'Like One of the Family' now on Kindle!

Delighted when I checked my author page on Amazon to find that my EBook version of 'Like One of the Family' is now available on Kindle with two good reviews already?  All  thanks due to that brilliant team headed by Matt and Diana Horner  ebookpartnership.com  This is a book about an Irish family, a memorable tale of love, passion and tragedy. A book that you can tuck up by the fire with and once you get stuck into it - so I'm told by friends and others! - you won't be able to put it down till you read that last page! So enjoy and happy Christmas! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Like-One-Of-The-Family-ebook/dp/B00HFZ7K6A/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

All about EBooks!

A few months ago, learning of the great advantages of going global with my published novels and short stories, I decided to get help having them converted to Ebooks. A writer friend gave me the name of EBookPartnership  and when I emailed them they promptly replied, giving me all the information needed to get me going. This brilliant team, headed by Matt and Diana Horner,offered me a good package - it consisted of formatting my books, designing the covers, providing ISBNs and taking care of general distribution. They also gave me a discount for multiple titles. So within a couple of months I had three titles - my first novel and two collections of short stories- available on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble (the Nook)and several other popular outlets. When I decided to go ahead with my second novel and submitted it to Matt for formatting, along with the completed forms listing my ideas for the book cover and other relevant publicity information, he sent me the new book cover three days later! Wow! And this cover, like the other three book covers, is really lovely. I'm so pleased with it and will be showing it in my blog very soon. Hopefully, 'Like One Of The Family' will be online, if not before Christmas, very soon afterwards. In the meantime I'm getting used to using Facebook, twitter, Goodreads and Linkedin to make my books known. It's all a bit of a learning curve but thanks to eBookPartnership.com all of the angst was taken out of the conversion process and I haven't had so much fun in years. It has been an enjoyable and satisfying experience. While I am so pleased with Ebook publication I am still very much in favour of traditional publishing and my new airline novel 'Holding Pattern' (sequel to Up Up and Away) is going through the usual channels at present, hopefully will be in print very soon. I have to say though, there is something irresistible about being able to read your work on screen and to have the facility to make it available to readers world-wide. To change is to grow and to change often is to become perfect!

The Straw Hat and Other Stories

Here is the link to these 21  short stories 'The Straw Hat and Other Stories' on Amazon.co.uk  Available on Kindle, Kobo and Barnes and Noble (The Nook)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Straw-Hat-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B00EVXL3ZI/ref=la_B001K7S24S_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385950958&sr=1-4

The Sraw Hat and Other Stories.

These are 21 short stories about life, love and relationships in provincial Irish towns.The first story 'Never Too Late' is about a Kerry girl and her father whose relationship suffers when he marries again soon after the death of her mother. But all is not lost when Mary's Italian landlady decides to take a hand to try and reunite the pair of them. 'The theme of the 'The Straw Hat' is jealousy.  The women of the village envy Mammy Donovan her position as dresser of the itinerant brides each year at the Horse Fair, and when it becomes know that this particular year the event will be televised their jealousy knows no bounds!  These stories and many in the collection were first broadcast on BBC and all of the stories have been published in Irish magazines and newspapers, especially in the ever popular 'Ireland's Own' magazine.

Another airline story 'Party Piece'.

Another airline story in my story collection 'The Mask' is called  'Party Piece' and the narrator is an air hostess, in older age, looking back on the day she flew to Liverpool  on a Fokker Friendship, her intimate  relationship with the co-pilot who was crewing with her, the various flying phobias common to her hostess colleagues and her own ongoing uneasiness with the rear door on that particular aircraft and which, not for the first time, was causing her angst on that fateful day!  

'To return to my particular bête noire, I can honestly say that to me the door on the Fokker Friendship was anything but friendly.  Not happily designed like the Vickers Viscount with a simple locking device, it had first to be lifted and then positioned firmly in a groove.  Finding the groove was the problem.'

Airline short stories.

For those of you who like reading about the glamour of airlines and romantic stopovers you will find three aircrew stories in 'The Mask and Other Stories'    Perhaps you will like 'Poodles and Diamonds' about Mary, newly wed and crewing with two engaged hostesses, who have nothing more serious on their minds than keeping their sparklers sparkling in a measure of gin in the galley and aiming to buy up half of New York when they land.  Not so long since Mary was just like them but now she and her young husband are saving to make a down-payment on a house and she cannot afford to to splurge her precious crew allowance on inessentials. But after a night out with the crew, having to calculate every little cost, choosing pasta  instead of steak, beer instead of a Tom Collins and regretfully foregoing coffee, even though the obligatory fifty cent tip is greater than the cost of the actual Espresso, she finds herself weakening when the other hostesses succumb to the blandishments of a street-seller and buy themselves 'gorgeous fluffy white poodles'' urging Mary, 'You must buy one too. Oh, you must! Only seven dollars, Mary, that's nothing!'  Why, Mary thinks, sorely tempted, I used to pay twice as much to have my nails painted, all at once feeling the burden of debt weighting on her like a fond, but wearisome elderly relative.

Short story extract from 'Stopover'.

"Anne was a helpless romantic, hopelessly in love with the idea of romance. In the airline she saw it all around her. It was in the other hostesses' sparkling engagement rings, the pilots' gold-braided uniforms. From dreaming, breathing, anticipating romance, Anne had created her own romantic aura. With her creamy apple skin, her slender velvet-beribboned neck, her crowning-glory of jet black hair, she managed to suggest to the more artistic amongst her admirers, of a work by Romney, perhaps his portrait of a young Emma Hamilton, others of a more literary bent discerned in her a resemblance to Nabokov' 'Lolita'. So they never tired of telling her."

This extract is taken from 'Stopover' one of 18 short stories in my collection 'The Mask and Other Stories' - "an intriguing, sensual and poignant portrayal of modern Irish women"available now in Ebooks. Hope you will read, like and review it!

Airline novels!

There can be a lot of research when writing airline novels. But the ability to get into the mind of the pilot when he finds himself In an emergency, whether flying solo in light aircraft or at the controls of a jet adds drama and excitement to an already fraught situation. In my first Celtic Airways novel 'Up Up and Away' when Captain Graham Pender is trying to land his B707 in Colombo in a heavy Monsoon storm a migraine attack coincides with a faulty ILS - Instrument  Landing  System - and a non-functioning altimeter and  he discovers too late that the rapidly descending aircraft is not at the altitude showing on his instrument panel but merely 200 feet above ground and far short of the runway.

Books!

Like most lovers of books with their satisfying smell and feel I never thought I would stray from the traditional manner of enjoying them until I tried Ebooks. Such ease of flicking over the brightly lit pages. How I would have loved a Kindle or IPad when a kid trying to read by torchlight under the covers!

Old-fashioned scent The Irish Garden April 2013

Keep the magic in the garden all year round

Light up your garden not only at Christmas but all through the year!