black ring with silver trim on his right. I stared at his face, but my thoughts were already somewhere else.
My wife Karry remained sitting on the examining table. I stood beside her, holding her hand. This is where we would all cry.
For ten years I had been developing my faith in Christ. And in ten years it had never been tested. Karry and I had five beautiful children and a strong marriage. Life was so good, we wondered why we had been so fortunate.
“Aren’t you afraid that one day the bottom is going to drop?” Karry would ask.
“No,” I would say. “That’s not going to happen.”
But the bottom was slowly dropping.
Our doctor began listing all the indicators seen on the pictures from the ultrasound: too much amniotic fluid, bone measurements indicating stunted growth, a heart defect, and perhaps the most recognizable indicator for a possible chromosomal anomaly, clinched hands.
Clinched hands.
The first indications were good. The shape and form of our 27-week baby was clearly seen. His spine looked straight, his legs and arms looked normal. He even granted us a clear picture of his nose and mouth, indicating no cleft lip or palate. His brain looked normal and free of excess fluid. She pointed to all his parts, calling them by name. His kidneys appeared normal.
Then they were looking bad.
A cyst on the umbilical cord was easy to see. Shaped like a circle and appearing black on the screen, it would become the least of our worries. The umbilical cord is supposed to have three vessels. Our baby’s cord appeared to be missing one. Too much amniotic fluid dampened the feel of every kick and indicated a possible problem with the baby’s ability to swallow. The technician spent a long time on his heart. I guessed that she was searching for any way to tell us it was normal. But in the end, she couldn’t.
Karry often confessed an ominous feeling about the pregnancy. Now it was all coming true.
“I suspect your baby has a chromosomal condition known as Trisomy 18,” the doctor informed us.
Also called Edwards syndrome and referred to as a “lethal fetal condition” in the medical community, it has a grim prognosis.
What do we do? What should we do?
Before our baby was born, we began preparing for him to die.
Oh my God. This is it.
OVERVIEW
Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984: the year a heat wave scorched Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil.
Sal seems to appear out of nowhere – a bruised and tattered thirteen-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home where he’s welcomed into the Bliss family, assuming he’s a runaway from a nearby farm town.
When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him and tensions rise, along with the temperatures as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him. As strange accidents start to occur, riled by the feverish heat, some in the town start to believe that Sal is exactly who he claims to be. While the Bliss family wrestles with their own personal demons, a fanatic drives the town to the brink of a catastrophe that will change this sleepy Ohio backwater forever.
AUTHOR BIO
An Ohio native, Tiffany McDaniel’s writing is inspired by the rolling hills and buckeye woods of the land she knows. She is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, and artist. The Summer that Melted Everything is her debut novel.
You can learn more me at my website:
http://www.tiffanymcdaniel.com/
Here’s the Goodreads link to the novel:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114523-the-summer-that-melted-everything
The Amazon link is here:
Book Trailer
INTERVIEW
1. What books are sitting on your night table right now….don’t cheat?!??
I actually don’t have a night table. I’ll be dramatic about its non-existence by saying I’m an owl without a branch. But in the stack of books I have to read next are two of Shirley Jackson’s novels, The Sundial and The Bird’s Nest. I love her writing like the stars love the moon. So she’s always around me. I’m in the middle of reading Robert Bloch’s Psycho (The book behind Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece film). A book of collected poems beneath the book of Howard Carter’s account of unearthing the tomb of Tutankhamen. I really wish I was with Carter when that happened. How amazing that would have been to fling open the doors of centuries (King Tut curse or not). I will say there’s always an R.L. Stine Goosebumps in there, because even though I’m thirty-one, I’m still that Goosebumps and Fear Street kid at heart. This time it’s The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena.
2. Who inspired you and why?
Writing is the first thing I remember doing as a child outside of any external influence or direction. I’ve always been driven by that internal flicker, to create something from it. Nothing really inspired me to write. I just knew I wanted to be around story, create story, and live with it. Writing is my compass. My lighthouse safely guiding my ship to shore. I’m lost without it.
3. Catherine Mckenzie needs her tunes, Dan Brown needs his gravity boots, Susan Elizabeth Phillips has to take off her bra. What do you need to do to write?
First of all, I love that Susan Elizabeth Phillips takes off her bra. That’s relatable. Let the hills rolls free. For me, as long as I have my sanity (and just as creatively important insanity), my heart, and my imagination, that’s all I need to write. For many years I didn’t even have a desk to write on or a desk chair to sit in. So I wrote on my bed with my laptop on my lap in a room with three windows that couldn’t open and with tape covering the window’s broken cracks and breaks. So really I’m just happy to have a desk to write on, a chair to sit in and a good window I can open.
4. Where do you get your ideas for your stories? This story is very unique. Where did this idea come from?
I always say my ideas come from the elements that make me. Somewhere in the thread of my DNA and my soul, the ideas exist. I’m not really sure where else to say they come from. I just know wherever they come from is out of reach, existing as fragile as a cloud, as strong as iron.
5. Who is your favorite author? I could never narrow it down to one so, the more the merrier.
I can’t narrow it down either. I feel like I wouldn’t even be able to make the choice if I were able to only save one of them if all my favorite authors were dangling off a cliff. I’d try to save and hold on to them all. I will say I love Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. Those are probably my top two. They’re my rocket ship and sugar dish in a castle. All you Bradbury and Jackson lovers will know what that means. But I also love poet James Wright as well. Lesser well-known, but he and his words was and is pure magic. Spark, spark, glitter and all that jazz. If his ghost wants, he can definitely haunt me. Heck, that goes for Bradbury and Jackson as well. Bring on the haunt.
Raven’s PeakBy Lincoln Cole
Genre: Horror, Paranormal, Thriller
A quiet little mountain town is hiding a big problem. When the townsfolk of Raven’s Peak start acting crazy, Abigail Dressler is called upon to find out what is happening. She uncovers a demonic threat unlike any she’s ever faced and finds herself in a fight just to stay alive.
She rescues Haatim Arison from a terrifying fate and discovers that he has a family legacy in the supernatural that he knows nothing about. Now she’s forced to protect him, which is easy, and also trust him if she wants to save the townsfolk of Raven’s Peak. Trust, however, is considerably more difficult for someone who grew up living on the knife’s edge of danger.
Can they discover the cause of the town’s insanity and put a stop to it before it is too late?
Author Bio
Lincoln Cole is a Columbus, Ohio-based author who enjoys traveling and has visited many different parts of the world, including Australia and Cambodia, but always returns home to his pugamonster puppy, Luther, and family. His love for writing was kindled at an early age through the works of Isaac Asimov and Stephen King and he enjoys telling stories to anyone who will listen.
https://www.facebook.com/lincolnjcole
Sorry for waiting so long to post a crafty post. I am working on the Senior Album. I am almost finished. Maybe a couple more weeks.
So here is a thank you card. This is my standard format for a card. Just different paper.
Thanks for stopping by!!!
Overview
Whether it’s a woman who must accept the reality of her son growing up, or a daughter becoming disillusioned with her father, this moving collection expertly conveys the joys, doubts, fears, and endless contradictions that are inescapable parts of domestic life. In “Mr. Sumarsono,” included in TheBest American Short Stories of 1994, a visiting Indonesian diplomat brings out the confidence and charm in a suburban divorcée, much to the surprise of her two young daughters; and in “Leaving Home” a teenage girl, stifled by her family’s rigid sense of virtue, attempts to reinvent herself during a summer vacation.
The everyday challenges of parenting, stepparenting, and familial love and loyalty take on great weight as the richly drawn characters of each story—fathers, mothers, children, lovers—face them with genuine need, strength, and confusion. Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Maine, Connecticut, and Long Island, these stories showcase the trademark insight and tenderness with which Robinson explores divorce, remarriage, and families yearning to move on.
Review
I am not a huge short story reader. However, I was asked to give this a shot.
These stories touch on all kinds of love, Mothers’ love, Fathers’ love, the love between siblings, second chance love, just to name a few. The characters are rich and rewarding. The settings add so much to these tender stories.
The author exposes many family issues. With wonderful insight and strength, she takes the reader through many trials which uncover the different levels of astounding love.
I am still not a huge fan of short stories. However, these enlighten you and just make you feel warm and fuzzy.
I received this book from Netgalley for a honest review
Purchase here
Overview
For fans of Orphan Train and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, a compelling historical novel from “one of the best authors of women’s fiction” (Library Journal). Set against the turbulent backdrop of American Vaudeville, four sisters embark on an unexpected adventure—and a last-ditch effort to save their family.
In 1919, the Turner sisters and their parents are barely scraping by. Their father is a low-paid boot-stitcher in Johnson City, New York, and the family is always one paycheck away from eviction. When their father’s hand is crushed and he can no longer work, their irrepressible mother decides that the vaudeville stage is their best—and only—chance for survival.
Traveling by train from town to town, teenagers Gert, Winnie, and Kit, and recent widow Nell soon find a new kind of freedom in the company of performers who are as diverse as their acts. There is a seamier side to the business, however, and the young women face dangers and turns of fate they never could have anticipated. Heartwarming and surprising, The Tumbling Turner Sisters is ultimately a story of awakening—to unexpected possibilities, to love and heartbreak, and to the dawn of a new American era.
Review
First of all….don’t you just LOVE the cover!!! This is the inside of the book….absolutely love it!!
This is actually a coming of age story for these unique sisters and it just happens to take place on a vaudeville tour. This is well researched and hugely entertaining, just like a vaudeville act. Each act is different and each sister is different, but somehow they make it work!
If you have been following my blog for a while, you know I adore strong women characters. This book is packed full. It is tough to make it on a vaudeville tour. Their “learning” experiences are strange, to say the least. However, each sister takes their “learning” and uses it to survive.
I enjoy the way this novel is layed out. Each chapter is told in the voice of two of the sisters, Winnie and Gert. Each of these sisters are very diverse in their opinions and their reactions. There are also quotes before each chapter from famous vaudeville performers. These are an added plus.
Through work, tragedy and heartache, these sisters come together to do what needs to be done. Whether it is performing, being a friend, paying for college or even being a nurse, they have each other’s backs.
This is a story I will not soon forget. It truly took me back and I felt like I was sitting there, right along with the girls enjoying the show!
I received this novel from Simon and Schuster as part of the XOXPERTS.
Purchase here
Eirwen’s Dream: Inside Snow White’s Sleeping Mind
By Kristen Reed
Genre: Christian, Fairytale, Fantasy
Three months after her father’s death, Princess Eirwen, affectionately nicknamed Snow White, is preparing to become the Queen of Talfryn. Unfortunately, as the princess rises in power and beauty and her love for Prince Roderick blossoms, envy drives her stepmother, Nerys, mad. The widow poisons her stepdaughter with an apple on the eve of her coronation, sending the princess into a dream like none she’s ever had before.
In Eirwen’s Dream: Inside Snow White’s Sleeping Mind, the fair princess sets off through the fantastical realm of Edwig with only a dwarf at her side to face trials and defeat a nefarious queen who acquires her power by bathing in the blood of virgins. However, what will save Eirwen from the poison running through her veins in the waking world, where there is no power in true love’s kiss?
Author Bio
Kristen Reed, a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, is an artist, filmmaker, and author from Dallas, Texas. As a Christian, her faith heavily influences her writing and is the driving force in her life.
https://www.facebook.com/fairetellings
https://www.facebook.com/KristenReedAuthor/
http://kristenreedtx.blogspot.com
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1XZIhJ5
Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1123705445
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/1sK6aXL
reecaspieces 