A.M. Jenner's Blog

Since October, I've been busy revising and republishing books. So far, we've re-published Scott's Tanella's Flight, Natalie's A Gigolo for Christmas, and The Mom's Place, and my Clues to Food. We've also republished our anthology, Bits and Bites.



Additionally, as an Editor with the Electric Scroll, I've been working with four other authors, and their books are in various stages of publication.





Today, I want to talk about the newest book out, Samuel, Seer. It's the fictionalized autobiography of the Old Testament prophet, Samuel, and it's...hmm...what's a better word than Awesome? Well, it's better than Awesome!



Also, today, and until the 9th, the Kindle ebook version is free! (Get it here.)



A M Jenner

A M Jenner

Deep breath. Ready?



In the past, A M Jenner has actually been a group of three related authors all pretending to be the same person. That past is over. Some of us are making career changes, and our opportunity for working as closely together as we have been is changing. One of us is a recent college graduate, another is just finishing a long career out in the real world and is coming home to write full time, while the third has recently finished with formal education and is now pursuing a more useful informal path of education.


Rather than deal with the extensive accounting changes that would otherwise be necessary, we have decided to become separate business entities. We have all signed with the Electric Scroll, a wonderful publishing house which has agreed to re-publish our back-list under our proper names, so the credit – and the royalties – will be given where they are due. We'll be editing the books as they're republished; some will have only slight changes, while others are getting massive rewrites. They'll also be publishing our new books as we move forward. They even agreed to put up links to the old, self-published versions of the books until each is republished. Told you they were wonderful!



Natalie Peck


A M Jenner will continue to write her intense romantic suspense novels, while Natalie Peck will receive due applause for her sweet heart-felt romances, and Scott Ashby will be made to claim his wonderful SF and fantasy. And you wondered why we never put author pictures anywhere!


Please take note that we’re not angry at each other, and this isn’t some sort of a terrible break-up. Rather, it’s a changed life situation where three literary artists no longer have the opportunity to work together in the same way they have been. We still intend to proof-read for each other, and work together via email as much as possible. However, our working arrangements have taken a radical change in new directions that are very good for each of us as individuals, while at the same time resulting in a change in how we present ourselves as authors.


All three of us have signed with the Electric Scroll, and have decided that maintaining our separate author pages there will be much easier than asking poor Scott to create and maintain separate web sites for each of us. The web address is www.electric-scroll.com.



Scott Ashby


Our shared website, www.am-jenner.com, will be going away shortly, and this blog will eventually dissolve as well, though all three of us will be contributing to the Electric Scroll's blog from time to time. You'll find us there, writing about things we find interesting, and hopefully things you'll like as well.


We’d like to collectively thank you for being our good friends and loyal readers, and hope that you continue as our friends and readers into the future. Expect the same sort of good writing you’ve enjoyed in the past, and join us in wishing the best to each other as we pursue our writing with a little less help from our friends.



A M Jenner

Scott Ashby

Natalie Peck

Contrary to all the rumors, I'm not dead, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, and I haven't even had the grace to have been involved in some sort of a catastrophic event.



The reason I haven't written since Mother's Day is actually rather simple and completely boring: I've been busy. That isn't to say I've forgotten my readers; I think of you daily, and I even think of writing a post to you at least a couple times a week. This hasn't been the sort of busy that means, "You are no longer my top priority and therefore I am busy." This has been the sort of busy that comes from, "I'm so busy running all over taking care of small but urgent wildfires that I have no time left for the important things in my life like writing blog posts. Or books. Or anything, really."



The truth is that I've been involved in several life-changing situations that have kept me from doing what I want to do, writing books and interacting with my readers. One thing I've been working on is a major update to my website, which I finally uploaded this morning. It's such a big change though, that until the new pages have a chance to propagate (which means spread all over the internet) you may see strange and ugly pages. Keep hitting refresh or go back later to see the pretty pages that I spent six months working on.



I've been getting ready to retire from my day job, and that's taken a lot of time, because in between running around making sure all the financial elements were healthy and in place, my boss decided that in addition to my regular duties I should write a history of our workplace. I've worked there 18 years, and know the history and have lived through more of it than anyone else there, including my now ex-boss.



My writing association talked me into being in charge of their website in January, and they assured my that once the conference was over in February, I would only be doing things for a couple of hours a week. This was true until we had some major difficulties on the site which we are now finally getting on the outside of.



I've been taking some computer classes which have used up more time than expected.



I've got very sensitive lungs, and there was a large mulch fire about thirty miles from my home which burned for the better part of a week. The evening wind shift blew the smoke directly to my home, however, which has made breathing difficult. Although the fire is now out, or at least under control enough that the smoke no longer reaches my home, I'm still coughing and trying to recover from the lungfuls I inhaled. Additionally, two weeks ago I was at the hair salon for a trim, and the place was full of acetone fumes from the nail place next door, making my breathing more difficult. I'll be fine, but it will take a while to fully recover from the fire and the other fumes. Later this month I'm going on a four-day three-night writing retreat up in the clean mountain air. I'm hoping that it will be good for my lungs, as well as being calming for my nerves and a kick-start for my writing.



And finally, I've been working on some changes that will be unveiled here in the near future. Please note that by "near" I really mean "sometime before the end of the year, if all goes well". They're changes that will mean better times ahead for me, and hopefully giving me more time to write and publish books for you to read.



On the book front, progress is still slowly being made on the suspense novel Just a Name, the sci fi novel Mindtouch, and the romantic novella Meet me Midway, all three of which I hope to publish by year's end. At least, that's the plan.



~Marie

Every mother needs some romance in their lives, so I've made my romance, A Gigolo for Christmas, free today. You can get it here for your mom's new Kindle.

What do those have in common? They're all components in the Evertaster Series by Adam Glendon Sidwell, my guest today as he shows off the newest book in his series, The Buttersmiths' Gold. I'll let him tell you all about it:






The Buttersmiths' Gold





BATTLES. BLUEBERRIES. BOVINES.



TORBJORN AND STORFJELL’S HISTORY UNFOLDS IN AN EPIC EVERTASTER NOVELLA.



 Everyone knows the most coveted treasure of the Viking Age was blueberry muffins. Blueberry muffins so succulent that if you sniffed just a whiff, you'd want a whole bite. If you bit a bite, you'd want a batch; if you snatched a batch, you'd stop at nothing short of going to war just to claim them all.



Young Torbjorn Trofastsonn comes from the clan that makes them. He's a Viking through and through – he's thirteen winters old, larger than most respectable rocks, and most of all, a Buttersmith. That's what he thinks anyway, until a charismatic merchant makes Torbjorn question his place among the muffin-makers. When Torbjorn lets the secret of his clan's muffin recipe slip, he calls doom and destruction down upon his peaceful village and forces his brother Storfjell and his clansmen to do the one thing they are ill-prepared to do: battle for their lives.



About The Buttersmiths' Gold



The Buttersmiths' Gold is a spin off novella in the Evertaster series that tells the story of two Viking brothers and their adventurous past. The Evertaster series (Book #1 released June 14, 2012) is about Guster Johnsonville, who goes searching for a legendary taste rumored to be the most delicious in all of history. Along the way he meets a slew of mysterious characters, including two Viking brothers Torbjorn and Storfjell. The Buttersmiths' Gold is their story. 124 pages. By Adam Glendon Sidwell. Published by Future House Publishing.



Evertaster, Book #1:





A legendary taste. Sought after for centuries. Shrouded in secrecy.



When eleven-year-old Guster Johnsonville rejects his mother’s casserole for the umpteenth time, she takes him into the city of New Orleans to find him something to eat. There, in a dark, abandoned corner of the city they meet a dying pastry maker. In his last breath he entrusts them with a secret: an ancient recipe that makes the most delicious taste the world will ever know — a taste that will change the fate of humanity forever.



Forced to flee by a cult of murderous chefs, the Johnsonvilles embark on a perilous journey to ancient ruins, faraway jungles and forgotten caves. Along the way they discover the truth: Guster is an Evertaster — a kid so picky that nothing but the legendary taste itself will save him from starvation. With the sinister chefs hot on Guster’s heels and the chefs’ reign of terror spreading, Guster and his family must find the legendary taste before it’s too late.






If the video doesn't work for you, you can view it on YouTube here.


 

The book can be purchased here.

 

Ebooks are considered to be more eco-friendly than print, so to celebrate Earth Day, I'm giving away my one book that is available only as an ebook, A Gigolo for Christmas. You can get it here for your Kindle.

Did you ever have one of those sorts of days when you knew
beyond doubt that life was out to get you? Me either. If I did, though, it
might resemble the weeks I’ve been living through.






I’m being pulled in a lot of different directions right now,
which is making things just as close to impossible to write anything as they
can get.



I’ve started a physical fitness program with the help of the
Walking for Fun website. I’m virtually walking the Chemin Le Puy trail in
France. In the last month I’ve walked almost sixteen miles. I average about
half a mile a day, but that’s half a mile more than I was walking before, so it’s
a great improvement for me. Mom walks with me at night when it’s late enough
for the mosquitoes to have gone to bed.



Dad is still working on healing his decubitus. (That’s a
pressure wound, or in the common cant, a bedsore.) Part of the problem is that
diabetics heal very, very slowly. What this means for me as his medical
coordinator is that he has more people trying to work with him to see it, more
appointments that have to be scheduled, and more rides to those appointments
arranged. To make matters more complicated, his primary doctor has a problem in
her office with getting paperwork processed in a reasonable amount of time, and
we are therefore searching for another doctor who can handle all of Dad’s
challenges, who takes his insurance, and
who is taking new patients.



Mom is getting ready to retire after eighteen years of
service to her current employer, and some thirty-six years of full time work
throughout her lifetime, most of it as a single mother and primary supporter of
the household. It often takes her a while to absorb all of the information that
is dished out at high speed in various retirement meetings, and the opportunity
to ask questions is often gone before they are thought of. My brain is always
looking for the catch, though, and I’m a bit quicker to spot the need to have a
particular question asked. I’m not saying that she’s mentally impaired in any
way, mind you, just that our brains work differently. She tends to gather all
of the facts and absorb them before asking questions, while I come up with
questions before I have all the facts in hand. That makes us a good team!



Her pending retirement means I get to go with her to the various
meetings and help make arrangements and decisions that will affect her finances
for the rest of her life. It also means that a serious effort has to be
expended to make her home office ready to work in, which would include filing
approximately sixteen boxes of papers.



Last Monday (the 8th), while we were on our way to a
retirement meeting (this one with her current employer), we were sitting in the
left-most non-turning lane at a stoplight and started to smell smoke. Then we
started to see it. It was coming from beneath our car’s hood. The light turned
green and we dove across three lanes of traffic and into a parking lot, where
we switched off the car immediately. It was smoke, not steam.



We opened the hood. A Hispanic gentlemen dressed in the
t-shirt and jeans uniform of the day-laborer who had been waiting at the bus
stop came running over to the car and practically pushed us out of the way. He
was afraid we were going to open the radiator cap. I told him I knew better
than that. He still refused to let me anywhere near the car, but told me that
he was a mechanic who had once built the monster truck “Gravedigger”. I
disbelieve that claim because a mechanic of the caliber to work on that truck
would not be hanging out at a bus stop during regular working hours – he’d be
working somewhere, even if he was not still with that race team. Additionally,
no mechanic of that caliber would tell me he wanted my glass of ice cubes to
pour onto the engine part that was smoking.



I refused to give him the ice, so he took a bottle of water
from another man who had come over to the car, and poured it on some part, even
though I was yelling at him not to touch our car. Twit.



In the end, we got rid of the volunteer “mechanic”, and
managed to get a ride to the meeting (we were on time) and back to Mom’s
workplace. My brother-in-law, who is a real mechanic, checked the engine over
and we got it to the workshop of the mechanic we pay to work on the car. The
air conditioning motor is dead, and it was an electrical almost-fire that
caused all the smoke. However, we stopped the fire from bursting into flames
when we shut off the car’s engine. The car will take more money to fix it than
we are willing to put into it. We’re now borrowing my sister’s car, and working
on getting together the money to buy a new-to-us used car that will hopefully
last us a good many years.



Remember those sixteen boxes of filing? I spent a goodly
chunk of today going through them looking for the title to the car. Found it,
too, but not until the end of the day and the very end of the boxes, of course.



All is well, or will soon be well…and in the meantime, I’m
still working like mad to get caught up on my homework, redesign my website
from scratch, and squeeze out a few hours to work on my writing association’s
website and get enough sleep to function each day. Yes, I know…good luck!

When I was a child my friends and I played outside. I didn’t
live in a particularly poor neighborhood, but it also wasn’t a wealthy one. The
best “toy” we had was our imagination. We spent a lot of time pretending, and
made up adventures based on our favorite television shows. Some of the time we
would need more characters than we had “actors” for. In that case, we just
interacted with the invisible space they would have taken up if there was a
body there, and one or another of us would provide the voices for the invisible
characters. Playing cowboys and indians was a lot more fun if you had an entire
tribe of warriors at your command.






As I grew up, I continued to interact with invisible
characters, giving them voices and personalities. It was a lot of fun. When the
adults in my life let me know that having invisible friends was beneath my age
level, and that I ought to grow up, I simply stopped inventing and talking to
invisible characters in places where people could observe my so-called childish
behavior. I would walk home from school rather than taking the bus, because it
gave me more time for long conversations with invisible characters. Though
walking was slower than the actual bus ride, when you added in the wait for the
bus, it only took ten minutes longer for me to get home.



I never lost my imagination, and I continued to polish my
skill at inventing and interacting with invisible characters.



As a writer, I simply invent a new set of characters,
interact with them, interview them, and discover the most important, exciting,
and pivotal moments of their life story. Then I write it down as they tell it
to me. Yeah, that’s where my ideas really come from.


~Marie

In honor of my Mom's birthday, I'm giving away a free copy of my latest romance, A Gigolo for Christmas. Without Mom, I never would have become a writer. Or, actually, have been here at all. I love you, Mom! Get the book for your Kindle here.

A Christmas book in April? Must be April Fool's Day! Celebrate being silly by downloading my book, A Gigolo for Christmas. Free today at the other end of this link.