Mark McNease

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Thirteen years ago over Martin Luther King weekend, a man I’d been dating less than a month invited me to his house in the New Jersey woods. I’d been a city boy until then, twelve in Los Angeles and, at that time, thirteen in New York City. I had no idea how I’d like this whole country living thing, but I knew the first morning I woke up here that I loved it. We spent weekdays in Manhattan and most weekends here at the house. We made the move permanent a year and a half ago when we walked out of the NYC apartment for the last time. I love it here, I love my life, and it’s good to celebrate thirteen years of our house in the woods.

I’ve had my ebooks exclusive to Amazon Kindle for years, in 90-day enslavements. This year I’m shaking things up and doing what I want to do, in part to reinvigorate my own creative output. Having ebooks sitting on Amazon year after year, unavailable anywhere else, is like killing them. Forgetting about them. Why did I write them? And how may people with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions are downloading them while Amazon rakes in the monthly fees and I get pennies? No more.

As my books come off the exclusivity period (all by the end of February), I’ll be adding them to Barnes and Noble (Nook), Kobo, and now Apple Books. I’m not concerned about how many I sell. My hustling days are over, those desperate months hoping I get enough from the free reads on Kindle to pay for a foot massage. I want to own my ebooks, just like musicians want to own their masters. So let’s start here …

My friend, fellow author, and creative engine behind Retire Fabulous has just published a new book on one of my favorite subjects: retiring! Personally, I can’t wait. Dave will be among my guests this month on the One Thing or Another Podcast. Fasten your headphones! – Mark

About the book:

The Quest for Retirement Utopia: How to Find the Retirement Spot That’s Right for You
By Dave Hughes

It’s fun to dream about where you’ll retire. Without a job tying you down, why not relocate to a place more to your liking?

Perhaps you want to live someplace warmer, closer to the water, or where the pace of life is slower. Maybe you want to stretch your retirement dollars by living where the cost of living or taxes are lower. You might even be thinking of retiring in another country or spending your retirement in an RV or on a houseboat.

With so much to consider, choosing the place that’s right for you can become overwhelming.

A taste of murder! I’ve made a five-chapter excerpt of the upcoming Beautiful Corpse: A Marshall James Thriller available for current and new email subscribers. This is Book 2 in the series, with a release date coming this spring. Just subscribe here for a copy via Book Funnel.

About Beautiful Corpse: A Marshall James Thriller

1984, Los Angeles. 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 the beautiful corpse he wakes up next to. But who would do something that evil, and that planned? Within a day 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.

The Bookworm returns! Welcome to a regular feature here in 2020, offering Terri Schlichenmeyer’s insightful book reviews. Terri’s reviews were part of the LGBTSr website for several years, and I’m delighted to offer them here. – Mark

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

“Chasing the Sun: How the Science of Sunlight Shapes Our Bodies and Minds” by Linda Geddes
c.2019, Pegasus Books $27.95 / $36.95 Canada 240 pages

You are decidedly not a vampire.

There’s no way you could be: you like sunshine much too much for that. You crave that warmth, that sun-kiss on your cheek, the brightness it brings to your day. And as you’ll see in the new book “Chasing the Sun” by Linda Geddes, you need the health benefits sunlight offers, too.

2020 will be much more focused for me: writing, writing, and more writing. Enjoying life with my husband, working for the bennies until I can stop … and writing. I’ve got plans for next year, including a monthly short story giveaway for subscribers, the audiobook edition of ‘A House in the Woods‘ coming out in early January, an excerpt of the upcoming ‘Beautiful Corpse‘, the second Marshall James thriller, and more great things I’ll think of as the year progresses. It’s going to be a good one.

Join me for a chat with Dr. Ronni Sanlo as we talk about her dedication to LGBTQ history, her life as an educator, her perspective on vanishing lesbian spaces, and the need to preserve our LGBTQ legacy.

About Dr. Ronni Sanlo:

Author, LGBT historian, and playwright Dr. Ronni Sanlo (UF ’69, UNF ’89, UNF ’96) is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center (LGBT) Center and a frequent keynote speaker and consultant on LGBT issues in Higher Education. Now retired, Dr. Sanlo was director of the UCLA LGBT Center and professor/director of the UCLA Masters of Education in Student Affairs as well as a Faculty in Residence. Prior to coming to UCLA in 1997, Dr. Sanlo was the director of the LGBT Center at the University of Michigan.

In a previous life, Dr. Sanlo was an HIV epidemiologist in Florida from 1987-1994. Ronni developed the initial standards and guidelines for LGBT work with the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) and was founding chair of the Consortium of LGBT Professionals in Higher Education. Ronni is the originator of the award-winning Lavender Graduation, a commencement event that celebrates the lives and achievements of graduating LGBTQ college students. Ronni continues to research and write with a focus on LGBT history which is the foundation for her play Dear Anita Bryant. She and her wife Dr. Kelly Watson have been deeply involved in the current Resistance movement, travel and bike ride domestically and internationally, and enjoy their boat Strait Knot. They live in Palm Springs, CA and Sequim, WA. Ronni may be emailed at ronnisanlo @ gmail.com.

Coming Up on the One Thing or Another Podcast:

• Rick Rose and our Christmas catch up
• Kevin O’Connor on the life of a literary agent
• Scott Coatsworth, Founder of Purple Roofs LGBT Travel website

Enjoy the One Thing or Another Podcast on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or SoundCloud.

Subscriber here for easy delivery of each new podcast.

Copyright MadeMarkPublishing

As I anticipate the upcoming audiobook release for my latest chiller, ‘A House in the Woods,’ narrated by the terrific Daniela Acitelli (our third audiobook together), I’ve decided to do a regular audiobook giveaway for subscribers “while supplies last.” Not a subscriber yet? Just sign up here and look for these and more complimentary audiobooks, eBooks and author updates as we sail into 2020. I have a limited number of free download codes for all my audiobooks, so fasten your headphones and enjoy! – Mark

This month:

Stop the Car
Narrated by Braden Wright

Stop the Car was selected as a Kindle Single after the editors at the Amazon program deemed it an outstanding short story. Bradon Wright brings his marvelous talent as a voice actor and narrator to this story about three teens on an Indiana backroad in 1977 – what they see there, and how it changes their lives.