Nicki Elson's Not-So-Deep Thoughts

Yay! It's release day for CassaFire , sequel to Amazon Top Ten best seller CassaStar.  Today author Alex J. Cavannaugh is taking over the internet to celebrate the big blast off. The goal of the party is to help CassaFire “catch fire” on the best seller charts and achieve the success of CassaStar . A super fun package of prizes and books can be won during Alex's two week book tour---going on right now!  More details at Alex's blog . In CassaFire , Byron's solitary space explorations lead him to alien ruins where he's forced to work with a new set of suspicious allies---including Athee, a woman whose skills rival Byron's unique abilities.    Available today! Author's site Book Trailer   Buy at: Barnes and Noble Amazon   Amazon Kindle And now, because Alex invited us all to make the posts our own, I give you who I imagine as 80s Byron...he went by Tom back then. ;)

In these crazy days that seem to be suddenly (or is it perpetually?) upon me, I just love it when I can accomplish two things with one post. :)  First up is Auntie Tara's Short Story Prompt .  And I'll admit it---I'm cheating.  Rather than write a complete 250-500 word story with the February theme "Secret Admirer,"  I put forth the first three paragraphs of something I've already written.  But it is a short story and it does entail a secret admirer. I truly did intend to write up something new, but as my mind raced with all the different possible directions I could take, I realized I already had something.  And then a new development helped me know that was the way to go (said development is part B of this here post.) Excerpt for dear Auntie Tara: The first night Rose heard it, she thought hooligans were in her yard playing their music too loud. She reached for her hearing aid on the nightstand and turned the volume all the way up to see if she’d reco...

My smile from the Tumble 4 Ya blogfest still looms and I just can't help it---I want to share my summary observations from the fest. Think of it as an after party. ;) The Guys:  The fellas' crushes seemed to be fairly evenly split between rocker chicks (like the girls from Heart, Stevie Nicks, and Cyndi Lauper) and the girl-next-door types.  My favorite quote from the fest is from the Armchair Squid , who said of Ally Sheedy's character in St. Elmo's Fire : "The eyes, the hair and the impish smile just made you want to gather her up in a blanket for the evening" Awww! A notable lady missing from the guys' 80s crush list was Princess Leia: Really boys, did ya not see Return of the Jedi ? The Girls :  I'd have to say the top ladies' choice is a tie between the boys of Duran Duran and, well, this isn't exactly a person, but...the Volleyball Scene in Top Gun .  Don't act like you don't know exactly what I'm talkin' about.  ...

Before I start in on the next blogfest I want to say THANK YOU to all the Tumble 4 Ya participants!  I had way more fun than I should've reading about your 80s crushes and truly appreciate each post. I'll do a retro recap later this week, but for now... Today is the Origins blogfest hosted by D.L. Hammons , Katie Mills , Alex J. Cavanaugh and Matthew MacNish in which we explain how it is we got started on this writing thing.  Just like we've all got different writing styles/genres/etc., I'm sure we're all going to have varied Origins stories, so this is going to be interesting. I've always been enthralled by words, and looking back, I see they've played an important role in my personal history, whether writing up quarterly reports in my former life as an investment consultant or drafting a memo for school parents in yet another former life as president of the parent-teacher organization. But creative writing didn't grab me by the throat and refuse...

Welcome, welcome to the Tumble 4 Ya Blogfest!  I'm so excited to see which 80s faces are going to pop up in the blogworld today.  Thank you to all of you who signed up--and so many of you who mentioned the fest on your blogs. Tim Brannan even had a contest to guess his crush! You've all made this so fun. And HUGE thanks to my cohorts, Suze and M.Pax who've made setting up this fest, like, totally radical. Right, onto my 80s crush...  I graduated high school in 1985, so I was of prime crushing age throughout the 80s.  As you can imagine, the list of my celebrity crushes from the 80s goes on and on and on.  And yet, picking just one ended up not being as difficult as I thought it would be.  Because as I scanned through pictures and videos of my top 80s men, there was only one who still made me all giggly the moment I saw him again. He's the one who had me glued to MTV just waiting and waiting and waiting for him . I speak of Joe Elliott , lead singer o...

Just when I was thinking I ought to do some sort of reminder post about the big Tumble 4 Ya blogfest this Friday, I got hit with another 80s sighting!  This morning the local news featured the No Limit Arcade in Algonquin, IL, featuring 80s arcade games: Pac Man, Frogger, Asteroids, TRON, Space Invaders, Ms. Pac Man, Robotron...and I'm sure I'll suck at them just as much now as I did then.  What's especially cool though is that the teens are digging the retro video games too.  My 14 year old can't wait to go---but he's holding out for verification on Donkey Kong. Here's a graphic from the No Limit Arcade website to get you into 80s mode while you write up your post telling us all about your 80s Celebrity Crush for the Tumble 4 Ya fest on Friday (sign-up is conveniently below if you still need to do that).  I'm totally pumped, stoked & psyched to see who y'all pick. Look at all these 80s babes we're going to get to look at! THIS FRIDAY, ...

This weekend, Francine Howarth at Romancing the Blog is hosting an Indie Author Tag Party , i.e. a bunch of us signed up to tag each other's books on Amazon.  A Tag is a key word or words readers associate with a book. The higher the number of readers selecting a specific keyword, the higher that book moves on the list in searches for that keyword. And tagging is so easy!  Just click on the link each of the authors have provided at their blogs, scroll down to the list of tags and click on all those you think apply to the book (you have to be logged into Amazon to tag). Below is my link (You can tag even if you're not signed up for the fest *wink* *wink*) Three Daves The keywords I most covet are: Love Romance 80s 1980s college life Chick Lit New Adult humor comedy Here's the link back to the fest so you can continue tagging others Thanks, Francine ! And in other news, if you have an excess of Middle Grade and Young Adult books about, please follow the link a...

Welcome to this month's edition of Insecure Writer's Support Group , brainchild of none other than Alex J. Cavanaugh---who's going to light the Blogosphere on fiyah at the end of the month with his Catch Fire! event to celebrate the upcoming release of his second novel, CassaFire. Hey, I didn't realize until I started typing this that Alex's event ties in with what I want to talk about today.  See, it's my observation that most of us writer types aren't the greedy sort.  If money was what we were after, we'd spend less time writing and more time doing whatever it is people do to make gobs of cash. So all these efforts to promote our books aren't really about money at all---they're about doing right by our story, doing whatever we can to get it out there so it can reach and entertain the types of readers it's meant to reach and entertain. That's a powerful incentive, but there's always something promotion-wise we could be doing, a...