New Releases and Giveaways from Laurel Garver and JL Campbell! A-Z is Coming! Camp NaNoWriMo is Almost Here!

ot some awesomesauce for you today!

This is my last post before the A-Z, as I'll be skipping Sunday. I've only got eight advance A-Z posts scheduled so far; thought I'd have 'em all done by now, but I ended this round of ROW80 with a bang - edited a short story and had it betaed in time to enter a competition! Now it's back to editing Druid's Moon in the next round.

I've joined Camp NaNoWriMo, so my fellow campers can spur me on!

Kait has a great challenge at the end of this ROW80 round: "I'm challenging you to change your outlook. Become, at least when dealing with your writing, someone who looks at the glass half full. At the end of each day, give yourself a pat on the back for what you DID do, even if it was just picking a new character name or plotting the next scene. Set yourself up for the positive, reinforce yourself for DOING. I promise it'll make it easier to condition yourself to work better, harder, faster."

She also had a question in a recent post on Nora Roberts: "How to strike that balance between authenticity and interesting and avoiding boredom"?

I'm excited for the Blogging From A-Z Challenge! Everyone's got such interesting themes! Michael, for one, is showcasing fellow bloggers' books!

My theme will be Twitter favourites: I went through all the tweets I'd favourited since joining Twitter a few months ago, from Commander Hadfield's photos from space, to band-related stuff, to book launches, to strange esoteric images and fun and intriguing randomness, and sorted the best ones in alphabetical order. Lots of fun stuff ahead.

There are, at the moment, 1397 of us participating in A-Z this year! Wow. Do you think you'll have a chance to visit everyone? I might try... But I'm also one of Matthew's Questionable Monks!

The other monks are the wonderful:

Jay Noel

Sheri Larsen

Schwa Michaels

and

Melanie Schulz

By the way, DL's first blogblitz went spectacularly! We all hopped over to PK Hrezo's - drop by if you haven't had a chance yet!

And now that I've rambled on a bit... I'm opening the floor to Laurel for an announcement!

Muddy-Fingered Midnights:

poems from the bright days and dark nights of the soul

This thirty-poem collection is an eclectic mix of light and dark, playful and spiritual, lyric and narrative free verse. In an intricate dance of sound play, it explores how our perceptions shape our interactions with the world. Here child heroes emerge on playgrounds and in chicken coops, teens grapple with grief and taste first love, adults waver between isolation and engaged connection. It is a book about creative life, our capacity to wound and heal, and the unlikely places we find love, beauty, and grace.

“In Muddy-Fingered Midnights, Garver seamlessly integrates unpredictable rhyme and alliteration to undergird the themes and strange beauty of these poems. The collection explores moments of cowardice and melting purity, ‘my only fruit / a cool ooze / that bubbles up / on blistering days,’  yet holds strongly onto faith as much as ‘Yankee girl grit.’ Even in dark times that are ‘glassy with misery,’ there’s a hidden reflection in the pane: hope.”

—Jessica Bell, co-founder of Vine Leaves Literary Journal and author of Fabric, semi-finalist, Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards 2012: Best Poetry.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

As if that wasn't enough excitement, Joy Campbell has a special visitor here today!

Howdy. I'm glad you've stopped in. My name is Christine and although I'm only eleven, I'm what some adults might call precocious. A lot has happened in my life, some of it bad, but like my dad used to say, good things can result from the bad stuff that happens to us.

To help me celebrate overcoming my challenges, a great gang of authors have teamed up and will be giving away copies of their books. Sweet, yes?

For a chance to win a pair of the books listed, you can do anything included on the Rafflecopter below or on Facebook. However, for those who'd like to win a $10.00 Amazon Gift Voucher, hop on over to the Jamaican Kid Lit Blog to enter for that.

Anyway, I tend to talk a lot, so before I carried away, here's my story:

Raised in a hotbed of arguments and fights, eleven-year-old Christine Simms is the victim of her mother's cruelty. A domestic dispute ends in tragedy, sending the family into a tailspin.

A shocking discovery sends Christine on a quest to find the stranger who left her behind in Jamaica. Determined to unravel the mystery of her birth, Christine uses every tool at her disposal and treads with courage where no child should.

Thanks so much for dropping in! I hope you win the novels of your choice. I should tell you that you get to choose books based on how the Rafflecopter does the drawing of the winners. So, if your name comes up first, you get to say which pack you want.

Available in ebook format at Amazon.

J.L. Campbell is a proud Jamaican, who is always on the hunt for story-making material. She writes romantic suspense, women's fiction and young adult novels. She is the also the author of Contraband, Dissolution, Distraction, Don't Get Mad...Get Even, Giving up the Dream, Retribution and Hardware (written under the pen name Jayda McTyson). Visit her on the web at Joy L. Campbell.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Are you participating in the A-Z?

How was your ROW80?

Wishing you all good luck on the two giveaways above!