Blog Archives
Timing is Everything
Timothy Bernard Carr’s Timing Is Everything is an ambitious alternate history novel that mixes time travel fiction, baseball historical fiction, and one man’s search for redemption. Mark Killoran begins as a dispirited Detroit Tigers executive in 2003, weighed down by alcoholism, family estrangement, and grief from the Vietnam War. A mysterious doorway sends him into baseball’s past, where his knowledge gives him the chance to reshape history. The premise quickly becomes larger than a wish-fulfillment fantasy, asking what might happen if a struggling person found purpose by creating second chances for others.
The richest sections are rooted in baseball history. Carr clearly enjoys the statistics, personalities, ballparks, and executive maneuvering that shaped the sport. Mark saves Jim Thorpe’s Olympic legacy, brings Babe Ruth to Detroit as a player-manager, recruits Ty Cobb as an executive, and helps integrate Major League Baseball years ahead of schedule. Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Turkey Stearnes, Oscar Charleston, and Monte Irvin become the core of a formidable Tigers dynasty, while Mickey Mantle receives an opportunity to build a healthier, longer career. Fans of baseball fiction and Detroit Tigers history will have plenty to chew on, especially when Carr constructs new lineups, pennant races, records, and World Series results from familiar names.
As Mark’s influence expands, Timing Is Everything grows into a broad work of speculative fiction. Baseball integration helps accelerate social change, an integrated military transforms race relations, and a conversation with John F. Kennedy produces a dramatically different political future. Carr’s alternate history is openly optimistic and driven by the idea that timely action can redirect institutions, nations, and individual lives. The historical background and explanatory passages give the novel the feeling of an enthusiastic storyteller walking readers through every ripple in the revised timeline.
This time travel novel is about choosing to use knowledge in service of other people. Mark’s journey gains emotional weight from his sobriety, his longing for his family, and his gradual understanding that redemption comes through sustained effort. The final return to 2003 brings the book’s many revisions together in a warm, personal payoff, with the altered Tigers legacy standing beside the restored relationships that matter most to him. Timing Is Everything will speak most to readers who enjoy baseball historical fiction, counterfactual history, and hopeful stories about how one well-timed decision can echo across generations.
Pages: 206 | ASIN : B0GN3CTRSF
Sell, Sell, Sell!
David F. D’Orazi’s Sell, Sell, Sell! is part sales guide, part career memoir, and part collection of life lessons gathered over more than four decades in the profession. D’Orazi opens with practical advice about relationship selling, listening, goal setting, prospecting, follow-up, product knowledge, and closing, then shifts into the story of how those ideas took shape over the course of his life. His central belief is simple and consistent: successful selling grows out of understanding people, earning their trust, solving real problems, and staying in touch long after the first conversation. That philosophy gives the book a clear sense of purpose from the beginning.
The book becomes most engaging when D’Orazi connects a lesson to something that actually happened to him. His stories range from selling leftover funeral flowers as an eight-year-old to building multimillion-dollar sales territories, winning major aerospace and industrial accounts, losing jobs, rebuilding his career, investing in real estate, and eventually creating an independent arrangement that allowed him to keep selling well into his seventies. These episodes give the advice personality and make the book feel like a conversation with an experienced salesperson who has accumulated a lifetime of stories. Some of the most memorable sections involve the less glamorous side of selling: showing up during graveyard shifts to understand workers’ problems, repairing relationships after mistakes, following prospects for months, and continuing to learn the technical details behind the products he represented.
D’Orazi returns to a handful of ideas, especially persistence, preparation, confidence, relationships, and follow-up. That repetition becomes part of the book’s rhythm and reinforces how strongly he believes sales success comes from habits practiced over years. His enthusiasm for the profession is unmistakable, and he measures success in tangible terms such as commissions, financial independence, major accounts, travel, investments, and career freedom. Yet the later chapters broaden that definition. His discussion of work and family is especially revealing because he reflects on the personal cost of being constantly driven and argues that long-term success also requires sleep, health, family time, boundaries, and presence. That section gives the book a more reflective tone and rounds out the relentless sales energy of the earlier chapters.
I recommend Sell, Sell, Sell! most to people who are early in a sales career, moving into B2B or relationship-based selling, running a small business, or simply energized by first-person stories about building a career through persistence and human connection. Experienced salespeople may also enjoy comparing D’Orazi’s old-school, highly personal approach with the way they work today. Readers who like business books built around anecdotes will probably appreciate his conversational style, because almost every principle arrives with a story attached. By the end, the book feels less like a technical manual than a veteran salesperson handing down the ideas he wants the next generation to remember: know what you’re selling, keep learning, treat relationships as long-term investments, stay ready for opportunity, and make room for a life beyond the next deal.
Pages: 118 | ASIN : B0FRJ2679T
Hope, Hearts & Forever
Sophie Bartow’s Hope, Hearts & Forever is a dual-timeline romance that combines a historical love story, contemporary mystery, family history, and a touch of the supernatural. Set in the close-knit town of Swan Harbor, the novel treats hope as more than an emotion. It becomes part of the town’s identity, connected to its swans, its founding families, and a mystery that has survived for generations. The present-day story follows Emma Foster and Killian as their approaching wedding coincides with a crisis involving Jonesy, Swan Harbor’s beloved swan. As his condition worsens, they turn to old journals and a family charm bracelet in search of an answer. The prologue establishes the stakes with a particularly effective line: “Until then, Swan Harbor is living on borrowed hope.” From there, the novel develops that idea through both the town’s history and the relationships at its center.
Much of the book is devoted to Hope Prince and Ian Jones, whose story begins in 1717. Hope is grieving her mother while also facing a future increasingly shaped by her father’s expectations. Ian arrives in Swan Harbor as the captain of the El corazón del Rubí, although his circumstances and ambitions make him more complicated than the appearance of a dangerous sea captain suggests. Their attraction develops alongside Ian’s pursuit of the El corazón de la Rosa and the threat connected to its captain. Bartow gives Hope and Ian’s relationship a strong sense of inevitability through the unusual connection they share, particularly their ability to sense one another’s emotions and heartbeats. At the same time, their romance repeatedly asks them to make deliberate choices about trust, family, responsibility, and the kind of life they want to build together.
The historical story also supplies the emotional foundation for the present-day mystery. Emma and Killian aren’t simply researching distant ancestors. As they read the journals, the consequences of Hope and Ian’s choices become increasingly relevant to Emma’s own future and to Swan Harbor itself. This structure allows the novel to move between an intimate romance and a larger story about inherited consequences. It also gives the title considerable weight. “Hope” refers to a woman, a swan, a town’s survival, and the emotional force that connects one generation to another.
One of the novel’s strongest qualities is its emphasis on relationships as active sources of strength. Romantic love is central, but Bartow also gives substantial attention to parents, siblings, friends, and the larger Swan Harbor community. Characters frequently depend on one another to interpret the past or face a difficult decision, which makes the resolution feel communal. The supernatural elements fit naturally into that approach because Swan Harbor operates according to its own history and traditions. Love in this novel is something that leaves evidence behind, shapes later generations, and can influence the future.
Hope, Hearts & Forever is a generational love story built around the mythology of one small town. The romance between Hope and Ian supplies its historical heart, while Emma and Killian give the past a present-day purpose. The mystery creates momentum, but the book’s lasting interest comes from the connections among its characters and from the way Bartow turns Swan Harbor’s history into something its current residents must actively understand. For readers invested in interconnected characters, family legacies, historical romance, and small-town stories with supernatural elements, Hope, Hearts & Forever offers a layered continuation of a community whose past remains inseparable from its future.
Pages: 454 | ASIN : B092Q72Z56
Grief Is Not Simple
The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four follows a grieving potions witch whose enchanted baking draws her into the secret magical world of 1920s Paris, where a deadly anti-witch forces her to decide how to carry the past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Thanks for having me! The original inspiration, and my go-to description of the book, came from having watched Practical Magic one day. When the credits rolled, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby was suggested as the next film to watch. I thought it’d be a lot of fun to write about witches in the Roaring Twenties, and then I watched Chocolat a few weeks later and realized my love for baking also had to play an important role in the plot.
Serena’s magic is expressed through baking, with ingredients carrying different magical properties and intentions. How did you develop the rules for her culinary magic, and did any real-world traditions involving herbs, flowers, or food inspire it?
I learned a lot about the mystical properties of botanical ingredients from social media accounts from real-life practitioners of witchcraft. These content creators are incredible in how much they teach their followers about divinity in nature, and I’m forever grateful for the knowledge and wisdom they pass on to their followers. I also referenced books about herbal magic when necessary. Sometimes you come across differences in opinions, but the research on this topic helped me learn the guidelines of these practices and to focus on what Serena’s intentions would be. I kept a document as I wrote of all of the ingredients Serena uses throughout the story and what charm would accompany each ingredient so as to keep my rules in order.
Paris feels almost like a character in the novel, from pâtisseries and speakeasies to glamoured flower shops and wintry train stations. What drew you to 1920s Paris as the setting for Serena’s story?
Paris is one of my favorite cities, so perhaps there’s a bit of bias that I set the story there, but I also feel like it was a good location because it was only nine years or so after the Art Nouveau movement, so the artistic whimsy of the city fits in well with the glamor and glitz of the world Serena was coming from in New York and the overall fantasy element of the story.
The novel connects romantic love, friendship, chosen family, and remembrance rather than treating them as separate emotional journeys. What did you most want readers to take away from Serena’s evolving understanding of love after loss?
I hope they take away the idea that grief is not always linear; nor is it simple. Sometimes it’s filled with moments of heartache and longing for the person who has passed, and other times, it’s still present while you laugh with new friends, find love, or eat a slice of lemon cake. I didn’t want Serena to be sad and sad only in this story. First of all, that would be a really hard book to read, but secondly, it’s also not realistic. Love after loss doesn’t mean that the relationship is gone; it’s just different now.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
But the past has not escaped Serena yet. Through the spellwork, potions, and tarot readings of Marie and her coven, Serena learns her past is on its way to find her, and though she has been able to lie low in Paris by selling charmed cakes that promise love, luck, and happiness, the time to find a secret mausoleum for the urn’s final resting place is running out, and the only one who can help might very well be Alexandre, Serena’s handsome customer with a secret of his very own.
A cozy yet dark tale for fans of Practical Magic, The Great Gatsby, and Chocolat, The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four is the perfect book for a wintery night full of love, magic, and desserts.
Life Is Hard and Then You Fly: How Your Nine Instinctive Responses Can Turn Pain into Purpose Through the Revolutionary Healing Power of SMGI®
Life Is Hard and Then You Fly is a warm, candid blend of memoir, healing guide, and invitation to explore the inner world. Gina Vance draws on her personal history, decades of client work, and the method she developed, Somatic Mindful Guided Imagery, to show how painful experiences can shape the body, emotions, relationships, and sense of self. Her central message is generous and reassuring: the reactions that trouble us often began as intelligent attempts to survive, stay safe, and remain connected to love.
The book’s most distinctive contribution is its map of nine instinctive responses: Avoid, Submit, Surrender, Fight, Flight, Freeze, Attach, Annihilate, and Repeat. Vance gives each response a full emotional vocabulary, illustrating how it can protect us in one moment and continue operating long after the danger has passed. She then translates the framework into practical exercises involving breath, bodily awareness, guided imagery, inner allies, emotional release, and the rescue of younger or fragmented parts. The structure makes a complex approach surprisingly easy to follow and gives readers plenty of places to begin.
Vance’s voice is conversational, playful, spiritually open, and remarkably frank. She writes about childhood violence, chronic pain, motherhood, sexuality, grief, suicidal thoughts, and healing with an honesty that feels authentic. Her humor brings welcome air into difficult material, while the many client stories show the method in motion. Scientific ideas, hypnotherapy, parts work, shamanic traditions, energy practices, angels, ancestral memory, and past-life imagery all share space in her expansive understanding of healing.
This is a hands-on book for readers who want to build a kinder relationship with their bodies, their histories, and the protective parts of themselves that have been working overtime. Its exercises encourage curiosity in place of shame and offer a memorable way to turn triggers into signals, signals into insight, and insight into purposeful action. Vance’s deepest achievement is helping readers see survival itself as evidence of resourcefulness, courage, and an enduring capacity for love. Life Is Hard and Then You Fly turns survival into a language of self-compassion, then gives readers the tools to make that language a way of life.
Pages: 419 | ASIN: B0FHQF45GS
Understanding Our Forefathers
Before the Revolution reveals the forgotten century of exchange between Cuba and the U.S. through the businesses, ballfields, music, science, and family memories that connected two neighboring cultures. Why was this an important book for you to write?
During the last 67 years, the history of the Republic of Cuba’s era of progress has never been taught in US and Cuban classrooms. The Cuban regime does not want to acknowledge the 100 years of friendship with the United States—a country and people they refer to as Imperialist. It is not taught in the United States either. The story of a troublesome communist island which once hosted Soviet missiles aimed at the US is not part of the standard American history curriculum, either. I sought to eliminate this vacuum of knowledge by spending a year researching 100 years of documents between Cuba and the United States stored within the US Library of Congress and then writing a book about it.
Understanding our forefathers’ struggles, successes, and failures can help move history from lifeless texts onto richer human perspectives. I seek to provide the people of both nations with an enlightenment capable of advancing a dialogue that can reset relationships between nations.
Of all the places you researched, which most changed your understanding of pre-revolutionary Cuba?
The most unexpected history lesson I discovered during my year-long research in the US Library of Congress was Thomas Jefferson’s role in the birth of the sovereign and independent Republic of Cuba.
In 1823, US Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson in which he wrote about Cuba’s preparation for a War of Independence from Spain. He writes that the war would lead to a destabilization of Cuba and a weakened Spanish army. This, he worried, might create an opportunity for England to take over the island of Cuba and continue north through Spanish-controlled Florida—forcing the United States to eventually have to fight a second War of Independence with England. Adams asked Jefferson’s support in annexing Cuba.
Thomas Jefferson responded with his own letter in which he disagreed with the American annexation of the island. People of a small island brave enough to fight the greatest colonial power of its time, he mussed, would make them fiercely independent people that could never be governed. The US would be better off partnering with a nascent Cuba than attempting to control those who won’t be controlled. Jefferson’s letter would become US policy towards Cuba during the next 137 years.
Can it be argued that as a result of his letter, Thomas Jefferson was in fact the father of two countries?
Your own childhood memories and family history gradually become part of the larger story. How did you decide where to place yourself in the book and where to step back?
I decided that my role in the book would be best in cameo appearances in order to introduce human context to the storytelling of a history book. Born in 1951, I was a child witness to the final years of the US and Cuba’s era of friendship and progress. I am in fact a part of the story.
Baseball is one of the book’s most personal and lively threads. What do you think the history of Cuban and American players reveals that conventional diplomatic history misses?
Baseball is more than just a game, it is about family moments, memories made, allegiances formed, loyalty, and life lessons learned. It bonds families with friends and strangers. Heals nations and opens doorways to understanding and acceptance. As such, baseball in Cuba was a part of the Cuban family conscience, an opportunity for American black players to play with Cubans and white American Major Leaguers in a tropical climate, and a bridge to future integrated Major League Baseball teams.
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During the US-Cuba era of progress, the friendship between these two countries was strong, and their differences were few. It was an era of common goals and hope. The future had never seemed brighter. Today, the story of the US-Cuba years of progress lives on in the structures it left behind on the island. They stand as silent witnesses to this beautiful and rewarding time.
Journey with author Mario Cartaya into the history of this era, documented in the historical records of the time—catalogued in the US Library of Congress, US National Archives, US Department of State, US Naval Mission, various academic and museum archives, as well as in concurrent national/international newspapers and journals. Discover the documents, persons, and buildings that attest to the US-Cuba story of friendship rooted in shared human values, cultures, needs, assistance, and goodwill.
Before the Revolution offers a richer human perspective that can advance dialogues aimed at resetting the relationship between these two nations. For the US and Cuba, the time for this conversation has come.
Witnesses: Nine Stories From The Margins Of The Gospels
Witnesses by Mike Casper is a Gospel-inspired short story collection that places ordinary people at the edges of familiar biblical events. This Christian historical fiction moves through nine distinct perspectives, including a mischievous child at Jesus’s baptism, a tilapia enlisted to retrieve the temple-tax coin, a corrupt tax collector, Joseph of Nazareth, the Samaritan woman, the Gerasene demoniac, and an aging Pontius Pilate. Casper’s central idea is compelling: history’s sacred moments were also confusing, physical, noisy events experienced by people who understood only part of what they saw.
The variety of narrators gives this biblical fiction much of its personality. “Whatever That Means” captures a child’s irreverent curiosity, while “The Angel and the Fish” turns obedience into playful aquatic comedy. The longer “The Tax Collector’s Gala” offers the collection’s richest social world, filled with guilty luxury, compromised friendships, and grace quietly working through Debra’s prayers and generosity. “Legion” is appropriately claustrophobic, its fractured voice conveying a man overwhelmed by commands that have nearly erased his identity. The closing story, “Death Comes Pretty,” then gives the book its most searching moral question as Pilate considers responsibility, choice, and the crucifixion he authorized.
Casper’s Christian short stories are grounded in work, bodies, and sensory detail. Builders assess roofs, bakers calculate provisions, a dying carpenter imagines heaven through flawless joinery, and holiness arrives amid sweat, blood, dust, animal smells, and shared food. That physical attention keeps the collection conversational even when its theology is direct. The emotional resolutions tend to arrive clearly, often through healing, forgiveness, or a decision to follow Jesus, giving the book an earnest devotional character. Its most affecting scenes are quieter ones, such as Silki holding Cyrus’s face, Simon’s wife repeating his forgotten name, and Joseph recognizing the traveler beside him.
As a work of biblical historical fiction, Witnesses offers an accessible, compassionate look at faith from the margins of the Gospels. Its humor, sorrow, miracles, and moral reckonings are tied together by the question of what people do after encountering something larger than their understanding. Two discussion guides, suggested readings, and biblical references make it especially well suited to Christian book clubs, church groups, and readers who enjoy faith-based fiction with plenty to discuss. The collection’s lasting impression comes from its witnesses themselves: flawed, practical people who meet the sacred in the middle of the lives they’re already living.
Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GX9Y2JL1
World Lines: From space-time to apocalypse
World Lines by EB Diamond is a science fiction adventure with the restless mind of a thought experiment and the voice of someone telling you an increasingly strange story across the kitchen table. At its center is Professor Nathan Sloan, a physicist whose fascination with space-time becomes a deeply personal quest to understand what happens when a human “world line” refuses to behave normally. His theory suggests that certain people, known as Alternates, can cross time, space, and dimensions along unusual paths, turning ideas like ghosts, prophecy, disappearance, and even immortality into problems that might be plotted on a graph. Around that premise, Diamond builds an adventure involving ancient Egypt, a neutrino mine in Newfoundland, a missing graduate student, an Air Force pilot in North Africa, a mysterious emerald ring, an eccentric businessman, a shape-shifting mathematician, and RCR23, a decidedly peculiar robot who becomes one of the story’s most important links between realities.
I think what gives the novel its personality is the way Diamond mixes serious scientific curiosity with absurdity, wordplay, literary references, and a narrator who’s perfectly willing to interrupt the proceedings. Physics and metaphysics bump into Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick, fairy tales, religion, archaeology, computer technology, and jokes about the habits of scientists. TD1 and TD2 can argue about invisible particles or a fisherman’s “magnetic pole” while the fate of civilization hangs somewhere in the background. Marco Spelling can worry about turning a profit from a disaster-prediction business while realizing that a successful prediction might leave nobody around to collect the money. That humor isn’t decoration. It’s part of the book’s way of thinking. Diamond repeatedly follows logic until it circles back on itself, becomes ridiculous, and then unexpectedly raises a question worth considering. The result is a novel that feels curious, playful, argumentative, and cheerfully unwilling to stay inside a single genre.
Beneath all that intellectual play is a surprisingly human story about people trying to recover what they’ve lost. Sloan’s obsession reaches back to the death of his wife, Jean, and his discovery of an impossibly modern ring in an ancient setting. His daughter Darien, tough, impatient, resourceful, and fiercely loyal, takes up the search when Richard Watson disappears during Sloan’s experiment. Andrew McBarrister, the enigmatic Alternate who appears in different identities and different moments, gives the novel another emotional thread as protector, observer, mathematician, and Fisherman. The characters keep asking scientific questions, but many of the questions underneath them are painfully ordinary: Where did someone we love go? Can we reach them again? Does death represent an ending, a transition, or simply a point we can’t see beyond? That emotional current gives weight to a story filled with cosmic forces and multidimensional speculation. The apocalypse may provide the scale, but mortality provides the stakes.
By the end, World Lines brings its scientists, soldiers, Alternates, skeptics, believers, and competing explanations together at the Newfoundland mountain, where the abstract questions become immediate and physical. The conclusion is eerie, sad, strange, and fittingly circular. Diamond doesn’t turn the book into an answer key. The novel remains committed to uncertainty, leaving the reader to decide how much has been proved, how much has been imagined, and whether those categories were ever as separate as we thought. That openness feels entirely appropriate for a book so interested in the boundaries between science and faith, life and death, reality and story, and one moment in time and another. World Lines invites you to look at a straight line, wonder where else it might lead, and entertain the possibility that an ending is simply the point where our view runs out. World Lines turns the mysteries of time, death, and the universe into a funny, imaginative adventure that leaves you wondering whether the impossible is simply reality seen from the wrong dimension.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0D9TQNDQX
