Besides being a successful author, blogger, and teacher, Tara carves out some time to support other writers such as myself. She has, over the past few weeks, featured my fiction on her very clever Fiction, Five, Friday!
http://taraford.weebly.com/fiction-five-friday
We are of like minds…’pay it forward’. Thanks, Tara 
This was just toooo good not to share! As a writer, I will tell you that it’s good, no, great advice if you are involved with a writer.
Okay, all laughs aside….seriously….if you are the significant other to a writer you are one of my HEROES!! Continue reading “How to Not Survive, but Thrive, Living with a Writer!”
Dear Trisha,
Congratulations, this is to let you know that your poem The Ash Can is one of the poems being featured on the PoetrySoup home page this week. Poems are rotated each day in groups of 14-16 to give each poem an equal opportunity to be displayed.
Thanks again and congratulations.
Sincerely,
PoetrySoup.com
The Ash Can © Trisha Sugarek
I got the call on Sunday night. I was traveling on business. When I looked at the caller ID
I wondered why my husband’s boss would be calling me. I was unprepared for what
he told me and my legs turned to water when he said that my husband was dead.
‘A heart attack? An accident?’ I asked. ‘No’, he said, ‘John committed suicide.
They found him in your garage this morning.’ I heard someone screaming and
wished that they would stop so I could hear the rest. His voice was very far away
and the woman just kept screaming. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ I need to hear. I clapped my
hand over my mouth when I suddenly realized it was me who was screaming.
I don’t remember hanging up or getting on the plane. Yes, John and I were having
problems and we had been separated for about three months but nothing was official.
After thirty years of marriage I never believed that we couldn’t weather this and share
the rest of our lives together. Continue reading “This Author featured on Poetrysoup.com”
We are so pleased to announce the winners of a signed, copy of Susan Elia Macneal’s new book, ‘The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent’.
CONGRATULATIONS!! The winners are: Sara Hyman and Micheal Nelson
Fans of Susan’s should check out my interview with her done last year. This author brings back the WWII experience and Winston Churchill’s glory days so vividly that readers will feel that they are there during the London Blitz, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hot political climate of the day.
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DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS!
In addition to my twice weekly blog I also feature an interview with another author once a month. So come along with me; we shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create!
To receive my posts sign up for my 
On the home page, enter your email address. Thanks!
REVIEW ~~ ‘The City’ by Dean Koontz (5 out of 5 quills)
True to Dean Koontz’s style he starts the reader off with a great tale of a musical family….Grandfather is a ‘piano man’ , mother is a jazz singer and eight year old Jonah is a wanna be piano man without a piano. You see, Mom is a single parent, married to an absent, then back again, no good, shiftless man. Theirs is a tight-knit lower middle class family squeaking by.
Then on about page 100, the weird stuff starts to happen and you know you are back in another of Koontz’s scary plots. ‘The City’ does not disappoint; you’ll love the characters in the story, good and bad. The story is written in first person from Jonah’s point of view and it certainly took me back to being just a kid with very real monsters under the bed and in the bedroom closet. And Jonah Kirk is a great kid; not too good, he’s still a kid and isn’t above lying to get out of potential trouble. He has a mentor who becomes an unlikely but loveable friend when he needs a friend the most.
As always, it’s a chilling, terrifying tale where you hope that good triumphs over evil but, not until the last few pages, will you know if Koontz sees it your way.
Author, Blogger Tara Ford seems to love my writing….so much that she is featuring my books on her web site at Fiction Five Fridays.
Tara is a successful author out of the UK. To help support her fellow-authors, she has developed this clever Friday Special. Visit her web site and wander around. You won’t be disappointed! http://taraford.weebly.com/fiction-five-friday
The rules are simple – 5 sentences from a page with the digit 5 in the number. Short and sweet and readers get a little taste of what their favorite (or new) author is writing.
TODAY! I have been chosen by Tara with my 5,5,5 contribution (fifth day of the week, a five in the page no. and a five sentence excerpt) from a roaring twenties, hot jazz and cold gin, wild novel that I wrote about San Francisco: “Wild Violets”. WHAT FUN!!
Continue reading “Author’s Roaring Twenties Featured on UK Blog”
To promote not only Susan Elia Macneal’s new book but also my Blog, the folks at Random House have invited me to do a BOOK GIVE-AWAY! Easy to enter but remember it is for a signed, paperback of ‘The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent’ only and you must have a US mailing address.
Like my page (writeratplay) on Facebook, like Susan’s page https://www.facebook.com/susaneliamacneal?fref=ts, and follow us on Twitter. Return to the post and comment on my page, ‘Book Give-away – Done’. WINNERS will be announced later this week! Hurry to enter!!!
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DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS!
In addition to my twice weekly blog I also feature an interview with another author once a month. So come along with me; we shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create! Dean Koontz 
was interviewed by me June 28th and July 1 in a two part sensational visit with this suspense-thriller mega-star.
To receive my posts sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Thanks!
Q: When did you begin to write seriously?
A: While I was in college. I sold my first short story when I was a senior, and the same piece won a prize in the college-writing contest Atlantic Monthly conducted at that time. I wasn’t very good for a number of years, but I kept selling. Later, I recovered the rights to all that early stuff and deep-sixed it, mostly science fiction and Gothic novels.
Q: What makes a writer great?
A: Writing truth, I think. By which I don’t necessarily mean entirely realistic settings and story lines. Any genre allows for the writing of truth. To do it means to write stories that are more than plot, to write characters that feel like real people, and to avoid writing ideologically. These days, a great deal of fiction is ideological, and that approach virtually ensures a limited lifespan for the work. Resist the temptation to be swept away by current
“issues” in your work and write instead about timeless human values and hopes. Ideologies sooner or later collapse due to the tendency of ideologues to ignore all manner of realities in the fashioning of their ideologies.
Q: What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book,” look like? Continue reading “My Interview with Dean Koontz! (part 2)”
Actor, director, playwright, author, Trisha Sugarek has created 305 pages of ‘How To’, Tips, Quotes, and 275 blank, lined pages for your writing. ‘I have created this journal for writers of all genres. Taken from my personal experience in the writing process, I hope it kick starts new writers to begin and more experience writers to continue.’
~~This spirited journal is designed to help writers open their hearts and minds. Much more than a journal for your creative writing, this handbook provides the writer with the ‘how to’s’ of writing. Tips, instructions and prompts to help you to hone your writing skill. Each blank, lined page has writing tips and quotes from other famous authors.~~
Available at www.amazon.com
A writer is only a writer when he or she is writing. Thinking isn’t writing, research isn’t writing, doing anything other than writing isn’t writing. 
Never one to break with tradition…..there’s a side story with regard to my enthusiasm for Susan Macneal’s writing.
The first of the Maggie Hope spy mysteries, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, (which I highly recommend) is fiction but based in fact. The author was fortunate enough to have had several interviews with Churchill’s private secretary before her death. The book is about a ‘typist’ who was relegated to a menial job because of her gender. She was actually educated in mathematics and cryptology and could easily have fitted in with MI-Five (British CIA) but for her being a woman.
I was so taken by Winston Churchill’s pets having the run of the war offices….and how Susan wove this little fact (with many others) into her story so deftly. At the time I was looking for lighter material to round out my collection
of short plays for the classroom. An idea came to me of Mr. Churchill noodling away in front of his easel and Nelson, his cat talking to the audience; telling them something about the times that they lived in, an anecdote or two about the Prime Minister and of course, listening patiently to Mr. Churchill’s comments about the world at large.
July 1st, the fourth and newest book in the Maggie Hope series will go on sale.
Continue reading “MacNeal’s release of new book Sparks Give-away!”
