Exhausted by Sidney Gaudet

Exhausted by Sidney Gaudet




Exhausted is like the color gray.

Like a hungry wolf that spend the whole night looking for food,

Or the soot you cleaned out of the fireplace.

It is like the clouds on a rainy day that woke me from my slumber,

Like the huge rock I tried to bring home.

Exhausted is like a heavy fish on the end of your fishing rod,

Like the smoke that comes from the chimney that you tried to clear all day.

Exhausted is like the cement you got stuck in before it dried and you have been using all your might to get out of,

Like grey eyed people’s eyes after a long day.

Book Review by R Gaudet: Too Many Books by Gilles Tibo

Book review by Robyn Gaudet (age 8)


Too Many Books by Gilles Tibo
(Illustrations by Bruno St-Aubin)



Start:

He tries to clean his cat. And then he tries to tie his shoes, but he got books and he did that and tied everything into a bow.



Middle:

He went to the library with his neighbour which is his girlfriend because he loves her.



End:

He got his books from the library and read one of the books and he loved it because he laughed!



My favourite part was the end when he laughed with the mouse in the book, and the mouse is out of the book now.

In My Shoes -- Guest Blogger Wendy Ely

I am pleased to invite guest blogger and author Wendy Ely to my blog to discuss her new book Midnight Secrets.

L.V. Gaudet




In My Shoes -- Wendy Ely



As a mother I try to encourage my children to persue whatever activity sparks their interest. My son is 12 now and my daughter is 13. Both children have vivid imaginations and you should hear the stories my son tries to lay on me! Even though both kids are creative and have been bitten by the writer's bug, I do my best to not push them in this direction but encourage them when they want to go in on it alone.


Even with such a wonderful imagination, my son has decided he isn't like me and can't write stories. He has such a hard time doing a writing assignment for language arts. He sits and stares at the paper while he tells me over and over how much he can't make up a story. I know for a fact he can, he just doesn't want to. That's fine with me though. Maybe it isn't an interest of his even though he would be good at it. Just because someone is good at something it doesn't mean they like doing it, right?


My daughter is totally different. She loves to write and is working on her first novel. She has started reading Stephen King On Writing and other writing craft books she has found on my bookshelf. Does this make me happy? Heck yeah! However, I don't push her to write but am always available to listen to her when she wants to talk to me about her book. She also won't let me read it which is the part I don't like but accept anyway.


One thing is for sure, both of my kids are proud of what I've accomplished in my writing career. On that note, I'd like to share the blurb from my newest release titled Midnight Secrets. You can find it here: www.lyricalpress.com/wendy_ely and I hope you like it.

Will Miguel's whispered midnight promises ever see the light of day?


Content with her job as small town waitress and roll of single mom, Allison believes she's better off without a man. In her opinion, all they bring is chaos - and that includes the father of her child. So why has Miguel's arrival shaken her so badly?


It's not easy for Allison to keep Miguel a secret with someone set on shutting down her bakery and the local sheriff believing she harbors a vendetta against the town because of her tormented past.


Keeping her secrets and clearing her name just might be harder than Allison ever imagined.


Content warning; This book contains cold family situations during the day and hot nights







Go for a swim in the waves of passion and romance with a book by Wendy Ely

Jesse's Brother and Confession available at

http://www.lyricalpress.com/wendy_ely

Coming soon: New Year's Resolution, Midnight Secrets,

and Cross the Line!

Guest Blogging

In October I hosted my friend Pat Bertram on my blog to help her promote her new book Daughter Am I.


I had a great deal of fun doing it. Starting with January 2010, I would like to make hosting a guest blogger a regular monthly feature on my blog. Since I actually have a blog with both BlogSpot and Wordpress, this really means hosting two bloggers a month – one on each blog.



If you would like to be a guest blogger on either one in January just drop me a note. First come, first served.



You can blog to promote your book, your blog, your website, or your author’s page. You can blog about writing techniques, trials and tribulations of coming up with and crafting stories, or the writing life in general. Pretty much anything writing related goes. All posts and comments on both blogs are pre-moderated to keep the blogs clean and friendly.

(What Kind Of) Writer Am I - With Guest Pat Bertram

Daughter Am I Blog Tour 2009 - With Guest Pat Bertram
(What Kind Of) Writer Am I

I am thrilled to be featuring my first ever guest blogger, Pat Bertram, author of three novels published with Second Wind Publishing LLC.

This is an especially exciting event for me for a few reasons; one being that Halloween is only a few days away and I love Halloween. Okay, so blogging isn't exactly the stuff witches, ghosts, goblins, and all manner of things that say "boo" are made of. Well, unless your guest blogger happens to be the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or Jeremy Shipp, that is. But blogging is fun and so is dressing up in a tacky costume and frightening little kids before bribing them with handfuls of candy so they hopefully won’t t-p my house a few years down the road. I’m not all that scary myself, but the assortment of screaming rocks, cackling witches, gravestones, and various dead creatures decorating my house are.

At first glance Pat’s new book Daughter Am I may not seem the stuff of Halloween. But when a young woman (Mary Stuart) finds herself on the move investigating her great-grandfather’s deadly secret with the help a group of former gangsters, and a killer on the trail anxious to dig up that same secret, things certainly could get a bit dicey. A little murder, a little mystery … what more could you ask for in a book to read around Halloween?


Another reason this is exciting for me is that my first guest blogger happens to be Pat Bertram, who also happens to be my first online writing friend and mentor. Pat has been an unending source of wisdom, support, and encouragement for me and many other writers who have met her. And, best of all, she hasn't complained about any of my silly questions. Not to me anyway.






I hope you’ll enjoy Pat’s blog post as much as I did. And don’t hesitate to visit Second Wind Publishing where you’ll find Pat Bertram’s newest novel Daughter Am I available both in print and ebook format.

Pat Bertram

National Novel Writing Month is coming up in November, and I am half in awe and half befuddled by those who enter. The writing of a novel takes me a year, and some of the research I’ve done has taken longer than that. But then, I am not an intuitive writer. I have to drag each word out of hiding and find its place in the puzzle that is a novel. I suppose two types could write 50,000 words in a month — the intuitive writers who spew out words, and the logical writers who have the whole thing outlined before they begin. Me? I fall somewhere in the middle. I so hate tossing aside my hard work that I habitually rework my writing as I write. (Though I have rewritten one of my novels four times, and deleted 25,000 words from another.)

I write slowly. Although Daughter Am I came easily to me, I still only wrote an average of 300 words a day. Not that the number of words matters to me, it doesn’t. The only reason I mention it is to let new writers know there are all kinds of writers. Some let the words gush out and try to type fast enough to catch them all. Some, like me, have to pull each word, kicking and screaming, into the world. Some have a compulsion to write; others make a conscious choice. How you write, how often, how many words you write per day are all unimportant, unless, of course, you are a writer under contract. But if you are a writer under contract, you would be writing, not reading this blog.

In the end, the only thing that counts is the finished story. The story doesn’t care how long it took you to write it. It doesn’t care if you wrote it in a month or in a decade. It doesn’t care if you bled words onto the paper or created it slowly, one puzzle piece at a time. A finished story exists complete and entire of itself, separate from the author and the author’s work habits.

Sometimes we wonder how our favorite authors write, but mostly we devour (or savor) their works, wanting only to immerse ourselves in the story. If it moves us to tears, makes us laugh or shiver, that’s what we care about, not how long it took for the author to create the effect. Being writers, of course, we might go back later and see how it was done, but at the time, all we are interested in is the story.

So, here’s the truth. You can call yourself a writer or not. You can write 50,000 words in a month or not. You can write every day or not. The only thing that counts is the story.

That’s what we are all aiming for.

Story.

Pat Bertram is a native of Colorado and a lifelong resident. When the traditional publishers stopped publishing her favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. Daughter Am I is Bertram’s third novel to be published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC. Also available are More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.