Straight Browsing from the Library: Realizing You by Ron Doades and Susan Sloate

Browse through Realizing You by Ron Doades and Susan Sloate as you visit The Library. Leave a comment or ask the authors a question, because one randomly chosen commenter will win a $50 Amazon/BN.com gift card. You can see the rest of the stops at http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2013/10/virtual-book-tour-realizing-you-by-ron.html.
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Meet Robby Aihn, the newest star in the self-help universe and author of the runaway bestseller, Realizing You, now struggling with his first taste of fame. Though his five principles for good living are changing other people’s lives, his own life is starting to fall apart. When Robby stages a lavish self-help conference in Dallas, he attracts others with their own secrets: his estranged wife and unhappy teenage daughter; the businessman pursuing his own agenda; the all-star pitcher facing the end of his career; and the shy co-author Robby never acknowledged, who is searching for meaning in her own life. Join Robby and the others on their journey toward understanding and fulfillment, in this truly novel approach to changing YOUR life.

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Sophie was the last one awake. She lay tensely in the queen-size bed next to her mother’s until she heard Marie’s soft, even breathing. Certain that her mother was deeply asleep, she slipped out of bed, tiptoed to her suitcase, and took out the little pink and red bag. Inside nestled a print scarf and a multi-colored beaded bracelet. Both items still bore their price tags. She’d snipped the tag off only the tortoiseshell hair comb so she could wear it today. She took it from the nightstand, looked at all three items, shook out and stroked the glossy material of the scarf, then quietly tucked all of them back in the bag, which she pushed deep into her suitcase. She wouldn’t take them out again until she left Dallas. She’d never wear that stupid hair comb again. She told herself it wasn’t as pretty as she’d thought when she first saw it in the store. The stern little voice inside her head told her that wasn’t the reason.

Sophie refused to allow herself to know what the real reason was.

She hadn’t left Colorado with those items in her suitcase. Her mother didn’t know she had them. She couldn’t explain where she’d gotten them.

But taking them had made her feel better. Everybody did it, at least once or twice. No big deal. She took a deep relaxing breath, thinking about how the act of lifting them from the counter made her feel, and realized she was finally getting drowsy. She crawled into bed, turned over, and was deeply asleep in three minutes.

MEET THE AUTHORS

RON DOADES is president of Ronald Doades & Company, a consulting firm that, since 1977, has helped the people of large and mid-size energy companies improve their individual and corporate performance results by learning from the best-practice experiences of others. A popular speaker on the topic of managing change for optimal results, he holds an MBA from Columbia University and an MS in Psychology from The New School in New York City. Visit him at www.realizingyoubook.com.

SUSAN SLOATE is the author of twenty published books, including STEALING FIRE, a #2 Amazon bestseller and Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest, and FORWARD TO CAMELOT (authored with Kevin Finn), which in its first edition was a #6 Amazon bestseller, took honors in 3 literary competitions and was optioned for film by a Hollywood production company. She lives in Mount Pleasant, SC. Visit her online at http://susansloate.com.

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Straight Browsing from the Library: Forward to Camelot by Susan Sloate and Kevin Finn

Browse through an interesting time-travel--Forward to Camelot as part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. The authors are giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card to a randomly drawn commenter during this tour and their Virtual Book Tour. The other stops can be seen here http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2013/09/virtual-super-book-blast-forward-to.html

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WHERE WERE YOU THE DAY KENNEDY WAS SAVED?

On the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination comes a new edition of the extraordinary time-travel thriller first published in 2003 with a new Afterword from the authors.

On November 22, 1963, just hours after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President aboard Air Force One using JFK’s own Bible. Immediately afterward, the Bible disappeared. It has never been recovered. Today, its value would be beyond price.

In the year 2000, actress Cady Cuyler is recruited to return to 1963 for this Bible—while also discovering why her father disappeared in the same city, on the same tragic day. Finding frightening links between them will lead Cady to a far more perilous mission: to somehow prevent the President’s murder, with one unlikely ally: an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Forward to Camelot: 50th Anniversary Edition brings together an unlikely trio: a gallant president, the young patriot who risks his own life to save him, and the woman who knows their future, who is desperate to save them both.

History CAN be altered …
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It was a famous photograph, one I’d seen many times. In the center of the photograph was a tall, burly man, with thinning hair slicked back, a large face, big flappy ears, right hand raised piously, facing a small brisk woman with dark hair and glasses. On the man’s right, crowded next to him, seeming crushed by his vitality, was another small dark woman, her face blank with conflicting emotions.

But the man, for all his bulk and heartiness, was not the magnetic force in the photograph. The woman on his left was. Younger than anyone else, with dark glossy hair, in a bulky light suit, her profile regal even in her anguish, blood spattering her clothes, she stood watching sightlessly. Her beauty and grief drew all eyes. Her pain was almost visible on the photo itself.

“This is the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson as president on Air Force One in Dallas, on November 22, 1963. His wife is on his right. Jacqueline Kennedy stands on his left. Sarah Hughes is the judge administering the oath. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only a couple of hours before.”

“I know the photograph, George.”

“Good for you. Look here.” He pointed carefully at the almost invisible edges of the book under Johnson’s massive hand. “Johnson, of course, needed to be sworn on a Bible. Here it is, being held by Mrs. Hughes.”

“You want the Bible Johnson took the oath on?”

“I do. That Bible belonged to President Kennedy.”

I looked up in surprise. “It was Kennedy’s Bible? I didn’t know that.”

“It was the only Bible on Air Force One. Kennedy supposedly traveled everywhere with it. When they were scrambling to find a Bible—Johnson insisted on taking the oath before he left Dallas—they remembered Kennedy’s Bible and used that.”

“Well, can’t you buy the Bible from the Kennedy family? Even though I can’t imagine they’d give it up.”

“Well, now, that’s a problem. The Bible disappeared right after this picture was taken.”

I hated to admit it, but that intrigued me. It was getting harder to remember that I’d just lost my job a few hours before. “How could it disappear?”

“Well, the story goes that Sarah Hughes actually had it in her hands when she left Air Force One in Dallas. You have to understand—that day, the whole country was in a state of shock, and people did crazy things without realizing it, half the time. Coming down the ramp, Mrs. Hughes met a man dressed in a suit and tie and sunglasses, a man she believed to be a Secret Service agent. He asked her for the Bible. I don’t think she even realized she still had it in her hand. She gave it to him immediately; she thought he would return it to the Kennedy family.”

He paused. I was riveted. “At least, that’s what she said. But the Bible disappeared that day and was never seen again.” George paused again and gave me a devilish grin. “JFK’s own Bible, used to swear in Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One... what do you think an item like that would be worth?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine.

“Nobody can,” he said softly. “Do you understand now? As a piece of history, part of one of the twentieth-century’s most pivotal events… that Bible would be beyond price. And I intend to have it.”

“You want me to find the Bible?”

“Not exactly. I know where it was on November 22, 1963. Sarah Hughes had it at Love Field.”

“Well, a fat lot of good that’s going to do!” I exclaimed. “Unless you’re somehow going to travel back in time and pick it up—”

“I’m not,” George said reasonably. “You are.”

MEET THE AUTHORS

SUSAN SLOATE is the author of 20 previous books, including the recent bestseller Stealing Fire and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel. The original 2003 edition of Forward to Camelot became a #6 Amazon bestseller, took honors in three literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production.

Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way!, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest on The History Channel. Amelia Earhart: Challenging the Skies is a perennial young-adult Amazon bestseller. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, managed two recent political campaigns and founded an author’s festival in her hometown outside Charleston, SC.

After beginning his career as a television news and sports writer-producer, KEVIN FINN moved on to screenwriting and has authored more than a dozen screenplays. He is a freelance script analyst and has worked for the prestigious American Film Institute Writer’s Workshop Program. He now produces promotional trailers, independent film projects including the 2012 documentary SETTING THE STAGE: BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, and local content for Princeton Community Television.

His next novel, Banners Over Brooklyn, will be released in 2014.

For updates and more information about Forward to Camelot: 50th Anniversary Edition, please visit http://susansloate.com/CAMELOT.html.

Straight Chatting from the Library: Susan Sloate

Susan Sloate, author of Stealing Fire, has stopped by The Library to chat about books with us as part of her virtual book tour with Goddess Fish Promotions. Susan will be awarding a notebook perfect for journaling to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour. You can find the other stops on the tour here: http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2013/06/virtual-book-tour-stealing-fire-by.html.

Welcome, Susan. What is the favorite book you remember as a child?

Like most of us, I became an addicted reader as a child, but the one book that really stood out for me was GONE WITH THE WIND, which I read when I was ten. I was going through a horrible time at school—I was the pariah who was being picked on every day—and it was a miserable year for me. I sort of hid in books, which was the only place where life seemed to be sane. I picked GONE WITH THE WIND from my school book-club catalog (it was one for older readers), and I just fell in love with it (as many, many readers have before me). It was so powerful that I not only read it cover to cover, I even memorized parts of it. To this day I can still recite the entire first paragraph of the book word for word. It was the book that really showed me an author’s power to weave a spell over her readers. I never forgot the lesson.

Tell us about your current book in 10 words.

STEALING FIRE : passionate love story about unlikely soul mates and 1980’s Broadway.

What are you reading right now?

ME & LEE, a nonfiction account of a woman who claims that she was Lee Harvey Oswald’s lover in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, a few months before the JFK assassination. It’s fascinating, and shows a side of him we’ve never been allowed to see, not to mention a lot of the world he was living in and the people he was working with. A tremendous read.

Do you have any bad book habits?

Yes, and it comes from my days as a story analyst in Hollywood. When I got a new script to read, I wanted to know how much torture I’d have to go through (most of the scripts I read weren’t very good at all)—so as soon as I got a new script I’d flip to the end to see the page count. I hate to admit it, but I still do this today, even with books I’m really excited to read. I try hard not to read anything on the page but the number, though sometimes I can’t help myself.

E-Reader or print? and why?

Both—and for a very good reason! I have a big library of bound books, some of which are old and rare—and I have no intention of giving them up. A lot of them are also not available in any kind of eReader edition (yet), so it would make no sense to get rid of them. And as an author, honestly, I never feel as though I’ve really written a book until I hold the finished product in my hands. You just can’t do that with an eBook, though I get very excited when I download it to my Kindle!

When do you do most of your reading?

At night; I tend to read myself asleep. To me, it’s a great way (not the best way, but a great way) to end the day!

Do you loan your books?

Seriously, I don’t like to. If I like a book enough to recommend it to someone, it’s usually because it’s had a profound impact on me. I’ve found that too often, I don’t get the books back, and that’s made me leery of lending them out to anyone. (To me, lending a book is like lending your child. Wait, that might actually be a good idea … ) A few years ago I started buying up multiples of books I loved, so if I wanted to lend it to someone, I could give them a copy and not mind if I never got it back. I can’t do that with every book, but it does help a little.

How do you keep your books organized?

I have custom-built bookshelves nine feet high and twelve feet wide (three of them). Each section is divided into single shelves about twelve inches high and 18 inches wide, so I have all my biographies in one section, my Hollywood books in another, my books on writing in another, and so on. It makes it very easy to find what I’m looking for.

Re-reader or not?

Absolutely! I feel about books the way I feel about certain movies: you can’t get all the good out of them just by reading or seeing them once. With a movie I love, it tends to be the third time I see it that I enjoy it most (I have no idea why). With some books, I’ve re-read them so often since childhood that now I just read them to look at the words laid out on the page. In some inexplicable way, that’s really comforting. I love those old stories, and still have all the Scholastic Book Club books I bought as a child, about 400 of them. I have no intention of ever giving them away—I’m still reading them!

What would make you not finish a book?

I used to finish every book I started. It was a point of honor: don’t start what you don’t intend to finish. Then a year or so ago I did some quick math and realized I’d never live long enough to finish all the books I want to read in my lifetime. So I got really ruthless: if a book didn’t really speak to me in the first 50 pages or so, I put it down. I think giving an author 50 pages to make an impression is fair; if he or she can’t do it in that time, there are plenty of other authors who can.

Keep books or give them away?

I used to keep all books. I didn’t understand people who said they had no room at home for books. I used to say, “Get rid of your furniture!” Then I had to move at the end of 2012, and I was faced with packing up boxes of books to go into storage. Well, that changed my mind in a hurry. (Do you see a pattern in this interview??? I think I do!)

So I decided if I knew I’d be re-reading the book within six months, I’d keep it. Until then, I’d kept books I last read in 1979 and would never read again. Those went to the book fair that raised funds for our local library. In addition to CD’s, DVD’s and VHS tapes, I donated 600 books at the end of 2012. But I still had 2000 books I couldn’t bring myself to give away! (And of course, I find myself buying more books now—the collection just keeps growing, no matter what I do!)

About the Author:

Susan Sloate is the author of 20 published books, including FORWARD TO CAMELOT (with Kevin Finn), an alternative history of the JFK assassination, STEALING FIRE, an autobiographical love story, and REALIZING YOU (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre – the self-help novel. FORWARD TO CAMELOT was a #6 Amazon bestseller, took honors in 3 literary competitions and was optioned for film production by a Hollywood company. STEALING FIRE was a quarter-finalist in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including RAY CHARLES: FIND ANOTHER WAY!, which won a silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Book Awards, AMELIA EARHART: CHALLENGING THE SKIES, a perennial Amazon bestseller, and MYSTERIES UNWRAPPED: THE SECRETS OF ALCATRAZ, which led to her appearance on a special for The History Channel in 2009, as well as books for five girls’ fiction series. As a screenwriter, she has written an informational film for McGraw-Hill Films and optioned two scripts to Hollywood production companies. As a sportswriter, she’s covered the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Mets. She’s also managed two recent political campaigns, founded the East Cooper Authors Festival (which put 18 professional authors in 17 area schools in one day) and serves on the Culture, Arts and Pride Commission of the Town of Mount Pleasant.

How do you recognize your soulmate?

In glittery 1980’s Los Angeles, Beau Kellogg is a brilliant Broadway lyricist now writing advertising jingles and yearning for one more hit to compensate for his miserable marriage and disappointing life.

Amanda Harary, a young singer out of synch with her contemporaries, works at a small New York hotel, while she dreams of singing on Broadway.

When they meet late at night over the hotel switchboard, what begins will bring them each unexpected success, untold joy, and piercing heartache ... until they learn that some connections, however improbable, are meant to last forever.

STEALING FIRE is, at its heart, a story for romantics everywhere, who believe in the transformative power of love.

STEALING FIRE was a Quarter-Finalist (Top 5%) in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.