Watch for exciting news soon! :-)

Watch for exciting news soon!  :-)

Writes of Passage anthology Edgar Winner!

Check out my review post back on June 15th, 2014 concerning this inspiring work on the writer's journey. It's won an award from the Edgars! Writes of Passage is a great resource and provides wonderful motivation on the wide range of an author's concerns.

And did you notice my May note in the 'about me' section? It seems impossible to be included on such a list, but I am greatly honored. For my non-writing friends, a 'submission' is not a 'nomination'. The Poisoned Pen Press and its imprint the Poisoned Pencil is awesome.

If you haven't yet reviewed it, will you do so on Goodreads, Amazon, and Barnes and Nobel?

Chaos Theory on Goodreads

Chaos Theory on Amazon

Chaos Theory on Barnes and Noble

Amazing Story from an Amazing Teacher

Suzanne Kelly is an amazing teacher. When given the assignment to teach problem solving skills, she went out and earned a private investigator license! Then she wrote a story and a teaching package that was phenomenal using those new found skills to solve the crime.

She is retired now, but one of her best projects came about after she read a short World War II memoir. It was about men who survived three weeks in a life raft after the plane when down. Her students were filled with questions: What happened to those men? Where were they now? How did the experience change their lives? Those questions began a years work as the students first found the survivors, mailed them, and finally spoke with them. It was a story that reached international news services and television! Since then, she has kept in contact with some of them.

At long last, she put together the information they learned. It will be a fascinating book, and due out June 1st according to Amazon, see link below. For anyone in the Ames area, the public library will have a signing on May 2nd.

I urge you to read this story!

http://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Beyond-Waves-Inspirational-Survivors/dp/1555718124/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429194945&sr=1-1&keywords=reaching+beyond+the+waves

Omnimystery News: A Conversation with YA Mystery Author M. Evonne Dobson

Omnimystery News: A Conversation with YA Mystery Author M. Evonne Dobson

Where to Find Your Story - What's the Big Deal

Apologize for the fast, unedited posting. On a time schedule, like normal. :-)

What's the big deal about 'where to find your story?' Here's the freaking truth. For me, it's never been a problem--ever. That sounds egotistical, but it's not. I've written all my life and stories pop all around me. They gel in the middle of the night, and I know they are right when my heart isn't simply touched by them, but wraps tight around them until I HAVE TO TELL THAT STORY.

Of course, I've picked up ideas here and there at conferences--all excellent ones:

• Tim Powers (SF/F) told a class that he researches until he has 'twenty ideas too cool not to use' and then he starts writing.
• Connie Willis (SF/F MASTER) told a group that you must 'keep your butterfly net out and scooping up ideas all the time.
• Mark Twain (you know Samuel Clemens) says that 'the difference between the right world and the the almost right world is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.' Or was that 'right word?' Doesn't matter, either work.
• Joyce Carol Oates considers herself 'as a teacher, I am the ideal editor...who defines herself primarily as a friend of the text and a friend of the writer, in that order.' 

My night writing has evolved into the bizarre. Normally ideas percolate like Connie Willis' butterflies, crashing around in a small space, until they merge as a story. Recently? Yeah, kind of freaky. I've been having dreams that aren't mine. I wake up and wonder where the heck that scene or that character came from. If I can't line it up with my real world, I've decided it's someone else's mind that came to visit.

Examples: 

• Last night in my dreams I met a woman (not homeless, but dang close) who lives in Seattle (yes, I've visited but that's it) and lives in a home that is a tiny Quonset hut. It must leak because inside that is a large hiking type hut. (She's very proud it, the tent, has two rooms, but you can't stand in it.) She burrowed into my heart like I imagine blood worms do in dogs' hearts. And isn't that a lovely idea. I will write about her one day. She was a proud woman.
• This is more typical of where my ideas coalesce. I'm researching #GamerGate for a short story, or maybe more, and last night went on line to try to contact some of the major players via twitter (since their website entitled Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, (FUoS) title based on what some fellow gamers think about women players--especially the ones that routinely crush male players online.) So many ideas thunk around in my brain space like boulders carried along in molten lava. Take away, as Wil Wheaton points out? You write off the comments as being from twelve-year-old boys, but the average gamer age is 34. That's a frightening and very Kami Files worthy plot idea. 
• Things start to gel, outline shapes up, characters rise, and all of it wraps around my heart and burrows in for the long haul. After all, I'll live with these characters and their lives for over a year. They need to be worthy of the attention.

So then it's time to begin. Stop posting on your blog. Get to work, Meg. And that's why this isn't edited nice and neat. Still, it might be helpful for fellow authors or for readers who have always wondered.

Endorsements and Book Giveaway for Chaos Theory!

Please visit my website at www.MEvonneDobson.com to see what wonderful endorsements have come in for my contemporary crime fiction/mystery, Chaos Theory releasing Feb 3rd from the Poisoned Pencil, imprint of The Poisoned Pen Press - one of the nation's largest publisher of hardback mysteries!  Including one from 2013 YA Edgar (Mystery Writers of America's top honor) finalist Kathyrn Burak.

And then visit Goodreads for a chance to win a free copy being offered by the press!

Chaos Theory Book Giveaway!

Exceptional Pink Ribbon Warrior's Memoir

Grit and Grace: Fighting Breast Cancer One Step at a Time 
by Carrie S Bell 

M. Dobson's review 

Nov 14, 14  ·  edit

5 of 5 stars

bookshelves: a-quest-for-sanity-in-an-insane-wor, pink-ribbon,pink-ribbon-heroes

Recommended to M. by: my writing critique group

Recommended for: pink ribbon heroes fighting cancer

Read in November, 2014 — I own a copy, read count: 1

In Grit and Grace, Carrie S. Bell shares and bears her soul to provide knowledge and hope for all fighting cancer. All profits are donated to cancer charities. And she does it with love, passion, and honesty.

I met Carrie S Bell in a writer's critique group. That first time, she brought pages from her cancer-fighting memoir she was considering publishing, and I loved them. Last time we met, she handed me the published work! How thrilling to see her writing quest and her personal cancer journey at last in book form and in my hands.

We share a common love of the Sonoran Desert. The thesaurus offers alternatives to the word desert: wasteland, wilderness, waste, barren and arid region, desolate tract. Yet there are some of us who find solace, comfort, peace, and beauty there. It takes grit to not only survive the desert but to embrace it. We both admire the plants and animal life that adapted over time to flourish there. However, while I putz along on gentler slopes and less strenuous climbs with naked bow in hand, Carrie seeks the mountaintops.

In her cancer fighting memoir, Grit and Grace, she shares the ups, the downs, the in-betweens, and the difficult reality of fighting breast cancer. Her determination to trek to soaring desert peaks is the same determination she applied to her cancer battle.

We share something else, the dogged determination to pursue our writing passion.

I look forward to reading her future works of fiction, but dare I hope she'll bring the mountain tops and the desert with her into the works? I hope so!

With great admiration, Meg E Dobson, AKA M Evonne Dobson