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Harmony Kent

2/10/2019

14 Comments

 
Hello everyone. Harmony here. I’m excited to share my latest non-fiction book with you all today. Huge thanks to Robert for hosting me today.

Creative Solutions for the Modern Writer does what it says on the tin (or cover, lol), and offers tools to fire your imagination. With chapters on things such as using chess and tarot to develop stories, plots, and characters—as well as adopting the principles of nursing triage, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, horoscopes, and more—this little guide is full of fun tips and tricks to get your muse working overtime.
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​This excellent writer’s companion is available on pre-order now in ebook. And both ebook and paperback go on sale on October 9th.

Here’s an excerpt for you:

Founded by Eric Berne in the late 1950s, TA (Transactional Analysis) works on the theory that each person has three ego states: parent, adult, and child. In simple terms, TA is designed to promote personal growth and change. For us writers, this offers us a great tool to show character arcs and character development as well as spicing up our character dialogue.
The idea in TA is that we relate to each other from the perspective of the role we see ourselves in, which will be from one of the above-mentioned three categories (parent, adult, child). Let’s expand upon each of those roles:
Parent: Is usually authoritative and lays down the law. In any argument, the parent pulls rank and has the final word.
Adult: Is usually the role of even-minded, even-tempered, balanced, rational, and analytical. The sort of person you would want in a crisis.
Child: Is usually emotional, irrational, selfish, tantrum-throwing, whiny, and pouting, as well as innocent and trusting and dependent.
Think what fun you can have in character behaviour and interchanges just with this one way of looking at things. Remember what I mentioned earlier about what characterisation is and isn’t? …
 
… Even though we tend to operate from a particular perspective most of the time, the circumstances in which we find ourselves can cause a temporary shift. For example, somebody who operates from the Adult role typically, might—if faced with not getting his own way on something vitally important to him—switch into argumentative or petulant child mode until he gets over himself.
Deep fear and terror can cause us to revert to childlike behaviours too—making us whiny and dependent. Stress can cause us to become snappy and volatile for no apparent reason … which can look awfully like throwing a tantrum. 

Author Bio

After spending around thirteen years as an ordained Buddhist monk, living in a Zen Buddhist temple, and six years after a life-changing injury following a surgical error, Harmony Kent returned to the world at the tender age of forty.
Now, she is famous for her laughter, and has made quite the name for herself … she’s also, um, a writer … and fairly well known for that too. She’s even won a few awards. Harmony lives in rural Cornwall with her ever-present sense of humour, adorable husband, and quirky neighbours.
Harmony is passionate about supporting her fellow authors.
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Links

Website: https://harmonykent.co.uk/
Story Empire (co-authored): https://storyempirecom.wordpress.com/
Amazon Author Page: author.to/HarmonysBooks
Twitter: @harmony_kent
LinkedIn: Harmony
Goodreads: Author Page
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/harmony-kent 

Creative Solutions Pre-order Link: http://mybook.to/CreativeSolutions

​​
14 Comments

Graham Higson

28/3/2019

0 Comments

 
The Little Screw Books – Memoirs or Novels?
by Graham Higson
​

Back in 1996 I landed the enviable job of writing the insider's column for a DIY magazine. I'd been rather fond of such articles ever since my previous incarnation working for a bank, where the magazine contained the inner thoughts of a lucky sod who'd been posted – would you believe? – to the branch in Cannes, from where every month he penned the mouth-watering Letter From France. Although I yearned to write similar entertaining diary pieces, the chance of me getting shifted to such a glamorous location was pretty damn slim – although I did suffer a posting to Hull, which, though still something of an adventure, didn't have quite the same feel as beside the Mediterranean. I mean, Letter From Paragon Street? I don’t think so.
 
Fast-forward 20 years and I'm running a hardware business and writing the retailer's insider page, which I did for over 10 years (a record, as it happens). It was these articles that formed the basis of my first memoir, How Much For a Little Screw?: Tales From Behind the Counter. 
​

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The Little Screw books are classed as memoirs, of which there are 10+ categories that I have whittled down to 3 main types: travel, emotional, and light-hearted, and I'm proud to be placed in the last one. When writing about the TV series Kingdom (2007), Stephen Fry said that "people want comfort television", and I feel there is a place in anyone's library for what I'd call comfort books, ones containing a mix of light-hearted eccentricity, with some dark areas and even sadness.
 
The Little Screw stories are true tales, told in a friendly, light-hearted style. Okay, so names and places have been changed, which is sound advice for stories based on true events. Writers of screen drama almost always jiggle true tales into a format that suits an acceptable story arc, and so I wrote in the style of a novel. In screen terms think Doc Martin without the coastline, Monarch of the Glen without the bogle, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole without the spots, and Cold Feet without the sex.
 
The articles had begun with simply writing about what was happening around me at the time, whereas with the book I went back a few years to when we acquired our apprentice. The book would then, as one of the secondary themes, chronicle his intended 4-year apprenticeship that actually took 10 years to complete. 
 
I once bought a book in Scotland that was written by someone called Greville. Now, I liked the sound of the name, with its suggestion of helplessness, mischievousness and naivety. So we got around to using this as a pet name for the apprentice. And it stuck. It has nothing at all to do with the character Granville in the BBC comedy Open All Hours. The MD in my stories has also been likened to the character Arkwright from the same show, but the MD in my books pre-dates Arkwright by many years. Jokingly, I once told him he could well have been the inspiration for the comedy character. After all, the MD's reputation was legendary in the region, so this could well have been the case.
 
It wasn't possible to fit all of our adventures into the first book (the mammoth-sized War and Peace comes to mind), so I told the story, including how it all ended, and published. Then I began to worry if I'd made a mistake by putting everything in just one volume and telling the whole story in one go. There was no way I could have foreseen the popularity of How Much For a Little Screw? and it soon became clear that readers wanted more of the tales. So I followed with All Mod Cons, a novella that would sit between chapters 13 and 14 of the first book. And then came the full-length Bobo and the Burglars, which follows straight on. Any of these, by the way, can be read as standalone books.
​

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These "equels" (as I call them), whilst being told in the same chatty manner as the first book, introduce some of the other dark forces that came along to blight our lives – but hey, it's not all doom. Particularly with Bobo, I think the burglary aspect is nicely balanced with new characters and places not visited in the earlier books.
 
It’s strange seeing the stories in print because, thinking back to those very times, now they feel to have more colour, no longer like flat memories. It feels good to bring those people back to life, to how they were when all that stuff was happening. And doing so has helped me to understand more about them, aspects I didn't appreciate at the time, especially for those characters who are no longer around. Perhaps this is why these books are indeed more memoir than novel. I hope you enjoy them.
​

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The Little Screw books at Amazon

 
grahamhigson.com


0 Comments

John Searancke

16/1/2019

2 Comments

 
 A LOVE AFFAIR WITH A BEAUTIFUL OLD BUILDING...
The Reluctant Hotelkeeper 

by 

bestselling author John Searancke
@JohnSearancke
ISBN: 978-1789017571
ASIN: B07LB7WLZM
Published: December 2018
Smart Link: smarturl.it/TheRelHotelkeeper
(Regularly 5.99)

"A Brilliantly Funny Memoir About A Hotel!"

#KINDLEDEAL
ON SALE FOR 99C/99P FROM 
JANUARY 16 - JANUARY 20, 2019
A rescue mission originally thought of as lasting for a year or two turned into a 35 year lifetime love affair with a beautiful old building.

There were to be battles royal with neighbours not wanting their status quo to be altered, and with the local fire authority who sought to impose draconian new safety measures.

John Searancke came to the role of hotelkeeper almost accidentally, and most definitely with much reluctance. After his parents' marriage fell apart, he was dragooned in, at the age of 22, to pick up the pieces of their new venture, a barely-trading country house hotel that had, frankly, seen better days. Not only was it posting an annual loss, but the fabric of the building was crumbling and there was no money left to make improvements.

Over the years, and with the steepest of learning curves, the grand old building was renovated and transformed to meet the requirements of the modern discerning traveller. Accolades for the hotel and its restaurant were won; together they became a well-regarded destination for a number of celebrities - and those that deemed themselves to be celebrities but were not. Stories abound featuring idiosyncratic guests, overbearing public bodies, fractured family life and animals of all shapes and sizes. The local fire station next door was demolished one foggy night, people were frightened by flying dogs and snakes in the long grass, and there were, as befits a country house, strange goings on in the night. Many were the guests who checked in who really should not have been seen together.

This is a tribute to all the people behind the scenes who helped to make the hard-won transformation into a great success.
Join The Authors Mailing List Here, Click here!
A Short Excerpt

Meanwhile, for my part, I recalled the tale of how one morning, on the way to the new kitchen, and walking through what remained of the old original hotel kitchen, I thought that I had been transported into another lifetime, a cross between Dante’s Inferno and a Victorian Christmas. I had stopped dead in my tracks.

There at the far end of the room was an unrecognisable person covered almost entirely in feathers. Any feathers not attached to that person were swilling around the room like a cloud, all but obscuring the far doorway, before landing softly to form a light covering on the floor tiles, much as I imagine the interior of a duvet to be.
On closer inspection, the mystery person turned out to be my mother! What had got into her mind I do not know, but she had, unbeknownst to anyone else, decided that her contribution to that particular Christmas was going to be the plucking of all of the pheasants that had just been delivered. Swooping on the box of birds and snatching them away from the hapless potboy, she maneuvered herself into a spare space, which happened to be adjacent to the top of a chest freezer. Clearly, tidiness was not going to be her watchword during this process. Feathers were pulled out, legs and heads were chopped off with gay abandon, and finally, the right hand was plunged into the bloody interior, emerging clutching a large handful of intestines, slimy heaps of which adorned the top of the freezer. Cleaning up after her was a bit of a trial, but I was glad that she had made the effort. I suppose that she could identify that with long bygone times and tasks that she had undertaken all those years ago.
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Guest Author's Schedule 

1:45(8:45am est)- Gearing up with Margaret Daly
2:00- John Searancke (posting done by Margaret Daly)
2:30(9:30am est) - Chariss K. Walker 
3:00(10:00am est) - Casi McLean
3:30(10:30am est) - Chris Schatz
4:00(11:00am est) - Mary L Schmidt
4:30-(11:30am est) - Janet Givens
5:00(12:00pm est) -Pamela Wik-Grimm
5:30(12:30pm est) - Nicole Anderson
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GIVEAWAY ENDS JANUARY 21, 2019 AT 12AM(EST)
PRIZES AWARDED BY JANUARY 25, 2019
ALSO BY JOHN SEARANCKE

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About John Searancke
John Searancke is restaurant reviewer for the Tenerife newspaper Island Connections. Born in 1943 at Derby Royal Infirmary, a war baby, he lived his early life in Ashby-de la-Zouch and was sent away to be educated at Kings Mead Preparatory School, Seaford and afterwards at Rugby School. Later commissioned into the Territorial Army, he has been variously a director of a light engineering company, an hotel and restaurant owner, director and chairman of a marketing consortium, and latterly a partner with his wife in a commercial legal services company. He has enjoyed working in England and Switzerland and has homes in England and northern Tenerife, where he now lives with his wife Sally.
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