McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour: Sep 17-Oct 17

Here we are, at the kick off for the McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour. This is actually the first blog tour I’ve done and it’s kind of terrifying.

What happens on a book blog tour? The blog tour was put out there, managed by Silver Dagger Book Tours, open to anyone and everyone interested in participating. Bloggers sign up and get a free copy of the book(s), in this case four-book McAllister series, in exchange for blogging and/or reviewing the book(s). The idea is to get unbiased reviews and commentary on your books in the hopes readers will discover and love them.

Over the next 31 days 62 bloggers will have unfettered access to read, review, and blog about the four-book McAllister Series. 61 of these people are total strangers! (I recognize one name on the list, but I won’t tell you which one).

Why is it so terrifying? Well, to start these are strangers. Ever heard of “stranger danger”? Of course you have. But this is the author’s version of “stranger danger”. With the single exception, these are people I don’t know. They don’t know me. They have no reason to be nice to me, although this is kind of the point of unbiased reviews. They are not supposed to write rosy blog posts and reviews just to be nice. They are supposed to give the good, the bad, and the ugly of what they really think of your book.

What they say about the McAllister Series is going to tell people whether it’s rubbish or not. (A lot of us writers secretly think everyone else will think our writing is rubbish.) Their views will either possibly potentially maybe hopefully drive readers to actually buy and read your books, or tell them why they should absolutely run the other way and spend their book fund on someone else’s books. And this, getting readers to find your books (and even more so to actually buy them), is no mean feat with the overwhelming exploded at the seams Cthulhu on steroids sized market of available books out there.

It is kind of terrifying. Okay, a lot terrifying. 61 book bloggers over 31 days reading and commenting on my 4-book series. To add to the, ‘will they hate it,’ fear, I’m not entirely a conventional writer. I’m not a follow the rules writer. I don’t conform to the status quo, the norms; the overall expectations of, ‘This is how it has always been done, so this is how you have to do it,’ mindset. I write entirely by the seat of my pants, outlining only after to keep details straight, and use a style, tense, first, second, or third person as it feels it fits the story.

So yes, I am going into this with that little bit queasy feeling of dread. The dark pall of knowing you are about to find out what people (who you don’t know) are going to actually think of your books that you labored so many hours over, putting pieces of your soul that you will never get back into (literally, I AM an author of dark fiction, after all). Half of me thinks they will hate them. The bigger half. A little piece is in wonder and awe. People, strangers, are going to read them. That makes the fearful half grow. Somewhere in there the writer in you tries to find the silver dollar, the silver lining, the little golden nugget of hope, whatever you want to call it. Maybe they won’t hate it.

Okay, time to push the doubts back into the darkness where they belong and talk about the more interesting than a writer’s self-doubts part of a book blog tour.

Photo by BSD on Unsplash

You, my wonderfully dark-loving readers, if you follow the tour will get to learn little tidbits about the author. That’s right. You get to learn some of my not so dark secrets and inner thoughts.

Part of the tour is a Q & A, which is doled out in bits to the book bloggers to share with their readers. Things like what is my favorite color. Okay, that one wasn’t actually on there, but to share the secret I actually have more than one. I love colors for different reasons. Green; for being the color of summer, green grass, trees, leaves, life living at its fullest. Purple, I just like purple. It’s kind of like a best of worlds in between pinks and reds and blues all melded together. But I do answer some questions about me, me as an author, writing, and writing the McAllister Series.

I tried to make my answers honest and entertaining at the same time. Unfortunately, I’m usually the only one who actually thinks my humor attempts are funny, so please humor me (and forgive the pun).

You also get the inside scoop, and hopefully not too many spoilers, on the stories that make up the four McAllister books.

So let’s kick this thing off, and please try to be gentle with my writer’s self-bruised ego (we authors tend to be our worst cynics, critics, and ego beaters). Visit Silver Dagger Book Tours to see more about the tour and follow the book bloggers’ good, bad, ugly, and hopefully not too dark views on why or why you should not want to read The McAllister Series.

Along with the Silver Dagger kickoff, the first stop today is a blogger called Insane Books. Let’s see what they have to think about the McAllister Series . . . just as soon as I pour this big glass of wine. I think I’m going to need it.

And in the meantime, Old Mill Road is just now brand new sparkling and shiny in a dark horror fiction monster kind of way NEWLY RELEASED! This book is the free giveaway (ebook) part of this book blog tour! (Other available to buy books include Garden Grove, The Gypsy Queen, and, yeah that’s it except for the McAllister Series. I’m working on finishing The Woods for the new year.)

For younger (middle grade/teens) readers of dark drama fiction, you can check out these books by Vivian Munnoch:

The Latchkey Kids

The Latchkey Kids: The Disappearance of Willie Gordon

Madelaine & Mocha

Do you know #WhereTheBodiesAre?

McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour:

Sep 17

Kickoff at Silver Dagger Book Tours

Insane Books

Sep 18

The Sexy Nerd 'Revue'

The Book Dragon

Sep 19

Readeropolis  - GUEST POST

Java John Z's

Sep 20

Casey's Corner

Bedazzled By Books

Sep 21

A Pinch of Bookdust

Book Corner News and Reviews

Sep 22

Always Love Me Some Books Blog - GUEST POST

Reviews and Promos by Nyx- GUEST POST

Sep 23

Lost in a Book – GUEST POST

Book Review Virginia Lee (BRVL)

Sep 24

Literary Gold

nanasbookreviews

Sep 25

Authors From Everywhere

2 chicks and a book

Sep 26

3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too!

Books a Plenty Book Reviews

Sep 27

Books all things paranormal and romance

books are love

Sep 28

Books, Authors, Blogs

Craving Lovely Books

Sep 29

Drako's Den

Keep on Booking

Sep 30

Dragon's Den

eBook Addicts

Oct 1

TNT Book Promotions

A Blend of Sass and Class Blog

T.L. Gray Blog

Oct 2

Tome Tender

Breanna Hayse Romance

Oct 3

Girl with Pen

Inside the Insanity - GUEST POST

Oct 4

b for bookreview

Book-Lover

Oct 5

A Wonderful World of Words

Maiden of the Pages- GUEST POST

Oct 6

Chapters through life

Luv Saving Money

Oct 7

4covert2overt ☼ A Place In The Spotlight ☼

Midnight Book Reader

Oct 8

Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read

Paranormal Palace of Pleasures

Oct 9

❧Defining Ways❧

Paranormal Romance Trance

Oct 10

Sapphyria's Book Reviews

Scrupulous Dreams

Oct 11

Valerie Ullmer | Romance Author

ⒾⓃⓉⓇⓄⓈⓅⒺⒸⓉⒾⓋⒺ ⓅⓇⒺⓈⓈ- GUEST POST

Oct 12

Stormy Nights Reviewing & Bloggin'

Sylv.net

Oct 13

T's Stuff

Taryn Jameson

Oct 14

Anna del C. Dye official page

Teatime and Books 

Oct 15

The Bookshelf Fairy

Yearwood La Novela

Oct 16

Better Read Than Undead

Twisted Book Ramblings

Oct 17

Casia Schreyer - Author – REVIEW ALL

Word Processor, Romance, Cats, Kids and Creed

Is this a Sign? (on Beta Readers)

I suspect this might be a sign of something. A sign of what I’m not quite sure.




I am a firm believer that a writer needs a test reader. Someone who is not intrinsically a part of the story through living and breathing it through months of writing and editing it. A fresh set of eyes. Someone who can read it as a new reader will, getting enthralled or bored, revelling in the characters or getting lost in a confusing plot. Someone who will immediately pick up on things the writer left out that is vital to the story that the writer missed because they already know it, or is confusing to the outside reader.

As the writer there is so much of the story, back story, pre-story, and post-story in your head. There is the life and dreams and unknown driving forces that make up the characters and surround the events that don’t make it into the story. All the behind the scenes stuff that adds to the vibe the writer puts into the story is in the writer’s head. Things you thought you hinted at but happen later, and missed the hint, leaving an obvious story gap in earlier chapters.

It’s almost inevitable for the writer to miss things; things that the reader will pick up because they don’t know what you know. Things that if left out will make the reader go “Huh? What was that? That made no sense.”



Here’s where the sign comes in.

I have two finished books (and untold works in progress).

One of these books is a 120,000 word novel. Something of a murder thriller with kidnapping, murder and an antagonist who is tortured by his own actions and his past. There are twists and surprises, psychological suspense, and an ending that is hinted at but may take some readers by surprise. (At least that’s what I was going for).

I’ve written this book (and re-written it) over a number of years and have spent so much time editing and re-editing and re-editing again (repeat many times) and have come to that point where I just can’t find anything else to change or fix.

I know the book isn’t perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect book. Writing is art and as such is open to the very fickle interpretation of the individual.

I also know the book could use some improvements before calling it publishable and that I’m just not seeing them. That’s where the test reader comes in.

My spouse started reading the book.

To be fair, I do have to point out that with a major career change for him involving now working on shift work, and some weeks doing almost a double shift with overtime, and our lives being a big hodgepodge of irregularity and zero routine stability, he’s had little time for things like literary pursuits. He also is not a book reader. It’s just not his thing. He’s read maybe two or three books in his life outside of required school reading as a kid and teen.



The second book is my first attempt at a kids’ chapter book. I made a list of what a good chapter book needs according to the experts (a couple kids I asked) and set out to write it. I’m on book three of the series. I’ve gone through the first round of edits on book one.

The problem is, how do I know I’ve done it right? If it’s too easy they’ll be bored and uninterested with it. If it’s too hard they’ll get frustrated and not read it. It has to be just right.

So I gave it to the first test reader, my nine year old. This kid loves to read. And, like me, she loves to read horror (that’s my girl!).



Now here’s the sign.

The husband hasn’t even gotten through the first couple of chapters, and that’s after weeks. He did note a few suggestions and very good ones – two in particular that are more than just missed spell-check errors and will involve minor rewrites of those two scenes.

And then he seems to have abandoned all interest (and yes, I do know that lack of time is a factor too).

The daughter similarly has quickly abandoned her reading effort. She was initially miffed that I hadn’t spent endless hours creating a wonderful and colorful cover picture for it before presenting her with the draft manuscript. Quite frankly I just haven’t had the time and I’m not exactly the artistic type who can just sit down and draw a fabulous picture. Her initial response after pouting about the lack of a proper cover was to toss it aside with no interest in the story. She read just a little bit and abandoned it. When asked about the story she made some vague reference to something being confusing and that has been the end of that. She was uninterested in elaborating on what was confusing.



The question is – what do I make of this?

I could just chalk it up to the fickleness off a nine year old girl and forty year old non-reader.

I could peg it as being a lack of time in our disorderly lives.

One must also not forget that those closest to you, family and friends, are not going to share your passion just because it’s what you love any more than you share theirs for hockey and grade four playground melodrama. They are their own people and have their own interests.

Then again, maybe they just thought the stories sucked and are afraid of hurting my feelings, so they won’t tell me that.

But they are just one reader of each story, and their opinions will be just as subjective as every reader’s will be to their own personal tastes, experiences, and relationship to the writer. One reader might hate it, while a hundred others might love it. You might have a problem if it’s the other way around, but good luck finding 100 test readers when many of us can’t even find one.

So, maybe the stories do suck or maybe those two test readers were just uninterested.

“Is it me or is Memorex?” (Remember that commercial?) Maybe I need to scrap or rewrite the stories or maybe I just had the wrong test readers. Of course, I may never really know since generally speaking I am my own test reader and that is not such a good thing.



The important message here is to never put too much into what any one person’s reaction is.

Opinions of the people closest to you will be the most biased. Either they’re afraid even the gentlest criticism or suggestion might hurt your feelings, or they might go the opposite way and are unnecessarily rough just to prove they are not holding back.

Opinions of people who might harbor any jealousy or ill feelings will be even worse. Probably the worst next to the people who need to tear somebody else down just to make themselves feel better.

It’s not the opinion of the individual reader that is the most important. What is more telling is the general response by multiple readers.

And if you are like me and don’t have a pool of available test readers, and don’t have the money to pay readers, put on that tough outer shell and take no offence if that one person who does agree to read your manuscript doesn’t show the interest you were hoping for.

It might just not be their thing.

Book Review: Light Bringer by Pat Bertram

When strange things happen people go to Chalcedony. But what is so special about the little town?



Helen Jenks’ life changed with a drive home on a snowy night. That change came in the form of an infant girl, who she calls Rena, which she finds abandoned on her doorstep.


It becomes immediately apparent that Rena is not your usual kind of abandoned-on-the-doorstep baby. There is something special about the child. Helen soon finds herself living on the run with the child, but on the run from who or what?





And that is where her story ends and the real story begins.



Philip Hansen opens his door to unexpected guests, Agent’s Derrick and Hugh from the National Security Agency. Philip immediately suspects they are there to discuss the books he’s been checking out at the library. He sounds borderline crazy-guy conspiracy theorist, but Philip quickly shows himself to be no crazier than anyone else who thinks aliens are visiting Earth.


With a little help from an unlikely source, Philip escapes the two agents, who aren’t who they claim to be, and finds himself drawn involuntarily on a path not of his choosing.




Becka Johnson, baby Rena grown up and with a new name, returns to Chalcedony thirty-seven years after her adoptive mother found her.


Becka has decided it’s time to find the answers to her lifelong questions that center around “who am I?” And she believes those answers can be found in Chalcedony, Colorado where her life started on a snowy night on a stranger’s doorstep.





In a financial bind, Jane Keeler finds herself in Chalcedony searching for her sister George Keeler. Instead of finding her sister, she discovers an empty house, ransacked office, and abandoned car.


Georgy’s apparent wild ways make things difficult for Jane as she finds herself drawn by the need to investigate this mystery and learn her sister’s whereabouts. Only no one seems to believe her or to even care.



When the trio converges on Chalcedony with no knowledge of each other, things immediately take a turn for the strange.


Philip Hansen arrives to find himself thrust into the arms of Becka Johnson, literally, when he’s dropped off at her doorstep.


Things soon heat up for Philip and Becka when the strange things happening to each of them grow in intensity with their proximity, leading them forward on an adventure of discovery.


Jane is pulled into the strange events surrounding Philip and Becka, finding herself drawn into the midst of a bigger mystery than she’d anticipated.





In Light Bringer, Pat Bertram weaves a fascinating tale of a group of people connected by events in the past, beginning before they were even born, who are inexorably drawn together for the culmination of what was started so many decades before.


In drawing out the strange events linking these three, I also had the impression that the small town of Chalcedony, Colorado hides other secrets that could very well find themselves revealed in another tale entirely unrelated to this story.



Light Bringer is published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC.








Something apart from the story that you might find interesting is this excerpt from Light Bringer (Page 217).

There are three details in particular that will have a sense of familiarity if you have read Pat Bertram’s More Deaths than One.



Hugh & Keith in are in a conference room in the underground bunker going through files taken from George Keeler’s house



Excerpt:

Hugh lifted one transcript out of the file. “Here’s an interview she did with Bob Noone.”

“Who’s he?”

“You know. The weird guy.”

Keith laughed. “That narrows it down.”

“He’s the artist, the one you thought seemed like a chameleon.”

“Oh, him. His work sure mesmerized you. I could hardly drag you away.”

Hugh shuddered, remembering that a monstrous thing had seemed to lurk in the depths of the painting, pulling him in, captivating him in the archaic sense of the word: taking captive. He realized he’d been captivated in the same way by this place, the source of that dreadful hum. All at once he felt glad not to have found the source. Perhaps some secrets should remain unknown.

“What did he have to say?”

Hugh started at the sound of Keith’s voice. “He spouts the same rubbish as everyone else in that ridiculous town. Listen to this. ‘I didn’t move to Chalcedony until the late eighties, so I don’t know anything about the UFO flap, but if you want my opinion, it would have been a mind control experiment. Government is a beast without conscience, and when it teams with conglomerates, it can and will do anything. Even control us as if we were robots.’”

Book Review – Jeffery Deaver’s The Blue Nowhere

I just finished reading Jeffery Deaver’s The Blue Nowhere. I should probably start by mentioning that this really isn’t my kind of book.



“What do you mean?” you ask?



The simple truth is that there are a very large number of books being pigeonholed into a small list of broad category genres.



While I enjoy most genres including crime fiction and thrillers, they include a large variety of story types and I’m not going to like every story type.



The idea of the whole story revolving around a computer hacker just didn’t appeal to me no matter how much the usual cover blurbs praised it. And, if you read my other reviews, you should know that I don’t pay attention to those blurbs anyway. They strike me as being little more than an advertising gimmick and don’t mean I’ll like the book.



I bought the book for the price. Two books for ten dollars! Who could go wrong? Even if I hate the book, at least I paid only a third of the usual cover price. There wasn’t much of a selection at the time either, so Blue Nowhere won by default. And, just because I can feel your curiosity, I’ll let you know that the other $5 book I bought was a Stephen King short story anthology. No doubts there about whether I’ll enjoy that one. Who doesn’t enjoy a good Stephen King short story? I’m saving that one for summer camping reading. Nothing stirs the creative juices for a good late night campfire story than stories by a good thriller writer.



Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll let you in on another secret. My review is inevitably tainted by my personal tastes and preferences, which happen to not include hacker stories, and are likely very different from other’s personal tastes and preferences.



In essence, this is a story about hacker vs. hacker. It plays on the simple internet truth that even our closest online friends are most often complete strangers who we really know nothing about.



Our main hacker “Wyatt Gillette” a.k.a. “Valleyman” is pitted against his ex-hacking partner “Phate”, who turned from the dark side of hacking to the darker side of blurring the lines between violent online games with real life. Disgusted with Phate’s deadly online activities, Gillette abandons his identity as Valleyman and turns on his online friend. It’s funny how the lesser of two evildoers is the one who gets sent to the big house. Not funny in a “ha-ha” way, but rather in a “isn’t that just the way things go” way.



When Phate’s deadly online hacks and snuff games turn to real life hands-on murders, the fine folks of the Computer Crimes Unit need an expert matching Phate’s skills in order to catch their killer. The bureaucracy springs Gillette from prison and he becomes our main character with an entourage of police officers leading him in the contest against his rival hacker.



Naturally, when Phate learns that his ex-faceless friend and now sworn enemy “Valleyman” is involved in the investigation, he changes the direction of his own online snuff game turned real life and makes his rival into his new main target.



Gillette is something of a geeky character and that pretty much fits my image of a hacker type. Sure that’s stereotyping, but we’re all guilty of that to some degree. I never really got a feel of that reader-character connection to any of the other characters. They seemed more like supporting characters to me.



I haven’t read a bunch of hacker stories, and really know very little about the hacker lifestyle. As a reader not in the know, I really didn’t buy the finger pushups thing. While it may very well be something they do and believe strengthens their fingers, it just seemed weird to me.



There were some events in the book, at the end, that were never explained. But, I think that was by design, a little reminder by the author that there will always be unexplained things in life and in stories.



The scariest part of this story is the reality that hackers like these are alive and well and living in large numbers across the globe. That, and the damage that could be caused at the psychotic whim and a few keystrokes of some anti-social loner who likely is unable to emotionally connect with real people and therefore is likely incapable of empathy. Of course that doesn’t describe all hackers, but even one who does fall into that category is one too many.



While I wouldn’t put this in my “I would read it again” pile, I was not disappointed with the read.



Jeffery Deaver managed to entertain me even though I had pretty much decided I wouldn’t care for the book before I even started reading it.



The story dragged a little at times for me, but the descriptions are good and Deaver moves the story without a lot of extra unnecessary words. It isn’t one of my favourite reads, but I certainly can see that someone who likes this kind of crime thriller would enjoy the story a lot more than I did.



While personal taste is relative, for the reader it means a lot.

Personally, I liked Jeffery Deaver’s Roadside Crosses better.