Monthly Archives: August 2012

Every Fiction and Non-Fiction Book Author Has an Audience

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By Denise Turney

Emily Dickinson may not have gone out of her way to publish and market her written works while she walked the earth, yet, after her sister discovered and started marketing her poems, her work found its audience. People began buying her poetry, even discussing it at schools and in writer’s groups. This happening may point to the fact that every author, be they aware of it or not, has an audience, a group of readers who are eager to explore, examine and enjoy the stories or poems they write.

When to Start Finding Your Book Reading Audience

However, if you’re a writer, the time to ponder or try to figure out who you’re writing for might not be during the creative process. I say this because my experience has been that great art comes from within the artist, not from a strategy to sell lots of books. The success of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings may prove this.

If you create with truth and sincerity, after you publish and market your works, you may discover that people from certain backgrounds, age groups, etc. buy and appreciate your books most. You can discover this whether you sell 25 books or 25 million books. As you develop conversations with these people, responding to their inquiries and comments, don’t be surprised if these members of your reading audience start asking when your next book is scheduled for publication or if you plan on writing a sequel to your recent novel.

Of course, you can also take the traditional marketing approach and research a segment of the general population, learn what their passions, interests and backgrounds are and write stories that meet their interests. However, if your work feels forced (as if you were merely writing to get book sales from a certain demographic) readers may catch on. Your stories also might lack sincerity.

You also might not fully appreciate the creative process. Because it is during the creative process that writers often reap their greatest rewards as they tap into hidden truths, emotions, perceptions and beliefs about themselves.

Finding Your Book Reading Audience

After you finish creating a story, to find your reading audience you may want to follow the route Emily Dickinson took and let someone else spread the word about your books. You can do this by hiring a marketing firm or public relations specialists to tell the media and reading public about your book titles.

Should you decide to market and promote your books yourself you can connect with readers on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also blog and write columns for periodicals that reach the types of people you think would love to hang out with your book characters were they real people. When using the column writing approach, always be sure to include your name, book title and website URL in your byline.

If you plan on writing several novels, consider building a database that includes the names and contact information of book readers who purchase your novels, comment on your writings or let you know how much they appreciate you work. Also, distribute free or complimentary copies of your books to book reviewers and book club presidents.

Thank you for reading my blog. Please return often and read more blog posts. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! 

Sources:

Love Pour Over Me – http://www.ebookit.com/books/0000001582/Love-Pour-Over-Me.html

Authors Getting the Most out of Book Blog Tours

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By Denise Turney

The first time I heard the term “blog tour” I thought the person I was communicating with was talking about an online radio tour. Turns out my assumption was only partially accurate.

Meet New Readers on Book Blog Tours

Blog tours can include a blend of written and oral author interviews. They can also include book reviews, with some blog tour hosts posting reviews of your books at retail websites like Amazon.com, Google Books or Barnes & Noble.com. During the early days that your book is on the market these book reviews can be particularly influential, helping book buyers to decide whether or not they want to pay for and read your book.

Then again, for book buyers like me, the reviews might not hold much weight as I decide whether or not to buy and read a book based on excerpts I read. I’ve got to get a feel for the writer’s style, the way the writer works with words, causing them to flow like sweet music.

All said — book reviews certainly don’t hurt.

Other rewards and benefits you can receive as an author conducting book blog tours include, of course, introducing yourself and your books to new readers. This is a key takeaway for authors. After all, if you plan on enjoying a lengthy writing career you want to attract new readers. Blog tours definitely helped me to introduce Raymond Clarke and other main characters in Love Pour Over Me to new book readers.

Additional Book Blog Tour Benefits

As an author, whether you write fiction or nonfiction, when you go on blog tours you can reap additional benefits. Some of these benefits include:

  • Creating relationships with blog owners (make sure you thank blog owners for supporting you before and after your blog tour runs)
  • Opportunities to conduct your first radio interviews
  • Reasons to write and distribute press releases about your new books
  • Chance to have your name, bio and book information listed at several book blogs
  • Additional links tracking into your official book website (helps improve your website’s search engine rankings)
  • Opportunities to answer questions posed by blog visitors

As a tip when scheduling book blog tours, I recommend that you pay no more than $50 to $60 for a four-week blog tour. I paid $50 for a four-week blog tour which put my book, Love Pour Over Me, in front of thousands of book buyers.

To get the most out of your blog tour make sure you create accounts at social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google Plus and StumbleUpon. Share your blog interviews with follows at these social media sites. Also be sure to respond to questions hosts and visitors post on your blog tour.

Also, you may be able to attract more followers to your blog tour if you giveaway prizes and/or free copies of your books. If you’re on Good Reads list your blog tour schedule at your Good Reads personal blog and in the Good Reads events section. Invite your Good Reads friends to attend your book blog tour.

Above all – have fun – lots of it! After all, isn’t that why you write? Because you love it!

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Even if you choose not to purchase your copy of Love Pour Over Me today, I encourage you to “consider Love.”

Material to Write Entertaining Books With

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By Denise Turney

When you pause to consider your life, the twists and turns, you’ve gone through, the myriad of experiences you have had while a portion of the limitless YOU inhabited your body, it may be easy for you to see that you have material for an awesome story. Regardless of the number of years you have been on earth, you are marvelous. Facts be told, if you had to keep a journal of your every thought and action, you might struggle to find enough paper to hold your story.

Finding Material to Write Novels With

The material you’d write your story, your autobiography or memoir with would come from your memories, the very same resources that shape the way you feel right now (at this very second), the very same resources that create your level of comfort with trying new things. Oh, memories . . . they can pack a wallop. It’s a reason it’s a blessing to hold onto memories that make you feel peace, love and joy and let other memories go.

But what if you’re writing a novel? Where, then, do you get the material to write with?

Believe it or not, to some degree, you will get the material from the same place the material to write your autobiography comes from – within yourself. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what makes writing so emotional, so moving, so therapeutic for authors and book readers.

I also wonder if using inner resources is what separates literature from novels that are written primarily to get cash registers ringing. The good thing is you don’t have to be a book writer to know, to feel, where a novelist is getting the material for his books from. All you have to do is continue reading stories he’s written.

Why Novels Feel Real

In fact, after my first novel Portia was released in 1998 readers emailed me and told me they just knew I was from Chicago, Illinois (the city Portia is set in). I’m from Ohio. Despite how many times I told the book’s readers I wasn’t from Chicago, they didn’t believe me. To this day I think that was due to the research I did in preparation to write Portia and to the way I used material from within myself to create the book’s characters, namely Portia.

About five years later, when I released my third novel, Spiral, readers told me I was from Memphis, Tennessee (the city Spiral is set in). By that time I’d learned that when authors’ material comes from within, the stories those authors write feel authentic, feel real.  Readers appreciate that.

And it takes so little work on the author’s part. It’s a matter of simply allowing information to come to us, to rise up from within. Songwriters, musicians, painters, scriptwriters and even actors and actresses do it. It’s that authenticity that readers and movie viewers are drawn to, even while reading and watching fiction stories, poems and multi-dimensional sci-fi thrillers. At the core people know the stories aren’t real. However, they feel so real (due to where the material they were created with came from) that readers don’t want to turn away, don’t want to stop reading.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Even if you choose not to purchase your copy of Love Pour Over Me today, I encourage you to “consider Love.”

Books That Are Breaking Barriers

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By Denise Turney

Read Love Pour Over Me and you’ll see the impact mental barriers have on us. In fact, I was reminded of this fact today after I returned from a daily walk.

While watching CNN’s Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien earlier today I was happy to watch a story about a school that teaches the Quran to Muslim girls, allowing them to read passages in the book for themselves. Through the readings the girls came to see that they were not created to be abused and mistreated.

Talk about a brilliant and joyous sight . . . to see another barrier broken! As I watched the story I thought about the movie The Help and how African American women were afraid to speak out against abuses happening to them in the 1950s and 1960s. As one woman after another shared her story, it became easier to distinguish facts from lies, kindness from manipulation and, perhaps most of all, fear from courage. After all, the fearful attack; it’s always a sure sign of fear . . . attack.

We Are Not Our Beliefs

In order to continue to distinguish lies from truth, we have to continue to examine our beliefs, even those practiced or passed down by our ancestors (after all, if our ancestors were as right as we might like to think they were our ancestors would have left the world in a more loving state). We also have to come to see that we are not our beliefs as we didn’t create ourselves; but we do create our beliefs. As we see we aren’t our beliefs we may come to realize that we are not harmed, weakened, etc. in any way, not the slightest or smallest way, by letting erroneous thoughts or wrong beliefs go.

Plainly stated, letting go of wrong beliefs, erroneous thoughts or illusions will not kill us. We precede our beliefs; what we truly are came first.

love pour over me book by denise turney

In Love Pour Over Me, Raymond Clarke’s erroneous thoughts start early, as they often do. Raymond’s father, a man with untreated alcoholism, tells Raymond one lie after another about himself. Evidence he uses to prove he’s right in his errorneous thinking might be something as simple as Raymond spilling a glass of milk on the floor or trekking mud in the house on the bottom of his shoe.

Seventeen years of hearing then believing lies about himself causes Raymond to start protecting himself, especially his heart. It also propels Raymond to flee home. It’s his next step that changes his life, and the lives of five people he meets at college, forever, that, over a long stretch of time, helps Raymond to start examining lies he’s been told, aiding him as he begins breaking inner barriers to love.

As I watched the CNN story, thought about the movie The Help and pondered Raymond’s fate in Love Pour Over Me, I couldn’t help but wonder if our greatest fear is real love (not the illusion of love we are so keen to celebrate and chase after). Think about it. Is real love what we’re trying to attack, trying to steer clear of?

Thank you for reading my blog. Please return often and read more blog posts. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! 

Sources:

Love Pour Over Me – http://www.ebookit.com/books/0000001582/Love-Pour-Over-Me.html

Great Quotes from Love Pour Over Me

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By Denise Turney

love pour over me book quotes

Love Pour Over Me is a book that is created to endure the test of time. Through multi-faceted characters, major and minor, the book explores and examines the human condition. It celebrates love, the joy that it brings and resistance to experiencing love, helping readers to see that anytime they thought they tried love and love failed it wasn’t love they tried but instead an illusion of love.

Scenes from Love Pour Over Me serve as wake up calls, motivation and inspiration for readers from various parts of the world and all walks of life. I share a very small portion of some Love Pour Over Me writings with you below:

  • “He wanted Malcolm to walk through the convention center doors sober and real proud like. He wanted Malcolm to be glad to call him his son.”
  • “A ghost haunted him; it pulled at him with so much force it felt stronger than he was. It was the shadow of a boy who didn’t want to leave, who wanted to stay and beg for his father to love him.”
  • “He wanted the thing he hated but had grown so used to he missed it.”
  • “Mirth hung between them like a thread. It bonded them closer one to the other — the good, the bad — the dark secrets.”
  • “He smiled as if images and sounds from the long ago experience were seeping through the memory so strongly that he looked like he’d just walked away from the concert, Lionel Hampton’s white dress shirt wet with sweat much like his t-shirt now was, his fingers entwined with his mother’s, his small head turned, looking back at the maestro as if he was more magic than man.”
  • “With his free hand, he brushed her forearm. ‘The only thing about trying to be too independent is that it gets you out of balance.’”
  • “Uncertainty hung in the air, and because it did, Brenda wanted to hold onto what was familiar to her. She couldn’t explain it. With each forward step she took, she had no evidence for it, but she felt certain that when she saw her sister again she would be deeply changed – forever.”
  • “He was jealous of Raymond. He envied the way Brenda doted upon him. She was unlike Leann, his tall, wiry wife of thirty-eight years, an emotionally steely woman with a frozen heart. Leann and he were tucked inside the walls of a dead union that not even all his preaching could revive. Yet somehow they found the energy to play the role of a happy, spiritual couple. Even their families thought love, not communal concern, kept them together.”
  • “The writing appeared smooth yet hard to read, the mark of a man who wrote often, who wrote fast. The letters were broadly curved at the ends. Space between each letter was wide, as if to leave room for the reader to pause or contemplate what was on the page. There was a pitch of deep sincerity in the note which read: ‘Even with an ailing loved one, I know you can do it. You’ve got what it takes to get over the top.’”
  • “Forfeit had long stood as a symbol of love to her. The more she sacrificed, the better she felt about herself. It was almost as if she believed that to sacrifice, to do what she least wanted to do, to go where she especially did not want to be, was to earn her place in the universe, akin to a tenant paying rent. Elders taught her that to relinquish her wants for another was the greatest act of love. It’s what made mothers good women, they told her.”
  • “If we didn’t have so much fear attached to things we want, I think we’d understand all of our dreams. Fear that we won’t get what we want makes us force dreams in a certain direction, to mean something deep down inside we know isn’t true. You know,” she added while she looked across the café. “I hadn’t thought of this before but I wonder if that’s the reason so many of us don’t remember our dreams. We don’t want to know the truth.”
  • “Twelve unaltered years, routine and habit forcing each new day to turn out like the one before, passed long and slowly for Raymond, like the train moving from station to station down the uneven tracks.”
  • “She took you down a new path with the way she loved you. She was the person you had courage to love in return. Do you know how freeing love is, Man? Do you know the gift this woman gave you? She opened you up to receive love, the greatest gift.”

Open to love, my friend. It’s inside of you, welling up even now. It lights your path. It knows the way.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You!

Developing Believable Characters

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By Denise Turney

creating believable fiction book characters

It’s long been said that if we readers don’t care about characters in a novel, we won’t continue reading a story. As a passionate book reader and author of six novels, I agree with the saying. To get into the heart of a novel, to tap into, explore and savor the richest flow out of a story, readers must really care about what is going to happen to the main characters in a book.

Create Believable Book Characters

Admittedly, I’ve read novels where one or more minor characters upstaged main characters. I’m not exactly sure how this happens. Perhaps this occurs when authors relax and become freer while developing minor characters, people they presume will have less impact on the story’s outcome.

When this occurs, minor characters can, unbeknownst to authors, become the story’s main characters. Signs that this has occurred may be when readers tell authors how much they love minor characters or when readers ask authors to create a sequel about minor characters. Those characters, the ones readers want more of, are the foundation of a good story.

So, how do novelists create believable characters?

As a book author, an easy way is to achieve this is to consider people in your waking life who stand out to you, demanding your and other people’s attention. Shape powerful components of these people’s personalities into your book’s characters. For example, you could take your aunt’s strong opinions, blend them with a cousin’s quick temper and add a spice of a friend’s stylish fashion sense to create a book character. This worked wonderfully for me while creating my novels Portia, Spiral and Love Pour Over Me.

More Ways to Develop Believable Novel Characters

You can also design a sketch of your characters. When doing this, add enough background data (e.g. birthplace, age, family background, interests, physical experience goals, career) to characters to bring them alive for readers, to make the characters feel real to book readers. After you fill in the background information for characters, start working on characters’ personality traits, habits, quirks, etc.

To get a feel for characters, especially major characters, consider having characters keep a journal or write a letter (or email) to a friend. This can help reveal hidden details about characters, making it easier for you to flesh the characters out. Although I didn’t use this technique while developing Love Pour Over Me, I did use it to further shape Tammy Tilson while creating my mystery novel, Spiral.

Finally, after you start writing your novel make sure you develop believable dialogue for your book’s characters. It’s important that you do this for both major and minor characters. Dialogue helps with story pacing. It also reveals details about book characters. As a tip, allow characters in novels to speak with accents and perhaps use slang that’s relevant for the time period your story is set in. This is an element I had to pay particular attention to in my novel, Love Pour Over Me, especially while developing Raymond Clarke’s roommate Patrick, a man with a gregarious personality who hails from Mexico.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You!

Taking Books on Successful Road Trips

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By Denise Turney

Hitting the road and going on book tours is an effective way to connect with readers in person, answering their questions about your writing process, characters in your books and what inspired or motivated you to create the stories you’ve penned. By taking your books on the road you can also increase your book sales in the short and long term.

Get the Most Out of Book Road Trips    

Readers appreciate meeting authors of their favorite books. In this regard, readers are akin to sports and music fans. They want to get close to the people who use their talents to captivate, entertain, inspire, educate and/or motivate them. Truth be told, many of us book authors, who are also avid book readers, get excited when we meet other writers whose works we admire.

Book events are fun. Take events like Book Expo America (BEA), the Maui Writer’s Conference or Miami International Book Festival and its clear to see why millions of people trek out to book events each year. There are author discussion panels, editor and literary agent meet and greets, keynote speakers and, of course, book signings.

To get the most out of book road trips, consider creating an itinerary so you remember to visit certain booths, connect with media outlets and engage readers while you’re out and about. You can also:

  • Introduce yourself to event organizers (it’s a great way to learn about upcoming appearance opportunities)
  • Schedule interviews with talk radio stations within 15 or fewer miles of the book event you’re attending (make sure you announce the dates, times and locations of local events you’re attending)
  • Bring enough books to sell at local events you’re scheduled to attend (no sense in running out of books one to two days before you’re scheduled to leave town)
  • Visit other author books (it’s a great way to network and make friends)
  • Focus on building relationships with book lovers (keep in mind that if you don’t sell lots of books at an event, if you make enough rewarding connections, you may see an increase in book sales days or weeks after you return home)
  • Giveaway free bookmarks, brochures, book excerpts, etc. (be sure to include your website URL on all giveaways)
  • Volunteer to read from your books at events

 

At the end of events be sure to thank the event organizers, supporters and book lovers for coming. In fact, make it a point to thank each person who stops by your booth, even if they don’t buy a copy of your book. I made a point to do this while on the road with my books Portia, Love Has Many Faces, Long Walk Up and Spiral. I plan on taking my new book, Love Pour Over Me, on the road this autumn; hope to see you while I’m on the road!

While you’re on the road with your books, meeting readers, media, booksellers and librarians, remember that life is truly about communicating and relationships. Above all, love what you’re doing. Stay in the moment and allow yourself to absolutely love and enjoy attending each book event you travel to!

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You!

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Thank you!

Accessing Strong Faith to Realize Your Dreams

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By Denise Turney

The genesis of faith is in the realm where physical eyes do not see. Faith might reveal itself in an emotion or thought. For example, if you want to land a six-figure job and buy a new house, faith might cause you to feel happy, hopeful and joyous when you drive through neighborhoods filled with houses that resemble the type of house you want to live in.

If you let the feelings and thoughts strengthen you will allow faith to connect your inner and outer vision causing you to see with your physical eyes what you first saw with your inner vision. Eventually you will have what you asked for (whether you used words or simply desire, absent words, to ask).

Temptations to Stop Using Faith to Realize Your Dreams

It all sounds simple enough and it is simple. However, we live in a physical world (even the physically blind use physical senses like touch to navigate the earth’s terrain). It’s tempting to keep checking to see if our faith is moving our inner vision for what we want into the physical realm. When we hear of others who have manifested their desires ahead of us we can start to feel like we’ll never get what we’ve been asking for. If we compare ourselves to others too much, we might start telling ourselves we’re “unlucky,” “not from the right family or background,” “created to sacrifice our desires so others can achieve” (this one is absolutely absurd!) or a failure.

I’m sure you can guess what likely occurs next. Yep. We quit trying to achieve our dreams, and that, my friend is not a fun life, because our authentic self will not stop asking for what it wants, and we may live a life of conflict, lacking peace, if we don’t get back to exercising strong faith to realize our dreams. It’s this refusal to quit that keeps moving Love Pour Over Me’s Raymond Clarke forward, propelling him to pursue his dreams to become one of the world’s top middle distance runners. Refusal to quit is also the reason Raymond never stops believing in and searching for love. Like many of us, the wait for true love seems too long for Raymond. Yet, the thought of living without love is too painful.

Realizing Your Dreams

The bottom line is – we were created to live vibrant, joyous, love-filled experiences . . . nothing short of it . . . ever. As we start doubting and not getting our most sincere, love-based requests while witnessing others doing the same, we may even tell ourselves that it’s the human condition to struggle, to be in conflict and misery. But this is a lie. Fortunately, there are enough of us using faith to realize our dreams to blow this lie out of the water.

For many students at a famous Pennsylvania university, Raymond’s successes serve as encouragement. Other students on the spacious university campus simply admire Raymond’s athletic achievements from afar, cheering him on with each win. While appreciating the support, Raymond can’t help but long for his father’s approval, something he didn’t get even when he was a little boy. This is where Raymond’s seeds of doubt about love and a truly good life derive. He starts to wonder if he can have what he really wants – a lifetime of love.

However, just because we don’t know how to start a car doesn’t mean a car won’t start. Just because we haven’t succeeded at riding ocean waves doesn’t mean ocean waves can’t be ridden (surfers do it all the time). Just because no one had broken the four minute mile didn’t mean humans couldn’t break the four minute mile (Roger Bannister broke the supposedly impossible to break four minute mile in 1954. Since that time the supposedly impossible fete has been accomplished by track runners many times with the fastest mile to date being run in 3:43. Perhaps it was the mental barrier that needed to be broken before the actual fete could be accomplished).

Possibly searching for a list of impossible fetes that humans achieved will help you to realize whatever you’re telling yourself is impossible might be very possible if you exercise faith to realize your dreams. Perhaps if you read stories of other people who felt a dream birthing inside themselves then worked to achieve or manifest the dream in the physical realm your faith will be strengthened.

It also might help to think about your love-based desires and paying attention to how good you feel when you see yourself achieving them. It’s this joy you want to feel all the time. Realizing your love-based dreams can help you to do this. It worked for Raymond in Love Pour Over Me. It’s worked for countless people around the globe. It can work for you.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Even if you choose not to purchase your copy of Love Pour Over Me today, I encourage you to “consider Love.”

Sources:

Love Pour Over Me – http://www.ebookit.com/books/0000001582/Love-Pour-Over-Me.html

Young Love’s Passion is Hot

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By Denise Turney

When we’re young, passion is hot. Passion seems to flow through every intimate relationship when we’re young. Oh, the magic of the 20s. We feel as if our bodies will never age, our hair graying and our limbs becoming less nimble, the way our parents and grandparents have. It’s a time of wonder.

Joys and Triumphs of Young Love

Life stretches out before us, full of promise and hope. We hold on tight. Even if we’ve experienced disappointments and frustrations, made mistakes and taken wrong turns, during our teen and pre-teen years we know we can win. We know life holds one success after another for us. We believe in our greatness (and we should). We believe in romantic love, burn with hot passion for romantic love.

If we’ve never been in love with another person, someone who makes our heart race, our hands sweat, we’re in for a wild ride. Everything will sparkle and come alive for us. It’s a feeling unlike no other . . . being in love. Even if we’ve loved before – loving our parents, siblings, pets and friends – we have a compass; it tells us that this is different.

And it is this experience many of us have after we pack our bags and head off to college or university. It’s as if there is someone waiting for us to step into his or her life, someone waiting to join with us in love. In the hustle and busyness of college life we may not notice this person at once, but college last four to five years. There will be other times for us to connect with this person who will stir the passion within us, changing our lives forever. . . .

It’s this passionate love that Raymond Clarke experiences in the book, Love Pour Over Me. At the start of Love Pour Over Me, Raymond has just met Anthony Thompson, a collegiate football star, when he looks up and sees her. He doesn’t say it, but he knows – deep down he knows – she’s the woman for him. If asked to explain what he feels the instant he sees her, Raymond would struggle to find the words. Nothing from his past has prepared him for this. He can’t think of one other time when he felt what he feels when he sees her.

He doesn’t even wonder if it’s mere fantasy, something he’s making up in his mind, something he’ll never “really” share with her. He just goes with the experience, letting it guide and pull him along. It’s the right thing to do as Raymond discovers throughout the pages of the new book, Love Pour Over Me.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Even if you choose not to purchase your copy of Love Pour Over Me today, I encourage you to “consider Love.”