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‘A House in the Woods’ Joins A Frightfully Good Halloween eBook Giveaway!
Halloween is just around the corner, and it’s time for a frightfully good giveaway. My supernatural chiller, A House in the Woods, joins over 30 other authors in a BookFunnel group giveaway. Just sign up for an author’s email list and download one of these spine chillers to curl up with on a cool dark night. You can find us all HERE. Other participating authors include: Nadya Frank, Mark Posey, Jodi Burnett, Jack Rollins, and many more! You’ll receive an ePub, MOBI, or PDF file of your choice, so sign up and start reading! This giveaway runs from October 20 – 31.
Laurel and Jeremy Calloway have longed for a new life away from the chaos and confusion of New York City. Driving along a country road in New Jersey with a young real estate agent in the back seat, they almost miss it: a small house in the woods for sale. Stopping to take a look at the property, they meet the house’s caretaker, Eileen, and within a few weeks they find themselves the very lucky owners of their ideal home. But is it the house of their dreams, or of their nightmares?
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Support Independent Bookstores and Read a Mark McNease Mystery at the Same Time
A big thank you to Scott Sheldon, co-owner with Barbara de Wilde of the new Frenchtown Bookshop for letting me know my books are available at Bookshop.org. It’s the perfect way to find a book you can’t put down, while supporting independent bookstores with your purchases. Not only does the site offer a dizzying variety of books to choose from, you can also find a local bookstore with their store search feature. This is the place to order your next book online. Browse and behold!
Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores.
We believe that bookstores are essential to a healthy culture. They’re where authors can connect with readers, where we discover new writers, where children get hooked on the thrill of reading that can last a lifetime. They’re also anchors for our downtowns and communities.
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LGBTSr.com Subscriber Giveaway! 5 Custom Coffee Cups
What better way to start your morning than with some coffee, tea, or your favorite beverage sipped from a custom LGBTSr.com coffee cup! I’ll be giving 5 of them away on my birthday, October 28. If you’re already a subscriber to LGBTSr, you’re already entered! If not, just use the RafflePress entry, type in your email address, and voila! You’ll receive our weekly news roundup with a dash of new content every Friday, and you may win a gorgeous coffee mug just in time for that cool November chill! Please note, this is for U. S. residents only, for shipping purposes.
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The Twist Podcast #171: Pronouns R Us, DADT Remembered, Kemp’s Vaccine Fail, and the Week in Headlines
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we sort through trending pronouns, consider GA Governor Kemp’s AIDS vaccine that doesn’t exist, salute a decade without DADT, and take a look at this week’s headlines.
Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.
Copyright 2021 MadeMark Publishing
Join Mark’s email list for updates, podcasts, giveaways, and his monthly newsletter!
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An Emmy Nomination Once Again! (It’s Only Been 20 Years)
Yes, it’s true. I’ve been nominated for an Emmy again, as a co-creator of the multiple Emmy-winning children’s TV program, Into the Outdoors. I have an Emmy on my shelf from 2002. What better way to ease into my retirement next April than with another statue?
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Lee Lynch Retires Her Amazon Trail Column
Crossposted from LGBTSr.com
For almost as long as I’ve had this website I’ve enjoyed sharing author Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail columns. I often said, if it’s a new month, it’s a new Amazon Trail. I looked forward to each and every one, offering Lee’s wisdom, experience, humor, and passion, as she shared her perspective on the world she’s lived in and the world we share. Lee is not shy, and her candor is among the most refreshing things about her. She’s also a legend in lesbian fiction, most deservedly so, with a Golden Crown Literary Society award named in her honor. My appreciation for her wit, her talent, and her personal generosity is boundless, and I’m most pleased to call her a friend. Some people lead by simply being who they are, and Lee has always been, and will always be, one of them.
You can read many of her collected columns in her book, An American Queer: The Amazon Trail
“This collection of Lee Lynch’s columns chronicles over a quarter century of queer life in the United States, from the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
“From the beginning of my writing career, I just wanted to write about lesbian/gay life as I experienced it. Like so many, I came from a place of great isolation. At the same time, being gay filled me with great pride and joy. Writers Jane Rule, Isabelle Miller, Radclyffe Hall, Valerie Taylor, Ann Bannon, and Vin Packer gave me inspiration and even the lesbian companionship I needed as a baby dyke. More than anything, I want to give to gay people what those writers gave me. And I want to do it well enough that my words might someday be considered literature and, as such, might endure because, as open as some societies have become, there are always haters, and cycles of oppression. Our writers strengthen us, offer a sense of solidarity and validation that we are both more than our sexualities and are among the best that humanity offers.”
About Lee Lynch
Photo by Sue Hardesty Lee Lynch is the co-curator, with S. Renee Bass, of the recent collection, Our Happy Hours, LGBT Voices From the Gay Bars, available from Flashpoint Publications. Her novel, Rainbow Gap, is available from Bold Strokes Books and other outlets. Her book, An American Queer, a collection of “The Amazon Trail” columns, was presented with the 2015 Golden Crown Literary Society Award in Anthology/Collection Creative Non Fiction. This, and her award-winning fiction, including The Raid, The Swashbuckler, and Beggar of Love, can be found at http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Author-Lee-Lynch.html.
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LGBTSr Subscriber Giveaway: Custom LGBTSr.com Coffee Mug!
What better way to start your morning than with some coffee, tea, or your favorite beverage sipped from a custom LGBTSr.com coffee cup! I’ll be giving 5 of them away on my birthday, October 28. Yes, it’s my birthday, and I’m doing the giving! This will be for subscribers only, so subscribe HERE, and look for more details in October. I’ll be selecting 5 random subscribers and getting the cups off to them in time to curl up by a November fire. – Mark
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One Thing or Another: Found At Sea
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Bodies of water hold a fascination for many people, as well as providing an indescribable comfort. I grew up in an Indiana town with two rivers, and I live just a mile from the magnificent Delaware flowing slowly between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For me there has always been something about the movement of these vast waterways that felt like home, as if I really am a fish out of water longing to jump back in where I belong and swim away.
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‘Palm Springs Noir’ Continues Series of Noir Anthologies from Akashic Books
I’m delighted to say my friend and fellow mystery author Michael Craft is among the authors featured in this newest anthology from Akashic Books. (You can listen to my podcast interview with Michael HERE.) Michael is among the finest writers you’ll encounter, with a skill and delivery that make his name very fitting: a craftsman and a wordsmith whose writing you’ll want to savor. If you’re not familiar with his fiction, you can start now with Palm Springs Noir!
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On Dreamshaping: Exit Signs
Mark McNease
There was something different about that morning. It could have been just another morning when I woke up feeling stagnant, overweight and overwhelmed. But when I opened my eyes, and my mind worked its way sluggishly back to the ‘real’ dream, the one I call my life, I had an unusually clear sense that the time had come: the time to change things, the time to rearrange the interior of my personal world, the time to shape what I experience as reality and my place in it.
I’d been on the same figurative road for years. I’d allowed myself to settle into a sort of perpetual frustration, and to think that if only I did some thing, or some things, differently, I would find the elusive happiness I’d always wanted but had cynically dismissed as a marketing tool for the self-empowerment crowd. I’d told myself contentment was much more important that happiness – and what is happiness, anyway? A puppy? An ideal job? Or, most probably, an illusion.
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On Dreamshaping: Straws and Camels
Mark McNease
I can’t name a specific date and time, but at some point the past few months I stopped paying attention to the news beyond what I need to stay informed. Is there a significant natural disaster nearby I need to know about? Has a foreign invader breached our northern shores? Have scientists discovered that drinking eight cups of coffee a day leads to a long life or that it causes permanent memory loss? There’s the local political stuff I want to know about, like who the next governor of New Jersey might be, and which dismal choice I’ll have to make next year for health insurance. But the overall big picture, the cloud of dread and anxiety that is our current 24/7 news cycle? I just can’t indulge in it anymore. Very little of it uplifts me and much of it depresses me. It’s as if, given the possibility we are not living in the end times, we’ve collectively decided to make it appear as if we are, like that Buck Owens and Roy Clark song I remember from Hee Haw, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me …”
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Audiobook Sale for May! ‘Beautiful Corpse’ Just $2.99 for the Month
On sale for the month of May from Authors Direct! The audiobook for Beautiful Corpse: A Marshall James Thriller is just $2.99 for the month. Narrated by Sean Rhead, who is set to do Reservation for Murder later this year. Normally $14.95 at Audible, $8.95 at your other favorite retailers.
It’s been over a year since Marshall James first became intimately familiar with murder. He’s six months sober now and happily living with the love of his life, LAPD Detective Mac McElroy. Despite the coming storm of AIDS and its devastating toll on the world Marshall knows, his dark days seem to be behind him. Then one night he says the wrong thing, storms out in anger, and walks straight into a nightmare. Someone is setting him up to take the fall for a beautiful corpse. But who would do something so evil, and so planned? Within hours he finds himself running from the police and the mob, and running toward a killer he must apprehend before the only chance left is no chance at all. -
On Dreamshaping: Nowhere to Hide
Mark McNease
Wherever I go, there I am!
It’s an old adage, meant to be humorous but with a grain of truth to it. The one thing I cannot escape is also the one thing I spend so much time attempting to flee: myself. My repetitive thoughts, my obsessions, my fixations, all playing out in loops that sometimes remind me of spools of yarn that have become entangled. Do I do this today? Do I do that? If I don’t to this, will I feel freer? What will bring me the simple relief I crave?
Another common analogy is that nearly all of us possess – or are possessed by – a monkey mind. This one is self-explanatory: what is something monkeys are known for? Jumping! Limb to limb, restless, never ceasing to move. That is a good description of our minds. It certainly captures what I experience almost every day. And the more I attempt to stop jumping, to settle on one fragile limb and stay there, the more another limb grabs my attention and within an instant I’ve jumped to that one. On and on, hour after hour, day after day.