Category: Personal



 Greetings one and all.  Sorry for the silence, but as you can guess I’ve been really busy on audio and writing projects.  Sadly, one of those projects will not come to light until this time next year. This would be the one I last posted about, namely “A Christmas Carol”. Between trying to get the audiobook version of “Forever Haunted” completed, as well as a lengthy short story (I know that sounds weird, a short story being lengthy) over on our other blog “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition”, as well as trying to deal with work and prepping for the holidays, time has not been very available for me. 

So I’m planning on releasing my reading/performance of Mr. Dicken’s classic for December 2021. It will be complete with voices and sound effects, along with royalty-free and public domain imagery from the internet. At the moment it seems to be coming in at a length of 5+ hours which is why I will be releasing it in staves (chapters) as Mr. Dickens wrote it. In addition, I may produce a complete audio of the performance to be made available on CD or as an MP3 download. But that’s all next year.

For now, I’m dealing with new shutdowns here in Santa Cruz, California (due to Covid – 19) which has hampered a number of other efforts Helen and I had planned. As well as other work related issues which have left us both rather tired at times. 

Helen also had to scale back on releasing her 4th novel in her “Forever Detective Series”, to next year as well, since it too is Christmas related. However, she did complete a short story that will be posted soon over on her blog theforeverdetective.com. We intend to also create an audio for that story which will also be published shortly for your enjoyment.

I’ll be sharing some new audio recording experiences here on this blog, starting in January. I’ll be focusing on editing and more recording techniques, so you know what to keep an eye out for.

I’ll post here again as soon as I have something to say, or just to wish you all Happy Holidays.

In the meantime, if you want a ghost story set around Christmas here is a link to the one I’ve created over on “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition”. To date there are two installments with more to come. I’ll leave the links for those right here and hopefully you’ll get a chance to check it out. Enjoy… and until next time, keep writing my friends.

LINKS FOR “Lisa’s Private Thoughts – December 24th 2017, My Christmas Ghost Story”

Part I: https://thevampyreblogs.blog/2020/11/28/lisas-private-thoughts-december-24th-2017-my-christmas-ghost-story-part-i/

Part II: https://thevampyreblogs.blog/2020/12/04/lisas-private-thoughts-december-24th-2017-my-christmas-ghost-story-part-ii/

Gifting E-books…


This entry may seem to be a repeat but every year I get asked about how to gift e-books to someone. So here you all are and I hope everyone takes advantage since giving someone a tale they will love can be priceless sometimes…

Okay gang, the big day is drawing near and you still want to get a few more gifts but don’t know what to buy, or don’t want to go out into the stores which have already pulled down half of their displays and are lining up Spring stuff. What to do, what to do… how about giving someone a good book to read on their Kindle? It’s fast, easy, and you can have it delivered on Christmas Day and know it will arrive on time…


Didn’t know you could do this? Neither did I for the longest time. I only found out a couple of years ago when we released “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home”. I found myself rewarding some of our beta-readers with a free copy of the finished product in whatever form they wished (trade paperback, Kindle, PDF).  Most requested a signed trade paperback, but a couple asked for the Kindle version.

So I headed over to Amazon, got into my account, and pulled up “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home”.  Once there I quickly found the “Give As A Gift” button and clicked it.  From there I was taken to another screen which asked me to sign into my Amazon account, which I did.  From there I was taken to a final screen

This screen asked only for the e-mail address of the recipient I was sending this book to AND what day I wanted it delivered.  It was the option of a delivery date that really caught my eye.  Now some of you might be thinking, “Duh, you never noticed this before?”  And the answer is “Obviously, I didn’t.  I rarely gave e-books as gifts to anyone before, even though I’m one of the authors.  Most of my readers buy the books for themselves and hardly anyone in my family owns a Nook or Kindle.”  So yes, this was  new to me and very exciting.

So now I have this huge new avenue for last minute holiday shopping before me, which I thought it important to share these options with all of you. Some of you may have known about all this, but for those (like me) who didn’t you now have more options when it comes to shopping for gifts.  I personally love the idea of having a book to place in someone’s ‘Cyber Stocking’.

So for anyone who didn’t know about this option, now you do.  And the best part is you can do that kind of shopping right now.  The e-book will not arrive before the date you set.

Of course, being an author I’m going to shamelessly promote our books by providing links below so you can visit our author pages on Amazon, where all our books are listed and you can choose whichever one(s) you’d like to gift to the readers in your life.

Here are the links for our Para-Earth Series:

US KINDLE USERS:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KT9C559?ref=series_rw_dp_labf

UK KINDLE USERS:

CANADA KINDLE USERS:

And for fans of Helen’s new “Forever Detective Series” which blends noir mystery and the supernatural here are the links to those books:

Thanks for tuning in and don’t be afraid to leave suggestions or ideas about gifting books that I overlooked in this post, in the comments section below.  Until next time, take care and keep writing.

With 2018 drawing to a close, I’m sure a lot of us are reflecting on what’s happened in each of our lives as well as wondering about what 2019 holds. For me 2018 was a strange year of revelations, new opportunities, as well as upheavals. Two bouts with bronchitis, the second one becoming pneumonia, really took a lot out of me and my vacation time from work. I was supposed to be off this last week and not returning until January 2nd.

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Our 1st anthology “The Vampyre Blogs – One Day At a Time” had been slated to be released in late September/early October but didn’t see the light of day until early this month (not a great time to push a new book, not when the big publishers are pushing a bunch of titles they’ve been holding back in time for the holidays). However, things will pick up. I know this from past experience, so I’m not too worried.

However, the big question of course is what can you all expect from us in the coming year? Well, quite a lot. Firstly, we’ve been gathering our thoughts on a number of writing topics to share here on the blog. We’ve got plenty of insights from our adventures to share with you all, so we hope you’ll still be checking in regularly and re-sharing our posts with others.

The Pass

Secondly, there are things that have been happening behind the scenes we haven’t shared with you yet such as what’s been happening with the collaborations. As you know, my high school friend Rich Caminit and I have been working by e-mail and Skype on a project involving Chinese vampires and actual historical events. I am happy to announce that the first draft of our collaboration “The Pass” is nearing completion as I write this post. Part of the reason the project has taken so long is the fact that the story was becoming more and more lengthy and farther removed from the Para-Earths vision Helen and I created. So, we decided to make “The Pass” the first in a new paranormal/historical set of books we are considering calling “The Paranormal History Series” (tell us what you think in the comment section below please). Furthermore, we decided to break the story up into two books because it was getting so long. We’d already found the perfect cliffhanger for the end of the “The Pass”, as well as a startling beginning for the second part of the story which will culminate in a battle scene of epic proportions.

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Thirdly, Helen and I have embarked on yet another new series that she is taking the lead writing role on, called “The Forever Detective Series”. The first book is “Forever’s Too Long”. Set in the late 1940s, the detective, a former policeman and officer has opened his business as a private investigator to find out that the cases he’s working on are leading somewhere there is no coming back from. She’s already written over 19,000 words of the first book and we have already started building a website for it over at https://foreverdetective.com/. Mind you the site is still under construction, but if you click on the “Blog” tab you’ll find some interesting background information about her leading man. And there will be a lot more coming soon to that site, so you might want to bookmark it. Her current goal is to have the book out by summer so stay tuned. She’s a lot faster writer than I am so the likelihood of it being out on time is very good.

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Finally, I want to let you all know that the long-awaited sequel to “The Bridge” and “The Ship” is once more fully under way. “The Door” takes up where both those books ended in a hospital where the wail of an infant leads Alex Hill, Veronica Ross, Cassandra Elliott, and Julianna Cloudfoot to face old and new threats from the realms of two different Para-Earths. Part of the reason this book has taken so long to write was the simple fact that I had a good idea of what I wanted the main story to be, but not a clear vision of how it should unfold. This is what led to our branching off and doing “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home” tale, which was more clear and complete in my mind.

New Photos 003

That book also allowed me to find the missing pathways I needed to get “The Door” back on track with new characters and scenes that will “bridge the gap” (please excuse the pun) between the first two books and “The Vampyre Blogs” part of our Para-Earth Series. The story that will be unfolding in “The Door” will start the beginning of bringing the casts between all three books together creating opportunities for many more stories down the road, including one that will bring Alex face-to-face with the nightmare dwelling that nearly destroyed him in every sense of the word. I am of course referring to “Harlequin House”.

As you can see, there’s a lot coming your way in 2019 and beyond. We hope you’ll keep joining us for the ride ahead. It will probably have more twists and turns than a roller-coaster, and I hope will be just as exciting.

New Year 2019

Until time, we wish you all a very Happy New Year, and urge you all to keep writing!

 


My apologies for not posting much lately.  The day after I made the Thanksgiving post a very dear friend who’d been fighting cancer for over a year took a bad turn and we lost her a few days later.  She’d been a part of mine and Helen’s lives for over 25+ years and had been like a sister to both of us.  We’ve been trying to help her husband who is back up in Sacramento (we’re down in the Monterey Bay area) from a distance as best we can.  We’ve been limited in what we could do because Helen just started working with the county and is on 6 months probation and cannot take time off at will, plus she had to finish final exams for her college courses.  Now she’s fighting Bronchitis as well which has made things more awkward for us.

Needless to say there hasn’t been a lot of writing being done.  However, we are still releasing the anthology “The Vampyre Blogs – One Day At A Time” on January 5th (The Twelfth Night Of Christmas) as planned.  In the meantime, we want to wish each and everyone a very Merry Christmas…

A very Blessed Yule…

A joyous Hannukah…

A memorable Kwanzaa…

And in case I don’t get to post again before the the year is out, we wish you all…

Keep writing dear friends.

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