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I came 2 meditation
Still and quiet
Fresh from sleep.

Mindless, I abdicated
All thoughts and plans
In2 God’s hands.

Thirty minutes later
I emerged reconnected
Centered.

As I sat down 2 table
He was there
Albino smooth.

A shadowy hallow
Where an eye cavity
Might otherwise B.

Tender was his demeanor
Reflective pools of brandy
His mellow gaze.

Dawn blinded me
With naught visible by a tiny light
Burning with a promise of eternity.

As I recognized the Spirit within.

Karen Micallef Tylutki
2009-11-09

Well, I finally did it! I have my first novel published. I never thought it would happen and my impatience after submitting the manuscript to the publisher (AuthorHouse) made the journey seem twice as long. In reality, though, I have to commend AuthorHouse. They did a very good job, helping me with this project. The book, 'A Murder In Zurich', is now for sale on their website and hopefully, within a few weeks, at Amazon.com. I hope my second one goes just as easily. The cover photo is in the photo file.

Suggested by one of your members that I should post the first page, is this any good or should I just stick with taking pictures?

Bangkok's new international airport, already a year old, still had the smell of fresh paint.
The beginning rays of sunlight,
just starting to add color to the large 150 foot high pavilion windows, were the only telltale
sign of what time it was.
People were racing around fighting over a shortage of luggage carts, queing up in long lines
to check in. The only winners
seemed to be the first class and business travelers who enjoyed an added amount of attention.
The chaos not
unlike the 2 hour drive to get here in rush hour traffic. A trip that at any other time might
have taken half as long.
My hands and shoulder were aching from the burning weight of my daughter's luggage. A subtle
reminder that I wasn't going
to see her for a long while.
Estee just grabbed onto my elbow with both hands as we walked and layed her head on my shoulder.
Estee was the first to see them, "Daddy, they're here!"
"Go ahead baby girl, I'll catch up."
Estee almost broke out in a skip, flashing back a smile as she went to greet the bunch of people
who came to see her off on
her first trip abroad by herself.
My mouth dried up and I wished I hadn't quit smoking cigarettes a week earlier. This was the
first time I was seeing the
family since my wife, Ta, had had her company Christmas party 8 months ago.
My sister-in-law Koi, still wearing her hair long with a speckled teeshirt, short denim dress
and diesel sneakers
still looked like the prom queen I had met years ago in college. Feeling like a pack mule as I
slowly got closer to the group,
I could see her admiring one of Ta's new jewelry designs. Something she had made for a European
customer. Ta had cut her hair
and boosted it with highlights. She was wearing a long robe jacket and her hands were clustered.
as usual, with jewelry.
"TJ!", one of my brothers-in-law, dressed up like a peacock in his police major uniform, came
over to help me out with the bags.

I've been posting material on what I've learned in the last two years on self promotion of my published novels. The intent has been to share lessons learned of what worked and did not for me personally. I just posted a "wrap up" article that discusses the benefits I've observed from 21 promotion avenues I have tried. I would have posted here but it's several pages long. The analysis is based on statistics I collected using a stat counter package.

In summary, my top and bottom three promo activities have been:

100 Special recognition
90 Reviews
75 Site participative contest
------------
5 Rings
5 Directories
1 Advertising

The numbers in front indicate the return on investment (resulting site hits/time spend during promotion). Thus a score of 100 is my best and a score of 1 is my worst. All 21 activities are discussed in the article along with other author’s experiences.

My intend is to help newbies shell shocked by the confusing array of self promotion opportunities, as I was two years ago. The discussion is offered "as is" and your experience may be different. I can be reached via my website for comments/questions.

To read the material go to Davisstories.com and click the right most "Article" button near the top. This is the last in a series of articles I've written to share my experience and I hope those that read it find the material helpful.

Michael Davis (Davisstories.com)
Author of the year, 2008

I finally discovered that link "Gifts".
After trying to answer all those thoughful comments I got an invitation to join this group.
To my amazement, I discovered I was already a member.
I apologise for being so politically inclined and motivated elsewhere. I forgot or should I say avoided what has been on my mind forever.
I write but have, after my ex destroyed my journals, shied away from writing a true Thai-American love story filled with political reality.
My question is, if I really wrote it, how could I get it published? And could I do it without anyone here knowing it was me.
I actually have about 900 pages of hand written notes. They are just notes, not prose, just remembering. Coming here in 74, getting chased out of the house with a gun because my father-in-law had a servant tell him I kissed his daughter. Jumping over the fence and hiding in the jungle with snakes and lizards, barefoot, 100 degree weather. Why did I secretly marry the daughter of a Bangkok mayor.
I would write it if I thought someone would see it.
Want a good book? Susanne Pari, The Fortune Catcher. I spent 6 months reviewing creative writing and I really wanted her book. Trouble was a $2 novel on Amazon. They wouldn't send it to me. I went to the Red Room website and she sent me an autographed copy. Some people love celebrities, I love great writers.
So anyway, any suggestions...encouragement...and I promise to keep in touch with the group.
TJ

A nurse took the tired, anxious serviceman to the bedside. "Your son is here," she said to the old man. She had to repeat the words several times before the patient's eyes opened.
Heavily sedated because of the pain of his heart attack, he dimly saw the young uniformed Green Beret standing outside the oxygen tent. He reached out his hand. The Green Beret wrapped his toughened fingers around the old man's limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.

The nurse brought a chair so that the elite fighter could sit beside the bed. All through the night the young warrior sat there in the poorly lighted ward, holding the old man's hand and offering him words of love and strength. Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Green Beret move away and rest awhile. He refused. Whenever the nurse came into the ward, he was oblivious of her and of the night noises of the hospital - the clanking of the oxygen tank, the laughter of the night staff members exchanging greetings, the cries and moans of the other patients. Now and then she heard him say a few gentle words. The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son all through the night. Along towards dawn, the old man died. The rugged paratrooper released the now lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the nurse. While she did what she had to do, he waited.

Finally, she returned. She started to offer words of sympathy, but the uniformed warrior interrupted her.

"Who was that man?" he asked.

The nurse was startled, "He was your father," she answered.

"No, he wasn't," the Green Beret replied. "I never saw him before in my life."

"Then why didn't you say something when I took you to him?"

"I knew right away there had been a mistake, but I also knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn't here. When I realized that he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, knowing how much he needed me,...... I stayed."

The next time someone needs you ... just be there. Stay.

We are not human beings going through a temporary spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings going through a temporary human experience.
Walk in peace! Take Care and God Bless.

From The Writer's Almanac November 17, 2009:

On this day in 1936, Scribner's Maxwell Perkins wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe that chronicled one of the most famous conflicts between editor and novelist in the history of American publishing. Perkins had helped to discover the young and unknown Thomas Wolfe (along with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) and helped shape Wolfe's manuscripts into book form. He sat down with Wolfe — and his first manuscript, O, Lost, written in just 20 months — and helped him cut more than 60,000 words; the finished product, published while Wolfe was in his 20s, was still 544 pages long and now entitled Look Homeward, Angel (1929), from a poem by John Milton.

The manuscript for Thomas Wolfe's second work was as lengthy as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Wolfe had written an epic composed of multiple volumes. Perkins insisted it would sell better if it were a manageably sized single-volume book, and he went to work with Wolfe trimming down the tome. Wolfe dedicated that completed novel, Of Time and the River (1935), to Perkins. He wrote in his diary the start of unsent letter to Maxwell Perkins that said, "In all my life, until I met you, I never had a friend." But soon after the publication of Of Time and the River, rumors began to circulate in the literary world that Wolfe's ability to shape his books into something publishable, and his success and his literary genius even, were overly dependent on Maxwell Perkins's editing. Wolfe grew resentful at Perkins for his editing and for the cuts to his manuscripts. Wolfe hinted that he was going to break ties with Scribner's.

Perkins tried to instill confidence into the self-doubting Wolfe, and to preserve their personal and business relationships. He hand-wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe on this day in 1936 that said, "I never knew a soul with whom I felt I was in such fundamentally complete agreement as you. […] You must surely know, though, that any publisher would leap at the chance to publish you."

Despite Perkins's efforts, Wolfe broke ties with Scribner's and signed with Harper and Brothers, and he and Perkins became estranged. Wolfe died at the age of 37 from tuberculosis. On his deathbed he wrote a conciliatory letter to Perkins that concluded: "I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below."