​My most recent book is the result of fan requests.  Our hero, Ears O'Fluffin, made his debut as a series of short mystery stories in the monthly free eMag, Bunnyzine.  The magazine's editor put a request to the Development Team for a regular monthly feature.  I thought back to some of my favorite authors, and remembered that Arthur Conan Doyle published the Sherlock Holmes short stories as magazine serials.  The idea was well received, I just had to figure out how to make it rabbit-related.  

At the same time, I was watching old episodes of the TV show, Castle.  One of my favorite episodes, The Blue Butterfly, features a typical trench coat wearing hard boiled PI.  I flipped through a book of rabbit breeds, looking for the least likely tough guy detective, and found the Dwarf Hotot.  Three pounds of white fluff and adorableness, I'd found my unlikely PI.

Of course he has a tiny trench coat, a fedora hat, and a bottle of carrot juice in his desk drawer.  Ears O’Fluffin is a Pet Private Investigator.  His office is a cardboard box in his human’s living room, complete with a desk, a chair, and a coat rack.  Other pets come to him to solve the mysteries in their lives, while Ears tries to maintain his tough guy persona.  

After about six months of serial shorts, I had run out of ideas for cases.  I asked the Bunnyzine fans for mysteries that Ears should solve.  I got several good ones, including an idea that deserved more than the short serial could provide.  I put the idea of an Ears O’Fluffin novel to the fans, and got overwhelming positive feedback.  

The Adventure of the Scarlet Bird is Ears’ most difficult case, to date.  The boredom of a Pet Expo is broken by a plea for help from a glamorous white cat.  A precious gem is stolen right under Ears’ nose dragging him into the seedy world of jewel thieves.  To top it all off, Ears is subjected to the sarcasm of a British hamster tasked with finding another stolen gem.  A room full of suspects, a hostile local police detective, and only two days to solve the case.  Can Ears recover the gem and preserve his reputation as the country's most successful Pet PI?

Without my rescue bunny, Peaches, I would not have been pulled into the wonderful world of house rabbits.  To give back to that community, and to help other rescued rabbits find their forever homes, I have set up a fundraiser for the Colorado House Rabbit Society.  For every signed copy of The Adventure of the Scarlet Bird ordered from me, I will donate $1 to the CHRS.  More information and purchase links can be found on my website at www.monicayoknis.com/earsofluffin.  

Follow the adventure of a dwarf rabbit detective as he solves a perplexing theft.  Appropriate for anyone ages 10 and up.
A boring weekend at a pet expo takes a dramatic turn for the mysterious when a bird made of rubies is stolen right out from under Ears’ nose.  With his reputation as the country’s greatest Pet P.I. at stake, Ears finds himself facing his most difficult case.  Is his client really a victim, or is she trying to frame Ears for the theft?  Can Ears find the jewel and apprehend the real thief before the expo closes?  Can he avoid being detained by the local police?  And can he work with a sarcastic British hamster?

Find Monica on Facebook, Twitter and her website! 

Tinthia lives on the Concord River with her black Lab, black cat, and assorted wildlife including a flock of Mallard ducks. When she’s not writing, she’s gardening, painting, eating ice cream, casting spells, and teaching. If asked about her favorite books, she'll tell you at the top of the list is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, followed by The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

​She enjoys writing romantic women's fiction, although she would like to try her hand at a murder mystery someday. Why? Well, let's just say she has a score to settle with a certain gentleman from a certain dating website.
​
​Would like to know more about Tinthia? Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and at www.tinthiaclemant.com. Ask her anything, she’s an open book.

Hi, I’m Tinthia Clemant, a 69-year-old earth witch with a passion for telling stories. My books fall into the women’s fiction genre and center on strong-willed (although they might not know it at the beginning of the book) female leads. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote in Women Who Run with the Wolves, “Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.” Thanks to me, my characters spend a lot of time in the woods where they stumble and fall, wish and hope, and ultimately learn to face the hidden truths about themselves.

Woven throughout all my stories are golden strands of romance, because, after all, life’s no fun without muscular arms, warm skin, and deep kisses. My heroines deserve no less.
My writing journey started back when Marilyn Monroe took her last breath, the Cuban Missile Crisis was on every adult’s mind, and the Beatles released Love Me Do. The year was 1962 and, at the age of seven, I wrote an enchanting tale about a monkey named Harry and a beautiful peacock named Claire.

My mother was the driving force behind my writing, acting as my cheerleader, critic, editor, and sole audience. I stopped writing after her death in 1982, convinced no one would ever want to read my stories, and jumped into the rat race called adult life.

Fast forward ten years and the birth of my son. While he took naps I wrote…and wrote and wrote. As Hemingway is quoted as saying, ‘The first draft of anything is shit.’ Boy, was he ever right. By the end of the year I had a completed novel. And it sucked! I stored the pages in the attic and stopped pretending that I could write.

Somewhere around my 59th birthday I read the following quote: ‘Don’t die with your stories inside of you.’  The words worked their magic and I pulled myself up by my big girl thong and opened the dam. The words flowed. I published my first book, The Summer of Annah: A Midsummer’s Wish on June 21, 2016 and I haven’t looked back since.

​I’m often asked what advice I would give wannabe authors. Here goes: Have fun. As writers, we get to craft worlds where our readers will play, laugh, cry, fight, hide, shake with fear, and fall in love. What’s better than that? So have fun and write, damn it, write!

​

​The conference itself was a real eye-opener. I’ve never left a writing conference where I didn’t learn something, and this was no exception. I visited the mock crime scene several times to test my sleuthing skills. I attended a number of panels on craft and career management. And, most importantly, I networked. I met some incredible writers, made some new friends, and was given some heady perspective on my writing career. I hadn’t realized it before, but I was making some pretty major decisions about the direction of my career based on fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear of making the wrong choices.

​For the past two years (almost) I’ve been inviting authors onto my blog to talk about their writing journey, the risks they’ve taken and the things that have inspired their work. As a result, I know that I’m not alone in feeling the pressure. I’ve learned a lot in the past four years of full-time writing, but the lessons never stop coming and for that I am immensely thankful. 
 
Killer Nashville provides a really interesting mix of opportunities. Over the course of four days, I met four literary agents, two of whom requested materials. I took copious notes on the craft of writing (Jeffrey Deaver’s master class was amazing!). And I heard some inspiring success stories about self-publishing. This last point caused a whole lot of commotion in my brain. I self-published Wallflower Bloomingearly in my career, when I was still learning as I went. An indie publisher in Colorado picked up WB and its sequel Best Laid Plans & Other Disasters. A third book was in the contract, but life happens to all of us and book three was put on the backburner as I turned my focus to writing thrillers. And in doing so, I found myself back where I started with no agent and no publishing contract. 

​That was OK by me. I needed to work on my craft and revise my plan for moving forward. In the meantime, I published a short story and more pieces for ESME and Novelty Bride. I kept busy. I decided to start again with traditional publishing as my goal, and once the revisions were done on my first thriller manuscript, I started querying agents. 
 
I’m still immersed in that process. I’d put the whole idea of ever self-publishing again on hold indefinitely, but when I heard J.A. Konrath speak at the conference, his words stopped me in my tracks. I love it when someone makes you throw out all your preconceived notions and take a hard look at what you’re doing. That’s what Joe’s talk did for me, and as the weekend progressed I heard more stories that continued to challenge the plans I’d made for my writing career.
​

​Like an old house where no wall is straight and no corner is exactly square, my writing career has been a constant search for structural integrity.
 
I was always a writer. I used to wonder with gravelly suspicion about people who weren’t pre-occupied with words and sentences, and the challenge of penning a novel.
 
My father was an office man. He was a mechanical engineer to be exact. He was responsible for designing massive industrial conveyor systems all over, from Seward, Alaska to Tasmania. In his world, every corner had to be perfectly square, measured lines even, plans produced in triplicate. One of my first jobs was to run prints for him and I can still see his perfect engineer’s handwriting.
 
Even today, some thirty-five years later, I recall the phone number to his office. On certain days after school I would call him at work before he left. I would ask about his day, but my real purpose was to request some of the notepads and pens his employer kept hoarded in the supply closet. For me, that closet was like a candy store; the spiral bound notebooks delightful places for new writing.
 
We lived on a country road, connected to another country road, which led to another country road that ran along a fruit orchard. There was a cherry tree atop a small hill. The shadow of that cherry tree was the outside boundary of how far, at seven years old, I was allowed to walk by myself.
 
Every day after school, rain or shine, I would walk out to the cherry tree where my Dad could pick me up on his way home. I could pick out his headlights from the bend in the road more than a half-mile up. Those days when I requested notepads and pens were especially exciting. I would hop into his old Ford F-150, slide up onto the bench seat where he’d have a stack of them waiting for me. He never forgot.
 
“Write a good one, OK?” he would say before taking us that last mile back to the house.
 
Once completed, my Mom would sew construction paper covers onto my books. We treated the whole process like a cottage publishing enterprise: over breakfast, I would discuss cover design, afterward we would carefully select thread and I would oversee the binding before we presented the finished product on the table like a bookstore.
 
Looking back my parents were a supportive pair. I’m sure they looked at that collection of silly space opera pastiches and wondered what it would all add up to.
 
Dad said, “write a good one” and Mom served as my publisher. Still, I wonder what they thought of the road I was setting out on.
 
No one tells you how to do this, other than to usually say, don’t do something like that. It’s an impractical thing, writing, perhaps the most impractical thing of all. Even without a map to where I was going, I would not be deterred though. Writing was always the thing I was going to do, one way or another. Besides, all of the more practical careers like astronaut, baseball player and President were already taken.
 
 So, I stocked up on spiral notebook pads and pens, and began the life’s work.
 
As I got older, my Dad began his process of parenting my aphorism. One of his favorites was, “be careful about making too many plans” which was odd for an engineer whose life output was a roll of blue printed plans.
 
More genuinely though, Dad would add, “all you’ll end up at the end of the day is a person biding their time.”
 
He was right. The longer you sit around in the “what” and “when” the more infirm your self-definition becomes. If you just do this thing, whether that thing is a book or an article or a blog, you become the action and not the plan.
 
Be the verb, right? That’s what he was saying. Be the action word.
 
Four years ago, I met Tom Robbins at a writer’s conference. He was alone at a banquet table, waiting impatiently for someone to bring him his dinner.
 
My fellow writers were afraid to walk up to Tom. Having already infused myself with some liquid courage, I had no such inhibitions.
 
“You’re Tom Robbins,” I said.
Feigning surprise, he replied, “I am.”
“Your writing has cost me a girlfriend or two,” I said.
Then he laughed. I mean, really laughed. “Hey, me too.”
I noticed that Tom was wearing an audacious pair of Converse All-Stars. They were covered in murals of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.
“Nice shoes,” he said.
“That’s the secret,” he replied.
“Shoes?”
Then Tom Robbins shook his head with sage disgust. “No, kid. Be memorable.”
 
~
 
My first self-published book, The Mask Of Tomorrow will hit the ground later this fall. Sadly, my Dad won’t be there to see it. I’ll send Tom Robbins a copy, but what are the odds he reads it?
 
If my Dad was here though, I would tell him that him proudly that I’m publishing it myself, and that I wrote the first draft in pen in a spiral notebooks. I don’t know if he’d fully understand. But I at least believe he’d recognize where all of this came from.
 
A lack of square corners. Wobbly walls. Years in, it hardly seems to make a difference. The strange road is home.
 
Be yourself. Be memorable. 

​Way out in Canyon County, Oregon the shadows seem to cast just a little longer. Maybe it’s because of the way the sunrises over Tallow Creek. Maybe it’s how shafts of summer dusk light spill out from behind the jagged peaks of the Cascade Mountains.
 
Or maybe it’s something deeper still, something buried long ago out in the sage grass that is only now simmering to the surface.
 
What took place in the early-1980’s around the burned out mill town of Josephine is one of countless untold chapters in the story of the American west. It is but a tiny, haunted sliver of a larger saga that began long before any one living there now can remember.
 
Taking place in a world teeming with glassy eyed drifters, stoic ranchers, heavy-pouring bartenders, and a few honest cops, The Strange Air Series of supernatural mysteries explores the unfurling of a long held cosmic secrets that threaten the rusted out husk of the American dream.
 
The debut book in the series, The Mask Of Tomorrow will be published in Autumn 2018. Subscribe at www.erickmertzauthor.com for updates on it’s release.

Facebook:
@erickmertzauthor
 
Twitter:
@emerzwriting

A guide for parents of premature babies discusses the experiences of the parents of twenty premature babies and the stories of their ordeals, as well as providing tips on dealing with feelings of anger and depression. 10,000 first printing.
Find Bert on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

​People have great book ideas. Yet despite their best efforts, they find it nearly impossible to complete a single chapter. All too soon they give up, disheartened. In this slender, easy-to-use volume, Phyllis Irene Radford--author of over forty books, and editor of twenty-five books, and fifteen anthologies—gently guides writers through plot structure, realistic characters, dynamic writing, organizational tools, and the publishing industry from an insider’s point of view. So, if you’ve ever thought about writing a novel, this book can help you create a dynamic beginning, conquer the muddle in the middle, and write a powerful and satisfying ending with an experienced teacher holding your hand and giving examples.

Find Phyllis on Facebook:
​www.facebook.com/phyllis.i.radford

In general, I knew literally nothing about how to finish most of my writing projects when I started.

My first “published” work was a Star Trek audio drama - think old-school radio plays like The Shadow with actors and sound effects and music.

I had no idea how to write the audio drama format and even less about how to produce one. Little by little, with lots of help from the online audio drama community, I had my first script, and then a library of sound effects and some music, and a friend who helped connect me to volunteer voice actors.

If you’ve never had someone lend a voice to one of your characters, I highly recommend it - it’s one of the most amazing experiences I think any writer can have.

Like self-publishing, there are a LOT of things to learn in the production of audio drama - timing, where to place sound effects, how to balance volumes of different clips... the learning curve was extensive, but learning how to stay dedicated to a project over weeks and months was hugely important to my future success in traditional publishing.

Around the 2-year-span before and after the height of the Great Recession, I had 12 jobs and was only fired 3 times. My friends were in awe of my ability to land job after job after job with the longest gap being about 3 months (when the average job search length at the time was 12-16 months).

All the while, I started my blog Psychotic Resumes about things at each job that were either spectacular or something I wouldn’t inflict on my worst enemy - like the time I was written up for being “overly direct” about a solution that would save the company about $150K in overhead costs.

I was sitting on all this excellent content - people continued to comment on my blog even after I’d slowed down regular blogging to focus on starting my own business. In a fit of kismet, one of the graphic designers I regularly worked with asked if I knew anyone who was looking to create a Kindle book. We didn’t have much of an idea of what would be involved, but we dove in and gave it a shot. I’d write, tweak, and modify blogs into chapters and she’d do the design work.

A few months later, I had my first published book - Psychotic Resumes. I sold maybe 15 copies total and learned a significant publishing lesson: create in as many different formats as possible. My book was only available in Kindle format, and not many people had a Kindle - especially folks looking for a job. There was no easy or cost-effective way to self-publish (CreateSpace wasn’t widely available yet), and so most people passed on my book.

I put most non-blog writing on hold for a while after that. Not that I didn’t want to write, but between a new wife and growing business, there wasn’t time for much else. Adding “new father” to my title didn’t help either until we were about six months into reading piles and piles of children’s books to our son.

My wife and I read quite a few beautiful books but just as many head-scratchers (we’re prolific library patrons). It wasn’t until my artist friend created his own CreateSpace children’s book that I realized that I could write a children’s book, too. He was kind enough to help me figure out the basics of the process over the course of a coffee meeting.

I wrote out the basic storyline and decided to illustrate it myself. I’d priced out a few graphic designers to help, but the lowest at $700 for 20-ish pages didn’t seem like a wise use of money with a new kiddo in tow. Diapers are expensive, after all!

Looking back, I was supremely naive when it comes to how much work this would actually take. I learned basic character design by using Lynda, Skillshare, and 53’s Paper app, but creating every page’s illustration from scratch was hugely time-consuming. This was made worse by the fact that I hadn’t properly confirmed page sizes or minimum page count in CreateSpace before I started illustrating (the technical term for this is “whoops”).

After drawing a few more pages and segmenting the story to get to the proper minimum number of pages, I had to learn how to work InDesign - again by using Skillshare and Lynda (surprisingly enough, this was the easiest part of the whole process).

A month or so later, I had my proof in-hand. After nearly a whole year of reading other people’s books to my kiddo, I showed him a picture of himself in my book. His giggle when I said, “written and illustrated BY DADDY” was incredibly rewarding.

Even better, the skills I learned while digging into Illustrator, InDesign, and CreateSpace allowed me to apply those same skills to help my clients in my day job.

Though it took a LOT longer, learning to DIY each part that I could has helped me gain a ton of valuable skills (I even put together my friend’s first book). While the DIY-all-the-things approach isn’t for everybody, for me, it opened up the creative process to so many more applications and reduced costs significantly - allowing me to take more risks on my creative projects.

My future projects will involve science fiction - some of my favorite reads are the Magic 2.0 series by Scott Meyer, anything by Becky Chambers, and Year Zero by Rob Reid (who I’ve had the chance to meet and high-five for his fantastic work).​

​To get the attention necessary to become gainfully employed in a double-dip recession job market with 9%(+!) unemployment, you absolutely have to stick out - in a good way.

Honest, risky, and effective, Psychotic Resumes is the kind of advice you won’t find anywhere else. Written by Nick Armstrong, the co-founder of LaidOffCamp Fort Collins and CareerCamp Fort Collins, this isn't your typical "resume" book. 

Nick's off-the-cuff sense of humor, keen mastery of four letter words, and unique look on today's job market will have you entertained, horrified, and inspired all at once.

Do you get the feeling that today's job market rules have changed, but nobody's given you the new playbook? Have you ever seen a job search technique so crazy that you're amazed it worked? Are you frustrated by your seemingly unending job search and willing to try something - anything - to land a job before you resort to a ramen-only diet?

Enter Psychotic Resumes: all the advice you never knew, but really needed to land a better job for better pay.

You’ll learn how to conduct an effective job search, write better, cleaner resumes, build amazing cover letters, ace your job interviews, negotiate your salary like a rockstar, and organize your business life so you impress on your first week at your new job.

Specifically targeted toward Gen-Y (the Millennial Generation), the advice in this book has been field tested for years, proven effective across career paths and geographies to get unemployed college grad butts off mom and dad's couch. Gen-Y doesn't get all the fun, though - Baby Boomers and Gen-X will find a lot of use from the advice in this book, too.

It’s time to stop flipping burgers and start doing meaningful work again!

I also enjoyed two very different presentations by two very awesome Megs. Last year, when I was reading Megan Abbott’s book You Will Know Me, my daughter was in gymnastics and it actually gave me nightmares. Megan is a sweet, funny, and enthusiastic presenter. She gave some wonderful examples about setting the mood when writing thrillers and I’ve already started applying those lessons to my manuscript. Then, there’s Meg Gardiner, whose class on creating suspense was full of valuable takeaways. These women are charming, articulate, and interesting, making for a very happy me.