BOOKS BY MY FRIENDS

Thursday, 27 March 2025

Welcome to Books By My Friends!

Today we are featuring

  • CHAD BOYKIN
  • JAMES FLANAGAN
  • BARBARA JEAN MILLER
  • VALERIE NIEMAN
  • LYNN SLAUGHTER

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CHAD BOYKIN

AUTHOR: Chad Ellis Boykin; Foreword by Tom Elliot

GENRE: Haiku, Poetry, Popular Culture, Television, Science Fiction.

BLURB: The Twilight Zone Haiku explores the essence of Rod Serling’s iconic,
uncanny 1960s television show through haiku, giving us dazzling, spot-on
snapshots of each episode. In seventeen syllables, Boykin captures the
show’s main objective: to deliver a keen jolt of existential awareness.
As you read, you find yourself marooned on an alien planet, lost in
time, trapped inside a mannequin, surrounded by the debris of a nuclear
attack, and always, always powerless to forces beyond your control. The
Twilight Zone Haiku conjures the trappings of each haunting plot of the
series, but more astutely, its scalpel-edged soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Attorney, author, and former boxer Chadwick Ellis Boykin is the owner
and creator of Jobber House Press, LLC. He is the author of Muay Thai
Kickboxing: The Ultimate Guide to Conditioning, Training, and Fighting
(Paladin Press, 2002), The Twilight Zone Haiku (Jobber House Press,
2023), and the forthcoming Kaiju and Kayfabe, essays on the uniquely
interconnected history of giant Japanese monster cinema and the art of
professional wrestling. He has contributed to the forthcoming Outside In
Can Live With It: 174 Deep Space 9 Stories, 174 Writers, 174 New
Perspectives (ATB Publishing), and The Kaiju Haiku: The Comic Zine with
Weirdo Poetry.

Tom Elliot is the host of The Twilight Zone Podcast, the definitive and
longest running podcast about the landmark show on the web. In addition
to episode reviews, the podcast includes short story readings, book
reviews, event coverage and interviews. The show has been graced by
guests such as Anne Serling (daughter of The Twilight Zone creator Rod
Serling and acclaimed author of As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling),
Earl Holliman (the first actor to ever appear in The Twilight Zone) and
Win Rosenfeld, Executive Producer of the 2019 The Twilight Zone reboot.
Tom featured as one of the speakers in the BBC documentary You’re
Entering Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, along with Anne Serling and
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. The Twilight Zone Podcast is an
unofficial production, dedicated to the preservation and promotion of
The Twilight Zone and the work of Rod Serling.


JAMES FLANAGAN

BOOK: The Civil War with a Twist

AUTHOR: James Flanagan

GENRE: Historical Fiction

BLURB: History meets the Twilight Zone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Retired principal became a professional storyteller then put his stories into books.


BARBARA JEAN MILLER

BOOK: Governess for a Week

AUTHOR: Barbara Jean Miller

GENRE: Regency Romance Suspense

BLURB: Governess Marian Greenway feels she’s been hired by a lunatic when her employer demands she wear a revealing dress to dinner then introduces her to his relatives as his fiancée. When she realizes his behavior may be rooted in his war wounds he has her instant sympathy. Captain David Armstead, Lord Wyle just wants to fob off his interfering aunts, and a fake engagement seems a good idea when in his cups. But the next day the woman he thought was a hired actress takes over his household, and his children become instantly devoted to her. After only a few days he feels that he is falling in love with her but she has vowed never to marry a soldier. Even before they wed Wyle and Marian face the dilemma of what is more important, the welfare of the children or their own happiness. They find the answer when a threat to those children vaults them into an international plot where only Marian’s resourcefulness and Wyle’s faith in her can bring them all home safe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Jean Miller is a retired educator, author, and nature observer.


VALERIE NIEMAN

BOOK: Upon the Corner of the Moon

AUTHOR: Valerie Nieman

GENRE: Historical Fiction

BLURB At the dawn of the second millennium, two royal Scottish children are swept away from their families—Macbeth to the perilous royal court of his grandfather, Gruach to the remnants of the goddess-worshiping Picts. Macbeth learns that blood bonds are easily severed while Gruach finds her path only to lose it when she’s summoned back to the patriarchal world. They struggle with gaining and losing power, guided and misguided by prophecy and politics as their paths converge in a fiery bid for royal succession. Upon the Corner of the Moon separates literary legend from the reality of rulers who changed the face of Scotland. While closely following recorded history about Macbeth, it also speculates on the heritage of his wife Gruach, drawing on the Neolithic settlement of Alba and the mysterious legacy of the Picts. “Upon the Corner of the Moon is a haunting and bloody tale of Scottish history. It’s also a finger tracing along a set of scars, ones we already know are too deep to ever really heal,” said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Valerie Nieman’s debut historical novel, Upon the Corner of the Moon, is the story of the young Macbeths, destined to unite Scotland in the tumultuous 11th century. To learn more about the people and landscapes, she wandered Scotland from coast to coast and spent many happy hours in museums, libraries, and small pubs. She is the author of a short fiction collection, three poetry books, and six other novels, including In the Lonely Backwater, winner of the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award, which was called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy.” Her novel Blood Clay won the Eric Hoffer Prize in General Fiction. To the Bones, a horror/Appalachian/ecojustice novel, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, and now has a sequel, Dead Hand. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships is professor emerita of creative writing at NC Agricultural and Technical State University.


LYNN SLAUGHTER

BOOK: Missing Mom

AUTHOR: Lynn Slaughter

GENRE: Young Adult Coming-of-age romantic mystery

BLURB: Never mind the circumstantial evidence. Seventeen-year-old Noelle, an aspiring ballet dancer, doesn’t believe her missing mother would ever have committed suicide and launches her own investigation. Meantime, she’s dealing with growing romantic feelings toward Ravi, her best friend and fellow dancer, as well as worries about why her little sister is so reluctant to visit their dad. Threaded throughout the novel is the story of a young woman nearly twenty years earlier whose escape from an abusive marriage turns out to be related to Noelle’s investigation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lynn Slaughter is addicted to the arts, chocolate, and her husband’s cooking. After a long career as a professional dancer and dance educator, Lynn earned her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. She is the award-winning author of five young adult romantic mysteries: MISSING MOM, DEADLY SETUP, LEISHA’S SONG, IT SHOULD HAVEBEEN YOU, AND WHILE I DANCED, as well as an adult mystery, MISSEDCUE. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she’s at work on her next novel and serves on the board of Derby Rotten Scoundrels, the Ohio River Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime.



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JOY E. HELD is an author, educator, editor, entrepreneur, and literary citizen responsible for this site and its contents. She is the author of
Writer Wellness: A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity (Headline Books, Inc., 2020)
Writer Wellness Workbook: A Guided Workbook and Journal to Accompany Writer Wellness: A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity (Headline Books, Inc., 2023)
The Mermaid Riot (Fire and Ice YA, 2024) Young Adult Historical Fantasy
She writes spicy historical fiction under a pen name.
She is the winner of multiple writing and book awards:
West Virginia Writers, Inc. Annual Writing Contest, Honorable Mention, Novel, 1998.
New York Book Festival, Honorable Mention, Writer Wellness, 2020.
Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Finalist, Writer Wellness, 2021.
Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America, Member of the Year, 2020.
Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America, First Book Award, 2020.
She is an adjunct faculty member in the Southern New Hampshire University Online MFA Creative Writing.
She is a proud graduate of Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA with an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction.
She is a member of The Authors Guild and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Joy is the founder and CEO of My WRITEDAY Subscription Box for writers and readers.

BOOKS BY MY FRIENDS

This article may contain affiliate links which may result in the author receiving a commission when readers purchase items through the links.

Today we’re featuring authors LAURY A. EGAN, ALLE C. HALL, LYNN SLAUGHTER, and LINDA BALLOU.


BOOK: The Firefly

AUTHOR: Laury A. Egan

GENRE: Romance and coming of age portrait

BLURB: 1964: A dark summer night on a still black lake. A lantern is lit at the end of a dock. A blond girl in white appears and begins to dance, her body illuminated like the fireflies surrounding her. A second girl emerges from a house and is beckoned forward. The two meet, swim, and then kiss, beginning an ethereal romance and a young woman’s journey into adulthood. Robin Bennet, 14, has been abandoned at a lakeside rental. Her parents argue and leave, each believing the other has remained with Robin. Alone, Robin discovers someone has been sleeping in the house and stealing food. A fifteen-year-old, Kieran, the charming intruder, invites himself to dinner. He is the brother of the beautiful girl who magically appeared on the dock the night before. After he departs, the “Firefly” returns, but in the morning she has disappeared, leaving Robin on a quest to find her all the while pursuing her dream of becoming an architect. Heat rating: 2

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laury A. Egan is the author of eleven novels, The Firefly; Once, Upon an Island; Wave in D Minor; Turnabout; Once, Upon an Island; Double crossed; The Swimmer; The Ungodly Hour; A Bittersweet Tale; Fabulous! An Opera Buffa; The Outcast Oracle; and Jenny Kidd; in addition to a collection, Fog and Other Stories. Four limited-edition poetry volumes have been published: Snow, Shadows, a Stranger; Beneath the Lion’s Paw; The Sea & Beyond; and Presence & Absence. Eighty-five of her stories and poems have appeared in literary journals.


BOOK: As Far As You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back: A Novel

AUTHOR: Alle C. Hall

GENRE: Literary fiction

BLURB: As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back is a-girl-and-her-backpack story with a #MeToo influence: Carlie is a child sexual abuse survivor. As a teen, she runs away to Asia. Falling in with an international crew of Tai chi-practicing backpackers, Carlie’s journey becomes one to find the self-respect torn from her as a child and the healthy sexuality she desires. Trigger warnings for: child sexual abuse, addictions, and suicide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nominated for The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Book Award, Alle C. Hall’s debut literary novel, As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back was winning prizes before its publication, including the National League of American Pen Women’s Mary Kennedy Eastham Prize. The novel was also submitted by the publisher for The National Book Award. Hall lived in Asia and traveled there extensively. She has a daily Tai chi practice that spans 35 years.


BOOK: Missed Cue

AUTHOR: Lynn Slaughter

GENRE: Mystery

BLURB: While dealing with her own messy personal life, Lieutenant Caitlin O’Connor investigates the most complicated case of her career, the suspicious onstage death of a revered ballerina.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: After a long career as a professional dancer and dance educator, Lynn earned her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. MISSED CUE (Melange Books) is her first mystery for adults. She is also the author of four award-winning young adult romantic mysteries: DEADLY SETUP, LEISHA’S SONG, IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU, AND WHILE I DANCED. Lynn lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she’s at work on her next novel, serves on the board of Louisville Literary Arts, and is an active member and former president of Derby Rotten Scoundrels, the Ohio River Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime.

 


LINDA BALLOU


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Revisiting Radway for a Renewing Perspective on the Future of Romance Fiction

READING THE ROMANCE BOOK COVER JANICE RADWAY_51XX-EHPDSL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_

Writing in The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Fred Botting’s piece “Bestselling Fiction: Machinery, Economy, Excess” reminds me that there are two sides to a coin, and I understand that an individual can realistically only see one physical side at a time. When Botting invokes Janis A. Radway’s assertion that women read romantic fiction because of “…an underlying dissatisfaction” (164), I remember that the Radway study is one good source for understanding not only an academic perspective on the topic of why women read romance but for some of the history of my favorite genre.

Revisiting my copy of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature by Radway, I was rewarded with a refreshing look at a historical perspective on the popularity of romantic fiction through the lens of how the publishing industry developed in America. Radway provides a thorough yet succinct review of books as a commercial commodity leading me, the reader, from the first printing press at Cambridge (America) in 1639 to how newspapers created a national hunger for serialized stories to the explosion of gothic romance novels in the early 1970s and how that set the stage for the contemporary world of publishing and reading romance.

What Radway reemphasized for me was the cold, hard truth that publishing is a business whose goal is to trade a relative product for the consumer’s money on a repetitive, reliable, and consistent basis. And that the romance novel industry led the way with particular publishers (i.e., Avon, Harlequin, etc.) intentionally seeking out emotionally stimulating content and consciously creating then delivering a targeted advertising campaign to a particular customer base: women. This foundational market took the bait, so to speak, beginning in the 1960s and have been the bedrock of the romance novel buying population ever since.

Radway’s chapter “The Institutional Matrix: Publishing Romantic Fiction” on the history of paperback publishing juxtaposed with the rise of romance reading actually allowed me to understand what Botting expressed in Cambridge Companion Chapter 9 about bestsellers and how the pulp novel industry led to the current state of affairs in popular genre fiction publishing.

Simply put, Radway’s history of publishing chapter (written several years before Botting in Cambridge Companion) culminates with claims that American women did and do devour large numbers of romance novels in order to repeat a specific type of reading experience, but that it isn’t sufficient to say that this is the only explanation for the popularity of the genre and the historically high sales. She makes it clear to me when she states, “The romance’s popularity must be tied closely to these important historical changes in the book publishing industry as a whole” (45).

Whether this ‘reading romance repetition habit’ is due to “an underlying dissatisfaction” with women’s position in the patriarchy as Radway and others propose, there is no definitive conclusion for me to glean except to say that the reading experience can’t be discounted and nor can the direct relationship to the industry at large.

In my opinion, the Cambridge Companion writers echo Radway. Botting ends with external forces-alteration, novelty, and desire-contributing to the production of bestsellers. Another contributor to CC, Erin Smith, wraps up her thoughts in a similar fashion by indicating that production, marketing, and consumption are king. Radway reiterates her accounting of romance novels as a point of consumerism by, what I see as a precursor of Botting and Smith, by claiming, “Commodities like mass-produced literary texts are selected, purchased, constructed, and used by real people with previously existing needs, desires, intentions, and interpretive strategies” (221).

They all agree that bestsellerism is mostly about marketing to consumer desire.

It’s evident to me from these three perspectives that the business of publishing is an important side of the coin. As a genre writer, I must keep a keen eye on it, but that I must also approach my work as marketable merchandise that will slake the buyer’s thirst but will also create a craving (dare I say addiction?) in the reader to return to take sip after sip after sip.

I believe my soon-to-be-released historical romance novel has the potential to quench readers’ thirst for unique historical settings and because I have two characters whose stories I plan to expand on for sequels, the possibility exists for repeat buyers. I’ve done a considerable amount of specific research on the American frontier in the late 1700s, but not everything I learned appears in the first book of the series. I have research and plot ideas in reserve to write at least two more books set in the same time period.

Considering that Radway and Botting point out as imperative the importance of marketing a novel to create long term reader relationships, the challenge for me will be finding historical events and or commemorations to “hook” my stories on to show a publisher that there is valid potential for interest in my themes and stories today and in the future.

All good things,

Joy

Works Cited

Botting, Fred. “Bestselling Fiction: Machinery, Economy, Excess.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Literature, edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 159-174.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Fear takes longer to experience in the human brain

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I’ve been rereading The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken. I can’t explain why except that the current upheaval in publishing is making me ask questions about the history of the business. In Chapter Six “”Reading time: popular fiction and the everyday,” editor McCracken makes some important points about what happens to readers when they read. Knowing more about reading and how a reader’s experience might affect my writing is definitely a question worth asking. McCracken provided me with a variety of diving boards from which to jump into my own head or other texts. I am drawn to this sentiment from Chapter Six:

The thriller thus allows for different forms of attention, which rely on a comprehensive knowledge of what to expect from the genre, a knowledge culled not just from written fiction, but also from film and television. Yet despite the familiarity of the structure, like the popular song, the successful thriller has to have a ‘hook’, an intriguing element of originality, which draws the reader in (Cambridge 112).

McCracken’s “forms of attention” triggered my curiosity about how I could understand his meaning and apply it to writing romance. While McCracken focuses on thriller novels for this thought, he is really talking about the tension and pacing of a novel. Romance has a sub-genre of romantic suspense, but all romance fiction has some degree of tension derived from the question “will they or won’t they?” The suspense of not knowing the answer and vicariously living the struggles the heroine and hero endure on the way to resolving the question is the same as “will the detective figure this out?”

McCracken emphasizes his premise with three primary examples that thriller novels can/do focus on different forms of attention, and I wondered what that meant in terms of how the brain deals with time (which underlies McCracken’s chapter) during different kinds of stress/excitement/worry/etc. Why does one form of attention in a thriller appeal to readers more than others?

I found a kernel of an answer in  The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity written by Stefan Klein who says:

The way we judge the length of an interval of time depends not only on the gauge the brain uses to estimate the elapsed time but also on the degree of our focus. If consciousness is occupied with other matters at the same time, we underestimate the time that has passed; if we are hyperalert—for example while watching an act of violence in a film—the seconds expand (62-63).

My interpretation of this is if a reader (or viewer) is thoroughly absorbed by a scene, paying more focused attention, the time will feel longer to them. The less engaging the writing or the acting, time will seem to pass more quickly for the reader/viewer because the brain is susceptible to distraction. It’s the difference between quickly scanning the pages of a magazine (distracted focus) and examining every detail of one particular page for several minutes (deep attention.)

Klein claims that during intense action it is the “sense of dread that makes the scene seem agonizingly long—like waiting in the dentist’s chair in view of the drill” (63) that captures the reader’s brain and holds them spellbound.

Therefore, my writing needs to include more showing and less telling to increase the reader’s vicarious experience with the action, and this will have positive effects on the degree of tension and pacing in my story.

All good things,

j

JoyHeldHeadshot3

Klein, Stefan. The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007.

McCracken, Scott. “Reading Time: Popular Fiction and the Everyday.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Ed. David Glover and Scott McCracken. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 86-102. Print.