Douglas G. Hearle ~ presents ~ Outsource

TITLE: Outsource

RELEASE DATE: August 2017

AUTHOR: D. Hearle

PAGE COUNT: 164

ISBN: 978-1974107827

IMPRINT: FoxBeck

CATEGORIES: Historical/Action & Adventure/Crime

BOOK PAGE: http://ravenswoodpublishing.com/bookpages/outsource.html

KEYWORDS: True Accurate, Exciting, Intelligent, Action, Exotic, Double Dealing, Espionage

ONE LINER:

1980’s Espionage! The story of an American businessman drawn into the world of murder, manipulation and a plot to assassinate a world leader.

SYNOPSIS:

Outsource is set in the 1980s and involves a New York businessman who is recruited by the CIA.  It describes the accidental discovery of a plot to kill a world leader and its connection to Wall Street activities. The story takes the reader on a whirlwind global tour from Yonkers to London; from Geneva to Jakarta, delivering several murders and intrigues along the way.

AUTHOR BIO:

Doug Hearle is a native New Yorker.

Born in the Bronx, the son of a New York policeman, he attended Iona College in New Rochelle, a city just north of the Bronx. After graduating, he spent two years in the US Navy Destroyer Force in the Arctic.

Upon his return, he got a job as a reporter on the NY Journal-American, then the largest evening newspaper in the country. In ten years he was Night City Editor.

He entered the Public Relations field in the early 1960s and spent the next three decades as a consultant. His specialty was crisis communications and he became internationally recognized as expert on the subject. He advised global corporations, foreign governments and even the Olympics.

He was often called in by law firms to help achieve balance in media coverage of high visibility cases such as the Helmsley indictments, the Virginia Military Institute litigation with the Justice Department over its admissions policy, the boycott of the Masters Tournament at the Augusta Golf Club and the US government’s attempt to ban saccharin.

With an MBA degree in Organizational Behavior, Hearle has been a member of the Board of Visitors of New York University’s School of Journalism and an adjunct professor at Iona College and the College of New Rochelle. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer at Fordham University, the University of Texas, Ball State University and the University of Jakarta in Indonesia.

He is the author of many articles on crisis preparedness. Hearle was elected an “ALL STAR” by the editors and readers of INSIDE PUBLIC RELATIONS magazine which honored his “long and distinguished career in Crisis Communications.” His biography appears in both WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA and WHO’S WHO IN THE WORLD.

Now retired, he and his wife, Mary, live in Westchester County, where he continues to lecture and write.

AUTHOR LINKS:

AMAZON US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074HRRVCR
AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B074HRRVCR
AMAZON CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B074HRRVCR

BARNES & NOBLE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/outsource-d-hearle/1126909974?ean=9781974107827

CREATESPACE: https://www.createspace.com/7412795

PAPERBACK: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1974107825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501631170&sr=1-1&keywords=outsource+d.+hearle+paperback

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Ravenswood Publishing

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Julian Padowicz ~ an interview and his novel ~ A Menace in Venice

I AM PLEASED TO WELCOME AUTHOR

Julian Padowicz

TITLE: A Menace in Venice

RELEASE DATE: July 2017

AUTHOR: Julian Padowicz

CATEGORIES: Romantic Humor/Adventure/Mystery

PAGE COUNT: 214

ISBN: 978-1974368693

IMPRINT: Black Hawk

BOOK PAGE: http://ravenswoodpublishing.com/bookpages/amenaceinvenice.html

KEYWORDS: Seniors, Sailing, Boat, Unitarian, Universalism, Humor, Domesticity, Former Spouses

ONE LINER:

Kip's abusive ex wife of 30 years ago decides to make up to him for the grief she caused him and virtually destroys his current marriage.

SYNOPSIS:

In an effort to keep her soul from going to hell, Kip's abusive, seventy-year-old former wife, Marsha, comes to visit him and Amanda, so she can make up for the grief she caused him over thirty years ago. In the process, she nearly destroys their life, causing Amanda to almost lose her thumb, Kip's beloved sailboat, Manda, to sail off with no one on board, Amanda to run off, and a variety of small calamities along the way.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Julian Padowicz was seven years old, Jewish, and living in Warsaw, Poland, when WWII began. After 6 months under Soviet occupation in southern Poland, he and his mother made a daring trek over the Carpathian Mountains into neutral Hungary. Arriving in America at the age of 9, Julian spent the next 13 years in boarding school and college, where his undiagnosed ADD and Dyslexia caused him considerable grief.

Graduating from Colgate University in 1954 with a BA in English, he was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox studios as editor of their company magazine, “Action.”

From 1955 to 1959 he served in the Air Force as a navigator and intercept instructor.

Following military service, he entered the documentary film profession, first as a writer and eventually as director, cameraman, editor, and producer, garnering numerous awards.

Upon retirement in 2000, Padowicz began writing a 4-part memoir of his WWII experiences. The first book, Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939 was published in 2006 by Academy Chicago and named “Book of the Year” by ForeWord Magazine. It was followed by A Ship in the Harbor, Loves of Yulian, and When the Diamonds Were Gone. A “young readers’” version of Mother and Me, published by Scholastic Inc. was a best seller in the school field.

Feeling that much of what was interesting in his life was not publishable as memoir, for fear of hurting people still living, Padowicz created the fictional village of Venice on the Massachusetts coast and peopled it with characters based on people he had known, including himself. Applying humor, which he calls his “weapon of choice,” Padowicz has written several novels in which these fictional characters go through many of the experiences he, himself, has gone through. His hero, Kip, is a retired college professor, married to his creative, but accident prone wife, the lovely Amanda, and trying to lead a “normal” life, in a new community, among whacky neighbors and whackier friends from his past.

Padowicz lives in a Hampton, Virginia with his wife, Donna Carter. Their blended family includes 5 children, 9 grandchildren, and 3 great-grands.

BANTER – STUFF ABOUT YOU 

Q: Did you like school when you were a child? 

A: I hated it. I have ADD, and school was just a distraction from my own agendsa. I considered it my punishment for being a child.

Q: Have you ever been too embarrassed to promote any certain titles to friends or family?
A: I would have had a difficult time promoting one of my memoirs to my ex wife, who is a major character in it.

Q: Dress up or dress down?

A: Both

Q: Dine in or dine out?

A: I really enjoy going to a good restaurant and being waited on. Again, it's not an ego thing but,, probably, a sense of being loved. On the other hand a restaurant where I consider the food to be bad, is a real downer.

Q: How do you feel about exercise?

A: I used to be a runner, till my back began giving me trouble. I used to do six miles a day, and found it to be my most creative time.

Q: Texting, love it or hate it?

A: What's textng?

BOOKS – ABOUT THE CRAFT 

Q: When crafting the story do you go from beginning to end, or do you jump around writing the scenes that are pushing themselves forward in your brain?

A: I'm definitely an "immerse yourself in the situation and see what develops" guy.

Q: Do you always know how a story will end when you begin writing it?

A: Almost never. I begin with a problem and hope someone comes up with a solution. If I do it the other way, it feels mechanical.

Q: Have your characters ever taken the story in a different direction than you had originally planned? Do you have a for instance, for us?

A:When I've had an idea as to where I was going, I've usually gotten there. But I mostly write the way I first learned to swim, which was to jump in and thrash around till I start moving in some direction or other.

Q: What geographical locations are your favorite and why?

A: I know the Norteast best, and so I set most of my stories there.

Q: Generally speaking, is your work based on real life experience? If it's not would you want it to be?

A: It usually begins with a life experience, but frequently goes fa afield.

Q: How long does it take you to create a novel?

A: About a year

Q: How does the woman in your life feel about the genre you write? Has he read any of your work?

A: She not only reads my work, but also edits it.

BOOKS - NOW LETS PROMOTE – STRUT YOUR STUFF

Q: Do you have a new book coming out soon? Tell us about it.

A: I have a number of books coming out,  A Scandal in Venice, Alexander’s Part-Time Band and a children’s book called Mrs. Parsly 2 – The Cat on the Mantle.  All of these book will be featured on this/your blog in the near future. 

That’s right! So, I’m inviting everyone to come back and learn more about them.

Q: How can we find you? Do you have a web page, FaceBook page or any buy links?

A:   Yes, I do. Here are the links.    

EMAIL: julianpadowicz@julianpadowicz.com

BUY LINKS:

AMAZON US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074PP2TNM
AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B074PP2TNM
AMAZON CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B074PP2TNM
BARNES & NOBLE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-menace-in-venice-julian-padowicz/1126970792?ean=9781974368693
CREATESPACE: https://www.createspace.com/7443092
PAPERBACK: https://www.amazon.com/Menace-Venice-Julian-Padowicz/dp/1974368696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502618305&sr=8-1&keywords=A+Menace+in+Venice+paperbackck

Brought to you by:

Ravenswood Publishing

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J. Noah Summerfield ~ 2nd guest post and his novel ~ The Platform

TITLE: “The Platform”

RELEASE DATE: June 30, 2017

AUTHOR: J. Noah Summerfield

CATEGORIES: Science Fiction/ Horror

PAGE COUNT: 256

ISBN: 978-1543017311

IMPRINT: Dark Serpent

BOOK PAGE: http://ravenswoodpublishing.com/bookpages/theplatform.html

KEYWORDS: Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic, Oil Platform, Oil Rig, Detective, Cannibalism, Ocean

ONE LINER:

Isolated on an oil platform in a post-apocalyptic future, fear and hunger will push the limits of what it means to be human.

SYNOPSIS:

The continents are plagued by poison and fire.  And so, on the deep-water oil platform, the Alpine, one of the last remnants of mankind must find a way to survive. Beatrice Plantain, an experienced security official, intends to go about her day and monitor the food rations, but other people on the platform - a grizzled roughneck, a spiritual leader, a feared administrator, a washed up elder, a young hunter and a simple chum-maker - have other plans, as does an explosion that spoils the platform’s food supplies.  Facing starvation, the Alpine’s occupants turn against each other.  Violent skirmishes lead to the death of a young boy.  Who killed the child? And what became of the boy's missing twin? With the Alpine tearing itself apart, Beatrice must uncover who killed the boy. Her investigation will force her to confront the Alpine's terrible past, and what that means for the Alpine's future.

GUEST POST:

While I went for one big horror trope in The Platform, that trope doesn’t occupy the narrative. The book is, at its core, a murder mystery. The underlying mystery pans out across the perspectives of different characters. I found it exciting to work with this device during the writing process. This allowed me to play with when information unfolds to the reader and, simultaneously, when that information is revealed to each character. Each character doesn’t necessarily know what the others experienced, which is, of course, a core element of any mystery.

That interplay also made Beatrice an exciting protagonist because, like everyone else on the Alpine, she is so obviously in over her head, tasked with solving a problem that no one is capable of working through. She is at the center of this scenario where all of the important information is not reaching her when it should. She is capable of solving the problems that are in front of her, but the world that she lives in is determined to make it as difficult and convoluted as possible.

On a normal day, she manages security on the platform. That is her day job. Usually, that just means handling the food rations. It makes sense that, in a post-apocalyptic world, there isn’t an organized police force with a designated homicide office. That capability is preoccupied with feeding what is left of the human population.

When the people on the Alpine discover the murder, the platform’s Administrator decides that Beatrice is best equipped to solve the case, even though she is lacks that specific training. No one on the platform does. So she follows in the footsteps of the great line of literary detectives – Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Harry Dresden, and so on.

What sets her apart is that she has to struggle with a world that suffers from a severe loss of information and skills. It is the brain drain. We see this again when Beatrice asks the Good Doctor, obviously a capable and intelligent woman, to perform an autopsy. It doesn’t even occur to Beatrice that, after the apocalypse, the Good Doctor may have never performed an autopsy before. What part of the Doctor’s experience and training would equip her to perform such a task? How can we, as a society, take these types of skills for granted? That is a common enough trend in post-apocalyptic literature. The Platform brings my two cents to the subject.

AUTHOR BIO:

The Platform is J. Noah Summerfield’s first novel. His non-fiction writing has appeared through various scholarly journals, including Quinnipiac Probate Law Journal, New York Law School Law Review, Creighton Law Review, Rocky Mountain Communication Review, Transnational Dispute Management and the NYSBA Entertainment Art and Sports Law Journal. He is a recipient of the Ernst C. Stiefel award from New York Law School and the Phil Cowan BMI award from the Entertainment Art and Sports Law Section of the New York State Bar Association. He lives in Florida with Kelvin, the dog. Now, on to the next novel… perhaps something involving pirates…

AUTHOR LINKS:

AMAZON US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074912PXZ
AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B074912PXZ
AMAZON CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B074912PXZ
BARNES & NOBLE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-platform-jason-n-summerfield/1126885230?ean=9781543017311
CREATESPACE: https://www.createspace.com/6921880
PAPERBACK: https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Jason-N-Summerfield/dp/1543017312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501630551&sr=1-1&keywords=the+platform+paperback+summerfield

Brought to you by:

Ravenswood Publishing

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