Great Review for What More Could You Wish For

I can't even describe the feeling of reading this wonderful review - my heart is swelling with gratitude and delight.Thanks so much to Cindy Roesel, and ChickLitCentral

By Cindy Roesel
Put a big fat chocolate cupcake lit up with candles on the cover of Samantha Hoffman’s first novel, WHAT MORE COULD YOU WISH FOR, and you know you’ve captured my attention. Now let’s read what’s between these pages, shall we.
Libby Carson has a wonderful life. She has a lovely family, great friends, her seamstress business is doing well, a guy who is kind and reliable and blah, blah, blah. She’s days away from turning fifty and surprise (!!!), her boyfriend proposes. For any other girl that might be a good thing, but Libby has been down that aisle twice before and it isn’t in her plans to say “I do” to any dude again. Suddenly steady guy turns into pushy guy just as she reconnects with another guy from way back in high-school. In fact, long lost guy just happens to be her old long lost flame. This raises Miss Libby Carson’s mid-life crisis to defcon five. She thought everything was neat and tidy in her nice little world. Guess not and now she has a few things to think about.
READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW.

My Book at O'Hare!

Is there anything more fun than seeing your book in a bookstore? Well, I suppose seeing them flying off the shelves would top that, but meanwhile, here's a photo that my friend Dennis West sent me. It's from Barbara's Bookstore at O'Hare, Terminal 3.
I'm in illustrious company here: John Irving below, Alice Hoffman to my left, Loving Frank and The Kite Runner  to my right.
Next time you're in a bookstore look for my book, send me a picture and I'll send you a signed copy!

What's Porn and What's Not?

What do you think of this picture? Sweet shot of a dad and his daughter, or sexual predator/victim?
I hope right now you're thinking, "What the hell are you talking about? Sexual predator?" because if you're not...what's wrong with you? 
Serge Bielanko (in the photo) wrote an article about men's fashions on Babble.com and accompanied it with this image. And then he got a boatload of hate mail. Now, if we're going to critique his fashion sense I'm all over that with negative reviews but that wasn't it. People wrote about how he has his arm around a nearly naked little girl (his daughter). 2,326 comments on the post the first day. Not all of it negative, but way more than you can imagine.
The question is, is bad publicity better than no publicity at all? After all, look at all the attention he got for his writing. Good or bad?
A friend of mine recently got a negative review of her book in USA Today. Actually it wasn't just negative, it was rude and insulting. That hurts, I know. But it's in USA Today. Is that the silver lining?

Book Review: Split Estate by Charlotte Bacon

I'm in awe of Charlotte Bacon's talent; the beautiful way she uses words, the way she brings her characters to life. This is writing at it's best. Split Estate is the story of a family in the aftermath of a suicide; how they deal with it (or don't), how they learn to live with it, the choices they make. There are four main characters and I was engaged with, and rooting for, each of them. They're not perfect people, they're real and human.
I was sad when this book ended. I was as enthralled with Bacon's writing, her amazing turn of phrase, as I was with her story.
My only problem with this book was the ending. I'm not a happily-ever-after person, I don't need a book wrapped up in a tidy bow, but this feels unfinished. I wanted just a little bit more.
Still, that's not a deal-breaker, it's an amazingly beautiful book, but that's the only reason I didn't give it five stars.
I can't wait to read more of Charlotte Bacon's work.

Yes, sorry, it's a cat video. But it's very funny.

Abusive Relationships the Rage in Fiction?

Author Laurie Frankel poses an interesting question:  Why the nationwide summer taste for abusive relationships?
Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels have been the hot best-sellers all summer and you have to wonder at  people's penchant to read about the kind of relationships portrayed in these books. It's not the eroticism Laurie or I have a problem with (which I didn't find erotic - I can't speak for Laurie), it's the theme of a powerful, abusive man vs. a weak, submissive woman. Jeez, how can that be entertaining?
What the heck makes things like this catch on? Is it a commentary on public taste or contemporary morals?
Holy shit (to quote the heroin in Fifty Shades of Grey - only one example of the splendid dialogue), I hope not! I hope it's just simple boredom and a jump-on-the-bandwagon craze that will pass. Although it doesn't look anyone's capping that well any time soon since the Grey  novels are into their twenty-something week on the NY Times best seller list. NY TIMES, for pete's sake! WTF?

Fifty Shades of Gone Girl
by Laurie Frankel
As you know (where you = a person on earth), the two big books of the summer are actually four: the three Fifty Shades of Gray books and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Having just finished the latter, what I'm wondering is this: 
Why the nationwide summer taste for abusive relationships? Not abusive relationships in a Lifetime movie kind of way. Much stranger than that. Consensual abusive relationships. Fantastical abusive relationships. Wildly complicated and begged for abusive relationships. Love so hopelessly confused as abuse, violent abuse, possibly murderous abuse, that you can't tell the difference.
Read the rest of Laurie's post.

How To Change The Video Image Created By Constant Contact

There's a nifty feature in Constant Contact (an email marketing program) where you can embed a YouTube video in your email blast and Constant Contact will create an image for you. So I was creating a blast for my friend and client, Mikki Williams, and look at the image that was created for me (right).
Not such a nifty feature when the image looks like that.

(Sorry, Mikki. But there's a payoff for you - I'm linking to info about Speakers School with Mikki Williams, CSP.)
Which, by the way folks, if you have any interest in becoming a professional speaker, you MUST attend!

Anyway, here's the dilemma - how do I wipe that unattractive grimace off of Mikki's face? I'm loath to send out an email blast to thousands of people with that image (the fact that I just put it out into the cyber-universe notwithstanding). I tried restarting the video and stopping at a different point and then copying the link to see if it would create a different image but there was no change.

So here's what I did: I took a screen shot of the YouTube video where Mikki has a nice smile on her face and I opened it in Photoshop (any other photo-editing program will work just as well - Gimp, for one, and that one's free). Then I found an image of a 'play' button and I opened that in Photoshop too. Then I cloned the play button onto the good-Mikki screen shot and saved the whole thing as a JPEG file. So now it looks like this:
Much better, right?
Next I imported the new image into the Constact Contact email I was creating, and I linked it to the original YouTube video.
Voila! Good-Mikki works the same way as grimacing-Mikki, only cuter! And isn't that what it's all about?