Ramblings of a Middle Aged Lunatic

  We're all looking for our money's worth these days.  After all, if statistics are to be believed, our salaries have not significantly increased since the seventies, and yet inflation has risen over a 100%.  It costs thirty dollars to buy two cheeseburgers from your neighborhood greasy spoon.  We're all looking for ways to save money, and when times are tight, entertainment is the first category to take a hit.  In that spirit, and also in an effort to help my fellow authors (writing a book is hard work-marketing it, ten times harder), I'm going to share the best Indie books I'd read occasionally on my blog in a new installment, Shannon's Cheap Book Picks.        I discovered Dylan Steel's Sacrasvita series purely by accident.  I stumbled across the first book in one of the daily emails I receive for cheap books and downloaded it, since it sounded interested and was free.              The day my mother died, I found myself unable to sleep, eat, or do an

Ponderings on The Playground                 My first book, The Playground , https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072823WZ9 is free this Easter weekend April 19-21, 2019.   Although it seems unbelievable, it’s been nearly two years since it was first published on Amazon.   Publishing it was a whim.   I had been trying for three months to get an agent, and I had just read that once an author accomplishes this, it takes another six months to find a publisher, and then another two years until the book is available for sale.                   I’m an impatient person.   That was too long of a wait.   I uploaded the book to Amazon, hit publish, and went to bed wondering if I’d regret it.   I haven’t yet.                 The Playground was a baring of my soul.   Its purpose was to illustrate how the scars of childhood bullying translate to an adult.   We hear all these dire statistics-victims suffer from low achievement, depression, higher rates of drug use, suicide, yet no one had ever written