Just Books

M. K. Graff

Hello, M. K. Graff, what should I call you?

1. My Name is: Marni Graff

Website: www.auntiemwrites.com

2. Which country are you from?

The USA.

3. Do you prefer to read a particular genre?

I review crime books, so that makes up the bulk of my reading. I’m partial to police procedurals and psychological thrillers, darker than what I write.

4. Do you write in the same genre? If not which one?

I do write mysteries, a mix of amateur sleuth and police procedural over two series, so my reading is also helping me keep up with the curve of what’s popular with readers.

5. Have you always written and what got you started professionally?

I knew I wanted to writer from an early age and wrote everything from poetry to essays during a 30 year nursing career. I studied various forms and experimented, did journalism during that period for a nursing journal. By the time I was ready to change careers and write full time, I’d settled on mysteries because that’s what I enjoy reading the most. During that turnover period, I wrote interview articles for “Mystery Review” magazine and learned from many of the authors whose work I read. Good training!

6. How many books have you published?

I have four in The Nora Tierney English Series and one in the newer Trudy Genova Manhattan Mysteries. I’m writing the second one in the Trudy series right now, and then will go back to Nora #5 and continue to alternate them. I’m also co-author of a non-fiction primer on finding your writing group, Writing in a Changing World.

7.Which one would you like to tell us about?

The Golden Hour: Nora Tierney is an American writer living in England who’s left the magazine job that took her to the UK to write children’s books. Nora feels she and her young son are being stalked, at the same time her partner, DI Declan Barnes, is investigating the death of a young art conservator at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. How the two threads intersect provide the twisted plot.

Ausma Khan says the books is “…A meditation on love, loss and motherhood, The Golden Hour blends touchingly real domesticity with tongue-in-cheek humor, as the backdrop to a tale of art theft, germ warfare, and international conspiracy…Add to this is a wonderful sense of place—Bath, Brighton and Oxford are vividly rendered and charmingly true to life. Come for the crackling mystery, stay for the steady companionship of debonair detective Declan Barnes and feisty heroine, Nora Tierney, who offers warmth and smarts in equal measure.”

8. Why did you write this book book and what is it about?

What makes The Golden Hour different from the first three Nora Tierney mysteries is that I deliberately decided to take a darker turn with it. First, I didn’t want followers of the series to feel they were always reading the same book. And second, I felt I wanted to do something different to stretch myself as a writer. In the first 3 Nora’s and in the first Trudy, I’ve been exploring something that fascinates me: what makes a seemingly normal person feel it’s reasonable to cross that line and commit murder? What motivates a person to convince themselves to do that?

But in The Golden Hour, readers know up front who’s the bad guy. This one is not a Whodunit? but more of a Cantheystophim? A psychopath has launched a plan to take down the people of Great Britain, whom he loathes. He has the financial resources and contacts to make this happen, too, but his anger blinds him to how far people will go to protect those they love.

This is the first time I’ve written a psychopath, and to my surprise, I had great fun creating the evil Viktor Garanin.

Using Keywords to Attract Interested Visitors

As you progress with the establishment of your blog or website, one of the main things that you need to keep an eye on is using keywords to attract interested visitors. This is a major part of white-hat SEO, and it means using relevant keywords in your content to attract visitors who are interested in items that those keywords attract.

Keywords

The first thing you have to do, of course, is determine which keywords are relevant to your site. If you started out right, you will have targeted your blog to a niche audience, but still you can be surprised at what words they use to find you. In order to discover these relevant words, you will need access to your logs, which most hosts provide through cPanel.

My logs revealed today, the end of the month, that the most popular words used to find this site were: digital-text, thriller, publishing, Asus 541UV, Amazon, publisher and books.

This doesn't really surprise me since this blog, Megan Publishing Services, is a site for readers and writers, and I have written many articles on publishing, publishers, and Amazon on my new laptop, an Asus 541UV. Not only that, but I write books, some of which are thrillers, but all of which are in digital-text.

I try to highlight the main relevant words used to find my blog every month, and I hope that this article has provided a good example of how that that may be done.

If you study this article, you will find that I have managed to insert the most relevant words used to find my site last month at least twice into this piece, thus increasing the density of those words on it, so that search engines will register me more highly for them.

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and list of audiobooks

All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Using Keywords to Attract Interested Visitors

Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences, or NDE's, are phenomena that are recognized by science and religion alike and can be viewed from three standpoints: psychological, physiological and transcendental according to the entry on Wikipedia.

The article also goes on to mention the five stages typical of thousands of near-death experiences, which are: 1) Peace, 2) Body Separation, 3) Entering Darkness, 4) Seeing Light, 5) Entering Light. It states that sixty percent of NDE's reach stage one, and only ten percent reach stage five.

I find the subject of near-death experiences an interesting one, so if you do as well, I urge you to enter the term into your favourite search engine.

However, if you would like to read my account of William Jones' NDE, I have called the novel A Night in Annwn - Annwn being the ancient word for Heaven in Welsh. The Welsh believed Annwn to be the Other World, which was located under the mountains usually, but also sometimes on an island. In my story, William, an old shepherd, has his NDE walking home from the pub and is 'rescued' by his wife, Sarah, who had passed over five years before.

According to William's perception of time, he spent only a night in Annwn and had a look around, although he could not remember much when he returned to his body.

We, the readers, however, can follow his often comical exploits and realizations in the capital city of Heaven in Wales, which is Annwn.

I hope that you enjoy my tale, but I am certain that William's near-death experience will get you thinking about the greatest mystery of all time, which is life after death.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Near-Death Experiences

Some People, Eh?

As those people with a remarkable memory might remember, I have been trying for the last twenty-six days to get my life assurance company, the incredibly crappy Friends Life, formerly Friends Provident, to help me sort out my policies as they have matured. Well, some people there have been having a go at me again :-(

I managed to contact them again three days ago, and a lovely-sounding young woman looked at my contact record, apologised profusely, Amy Hill was her name, and sent me on my way a happy boy. She promised I would receive paperwork and email versions of the information I require and I have had nothing for the fifth time of asking.

They don't mind taking the premiums for twenty-five years, but now they don't want to know.

Don't some people just make you want to scream:

TOSSERS!

As I left my garden by the rear gate this evening on my way to the shop for a pint and a scribble, I saw what looked like a large rat in the grass against a wall opposite me. Now this was strange, because I have never seen a live rat in our village because they tend to live near the rice fields where the food is.

So, I stepped a yard closer and could clearly see that I had mistaken the head of a snake for a rodent. The snake saw me and slithered away. I followed as it was not in full flight.

It was four or five feet long, as thick as a wrist and olive green with the criss-cross pattern on it that a reinforced hosepipe has. As I followed it kept moving, but I watched it for about three minutes. I love snakes - from a safe distance.

So, anyway, sitting in the shop drinking my beer, I saw the shopkeeper run across the road and kill something the size of a worm with an eight-foot pole. 'Bite die' she explained, so I told her about my snake.

She was suitably impressed and shivered to emphasise it. 'Poisonous Lion snake' she suggested.

'No, they're grey and shorter, mine was bottle green'.

'Ah, cobra,' she said with a nod.

'No,' I replied, 'they are black'.

She nodded, 'Python?'

'There are only two species of python in Thailand,' I said, 'one is brown and yellow and the other is red-brown and yellow'.

She nodded again.

'A Lion Snake!' she said again.

'No,' I said.

'Er, um, a cobra?'

'No,' I said and picked my book up again so I could ignore her.

She is fifty-odd and any ten-year-old would know that she was speaking rubbish. she's lovely really, but some people seem to want to get up your nose sometimes...

I just looked it up: a Slender Wolf Snake, but I just showed my wife the photo.

'That's brown not green,' she insisted.

It's green to me, but I know I'm colour-blind on greens, browns and reds.

I gave up.

All the best,

Owen

Please visit my bookshop

Podcast: Some People, Eh?