Writers4Higher features Lucas Lindsey of Writrsbloc

Hi Lucas! Welcome to Writers4Higher.

1.   Tell me about yourself, your business, and the connection with the writing world.

Each day the web fills, to the point of rupture, with words. How-Tos and Why-Nots and numbered lists abound. Steadily, the noise grows louder. That’s where Writrsbloc comes in. Through accepting submissions and releasing a weekly, curated email, Writrsbloc cuts through the noise. We discover great writers and uncover compelling stories, one sentence at a time.

2. How do you work with authors?

We give writers an additional channel to promote their work. By sending a regular email packed full of the week’s best writing, Writrsbloc drives additional readers to articles, stories, and blog posts published across the Internet. Writers can submit at www.writrsbloc.com/submit using only quick excerpt, a link to where the story lives online, and an email address!

3. Do you write as well as contribute through your business? Please share!

From time to time, I throw enough sentences together to call it writing, often profiling the stories of entrepreneurs across the Southeast. My most recent release took a hard look at the emotional rollercoaster that is small town startup life.

Links to the website, Facebook page, Twitter.

Website:
http://writrsbloc.com/
Submissions:
http://writrsbloc.com/submit
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/writrsbloc

Thank you for joining us, Lucas!

Rhett DeVane

southern fiction author and blogmaster

Rhett DeVane's Website

Writers4Higher features Leslee Horner

Welcome to Writers4Higher

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

This issue, Writers4Higher features

Leslee Horner

Hi, Leslee. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

My name is Leslee Horner and I am a mother, wife, and author. I left my teaching career ten years ago, moved to Florida, and became a stay-at-home-mom. In 2007, while spending my days with my then eighteen-month-old and three-year-old, my passion for writing was reignited and I began work on my first novel. I have written four novels since that time and recently published one of them.  

SUMMER OF STARS (THE PAST LIVES OF LOLA RAY~BOOK ONE) is the first book in a four-book Young Adult series that follows a fifteen-year-old girl named Lola as she deals with the stresses of adolescence while simultaneously flashing back to the past lives in which she died the day before turning sixteen. In SUMMER OF STARS, Lola’s family is falling apart at a time when all she wants is to be normal. It’s bad enough that her bipolar mother slips into a deep depression and her father has a mysterious online friend but now she’s having dreams and visions of a life in the Holocaust. With the help of Ian, the new boy across the street, she realizes that it is her family’s past life together that she is seeing. Ian helps her make peace with both the past and the present, becoming her best friend in the process. Of course, being best friends with Ian isn’t exactly uncomplicated.

I get much of my inspiration from my fascination with the mysteries of life, particularly the journey of the human soul. Many people find easy answers to those questions in religion or science where as I tend to get caught up in the “yes, but, what if?” And that question is where all of my novels begin. With THE PAST LIVES OF LOLA RAY series, I used the theme of reincarnation (what if our souls really do live many lives in different times and bodies?) to also write about points in history that I find to be incredibly important. We need to remember where we’ve been in order to see how far we’ve come and to also not repeat tragedies of humanity.

2. Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

In the next two years, I hope to have completed and published the entire Lola Ray series. Book two, AN UNREQUITED FALL, will be released in the fall of 2014. I may revisit my first two unpublished novels, HEALING NIGHT (women’s fiction) and A CIRCLE HOME (new adult) and polish them up for publication. I also hope to complete a current work in progress, LIFE IN THE WAKE (women’s fiction), about three women dealing with the sudden and tragic death of their best friend. I also have another Young Adult book series idea floating around in my head that, if the stars align, will make its way onto the page and out into the world in the years to come.

3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

Something that I have always enjoyed is working with and being a role model for our youth. It was this passion that brought me to the teaching profession and guides me as I write fiction for young adults. For four years now, I have been the leader of the teen program (Uniteen and Youth of Unity) at Unity Eastside Church in Tallahassee, Florida. I think it is important for young people to have adults in their lives that listen to them with open hearts and allow them to be who they truly are. I try to be this kind of presence for the kids I spend my Sunday mornings with.

Would you like to find Leslee?

Check out the links to this talented author:

Leslee Horner's Website

Summer of Stars, The Past Lives of Lola Ray on Facebook

Leslee Horner on Twitter

Summer of Stars on Amazon

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog

Writers4Higher features Malcolm R. Campbell

 

Welcome to Writers4Higher

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views.

Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.
2. Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?
3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

This issue, Writers4Higher features

Malcolm R. Campbell.

Hi Malcolm. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family.

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

My contemporary fantasies are linked to wilderness settings because nature inspires me and lends itself very well to magic or to the possibility of magic. I grew up in the Florida Panhandle where I was a member of a Tallahassee Scout Troop that spent many weekends camping at nearby lakes, sinkholes and rivers. This was my first major exposure to the out of doors and it has helped me find connections between my characters and the places where they live. Most of my career has been focused on technical writing, but I always had a manuscript hidden away in a sock drawer. The mega-corporation I was working for laid off our entire division after 9/11. It was quite a blow, but it did change my focus from describing software to telling stories set in places like Glacier National Park, Tate’s Hell Swamp, and the Missouri River.

2. Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

After Sarabande was released last summer, I wasn’t ready for another long project, so I shifted over to writing short stories. First, it’s good practice, especially when a contest or magazine has strict word-count limits. I’ve been enjoying writing within 500-word and 1,000-word arenas. I love folktales and stories with a folktale-like approach. I’m tempted to head off in that direction. The short stories, whether they ever find a market or not, are allowing me to experiment with a lot of characters, settings and themes that connect magic, personal transcendence, and nature into adventures that could easily happen to anyone, anywhere. I’ve been having fun discovering what it’s like to set a story in my old Tallahassee neighborhood, another on a Florida highway between Tate’s Hell and the Garden of Eden, and another that features a Florida Panther and a Limpkin as its main characters.

3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

I review about forty books a year on several weblogs with a strong focus on small-press books. This comes under the heading of a “labor of love” because I’m never without a novel on my nightstand anyway, so why not share a little something about the plot and themes with others? While I can’t compete with Publishers Weekly, Kirkus or The New York Times, most small press books never make it to those places. So, I hope the exposure on my blog, Amazon and GoodReads helps. The act of writing walls us off from each other and because it does, I think those of us who don’t have a big publicity machine behind our books can support each other in part by doing book reviews, using Twitter to spread the word about each other’s posts, and from time to time using our blogs and Facebook accounts to discuss writing tips which have worked well for us. It saddens me to see so many talented authors having to fight so hard for support and exposure; sharing the treasures sitting on my bookshelf with prospective readers is important to me as a fellow writer. And, it gives me a real good excuse to keep my nose in a book!

Thanks for inviting me to stop by your blog, Rhett. Now, if only there were a way to have a huge plate of piping hot cathead biscuits while I’m here.

Malcolm

******

Would you like to find Malcolm?

Stop by and say hello and check out this talented author's work.

Here are links:

WEBSITE: Malcolm's website

FACEBOOK: Malcolm on Facebook

TWITTER: Malcolm on Twitter

MALCOLM'S BOOKS:

Sarabande: Sarabande on Amazon

The Sun Singer: The Sun Singer on Amazon

Thank you, Malcolm, for your insightful answers. And I'll put those cathead biscuits in the oven whenever you stop by, hon.

Rhett DeVane

Writers4Higher

Rhett's author website

Fiction with a Southern Twist