Thanksgiving- Anniversary Issue

Time flies...whether you're having fun or not. Cherie coined this phrase in my book Next Time Lucky: Lessons of a Matchmaker . I still find it true and poignant. In this case I'm happy to say I had fun creating this promotional website for writers and bloggers that offers quality content at the same time. I learned a few things along the way not just regarding writing and promoting one's book. There were topics I normally wouldn't care to read up on. Blogs I would never have found. I made a number of connections with other writers around the world.
Our readership is growing all the time. We reached my secret goal for 15,000 however I dreamed up this arbitrary number. Consonantly trying to improve the look of the site and placing info about it on more and more Facebook sites related to writing and otherwise. With the help from out contributors, their friends and Twitter buddies, I trust we'll have an even more successful year with bigger numbers.
I kept the site ads free except for a few promotional free book downloads That I've been doing lately.
I'm always open to new ideas and constructive criticism. Our writers appreciate feedback and comments. So keep it coming, please!
Thanksgiving-- from the Perspective of a “Blow-in”

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American and Canadian tradition. In Germany, where I grew up, I only knew it from that Thanksgiving Sunday in early autumn in the Catholic Church where thanks is given for a good year’s harvest. Some crops are brought in and put on display under the altar to be blessed. Ireland where I also lived hasn’t adopted this American holiday although it tends to follow American trends in many other regards.

So my exposure to American Thanksgiving is fairly new. It was only introduced into my life a few years ago by my new American husband. I read up on it and know that it originates from the first pilgrims. “When Europeans first arrived to the Americas, they brought with them their own harvest festival traditions from Europe, celebrating their safe voyage, peace and good harvest” (Wikipedia) and blended them with Native American harvest traditions.

Having read up on a topic is one thing; living it can be a different matter. Halloween feels equally strange to me. Our whirlwind romance catapulted me into the open arms of a welcoming family. Not being used to a big family, I find the big get togethers and their customs challenging. In Germany, we never ate turkey. I find the food pairings odd and am not aware of their symbolic meanings. Why pickles with turkey and gravy? Bread rolls plus potato mash? The overflowing table and abundance of everything makes the Ex Farmer’s wife in me cringe when I think of all the starving people around the world and millions that go hungry in this country alone. In all fairness, not all left-overs go down the garbage disposal. The turkey will be served again in various forms until everybody is fed up eating it. Why not get a smaller turkey in the first place?

I should still embrace the day as one of purely saying thanks for the good life I’m enjoying. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I am grateful for the privileged life-style I’m enjoying. I’m grateful for the fact that my husband has a job and that he brings home the bacon while I can indulge my hobby, i.e., writing. I’m grateful for all my friends and the encouraging words and responses I’m getting from people who “befriend” me and that I’m “linked” to.

I’m grateful that my daughter started her first paid job and that my son will graduate soon too. I’m grateful that I have lived a life in countries with civil liberties and the freedom to express my convictions without persecution. I’m grateful that I was born into this world at this point in time and place.

Yet, being a person for whom the glass is always half-empty, saying thanks doesn’t come natural. Since I feel the years creeping up on me, the cynic in me wants to inject that what is left in the glass is evaporating fast. I would be more grateful if I saw my children more often than just a few days a year. I would be more grateful if my pain didn’t keep me from working in my job. 

 Having been told to “Count my blessings” by my Irish housekeeper, I try to do that every day. Shouldn’t we all be grateful for what we have all year long, day in, day out? Do we need a specific day in the year to remind us?

I guess we do. Otherwise we would take it all for granted even more.

PS. My American family would find some German traditions strange too, I’m sure.

Siggy Buckley 

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Siggy's Omnibus and also http://www.glos.si/siggys-omnibus

 

FREE DOWNLOADS NOV 20-21 0nly

November 20 and 21 only: 

You can download four fantastic Guild of Dreams fantasy books for FREE!

THE BONES OF THE EARTH

The Dark Age, eastern Europe: the earth has decided to rid itself of humanity with earthquakes, volcanoes and new plagues. Civilizations, even the mighty Roman Empire, crumble under the pressure of barbarian waves that are fleeing worse terrors.

Rejected by his own people, pursued by a dragon, young Javor heads for Constantinople, the centre of civilization, looking for answers to the puzzle of his great-grandfather's dagger and the murder of his family.

On the ancient, crumbling Roman highway across haunted, deserted Dacia, Javor rescues the beautiful Danisa from a human sacrifice. He cannot help falling in love with her. But Danisa has her own plans, and when she is kidnapped again, Javor has to wonder: what is the connection between his dagger, his lover and his enemies?
By Scott Bury

Download FREE from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bones-Earth-Dark-ebook/dp/B006PI0NRG/ 


ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST:

 An Icarus Fell Novel

 By Bruce A. Blake

Icarus Fell's life sucked. Then he died and things got really bad.

After muggers killed him, Icarus became a harvester, his job to help souls on their way to Heaven, and it turned out he possessed as little talent for this as he did for every other job he lost. People are dead. The deposed Angel of Death nearly took his teenage son. The Archangel Michael is angry with him and the police think he is a serial killer.

The only one left on his side is his guardian angel, but when he asks her to help him get to Hell to rescue the souls wrongly condemned because of him, she refuses to go against Michael's wishes.

Then another guardian shows up. Piper is beautiful, mysterious, and willing to help. Having her around turns Icarus' afterlife upside down. But knowing how to get to Hell is only half of the problem.

Getting back with your soul is the real challenge.

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BLOOD SKIES (Book 1)

by Steven Montano

  

Free on Smashwords through November 25th!

In the time after The Black, human survivors of the Southern Claw Alliance clash with vampire legions of the Ebon Cities in a constant war for survival. Earth as we know it has been forever damaged by an arcane storm that fused our world with distant realms of madness and terror. Things that once existed only in our nightmares stalk the earth.

Now, humanity is threatened by one of its own.

Eric Cross, an enlisted warlock in the Southern Claw military, is part of an elite team of soldiers and mages in pursuit of a woman known as Red — a witch whose stolen knowledge threatens the future of the human race. The members of Viper Squad will traverse haunted forests and blighted tundra in their search for the traitor, a journey that ultimately leads them to the necropolis of Koth.

There, in that haven of renegade undead, Cross will discover the dark origins of magic, and the true meaning of sacrifice...

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 BORN OF WATER

By Autumn M. Birt

In the buried archives of the Temple of Dust may lie the secret to defeating the Curse, a creature which seeks to destroy 16 year old Ria for the forbidden gifts she possesses. But it is from among the ranks of those who control the Curse where Ria will find her best chance of success. Only the Priestess Niri can save Ria from the forces that hunt her, if Niri doesn’t betray the girl first. Along with Ria comes Ty and his sister, Lavinia, both bound to defend Ria from the Church of Four Orders and Niri, if they must. However, Ty has been living a life less than honest and keeping it from his sister. To survive a journey that takes them across the breadth of their world, the four must learn to trust each other before pursuit from the Church and Ty’s troubled past find them.

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GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

Reaching across the years and striking a chord with people of today, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is inspired by a dramatic true story of two Southern Ohio families during the Great Depression and World War II who also struggled for their fair share of the American Dream of hope, freedom and opportunity.  Through dozens of authentic private letters written by the characters and included in the book, readers are given an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day experiences of a singular group of people called upon to be counted among the ranks of the greatest generation in history.  It is a preserved anthology remarkable in its powerful journalistic quality of chronicling the incomparable history of those times, as well.  Although spanning the years of 1936 to 1941, the letters could have been written by modern-day families and friends of troops and diplomatic personnel who, like their forebears, are risking their lives in hotspots around the world to protect their way of life and their country.   

GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

An Excerpt

The one-room, Cedar Fork schoolhouse across the holler from the little log cabin on the near side of Peach Mountain was a tolerable two-mile walk in nice weather.  It was an enjoyable walk actually, if one had time to swing from a grapevine on top of a high cliff and drop into Cedar Fork Creek for a lazy dip, or stop by the Workman’s place for a quick smoke of their corn silk tobacco.  But in snowdrifts as tall as thirteen-year-old, Lee Greene, in threadbare clothes, thin hand-me-down coat, and barely covered feet in holey socks flopping in an old pair of secondhand shoes that were several sizes too big for him, the walk that frigid morning was worse than pure misery.

The chronically aching stomach of Lee was hollow and rumbling.  His meager breakfast of cornmeal mush and sugar water was quickly wearing thin, but he had more important things than his stomach to worry about that morning.  He was stewing about the paucity of milk he had drawn from their cow tethered in the yard just beyond the lean-to kitchen at the back of the tiny log cabin.  The two-story structure, built by A. E., Lee, and Bill only five months before, consisted of a common, or front room on the main level, a primitive lean-to kitchen at the back, and a bedroom where Eva Love and A. E. slept, housing the only closet in the place.  A rough-hewn timber ladder gained access to the upper deck, where, in an open-to-the-front loft, all of the many children slept on crude cots, or thin pads on the floor.  A large ceiling-to-floor fireplace of indigenous stones in the common room on the first floor was the only source of heat in the place.  Felled tree trunks supporting its roof, a porch spanned the width of the front of the log cabin.  

The soil on Cedar Fork, thin, hard, and dry, a crusty layer of sediment topping bedrock of limestone, dolomite and shale, made for poor farming and gardening, posing a formidable challenge for the growing of adequate food.  Squirrels, rabbits, opossums and birds, hunted and brought in by Lee, the insufficient supply of milk from the cow, and scant eggs supplied by their paltry flock of scrawny chickens in the yard, were the only sources of protein for the family.  In season, a large vegetable garden and a stand of corn were coddled into fruition in the poor soil, but only if they were favored with enough rain.    

His nose and eyes crusty from yet another head cold, gloveless hands thrust into the pockets of his thin coat, and his feet turning to blocks of ice, Lee trudged on to school, his white-blond head under his hat hunkered into his shoulders.  Despite the fact that he might not make it through the perpetual hardships of his life, much less that cold, windy, and snowbound morning, his soul was full of dreams, his mind of intention, his body of vigor and endurance, and on the strength of pure power of will alone, and maybe some help from the man upstairs, Lee was determined that if he got out of his childhood alive, nothing would encumber him again.

The schoolhouse was dark and frigid, Lee, by design, having been the first to arrive.  The door was unlocked as it always was, and Lee, halting for a few minutes to give his blood a chance to circulate again in his frozen limbs and digits, sat down on one of the benches.  He would have wept if he had allowed himself to seriously consider his unfortunate circumstances—but not Lee!  No, not Lee!  He had a chance to earn fifty cents that week, and every week for weeks to come, fifty cents for building a fire in the “Warm Morning” coal-burning, heating-stove each morning before school, and that was exactly what the Sam Hill he was going to do…

Linda Greene
http://ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com/ 
http://www.booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/