We love interviewing J Alexander Greenwood because he has so much great insight about indie publishing. We also love his John Pilate Mystery Series. So, you can imagine how excited we are to have the opportunity to interview him again, now that he is planning to release his new book Pilate’s 7. For those who aren’t familiar with the wonderful John Pilate Mystery Series, I asked J Alexander Greenwood to tell us about John Pilate, beginning with the first book: “Pilate’s Cross is based on a true story of a real-life murder that happened in 1950’s Nebraska. I took the true story, updated it and added a back story. I thought the book would be a one and done deal. I had a nice response, and I thought about what could happen next if I continued with the characters and took it to the next level. That’s where Pilate’s Key came from.” J Alexander Greenwood took John Pilate to the beach: “He went to Key West to write a book about what happened during Pilate’s Cross.” Alex smiled and added: “A little bit of meta stuff going on. I don’t believe in just doing two things. I’m a Gemini and a second son and I like threes. Shortly thereafter, I came up with Pilate’s Ghost, which I thought would be the end of the series. Pilate’s Ghost wrapped up everything that happened in the first and second books.” But John Pilate’s story did not end with Pilate’s Ghost. J Alexander Greenwood waited about two years and came out with Pilate’s Blood late 2014. Now, Alex is releasing a new book to the John Pilate universe called Pilate’s 7, and it’s not a novel. Pilate’s 7 is a collection of short stories centered on the...

I have to begin with saying… creativity is my life.  For better or worse, I’ve chosen this path, not because it is what I want to do or be.  It simply is what I am: a creator.  You see, I’m driven to do it at my highest peaks of inspiration, as well as my lowest slumps of depression.  Perhaps I would go so far as saying creativity has saved my life, and it has even forged me into the person that I am today: driven. Art, Music, and Literature are my muses, candidly I might add. They are my lovers and have been for many years.  I can confide in them when there is no one else to trust or talk to.  I can express in depth to them my deepest, innermost intimate thoughts.  And because I listen and pay close attention to them, they have given me my greatest accomplishments in life.  These loves have been inspirations for my newly developed art style called Empathicism, to my stories being brought to book form, to all of my songs and, lastly, to my latest album Articles in the Cellar. This collection of music is a summary of influences, crises and turning points of my life.  I grew up in the South listening to a smorgasbord of music that my parents or older brothers would play. That music inspired the sound for this particular album.  I decided on a more vintage sound, because I truly feel much of the music from the 60’s and 70’s still resonates with so many people today, even the people who didn’t grow up in this era.  The horns, the strings, the rhythm guitars and the raw, realness of the voice unadulterated by modern tricks of technology… These are the...

Memoirs of a Girl Who Loves God… This book, my debut novel and my first of many, is a symbol of so many things. It represents a dream come true, hard work, answered prayers, acknowledgment and change. My book is a Young Adult Fiction in the Faith & Spirituality genre. It’s about a struggling fourteen-year-old named Krystal, who is cutting in order to cope with changes in her life. While the story is fiction, the main character is based on a real girl, someone I’ve known forever and love dearly. She is my muse. A plethora of research, interviews and heart went into creating the vivid characters that cross Krystal’s path in Memoirs of a Girl Who Loves God. How did this all come to be? I don’t really know. Something about growing up as an only child gives the imagination an extra spark! Extra sparks do wonders for reading. I’ve been a reader my entire life. In junior high and high school, there would often be a novel on top of my stack of schoolbooks. It was always smaller than everything else in my arms and constantly slid around while I was walking through the halls. Most of the time, the book would have a Stephen King or Dean Koontz title. Because I was painfully shy, I kept just a few close friends and busied myself with reading in my spare time throughout the day. Reading is a lifesaver during moments of awkward silence. My first real memory of enjoying the writing process was in grade school. We’d been learning about the science of weather, and our assignment was to write a weather report. My teacher said we could pick any location, so I chose Mars. My meteorologist was abducted by aliens midway...

Congratulations to smooth jazz, funk and R&B recording artist Kirk Green for winning our first Amused Now Featured Artist Contest! We selected Kirk Green because we love his singing voice and we adore his hit single Ocean Breeze. When I asked Kirk for the back story behind Ocean Breeze, he told me that he was inspired to write the song while attending the Oregon Newport Jazz Festival last year: “I saw all the musicians performing and they were having a great time. I enjoyed relaxing on the beach, enjoying the sunset and listening to smooth jazz. So I said hey, I’m going to write a beautiful song about the experience.” The single Ocean Breeze has been getting a lot of airplay and internet radio airplay. How does Kirk Green get so much exposure for his music? He knocks on doors: “I contacted some DJ’s and let them hear it. I let a few club owners hear it. Fans who normally come to my shows loved it. So, now it’s on the radio.” Kirk Green sounds like he’s been singing his entire life, and he has! Kirk started singing at age five: “My dad was a pastor at a church, so it was imperative that I go to church and sing in the choir. Then I started playing piano. After all those years of paying music developed my inner person, which I could project through my outer person as improvisation and singing.” How did Kirk get into jazz? “Even before high school, I started learning jazz when I played with a creative jazz ensemble under Thera Memory. It kept me out of the street. I played jazz in the after school program at Jefferson High School under the instruction of Jim Little. We traveled to...

Rapper, author, filmmaker and activist Jeremiah Wrong has successfully turned his political cause into a multidimensional artistic career. To Jeremiah Wrong, “It’s been a journey. While we are perfecting our craft and creating a voice, we are also trying to find ways to make money through music. It’s 2015, and everything has changed. We’re merging music with books and plays and curriculums. We want to impact the community while making a profit.” On the music side of his career, Jeremiah Wrong has released three EP’s. Each one reflects his life. I really love the single off da chain from his first L.I.F.E. EP. I can’t sit still when I hear it. Jeremiah Wrong recorded the single with Young Black: “Young Black and I formed the group called L.I.F.E. We took the song and collaborated with a Chicago rapper Eisha. We felt like we were off da chain, and we felt like our city (Louisville, KY) was off da chain. It’s a good opening for that album.” The upbeat single off da chain is so different from my other favorite single I Confess from the Redemption EP. I Confess is raw and moving. I had to know what changed in Jeremiah Wrong’s life: “I had a spiritual transition in my life. I Confess is a confession of my sins. I decided to be transparent and real with my music.” Art reflects life reflects art. Jeremiah Wrong wrote the book They Say I’m Still Not A Man in response to Barak Obama’s claim that African American fathers are missing from families. In response, Jeremiah also filmed an ad, developed several websites and founded a mentorship program. Jeremiah Wrong added political activism and filmmaking credits to his creative resume. Working hard to make a difference, Jeremiah Wrong...

My name is Mark King the author of FRENZY: A Daniel Jones Story and its sequel Daniel Jones DOOM, which are now available for sale around the world. I’m also the writer behind the successful worldwide blog Always hanging around. My varied working life has taken me from an auctioneer to a Court bailiff and then finally to an area operations manager, plus other positions in-between. It has given me a rich tapestry of experiences that has helped feed my imagination, which is now used in my creative work as a successfully published author. One of the big spurs for my writing career was the death of my father-in-law. I’ve started writing stories over the years, but never got passed the second chapter, as the daily tribulations of life requiring my attention took priority. So, my scribbles would end up in a drawer waiting for the day when I had time to finish them.  It was after this heart breaking event that I realized you can never guarantee tomorrow will arrive. I made the decision to resign from my secure job during the biggest world recession in living memory to concentrate purely on writing. Two years later, I published my first book, FRENZY: A Daniel Jones Story. I’m now working on the third book in the series, which at the moment I have titled REVENGE, although I’m still toiling with various different options. I’m going to see how the book pans out as I write the manuscript, before I decide on the final title. The best advice I can give is to be prepared for disappointment. It starts from the beginning and will carry on throughout your career. It’s doesn’t matter what field your artistic talent lies. Don’t be surprised when you receive your...

My thanks to Cynthia Kahn for asking me back to do a second guest blog. I had no idea when I submitted the first one that it would gain so much attention. Hardly a day goes by, even now, without Cynthia thanking people for including my post in their papers, and I know she’s made a great contribution to spreading the word about my writing. This blog will be totally different from the first. Yes, I’ve added another book to my series (details below) and finished my online book, garnering a staggering readership with over 3,000 new readers each month adding to the figures. However, with the centenary of the 1st World War this year, I have to share with you a trip my family took me on, to France, two years ago. I remember it often; much more these last few weeks, leading up to Armistice Day, apart from the months that followed my initial visit. My family took me to Oradour-sur-Glane, a commune in the Haute-Vienne department of the Limousin region in west-central France. The original population was destroyed on 10–June-1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, but on the orders of the then French president, Charles de Gaulle, the original has been maintained as a permanent memorial and museum. The paragraph above is grim reading. I was warned by members of my family about the atmosphere of the whole place. That being said, I really wasn’t prepared for how tangible the emotion was, walking around the commune. Every building and the burned out cars were left exactly how they were found, after the massacre, as a memorial to all...

Indie author Jeff Martin publishes an amazing blog called The Oak Wheel, which is a mixture of poetry, stories and random thoughts. Jeff calls it his Labor of Love. As Jeff Martin told me, “The Oak Wheel started as a venue for me to promote my own writing, poetry and short stories. It quickly became an amalgam of other fiction authors that I met through social media. Today, it’s almost like an online newspaper.” When I asked Jeff where he gets his inspiration for posts, he smiled: “I just see what my whim and fancy is for the day. When I write short stories, I often use writing prompts.” Jeff Martin is currently working on two novels, a fantasy and a sci-fi thriller. Jeff describes his fantasy novel: “It’s kindda my baby. It’s based on the idea of The Oak Wheel. The story is set in a world where there are a group of gods and goddesses, Greek tragedy style, that rule over this world and gamble over the fate of this world. The series is about the trials and tribulations of the people that have to deal with the repercussions of the gambling.” The sci-fi thriller has a dystopian theme: “A calamitous event occurs on Earth that forces a group of astronauts to orbit the Earth for over 10,000 years. The captain goes nuts and decides that he wants to go back to the planet.” Jeff Martin is working on both books simultaneously. He plans to have both books edited by the end of this year. He’s debating whether to self-publish or go through the long query route (and send his manuscripts out to publishers). Jeff hopes to publish both books by the summer of 2015. Although Jeff does not have a formal...

El Mono is the novel that I was inspired to write on coming to live and work in Colombia in 2011. I guess there had been the urge to write a novel buried deep inside me for years, if not decades, but I didn’t actually sit down and begin in earnest until a number of factors conspired to make me decide that, yes, this was the time and place to start. There were both negative and positive impulses involved. Firstly my job: strange though it may seem, the many years of lecturing in Economics (what?) and explaining complex academic theories in a step-by-step manner gave me the experience of how to unravel a story and carry students along with me and keep them up with the plot. Meanwhile, the demand of maintaining academic objectivity left me always frustrated that I could not fully express my own discontent with the injustices, conflicts and painful choices that many people, particularly those in the developing world, are faced with. Similar influences came from a number of books and articles I had read. On the one side, there was this review I had found stating that the world-wide English language market was now eagerly devouring novels based in foreign locations and written originally in other languages. On the other hand, I had picked up and thrown down certain other ‘best sellers’ where the plots were unreal, the characters paper thin and, particularly, the settings they were placed in were totally unbelievable -surely even I could do better than these? Coming to Colombia gave me the place and the people I wanted to write about. The international image of this country was so distorted and unfair to this beautiful place that I finally got the courage to put a...

The personal attribute contributing most to my novel, Harbour Views, has been the compulsion to observe. In that I’m probably no different from hundreds of other authors, except the very best for whom imagination towers over everything. The outcome for the book is a cast of characters that is an amalgam of people from dozens of chance encounters and fleeting sightings on the streets of Hong Kong and, not least, the city itself, with its sharp cultural distinctions, slipping into place somewhat accidentally as the story’s main persona. If the desire to observe has any origin, it has lain in the nomadic pursuit of a human resource career, which primarily earned my living and where I spend long periods assessing the probabilities of whether certain personalities, irrespective of skills, will fit, with all their baggage of bad chemistry and unknowable agendas, into an organization’s work force. No time is ever lost in the crowded bus or the airport lounge when constructing the circumstances of the person sitting or standing opposite. Such assessments are a solitary pursuit, not unlike the act of creative writing, which, for me, has to be totally devoid of distraction, except for the low volume of Bach or Wagner keeping the world at bay from the background. The book’s blurb talks of the central character’s influence on the lives of others; I prefer to think of him as the thread on which a loose association hangs, until falling apart with his demise. I’ve chosen to tell the story as a tragic-comedy mix, partly because that’s the way I view the world, but also because if it is done well, it has the ability to most engage an audience. I’ll have to leave it to the reader to decide whether I have...

I am Adeniran Bamisaye, and I am a Nigerian author. Some years back, during my undergraduate days, I was in the cab and (as my custom was), and I gave a piece of paper containing one of my write-ups to the people who were in the cab with me. Least I forget, I was actually on my way to school on that particular day. At times, after giving out the write-ups, I would ask about the recipients’ views and at other times, I wouldn’t. Some would say, “Thanks” or “It’s a nice piece.” On this particular day, I did not ask, but while the cab was about parking, the two people who sat with me at the back seat gave me their feedback. One of them said, “Thanks” and the other person said, “Thanks for strengthening me.” I was touched by her remarks. She went further to say she had an exam that morning and that course was often tagged by students as “Pharaoh,” a course that kept a lot of them from graduating or made some spend extra year(s) in school. As much as I could, I encouraged her and told her to expect nothing but the best. I was glad to see her express some good measure of optimism as she hurried to write her exam for the day. The power you have to reach out and be a blessing to other people is hidden within your gift. It resides in your gift, ability and talent. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not express these special deposits. I have been writing for over a decade, and one major thing that inspires me is the people whose lives I have been able to touch positively. Using my gift and developing it along the...

My name is Angela Ardis. With 37 years of writing experience, 5 published books, over 100 published articles and countless collaborative television, movie, live production and animation projects completed and in the works, I find myself still enamored with the craft of writing. The art of writing has always allowed me a sense of unrestricted freedom that I’ve adored since the age of seven. My format is mine without apologies.  This art relinquishes the extreme structure that other art forms require. My new novel, THE BLOCK: Truth Revealed, the sequel to THE BLOCK, will be released August 1, 2014.  I’m so excited for this book to get into readers’ hands.  The really amazing aspect of this series is that you don’t have to have read the first book to enjoy any of the others. However, it will initiate curiosities that will lead you back to the book which proceeded the one being read. Nevertheless, for those who have been following the series, THE BLOCK: Truth Revealed will satisfy questions from book one, set up curiosities pulling you into book three and will ignite a yearning for the final installment THE BLOCK: The Labyrinth which will hopefully be released in 2015. I knew a reader who was so enthralled with trying to figure out stories that (in his mind) would sell, he wasn’t tapping into his own creative process.  He was attempting to copy someone else’s idea for the sake of the possibility, not certainty, of a big paycheck. My advice: “Write what motivates you.  Don’t try to duplicate ‘Harry Potter’ or Stephen King.  Create stories that are yours.  The fans/readers will come and eventually, so will the paydays.  Write stories you’re proud of, instead of imitating what’s already been done.” It might take a...