Beginning Is The Key Step
Numeral M: Volume II is a practical guide to saving, emphasizing that discipline, structure, and repetition lead to meaningful savings within a year. Who did you have in mind as your ideal reader while writing this book?
My ideal reader is anyone who has a goal or a need to begin saving and requires an avenue or guidance on how to do so. This could be from a young adult, parent begining a savings account for their child, parent starting a college savings account, those saving to purchase a home, seniors saving to add to to their retirement income, someone saving for a wedding, purchase of a car, etc.
Do you personally favor one of the methods, or does it depend entirely on the individual?
I use the weekly technique this is actually how I began savings journey and continue to use it to this day. The techniques in this book will vary based on the individual goal and amount to save.
Many readers face emergencies, fluctuating income, or unexpected expenses. How should they adapt your methods when life doesn’t go according to plan?
When life doesn’t go according to plan start. It doesn’t matter how much you start saving as long as you begin. Beginning is the key step to achievement of your goal.
What does financial stability mean to you personally?
Financial stability in my eyes is having little to no debt and being able to use my funds to bless/help others.
Author Links: Amazon | Facebook
A little about me … I was born and raised in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. I have worked in the mortgage compliance industry for over seventeen years, the last two as a Regulatory Analyst and Advisor. I am also certified as a CFCP and a MCPC. Throughout my entire career, I have come to understand that there is such a tremendous need for simplified educational materials as reflected in this book. My readers have requested that I create a simple, easy to understand way to save. This book gives you just that, using actual techniques and numbers. I leave it up to you, my readers, to choose which ones will work for you and go for it.
Remember to discipline oneself and don’t give up!
If this book is able to help just one person, it was worth it!
See you on the next read and many blessings on your savings goal journey!
Listed
Listed imagines a Louisiana where children can be entered into a market before they are born, their futures priced, traded, and later harvested through dividend claims on their adult earnings. The novel follows Solomon and Leah, two listed children whose lives are shaped by share prices, compliance reports, family sacrifice, and the strange intimacy of being loved through a system that also exploits them. Told through the voice of Eve, their daughter, the story becomes more than a critique of financialized childhood; it is a generational reckoning with the compromises parents make when the world turns love into math.
Leger doesn’t lean on spectacle, even though the premise could easily support it. Instead, he builds the horror through kitchen tables, cold coffee, school records, pay stubs, and the small humiliations of being assessed. Solomon’s childhood feels polished into performance, while Leah’s feels like a long act of refusal against a number that never understood her. I found the contrast between investor language and parental memory especially sharp: the market sees milestones, but the families remember cake, red beans, fly balls, illness, silence, and the ache behind every “opportunity.”
I also admired the novel’s patience. It resists turning any parent into a simple villain, which makes the book more troubling and more humane. Gerald, Pete, Valerie, Carolyn, Solomon, and Leah all participate in the system in different ways, but the novel keeps asking whether participation is the same as consent when the alternative is scarcity. That moral ambiguity gives the story its bite. The final part, when the promise not to list a child begins to buckle under the pressure of real expenses and inherited logic, felt inevitable in the saddest possible way. The book understands that systems endure not because people fail to love their children, but because love itself can be conscripted.
Readers who enjoy dystopian family drama, science fiction, social satire, and morally complex near-future novels will find Listed especially compelling. It would appeal to book clubs and readers drawn to stories about class, parenting, capitalism, medical and educational ambition, and the cost of being measured too early. In spirit, it sits near Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, not because the plots are alike, but because both novels turn an institutional cruelty into something intimate, tender, and almost unbearable. Listed is a haunting novel about the price of a child, and the immeasurable worth the market can never touch.
Pages: 149 | ASIN : B0GWV76KGL
Gravitido
Gravitido, by Simon Carr, is a wild comic sci-fi adventure about a human-made gravity-powered child who grows up on the scorching planet Titunal after surviving the destruction of Atlas Nine. Adopted by the wonderfully dry Dari and warm-hearted Jen, Gravitido begins life as a mystery, a baby who “doesn’t weigh anything, it’s like I’m holding nothing but air.” From there, the book builds a galaxy-sized story around identity, power, rebellion, and a lot of very silly conversations in very dangerous places.
The story follows Gravitido as he leaves home to discover what he was created for and ends up challenging Gidering, the AI ruler who has enslaved humanity. The setup has the shape of a chosen-one space epic, but the real charm is in how casually strange everything feels. Spaceships look like rocks, robots argue about handbooks and air fryers, and deadly missions are constantly interrupted by petty debates, awkward misunderstandings, and characters taking themselves just seriously enough to be funny.
Gravitido is an appealing lead because he’s powerful, vain, decent, and confused in a very human way. He wants purpose, but he also wants applause. He wants to save people, but he has to learn what freedom actually means after the fighting stops. That gives the book more emotional weight than its jokes first suggest, especially when Gravitido admits, “I’m a weapon, not a leader.” The line captures one of the book’s strongest ideas: being made for one purpose doesn’t have to decide who you become.
The supporting cast gives the novel much of its personality. Obfit brings bluster, loyalty, and unexpected leadership. Megabolt, the anxious ship, adds a great comic rhythm. Henry and Francis are standout robot characters, turning even guard duty into a stream of absurd workplace banter. Gidering, meanwhile, works well as both a galactic threat and a warped mirror of the humans who created her. The book’s comedy keeps the tone light, but underneath it, there’s a sharp interest in domination, fear, prejudice, and what happens when a civilization builds tools to do its worst thinking for it.
Gravitido feels like a big-hearted space comedy with a rebellious streak. It’s packed with oddball worldbuilding, fast dialogue, slapstick action, and enough sincerity to make Gravitido’s journey matter. The book is best when it lets cosmic stakes sit right beside ridiculous arguments, because that’s where its personality shines. It’s a story about a manufactured hero finding his own place in the universe, then making room for everyone else to dance the swishy wishy with him.
Pages: 388 | ASIN : B0GX32PG1M
The Chaos Behind Them
Murder at the Aphrodisia follows a former soap-opera star whose grand reopening of her restored beach mansion turns deadly. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
This book is a sequel to my first book, Death by Chaos. It picks up 10 years after Tasha and her friends help solve a cold case and thankfully, put all the chaos behind them. I originally planned to make that book a one-off but over time, I found myself missing these vibrant characters. Plus, readers kept asking me if there would be any more stories. The characters are now 10 years older and wiser, so I wanted to place them in a more grandeur environment and have them rely more on their individual skills to solve a mystery. Plus, they are goddesses, so I wanted to create a scenario where they would be dressed in their appropriate togas.
What made you want to tell a mystery through such a strongly character-driven lens?
I tend to write stories that I would want to read. I am attracted to fun, colorful, witty characters who somehow always seem to get into a mess and then needs to use their wits to get out. I also enjoy dialogue. Just the way characters speak to each tells volume about their dynamics, and their reactions to discovering a crime scene or new evidence helps move the plot along.
How did you balance the mansion’s glamour with the darker secrets hidden within it?
From the beginning I wanted the mansion to be a main character. I spent hours researching famous Hollywood mansions and home remodeling articles. Tasha spent years and a fortune renovating a dilapidated mansion on the beach, restoring it to its glory. But all the fresh paint in the world cannot hide the dark history, nor the tendency for history to repeat itself.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have just started my fourth book and much to my surprise, I am creating new characters in a new environment. It may be because I have recently attended school reunions, have reconnected with childhood friends, and have had some wonderful visits with cousins, that I have decided to embrace my Polish heritage and create a mystery that forces my main characters to revisit and reexamine her childhood, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Falcon and the Songbird
The Falcon and the Songbird, by Susan Kay Harris, follows April Winford, a perceptive girl coming of age in the Texas Hill Country during the early 1960s, as her private world of horses, family tensions, first love, and friendship is overtaken by the public tremors of Kennedy’s presidency, his assassination, racial injustice, land greed, and the fight to protect a fragile natural habitat. What begins as a young girl’s intimate remembrance widens into a story about conscience, how it wakes, how it wounds, and how it asks ordinary people to become braver than they planned.
I was drawn first to the novel’s strong sense of place. The Hill Country is not merely scenery here; it breathes, with its rain-starved grass, limestone ridges, ranch roads, birdsong, and the half-wild freedom of Moona, April’s horse. Harris writes April’s girlhood with a vivid inwardness, catching the awkwardness of adolescence without making it small. April is romantic, stubborn, naïve, observant, and sometimes painfully wrong, which makes her feel alive. The book is at its best when it lets innocence brush against danger before April fully understands what she has encountered.
I loved the way the novel braids personal awakening with historical disillusionment. Kennedy’s assassination does not sit in the background as decoration; it alters the moral weather of the book. The story can be sprawling, and at times its political conversations become more explicit than subtle, but I appreciated its ambition. It wants to connect a girl’s first difficult loyalties, to her mother, to Clay, to Ronnie, to the land itself, with the larger betrayals of a country entering a darker age. That gives the novel a raw, earnest charge, a kind of flint-struck sincerity.
I think this book is best suited for readers who enjoy reflective historical fiction, coming-of-age novels, Southern fiction, and stories about moral courage. Readers who admire the ethical awakening and regional atmosphere of To Kill a Mockingbird may find a familiar gravity here, though Harris’s novel is more openly political and more meditative in its treatment of land, memory, and loss. The Falcon and the Songbird is a heartfelt and searching novel about the hour when childhood ends, and conscience begins to sing.
Pages: 320 | ISBN : 978-2839949330
The Shadowy, High-contrast Look
Double On The Murder follows a private investigator who gets pulled into a missing persons case that engulfs everyone connected to it in violence, secrets, and grief. What attracts you to the hardboiled detective tradition?
My father was a fan of noir / hardboiled detective movies. That’s where my exposure to the genre came from, when I was a kid. And being a photographic artist, I was drawn to the shadowy, high-contrast look. I liked the way the men and women dressed, too, especially the sexy femme fatales. As for the violence, secrets, and grief, that’s part of what makes the genre tick. By the time I was in my twenties, I had read Hammett’s and Chandler’s works, along with many other writers of the genre, which amounted to more influence and inspiration.
How much of the plot was planned in advance, and how much developed as you wrote?
For DOUBLE ON THE MURDER, the plot developed on its own. I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t plan it. Didn’t have notes to follow. Didn’t have a storyline. I got the characters talking and moving around and they told me what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go. As a first time novelist it was an exciting process, that is, the challenge to finish a crime novel and to have it make sense – without days or months of planning it. As the novel developed, and seeing the style that was evolving, my aim then was to incorporate that classic crime noir format into the story without being too cliché, while manipulating that style into a more cinematic-poetic form, and then adding as much originality as I could conjure. I never stressed over having to complete the story, though. Either I finished it or I didn’t. It was that simple, that relaxed.
Despite its violence, the book pays close attention to grief and loss. Why was that emotional dimension important?
It wasn’t important to me other than the fact that I had experienced a good amount of loss in my life, starting at an early age. So I know what genuine grief and loss feels like, which made it effortless for me to write those feelings into the story.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Novel Two is another Joe Stone mystery. I’m thirty chapters into that story. The title of the book is under wraps until it’s published, maybe in late 2027.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
Motivated by the murder of his closest friend, Joe Stone investigates several brutal killings that lead to a trail of grim secrets. Troubled by childhood tragedies and by his all-consuming drive to stop the elusive killer. Stone comes to the realization that life is nothing more than a slap in the face and a lonely funeral.
Nero’s Nile
Nero’s Nile, by Rowan O’Neill, is a historical fiction adventure that follows Emperor Nero’s obsession with discovering the source of the Nile. To carry out that ambition, he draws Titus Statilius Taurus back from the quiet life he has earned and sends him into Egypt and beyond, while Rome itself rots under ambition, violence, grief, and spectacle. The novel moves between imperial politics and expeditionary danger, mixing Roman history, Egyptian myth, and supernatural menace into a fast, dramatic story about power and the price of being useful to people who see the world as something to own.
What stood out to me first was the pace. This book doesn’t linger at the doorway. It kicks it open. O’Neill writes in bold strokes, and the result is a novel that often feels closer to a sword-and-sandals epic than a restrained historical drama. Battles, assassinations, betrayals, crocodile attacks, ancient temples, and political murders arrive with steady force. I liked that confidence. The writing sometimes favors impact over subtlety, especially in the dialogue, where characters often say exactly what they mean and say it loudly. That can make some scenes feel theatrical rather than natural. But honestly, that theatrical quality also fits Nero. His world is all performance, blood, gold, and applause, so the heightened style makes a strange kind of sense.
I was most interested in the author’s choice to make the Nile expedition more than a geographic mystery. The book treats the river almost like a living border between history and myth. Titus becomes the steadier center of the novel, a soldier who wants peace but keeps getting pulled toward other men’s dreams of glory. Nero, meanwhile, is written as both ridiculous and dangerous, which can, at times, be a hard balance to hold. He is vain, childish, cruel, and sometimes oddly sad. I found that mix compelling, even when the character work leans broad. The historical fiction genre gives the novel its bones, but the adventure and supernatural elements give it its pulse. By the time the darker mythic material moves closer to the surface, the book has shifted from Roman intrigue into something stranger and more feverish.
I would recommend Nero’s Nile to readers who enjoy historical fiction that is energetic, dramatic, and unafraid to bend history for the sake of the story. If you like ancient Rome, dangerous quests, myth-soaked adventure, and a plot that keeps throwing new hazards into the river, they will probably have a good time with it. I did. The book is a torchlit march into empire, obsession, and chaos, and it knows exactly the kind of spectacle it wants to be.
Pages: 269 | ASIN : B0GY27MQ2B
Healing Is Rarely A Straight Path
Inspiring Book of Poems, Dreams, and Stories is a collection of faith-centered reflections, poems, dream-visions, and encouragements about survival, healing, and spiritual freedom. What inspired you to share this collection with readers?
My inspiration came from my own journey through trauma, healing, and faith. Writing became a way to process pain, reflect on God’s presence in difficult seasons, and find hope in the midst of uncertainty. I wanted to share these poems because I know many people carry silent struggles. If my words could help even one person feel less alone and encourage them to trust God through their own journey, then sharing this collection would be worthwhile.
Why was it important to include both struggle and hope?
Because healing is rarely a straight path. Real life contains both suffering and hope, pain and restoration. I wanted the poems to be honest about the difficulties we face while also pointing readers toward the possibility of healing. My faith taught me that God often works through our struggles, and I wanted the collection to reflect that truth.
How do dreams influence your creative and spiritual life?
Dreams have often served as a source of reflection and inspiration in my spiritual journey. Some dreams have encouraged me, challenged me, or deepened my faith. They have inspired poems and reflections that helped me explore God’s presence, purpose, and guidance in my life.
Are there themes or experiences you would like to explore more deeply in your next work?
Yes. In my next collection, The Art of Liberation: A Poetic Reflection, I explore themes of freedom, surrender, spiritual renewal, self-worth, and trusting God through life’s transitions. It continues the healing journey begun in my first two books while focusing more deeply on liberation, faith, and becoming the person God created us to be.
Author Links: Goodreads | X | Facebook | Website
Inspiring Book of Poems, Dreams and Stories is more than a poetry collection. It is a place to pause, breathe, and find peace when life feels overwhelming.
These faith-based poems speak to the heart in real and personal moments. Through life’s storms, healing, faith, and hope, this book meets you exactly where you are. If you have ever felt lost, searching, or in need of encouragement, these words were written with you in mind.
Each piece is short, meaningful, and easy to return to. The poems are designed to be read in a single moment, yet their message stays with you, offering comfort and reflection long after the page is turned.
Written from a journey of overcoming life’s struggles, Lisa McCarthy shares honest reflections on faith, resilience, and finding strength through God, even in difficult seasons.
If you are looking for something gentle, uplifting, and deeply encouraging, this is a collection you will want to keep close and return to whenever you need it.
