The Latest
Random Thoughts
It has finally stopped raining, here in Charlottesville, VA. For the moment, anyway. It’s bound to start up again. More sooner rather than later.
I’ve been involved in the seemingly Sisyphean[i] task of getting ready to attend BookExpo America – 2016 in Chicago, IL. This is a rather large trade show and Urban Mermaid will be on display, there. I won’t go into every incident which has helped to drive me barking mad. I will, however, tell you about the latest one.
Posters. I need posters. Not many, really. Just one.
I’ll be signing copies of Urban Mermaid on the last day of the event and need a poster-sized copy of the front cover to use at the IBPA signing table. I ordered one in three different sizes since the IBPA wouldn’t tell me how big their easel would be. The print department at the Staples in Colonial Heights, VA was running behind last Friday when I placed my order & promised they’d call me as soon as it was done.
They never did.
For some odd reason, my wife wants to see me every now and then so I decamped for Charlottesville on Sunday. Since there’s also a Staples in C’ville, I decided to hedge my bets by ordering a second copy up here.
It was supposed to be ready on Wednesday afternoon.
The C’ville Staples did manage to call and tell me that the poster would be ready as soon as their printer is repaired. I depart for Hopewell, late Saturday afternoon.
I am not holding my breath on this one.
I will return to the Colonial Heights store on Sunday to find that the original print order has either been completed or it hasn’t.
I fly to Chicago on Tuesday.
Fortunately, my brother – the successful writer – gifted me a bottle of fine single-malt at the holidays and I plan to seek consolation therein.
Meanwhile, the Epic Urban Mermaid Giveaway is chuntering along. The winner of the latest prize will be announced on Saturday or Sunday. It all depends upon when I break the seal on the aforementioned bottle of single malt.
[i] Pertaining to or resembling the unceasingly recurring and fruitless labors of Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra (Corinth). He was punished by the gods for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity.
Epic Giveaway: Our 4th Tea Mug Winner
Our fourth Tea Mug winner is Becky Nelson and the Urban Mermaid tea mug will be on its way to her just as soon as I can get to the Post Office.
Here’s how you can can be a winner:
I have a very limited supply – 2, to be precise – of Urban Mermaid tea mugs to give away to some lucky winners. While tea – hot or cold – is the drink of choice on Colony Island, those of you who are java junkies can use these mugs for your favourite brew.
By the way, if this is the first time you’ve heard about the book, Urban Mermaid, you can learn more here.
The Give-away Ground Rules
The Official Urban Mermaid Tea Mug
The whole thing is very simple. I’ll be giving away one Urban Mermaid tea – or coffee, if you insist – mug per week. At the end of that week, the lucky winner will be selected. They will have seven days to claim their prize. Other than the congratulatory message, I will send only 1 “nag-mail” during the week.
If the winner has not informed me of his or her mailing address – or even acknowledged the congratulatory message – after seven days, the prize will be awarded to another participant chosen at random from the remaining entries.
I’m opening up this portion of the giveaway to all comers. It doesn’t matter if you won a copy of Urban Mermaid in the first phase of the giveaway. You’re elligible to win a tea mug as well.
While it is pretty easy to ship books anywhere in the world, things become a bit more tricky and expensive when you try to ship non-print items. Therefore, I’m going to have to limit entries to the US & Canada.
All you have to do is enter your name and e-mail address in the contact form at the bottom of the page. Pretty darn simple, right? If you don’t win this week’s prize, you’ll have a another chance the following week.
You will only need to enter once. The sooner you enter the Giveaway, the better your chances are of winning one of the tea/coffee mugs. Duplicate entries will be discarded.
OK, that’s enough blether from me. The only thing left to say is “Ready. Steady. Go!!!” Good luck, everyone.
Author not at work
Author at work: Inspiration
Inspiration comes from the strangest of places and circumstances. As I mentioned last week, I’d been working on Chapter 7 of Sirena. At one point in the plot, Penelope is asked to sing the very same two songs she sang in Chapter 5 of Urban Mermaid. If you don’t remember, it’s the scene where Peter hears Penelope singing in the motel room adjoining his. She has a beautiful voice and we see Peter really starting to fall for her.
The scene in Chapter 7 is only a minor recapitulation of the one in the first book so readers need not worry that I’m recycling material from Urban Mermaid.
As I was cobbling the scene for Chapter 7, I found my mind drifting back in time to the point where I first conceived Penelope’s ability to sing. It suddenly struck me – like the proverbial bolt from the blue – that I had heard Penelope’s voice, before. The inspiration for her voice came from a girl who favoured me with a bit of her time decades ago. She had a wonderful voice and sang in her high school chorus. No doubt, the inspiration for Penelope and her friends singing came – at least partially – from that source as well.
After all these years, that girl and I are still friends and I just had to send her a text message explaining what I had discovered. It was ten minutes before eleven PM when I tapped the send button but she was gracious enough to accept the accolade and inform me that she sings just as much today as she did way back when.
I immediately dubbed her my musical muse. There’s no pay to go with the position and I’m not sure that the title is worth all that much, either. Nonetheless, it’s amazing how incidents and voices from the past still call to us, decades later.
Epic Giveaway: Our 3rd Tea Mug Winner
Our third Tea Mug winner is Rachel Trolinder and the Urban Mermaid tea mug will be on its way to Rachel just as soon as I can get to the Post Office.
Here’s how you can can be a winner:
I have a limited supply – 3, to be precise – of Urban Mermaid tea mugs to give away to some lucky winners. While tea – hot or cold – is the drink of choice on Colony Island, those of you who are java junkies can use these mugs for your favourite brew.
By the way, if this is the first time you’ve heard about the book, Urban Mermaid, you can learn more here.
The Give-away Ground Rules
The Official Urban Mermaid Tea Mug
The whole thing is very simple. I’ll be giving away one Urban Mermaid tea – or coffee, if you insist – mug per week. At the end of that week, the lucky winner will be selected. They will have seven days to claim their prize. Other than the congratulatory message, I will send only 1 “nag-mail” during the week.
If the winner has not informed me of his or her mailing address – or even acknowledged the congratulatory message – after seven days, the prize will be awarded to another participant chosen at random from the remaining entries.
I’m opening up this portion of the giveaway to all comers. It doesn’t matter if you won a copy of Urban Mermaid in the first phase of the giveaway. You’re elligible to win a tea mug as well.
While it is pretty easy to ship books anywhere in the world, things become a bit more tricky and expensive when you try to ship non-print items. Therefore, I’m going to have to limit entries to the US & Canada.
All you have to do is enter your name and e-mail address in the contact form at the bottom of the page. Pretty darn simple, right? If you don’t win this week’s prize, you’ll have a another chance the following week.
You will only need to enter once. The sooner you enter the Giveaway, the better your chances are of winning one of the tea/coffee mugs. Duplicate entries will be discarded.
OK, that’s enough blether from me. The only thing left to say is “Ready. Steady. Go!!!” Good luck, everyone.
Author at work: Chapters 7 and 8
Well, I started and finished Chapter 7 of Sirena, yesterday. Before you applaud my writing prowess, please be advised that I actually wrote only one half to two thirds of it, yesterday. The remaining bit had already been written months ago and was waiting to be slotted in at the appropriate point in the narrative.
I also finished most of Chapter 8, yesterday. In this case, almost all of the contents had been written early in 2015 and was just waiting for Chapter 7 to happen. I still have a bit of work to do on this chapter, including some dialogue at the end.
Then, there are the tweaks and refinements waiting to be done. Nothing is ever completely finished, is it? I just want things to be as good as I can make it before my editor gets a hold of these two chapters.
Throughout the first part of the story, readers will learn more about Amy’s parents and her extended family, offshore. Though Amy’s father, Phrastôr, is away from home most of the time, he’s still a good man and does his best to provide for his onshore family. He’s a feral merman who hasn’t taken to life on land, just yet.
Amy’s mother, Loraine, came from a long line of feral merfolk. Though Loraine’s mother had been born and raised as a feral mermaid, she wanted her child to have an onshore education. Raising a child as a single parent was not unusual for feral mermaids and Loraine essentially followed suit with Amy.
Loraine’s mother had chosen the name so her daughter would fit in more with the humanised residents of Colony Island. Feral Merfolk usually do not have last names and when told she was going to need one for life on dry land, Loraine’s mother chose the first thing she saw; a Seagull.
Once Loraine was done with school and deemed ready to choose a mate and breed, Loraine’s mother returned to sea, full time. There were, however, regular visits to check on her daughter, catch up on gossip and indulge her fondness for mainland food.
On one of these visits, Phrastôr tagged along and the rest was history.
Reviews
No author likes bad reviews. No author likes when reviewers skim the story in a book they really didn’t want to read in the first place.
None of this applies to the following review by Shannon Fukumoto of the Hawaii State Public Library System. I know they can’t all be like this one but this particular review really made my day.
The Review
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Full Text: I was expecting this book to be along the lines of Charlaine Harris’s paranormal reads, but I was wrong. That’s not a bad thing! While I am a fan of Charlaine Harris’s works, I get a little less than impressed when derivative works that ride on the coattails of a successful story or plot. In this case, Howard Parsons should be applauded for coming up with a fun and heartfelt story that stands on its own merit. In a clamshell….er…nutshell, single mermaid falls in love with single human guy and they have to learn to overcome a variety of things to end up happily ever after. What I really like about this book was that Penelope is a lovable character, even when she was being all cold, bitchy and distant. It was great how the merfolk were culturally different[1] from humans–they weren’t just humans with fishtails instead of legs that happened to live under the sea, or on land. I felt like Mr. Parsons really did his homework in studying mermaid lore and wrote a lovely story that caters to all of us who enjoy fantasy and fairytale, Thanks for the opportunity to review this book!
Additional Questions:
Is your library likely to purchase this title? Yes
Will you recommend this title through Readers’ Advisory, book clubs, events, etc? Yes
Would you recommend this title for the LibraryReads List? (US only) Yes
Description Yes
[1] The culture found amongst the residents of Colony Island is a hybrid of small town American culture and the culture of feral merfolk. People on the mainland think of the Islanders as a bit odd, but otherwise, human.
Epic Giveaway: Our 2nd Tea Mug Winner
Our second Tea Mug winner is Peter Austin and the Urban Mermaid tea mug will be on its way to him just as soon as:
- He sends me his mailing address
I can find the right sized box to accommodate the Styrofoam shell in which the mug is encased.UPDATE: I’ve found the perfect boxes for shipping.
Here’s how you can can be a winner:
I have a limited supply of Urban Mermaid – 4, to be precise – tea mugs to give away to some lucky winners. While tea – hot or cold – is the drink of choice on Colony Island, those of you who are java junkies can use these mugs for your favourite brew.
By the way, if this is the first time you’ve heard about Urban Mermaid, you can learn more here.
The Give-away Ground Rules
The Official Urban Mermaid Tea Mug
The whole thing is very simple. I’ll be giving away one Urban Mermaid tea – or coffee, if you insist – mug per week. At the end of that week, the lucky winner will be selected. They will have seven days to claim their prize. Other than the congratulatory message, I will send only 1 “nag-mail” during the week.
If the winner has not informed me of his or her mailing address – or even acknowledged the congratulatory message – after seven days, the prize will be awarded to another participant chosen at random from the remaining entries.
I’m opening up this portion of the giveaway to all comers. It doesn’t matter if you won a copy of Urban Mermaid in the first phase of the giveaway. You’re elligible to win a tea mug as well.
While it is pretty easy to ship books anywhere in the world, things become a bit more tricky and expensive when you try to ship non-print items. Therefore, I’m going to have to limit entries to the US & Canada.
All you have to do is enter your name and e-mail address in the contact form at the bottom of the page. Pretty darn simple, right? If you don’t win this week’s prize, you’ll have a another chance the following week.
You will only need to enter once. The sooner you enter the Giveaway, the better your chances are of winning one of the tea/coffee mugs. Duplicate entries will be discarded.
OK, that’s enough blether from me. The only thing left to say is “Ready. Steady. Go!!!” Good luck, everyone.
Truer Words Have Never Been Spoken
Words to the Wise
Epic Giveaway: Our 1st Tea Mug Winner
We have our first Tea Mug winner! Carlene Flynn has won an Urban Mermaid tea mug and it will be on its way to her as soon as:
- She sends me her mailing address
- I can find the right sized box to accommodate the Styrofoam shell in which the mug is encased.
Here’s how you can can be a winner:
I have a limited supply of Urban Mermaid – 5, to be precise – tea mugs to give away to some lucky winners. While tea – hot or cold – is the drink of choice on Colony Island, those of you who are java junkies can use these mugs for your favourite brew.
By the way, if this is the first time you’ve heard about Urban Mermaid, you can learn more here.
The Give-away Ground Rules
The Official Urban Mermaid Tea Mug
The whole thing is very simple. I’ll be giving away one Urban Mermaid tea – or coffee, if you insist – mug per week. At the end of that week, the lucky winner will be selected. They will have seven days to claim their prize. Other than the congratulatory message, I will send only 1 “nag-mail” during the week.
If the winner has not informed me of his or her mailing address – or even acknowledged the congratulatory message – after seven days, the prize will be awarded to another participant chosen at random from the remaining entries.
I’m opening up this portion of the giveaway to all comers. It doesn’t matter if you won a copy of Urban Mermaid in the first phase of the giveaway. You’re elligible to win a tea mug as well.
While it is pretty easy to ship books anywhere in the world, things become a bit more tricky and expensive when you try to ship non-print items. Therefore, I’m going to have to limit entries to the US & Canada.
All you have to do is enter your name and e-mail address in the contact form at the bottom of the page. Pretty darn simple, right? If you don’t win this week’s prize, you’ll have a another chance the following week.
You will only need to enter once. The sooner you enter the Giveaway, the better your chances are of winning one of the tea/coffee mugs. Duplicate entries will be discarded.
OK, that’s enough blether from me. The only thing left to say is “Ready. Steady. Go!!!” Good luck, everyone.
