In Response to the Recent RWA Controversy, I am Reposting this Article from April
For me, the Holocaust is a real emotional thing. I had no grandparents growing up, but we spent lots of time in our apartments in Miami in a Jewish enclave, I guess. It was a gated community on North Miami Beach with three towers, a little convenience store, a restaurant and pool, and Dock slips for boats. And so my babysitters were retired Jewish retirees, most of whom were holocaust survivors. I was 2 or 3, the first time I heard of the Holocaust. I was spending the night with the Fusses, whom I called Grandma and Grandpa Fuss. I had taken a number and written numbers on my arm, to be like them. I didn’t understand why it horrified these two Holocaust survivors. I still remember the tears pouring down Grandma Fusses face as she scrubbed my arm with a sponge from the kitchen. Eventually, I learned their story. Two people who were the only survivors of their families who found love after the camps. I heard about their parents and siblings who died in the camps. I remember that one of their sisters was a ballerina. She was a teenager when she went into the camps and she ade it through the initial separation because a guard thought she was beautiful. As an adult, I know what that meant but as a child I remember thinking it was so beautiful that she gave the food to her sister. He would take her to his office and have her dance for him. She would come back with extra food for grandma Fuss and cry herself to sleep. She never made it out of the camps. And though it hurt, Grandma Fuss to tell me that story, she did it in whispers and with tears. She told me it was my job to remember her sister, the ballerina, always and forever a teenager.
I was in 1st grade before I thought of it again, in a meaningful way. I went to school in our temples basement in Dunwoody, Georgia. and one Monday we didn’t have school. Over the weekend someone had broken in and defaced desks, couches and chalkboards with swastikas. I saw that symbol and remembered Grandma Fusses tears. And I knew that it was evil and I was hated. I never understood what those teenagers were thinking as they painted a symbol of hate or scratched it into surfaces.
I am shocked and horrified at the news today that Hitler never gassed his own people. I know that is not true. I am one generation removed from the survivors. Their children were my parents generation. As we remember our flight from Egypt this week, so too do Jews remember the Holocaust. Last year, Elie Wiesel , a Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate author, died. He has many quotes…too many to list about why Jews wrote down their memories for my generation and forward. Read his Nobel speech, or even just the quotes that come up on google. We remember the generation lost. All 6,000,000 of them. Men and women, Mothers and Fathers, Children and Artists, Brothers and Sisters.
But I want to be real here. These are the approximate numbers:
Number of Deaths
Jews: up to 6 million
Soviet civilians: around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews)
Soviet prisoners of war: around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)
Non-Jewish Polish civilians: around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)
Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina): 312,000
People with disabilities living in institutions: up to 250,000
Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Around 1,900
Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials: at least 70,000
German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory: undetermined
Homosexuals: hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above)
But, Hitler never used chemical weapons on his own people, Right?!?
Karen Chance has Released a few more Q & A to go with the release of Ride the Storm
http://www.karenchance.com/news/q-and-a-61/
http://www.karenchance.com/news/q-and-a-63/
http://www.karenchance.com/news/q-and-a-63-2/
http://www.karenchance.com/news/qa-64/
Ride the Storm
Fiction
Penguin
2017-08
608
Cassie Palmer can see the future, talk to ghosts, and travel through time--but nothing's prepared her for this. Ever since being stuck with the job of pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world, Cassie Palmer has been playing catch up. Catch up to the lifetime's worth of training she missed being raised by a psychotic vampire instead of at the fabled pythian court. Catch up to the powerful, and sometimes seductive, forces trying to mold her to their will. It's been a trial by fire that has left her more than a little burned. But now she realizes that all that was the just the warm up for the real race. Ancient forces that once terrorized the world are trying to return, and Cassie is the only one who can stop them...
Breaking News from Karen Chance
I am amazed that this needed to be said, but as Karen said apparently it was necessary!
Public Service Announcement
In the past few days, I have received repeated emails from people unhappy about Ride the Storm supposedly being the last book in the Cassandra Palmer series. They were angry that I hadn’t tied up every single strand and given them a proper send off. They were distressed because someone, somewhere, had told them that this was the last book and they believed it.
It occurred to me that, if I was getting repeated emails, there might be more people out there who believed the same thing, but who hadn’t dropped me a line. So here, for the record, is my official take on this: this is not the last book.
Originally, there were supposed to be nine books in the series, three interwoven trilogies, each dealing with a different challenge for Cassie to face. A sort of “Big Bad” around which her other adventures were framed. This book completes the second of these “trilogies” (the quotation marks are because they each took four books to complete, not three as originally intended.) So we have a ways still to go. I am not saying, btw, that there are exactly four books left; I am saying that it will take at least that many to complete the original design.
Thank you for reading this boring post, but apparently, I needed to get this out there.”
Review of Amy Lane’s Rampart Volume 1 — Yay Cory’s Back!
Rampant, Volume 1
Little Goddess
Paranormal Romance
DSP Publications; 2 edition
e book
https://www.amazon.com/Rampant-Vol-Little-Goddess-Book-ebook/dp/B01LW8X5KJ/ref=pd_sim_351_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7HQC62EF4FZHTK4QDJ0K#customerReviews
2nd Edition
Little Goddess: Book Four
Vol. 1
Lady Cory has carved out a life for herself not just as a wife to three husbands but also as one of the rulers of the supernatural communities of Northern California—and a college student in search of that elusive degree. When a supernatural threat comes crashing into the hard-forged peace of Green's Hill, she and Green determine that they're the ones in charge of stopping the abomination that created it. To protect the people they love, Cory, Bracken, and Nicky travel to Redding to confront a tight-knit family of vampires guarding a terrible secret. It also leads them to a conflict of loyalties, as Nicky's parents threaten to tear Nicky away from the family he's come to love more than his own life.
Cory has to work hard to hold on to her temper and her life as she tries to prove that she and Green are not only leaders who will bind people to their hearts, but also protectors who will keep danger from running rampant.
An explanation of why I’m bouncing off the walls Until May 2nd (Hurry up and preorder NOW)
This is taken verbatim from https://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/quickening-vol-1-by-amy-lane-blog-tour-guest-post-excerpt/
How It All Began
by Amy Lane
So I know for a lot of people, the “big deal” of Quickening’s release is sort of lost.
Amy writes lots of books. Lots of big books. So?
And let’s face it—this one’s got a girl on the cover, and, yes, well, girls on the cover of an author known for her gay male romance work does not inspire a lot of “HUZZAH!”
But, like with everything, there is a story…
So, once upon a time there was an English teacher who felt compelled to go back to school to get her master’s degree. Why? Well, it was unclear even then. All of her peers were doing it, and it appeared to be the only way to get any income mobility and…
Whatever.
Everybody else was getting their MA in education, the better to become administration, but this particular English teacher wouldn’t touch administration with a barge pole. Ugh. Gross. No.
But learn more about her subject matter? Holy Goddess YES!
So she took a bunch of different classes—an entire semester on Hamlet, anyone? And finally decided that creative writing was where she wanted to be.
And she was in this class, loving it, when some asshole dropped a couple of planes on some buildings in New York, and she had a big epiphany: She’d left her two young children at home during her school time, and they were only six and eight at the time, and she didn’t want to spend her precious moments taking classes to make a quota, she wanted to spend her time with them.
So she dropped out of the master’s program—but she kept writing.
Three and a half years later she self-published the book she’d started during that time in the master’s class. It felt like self-aggrandizement mostly—the master’s project was a finished novel, and hey, she’d done that, so even if she didn’t have the piece of paper to prove it, she had Vulnerable.
This was back when self-publishing was in its infancy, and our English teacher made a LOT of mistakes—a lot of them surprisingly enough, in English.
This was back during a DARK period in language instruction. A time called “whole language” learning—when it was considered unprofessional for an English teacher to so much as request a grammar textbook to teach her students how to write English with any sort of proficiency. They were supposed to just “absorb” that knowledge from the books they read.
For the record—it didn’t work.
Also?
It destroyed this particular English teacher’s basic knowledge of grammar and punctuation—all she was reading at the time was student papers.
Which meant when her masterpiece came out, there were some really fucking embarrassing errors all over the goddamned manuscript.
But she didn’t care. Because seriously. How many people were going to read something she wrote? She worked in an extremely misogynistic environment—none of the people in her staff room would so much as let her finish a sentence. She grew up with people who thought she was too stupid to finish college in the first place—and were really confused as to why she’d take master’s classes in something that wouldn’t get her more money just because she hated the job. Her students thought she was okay—but it was an inner-city school, and the ones who didn’t think she was okay told her she was a dumbfuck twat on a daily basis, and her administration didn’t really think that was too bad on the whole.
Her children—whom she adored—both had their own difficulties in school. Obviously her fault, because what did she do wrong to produce a kid with a communication handicap and one with a skewed, Eyeore view of life, even at six?
Nobody would read this book. (Except her outstanding and wonderful Mate.) Nobody would care. It was her accomplishment, and hers alone, and she was really proud of it.
And she was proud of the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. For six years, her Christmas gift from her husband was a chance to self-publish the book she’d written that year between kids and school and soccer and dance and karate and, oh, hey, giving birth to two more children for a total of four.
And then, one day, someone on Twitter asked for a short fic—just a short fic—based on a video of some really hot guys and a dirty guitar riff, and she wrote it, just for fun…
And these people—this publishing company—loved it.
In fact, they had read her books. They loved her stories. They thought she was worthwhile—they wanted to see what else she could write.
And her love affair with writing purely gay romance began.
Now, the last thing she’d written on her own had been the fourth book in her first series—Rampant.
And she’d dropped a helluva bomb at the end of that book. A sort of, uh, BIG cliffhanger. Or two.
And just when her writing career in gay romance took off, her teaching career took a HUGE, devastating, killing hit—and yes, the two things were very closely connected. So suddenly, writing gay romance became the thing she absolutely had to do.
It became her livelihood.
And finishing that series—ending that cliffhanger—that became the last thing on her list.
So… what does this have to do with Quickening?
Seven years ago I wrote a book that ended with a teeny-tiny-itty-bitty sorceress being told some VERY BIG GINORMOUS LIFE CHANGING NEWS.
And people have been waiting to see how that comes out. For seven years.
So I’m going to be writing some blog posts about this book in the next week—and I’m going to be WAY more excited about its release than I think my community is going to be.
But that’s okay—because the first book was something I wanted to do for myself. And this book was a promise I kept to all the people who thought that first book was something special, something that resonated with them, and took the time to tell me that my voice—the one that seemed to be raised desperately unheard for so long—was really important to them.
So it’s possible Quickening isn’t going to take the gay romance world by storm.
But I’m so happy that it’s out, I’m could actually cry.
If you’re interested in the books that started it all, start with Vulnerable—it’s been re-edited and recovered, as have all of the original books in the series.
If you’re a fan of the series already, and you’ve been waiting for the last seven years—you’re the best. Period. I couldn’t have done the last twelve years without you.
Amy
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Quickening, volume 1
Little Goddess (Book 5)
DSP Publications
(May 2, 2017)
316 pages
Little Goddess: Book Five
Volume One
Cory thought she’d found balance on Green's Hill—sorceress, student, queen of the vampires, wife to three men—she had it down! But establishing her right to risk herself with Green and Bracken had more than one consequence, and now she’s facing the world's scariest job title: mother.
But getting the news that she’s knocked up takes a back seat when a half-elf hunts them down for help. Her arrival brings news that the werewolf threat, which has been haunting them for over a year, has finally arrived on their doorstep—and it’s bigger and more frightening than they’d ever imagined.
Cory throws herself into this new battle with everything she’s got—and her men let her do it. Because they all know that whether they defeat this enemy now or later, the thing she's most afraid of is arriving on a set schedule, and not even Cory can avoid it. The trick is getting her to acknowledge she's pregnant before she gives birth—or kills herself in denial.