Louise Book Tour ~ Diana Nixon

Hello!
I am lucky enough to be helping Diana Nixon on a blog tour for her upcoming novel. It is a sequel to her novel Louise that was released a year ago.

Louise by Diana Nixon

Book Blurb:

It doesn’t hurt to dream, unless you know your dreams will never come true.

Since childhood, Louise Woods has wanted to become a dancer. The day she arrives at Le Papillon – a private cabaret club where men come to enjoy the beauty of women dancing, her life completely changes. Louise lives in the club and the rules of living and working there cannot be ignored or broken. Either you do your best to please the clients, or you are out. No flirting, no secret affairs, just dancing.

During her first public show, Louise meets a stranger who pays for the privilege to have her privately dance for him. He won't let her see his face, he won't even introduce himself, but he will make an offer that she won’t be able to refuse. He won’t make any hollow promises, but he will make her believe she is special…

“I hate following the rules,” he’ll say, “but I do love breaking them.”

Will she dare to risk losing everything she has, just to make the darkest of the stranger’s fantasies come true? Once the decision is made, there will be no way back…

ADD ON GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24838327-louise

STORES: http://www.diana-nixon.com/#!stores/mlttq

LOUISE: A New Beginning

COMING SPRING 2016

Book Blurb:

Life is not always easy. Especially when you are in love with the man whose life is so much different from yours. Power, money, respect – these are the things that a girl raised in an orphanage can only dream about. But sometimes, love is the only power that you need to get whatever you wish for…

Louise Woods had always been a fighter. She had known since childhood that everything has a price. But freedom was the only thing that she could never have.

Living in a world of lies and betrayal, will she sacrifice her love to become finally free?

Or will she let her heart win?

A new journey full of passion and forbidden dreams; it’s a new dance, it’s a new life.

“We will start it all from the very beginning, from the very first kiss…”

ADD ON GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28053668-louise

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Diana Nixon, an International Bestselling Author of contemporary and paranormal romances, is a woman of contradictions. She was born in Minsk., Belarus. She has a Master of Law degree and speaks several foreign languages, including English, Polish and Spanish.

Diana’s writing career is like a roller coaster ride. It started with a fantasy novel named Love Lines, that was originally written in Russian and only later, it was translated into English. Since then, Diana has published 15 more books, both of contemporary and fantasy genres.

Diana Nixon is the founder of Inks and Scratches, a literary magazine  intended to help authors of all genres find readers and spread the news about their writing all over the world.

OFFICIAL PAGE: www.diana-nixon.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Diana-Nixon/203165316483322?ref=hl

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DianaNixon9

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/diananixon96/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authordiananixon/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5814368.Diana_Nixon

Spring Break, homework, and gardening

Hello!

I feel bad that I am only ever talking about my books, I need to get better with just writing on my blog. During this spring break I am hoping to get ahead of school work so that in a couple of weeks when I'm at my boyfriend's step-brother's wedding I can have a weekend away. That and two big projects are due the weekend of the wedding which doesn't help at all. I'm so easily distracted by this gorgeous sunny and 70 degree weather we've been having. The weather doesn't seem to be on my side with my school work plans. Checking the weather though it says it's going to rain the next three days. Part of me is bummed, but then the other part of me is like yay my seeds need water!

You might be asking yourself, what seeds? I am renting a house near my school. I wanted to make sure that I liked the area before buying a house. That and my boyfriend and I want to make sure we are a little more stable situation before we buy a house. We unfortunately found a house that we both love in the town we live in that's been on the market for nearly two years, but we're trying to be responsible. So we are renting from a family friend of his who is pretty much giving us permission to do what we want to the house.


Yesterday I spread grass seed around the front yard so I'm hoping that the rain comes soon because the clovers and dry patches are drying me crazy. I got frustrated with the clovers in the flower bed and one day I dug all of it up then a week later I planted random flowers. I wish I could tell you other than lavender that I planted.

Today my boyfriend decided threw one of his planks (firewood) near my flower bed and said I could use them as an edge. I laughed it off. When he left for work I looked at the flower bed, and well I dug it then put the planks in. Once I did that I took some of the other planks and laid them on the other side of the house where you can see an outline where a flowerbed used to be. I'll have to get seeds and plants for the other side because I think like how it looks. I'll post more when I see what survives my far from green thumb.

Now, to leave and actually get homework done.
~Ottilie

Ezekiel Culverwell's abbreviated Bible

Ezekiel Culverwell! How could he not have been what he was, a pillar of godliness (as the ODNB joint life of members of the Culverwell family calls him)? Their lives read together like a godly version of Wolf Hall, religious radicals who achieved, via the founder of the family success, Ezekiel's father Nicholas, great wealth, which they deployed to organise, disseminate, foster their beliefs and community.

The long-lived Ezekiel, son of this purposeful father, strikes me as carrying a businesslike outlook into his religious writings. Capable, diligent, he can achieve something that probably makes him unique in his age: being succinct about faith and the bible. Yes, his Treatise of faith concerning Perseverance runs to a more normal 527 pages (followed by a methodical authorial index of the principal contents), but his popular Way to a Blessed Estate in this Life runs to 17 short pages

I was first struck by his A ready way to remember the Scriptures. Or, A table of the Old and New Testament. By that late able, painfull, and worthy man of God, Ezekiel Culuervvell, minister of the Word, 1637. This was printed, as it says, after his death in the same year as John Donne, 1631, but there was clearly an earlier edition, for the introduction comes from Culverwell's pen, explaining what he had set out to do, how well it had worked for him, how the aide-memoire came to the press, what it can be used for, and what it will ensure. Look at his stress on 'chief' matters, principal matters:

"Having many years ago gathered and made this brief Collection of all the principal matters contained in the New Testament, whereby I may say (I lost not my labour) for I found it by good Experience no small help unto me; for by it I could easily find any principal matter; Now although the chief use thereof be for Divines and young Students, yet upon the desire of many good Christians, which have found the like fruit and benefit, I was willing to publish the same and make it more common; unto whom I wish, that reading over the New Testament, they diligently observe the contents and chief matter contained in every Chapter and Verse, and often repeat them over, and every day to go through some Chapter or other; and the better to keep the Contents in memory, to say over daily that which is past; whereby I have good proof, that by this means, in short time one may readily tell what are the Contents of any Chapter, and where any special matter is written, (which I conceive may be a good Exercise for the training up of Children of ten years old and upward) for by reading over these Contents, a man well exercised in the Scriptures, may in one hour see the principal matters in the whole New Testament: One special use thereof will be this to fill the Head, and so the Heart, with much heavenly matter, which is the best way to keep out idle thoughts. And therefore now having my hearts desire in what I did expect, I have thought good to publish the like on the Old Testament." 

Culverwell created a vade mecum to both Testaments, first to the New, then to the Old.

Above, he sets about Genesis. Recall, this isn't intended as a summary, but rather an orientation to the Bible's full contents, partly a guide by topic, partly by memorable events or words, so Genesis chapter 3 boils down to "3 Fall, 6. Punishment, 16. Cursed, 17. Thrust out of Paradise, Vers. 23."

Here, below, a double page spread from his reduction of The Book of Job:

There's no nonsense about it: here's some of the prohibitions in Leviticus, with Culverwell not mincing his words:

There's occasionally an aspect of a found poem, as when Ecclesiastes 10 is given as: "Dead flyes, 1. Folly in Ruler, 5. Speech, 12. King a childe, 16. Curse not the King"

Just how effective he is can be grasped from a double spread from his first completed section. this is from the Acts of the Apostles. We see him reduce Chapter 12 to "Herod, 1. James, 2. Peter, 3. Iron gate, 10. Rhode, 13. Herods oration, 21. Wormes, 23. Sauls returne, Vers. 25."

The 'Iron gate' is indeed the thing anyone would remember as the angel helps Peter escape from Herod's prison: "When they were past the first and the second ward, they came unto the iron gate that leadeth unto the city; which opened to them of his own accord: and they went out, and passed on through one street; and forthwith the angel departed from him", while verses 21 through to 23 read in full:

And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them.22 And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. 23 And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.

Not that our 'painful and worthy man of God' was a corner-cutter. This was an aid to your Bible knowledge, to help you get to the chapter you wanted to consult, it saved time for the serious business. And the serious business was indeed just that. In his characteristically titled

Time well spent in sacred meditations. Divine observations. Heavenly exhortations Serving to confirme the penitent. Informe the ignorant. And, cherish the true-hearted Christian. By that late able, painfull, and worthy man of God, Mr. Ezechiel Culverwel minister of the Word. (1634), Culverwell sets out a working day for a true, believing student of the Bible:

"Students.

This course have I by experience found profitable, and resolved upon, namely to be diligent in reading the holy Scriptures, and of them at the least every day four chap|ters; in like manner (for the increase of my knowledge) to spend three hours in the forenoon in searching out the sense of the hardest places, as two in the afternoon in the searching out the proprieties of the tongues, and other two in perusing the tracts and commentaries of learned men; one in meditation and prayer; what time remaineth to spend the fame in brotherly conference."

I'm rather charmed that anyone dared abbreviate the Bible, even as preparation for complete mastery of the holy text. Generally, their commentary and extrapolation piles up, like Hamlet's Ossa on Pelion.

The lady and the coin

A few days ago, I wanted an envelope to place a small gift in it and give it to a friend, at a farewell function. So, I went to a nearby gift store to get one.

On my return, after buying the envelope, just as I entered my apartment block, an elderly gentleman asked me which was the exit in the building. No sooner I had pointed at the door than he asked me where he could get an envelope. (It turned out that he too was heading for the same farewell function, and he too needed a gift envelope.) I told him there is a shop behind the apartment complex. And that I am just returning after buying one for myself.

While I walked a few steps towards the exit to show him the direction to the store, he popped a question: "Could you just come with me?"

The gentleman, who must be in his sixties, was very apologetic. I agreed to to go to the shop with him, but I also suggested he could use the envelope I had bought, and that I shall quickly go back to the store and get another one. Why should he walk all the way to the store, I thought.

But he said no, and cheerfully agreed to walk along with me. As we walked, I told me where he had worked in Bengaluru, and asked me where I lived, where I worked, how long I have been in the city etc. We just quickly got to know each other.

Back at the store, I asked the lady at the counter for anther envelope. The lady is the wife of the man owns the shop.

"Give me a simple cover," the man told the lady, who then offered one which cost Rs 3.

Seemingly satisfied, he took out his purse and offered her coins of Rs 2 and Re 1.

However, a few other coins too dropped on the desk, and the woman's eyes fell on a shining one.

"What is that coin?", she asked.

Before he could reply, came another question: "Can I see it?"

A bit taken aback, he put the coin hurriedly back in the purse.

But the woman was insistent and assured him that she won't take it, but only wants to just see it.

Then he took it out and handed it over to her. She examined it.

"Is it a silver coin?" she was curious.

"No, it's an American cent, a penny," he explained.

She didn't seem to have understood. So, I said, "It is a coin of a foreign country, and not ours."

Then in a sudden turn around, she asked, "Can I have it?"

Why she abruptly wanted to own it, I wondered.

I asked her, "I wonder if it's right to ask for something personal from a customer in this manner!"

She then turned a bit apologetic, and reasoned out. "When I go to Rajasthan, I can show my friends the foreign coin."

"But still, isn't it a personal thing?" I asked her.

She then quickly said, "Uncle might have more such coins at home."

The elderly man, probably not wanting to have with him something that someone is longing for, readily parted with the penny, saying there are many more such coins at home, and that his son works in the US.

As we walked back, the incident left both of us thinking why she suddenly wanted to have the coin for herself.

End of the Line for FREE

Hello!
Off the Beaten Path (End of the Line 2) is going to be released April 2016. I am pretty excited to release this sequel and I hope you all enjoy it! I will be doing a cover revealing soon which will include a new cover for End of the Line! However, to prepare for the release of the second book I am making the first free for a limited time. If you have not read the first this is your chance!

End of the Line

When so much is lost how does one to have the strength to move on? At seventeen Lauren was prepared for yet another year of school. Then asteroids hit, killing all of those she knew except for a few other teens from her neighborhood. Joining forces with her classmate Aaron, they work together on the journey in the hopes of finding more people that are alive. On the way, threats of starvation, illness, and freezing to death don’t compare to the danger of Dean Manson. Manson is an ex-con out for revenge against Aaron. With so much working against them these teens fight for everything even if it means denying their feelings just for the chance to see a new day.

FREE Smashwords (has all formats including pdf)
FREE Nook (This site has 18 reviews as well if you're still not sure.)
Kindle

It is back to cloth bags

No more plastic carry bags in Karnataka. The ban came into force on Monday, March 14.

I am happy that the government is enforcing this rule very strictly, to the extent that corporation officials are visiting shops and confiscating the bags they have. Many shops have put up boards that it's illegal to use plastic bags.

Look at the plastic bags in garbage piles on roadsides. In fact, two years ago, the Supreme Court had urged people to be sympathetic to animals and called for a complete ban on plastic bags, as stray cattle ended up consuming them.

According to the The Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar, 15, 000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated every day, out of which 9, 000 tonnes is collected and processed, but 6, 000 tonnes of plastic waste is not being collected.

Efforts like the recent one, wherein the Union government increased the minimum thickness of plastic carry bags from 40 microns to 50 microns, aren't really going to help. The government brought in this change because the thicker bags will be costlier, so that will be a trigger for people to switch to green products. But such efforts aren't going to yield any result. People will just start using the thicker version.

OTHER STATES TOO

In Gurgaon, the municipal corporation is offering discounts for people who shop with cloth bags, under 'Bring your own carry bag' drive.

Two years ago, California became the first state in the US to ban single-use plastic bags as a way to address litter, primarily in waterways.

Punjab and Tripura have banned plastic carry bags.

CLOCK COMES FULL CIRCLE

In a way, the clock has come one full circle. You remember the days when plastic carry bags weren't this popular, and all of us carried cloth bags, before we stepped out to shop?

Then, it was a more organized lifestyle too. No one shopped just because there wasn't anything else to do. Most people shopped because they wanted to buy something, not because they wanted to spent money.

Earlier, many people had a fixed day or a couple of days every week when they made the purchases, and they went prepared for it with a cloth bag. Today, we buy stuff randomly as and when we remember. That could mean shopping on way to office, or way back from office, or at any random time. Needless to say, we wouldn't have a bag to carry stuff back home. And quite naturally, the plastic bag culture set in with our haphazard and erratic shopping culture.

Not all shops have green alternatives, so we have to first remember to have a cloth bag in hand before we step out to the nearby provision store.

Just wondering if the ban will end up in increased online shopping.

At Robert Egger's 'The VVitch'

As web piety or good netizenship requires, multiple 'spoilers' ahead.

I went with a friend to see 'The VVitch'. The work has been put in on this film, and it benefits. I was startled to recognise bits of the dialogue as things I'd read in witchcraft pamphlets (the Warboys/Throckmorton children, and one of the other demoniacs also verbatim - Thomas Darling, maybe?).

I especially liked the way the film adroitly exploited our typical narrative expectations of a Hollywood film - 'The Witch'? Yes, her in the woods, the one with the lair, the hag who can appear like a Cavalier courtesan. Eggers is distracting us with expectations of a daring assault on the sorceress' den by the axe-swinging father, while his film is quietly getting on with its own narrative of how Thomasin comes to accept that role. From the moment when Thomasin tries to quell her younger sister Mercy by a sudden profession that, yes, she is indeed the witch who lives in the forest, one can see her fate starting to unfold. Voicing the unthinkable makes it seem more possible.

The film is very aware of its cinematographic forebears: there's quite a set of regular tropes here. So, the young heroine who is reaching her menarche, the uncanny twins, the coven dancing round a fire in the forest. It creates its own space in which to be original by a commitment to historical reconstructions of language and religious thinking. The climax of the film, as the young women transvect up to tree top height seems less 'teenage witch' than it might, because we have watched and listened to Thomasin slowly reaching this point.

My family used to play a Scrabble-like card game called 'Lexicon', one of those games in which you pick up as many cards as you have played in your turn, until the pack thins to the last few cards. But if by that stage you have worked out that there has to be an unplayable Q or Z still lurking, then you don't want to pick up any cards, which you will probably be left with in your hand, their value to be deducted from your accumulated score.

Thomasin's game plays out like that: being forced to pick up the last, most undesirable card. After the abduction of the baby from her care, her mother suspects her. Her younger sister Mercy, herself in cahoots with Black Philip, accuses Thomasin, who rashly accepts the charge to try to assert herself over the obstreperous child. Mercy and her twin brother exchange mutual accusations with their sister, are possessed, and are killed. Her staunch brother Caleb has gone; the goat kills her father (who has also accused her of witchcraft). Finally the wretched Thomasin is caught in a fight to the death with her own deranged mother (and wins, bloodily).

What is left for her? Providence has made a very poor show as far as these Calvinist settlers are concerned. Caleb has some kind of vision of Jesus as he expires, but Eggars cunningly makes it seem mad or somehow indecent: really, heaven does nothing. Only Satan cares.

So, as the traumatised Thomasin staggers away from the corpse of her mother, what is left? She can't bury the dead and survive alone in the wilderness, she probably can't walk back to the settlement without being identified as a witch and being hanged for it. The last card, the card she doesn't want, but must pick up and try to play, is to talk to the goat.

And Black Philip answers, not at first, but soon, and then is seen, deep in shadows, as the black-dressed gentleman wearing spurs - the devil as so readily invented by the much-prompted fantasies of those accused of witchcraft. He will guide Thomasin's hand as she signs his book, and she will go naked into the forest to meet her new sisters. The actress plays the terror and the exhilaration as she transvects upwards very well.

The film accepts the supernatural as real. This is not 'The Crucible'. The weird claims of demonology are not psychologised away: evil exists. And yet, and yet, there's almost an explanation, so careful has the film been to show the mindset of the Calvinist settlers: the sin that they insist that they all bear individually, inherent to their nature, their acceptance of the demoralising possibility of their own predestined damnation. All this makes the witch or witches in the forest a very comprehensible extroversion of that (inner) state of sin: as if the community imagines them into being, the unthinkable other that it's so easy to become.

As easy, indeed, as stepping into the forest, where emptiness closes in, the arboreal labyrinth Una and Red Crosse enter in the first canto of The Faerie Queene. Here you will meet your other self: Eve / Duessa / The Witch.

Sin, in this film of continuously somber colours (sky, clothes, interiors), is a source of colour (blood red, mainly). Sin or witchcraft liberates from everything, even gravity. 

Eggers reports himself to have read the whole of the Geneva Bible, the Bible of the Puritans, to get the language right. The effort paid dividends. The phrase with which Black Philip / Satan secures his converts is based on Tyndale (2 Peter, 2), but re-appears among the cruder phrasings and vehement annotations of the Geneva text - the unjust, that 'walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleaness' 'count it pleasure to live deliciously for a season ... They are cursed children and have forsaken the right way'.

Eggers himself answers most scrupulously to a pointed query about factual inaccuracies in the film
(https://www.quora.com/Robert-Eggers-What-are-the-major-factual-inaccuracies-if-any-in-The-Witch/answer/Robert-Eggers-3)
I think he probably knew that a baby's fat was used in a flying ointment, rather than mashed-up baby - he wanted the gore, the colour. The horrible scene of the deluded mother suckling her baby, back from the dead, unable to perceive it as demonic, as a raven pecking viciously at her nipple (it prompted a unanimous wail of horror from the women present in the screening I attended), Eggers lightly passes off this as his invention, something he came up with because he is himself evil. [In a forum exchange here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/46m0lf/im_robert_eggers_writerdirector_of_the_witch_ama/  ]
Again, after five years with witchcraft sources, he'd know all about vampiric familiars feeding on a witch's blood. The devout mother is turning into another instance of witchcraft: her final appearance, hair down, murderous, hag-like, completes the journey.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the acute desire of the emigrants to turn back, get back to England, even if England was the Babylon of 'Dog and Bitch Yard':

http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/witch-detected-en-route-for-america.html

Eggers has both the mother confess to her desire to be back at home, and the daughter quizzing her brother as to whether he remembers life before this exile - when they lived in a house with glass windows.

A thoughtful film: a witchcraft film with integrity. No gross CGI, no electronica on the soundtrack. I think I will have my 'Witchcraft and Drama' people watch it and learn. There: that's approval!

DataWind sold more tablets than Samsung in India

DataWind quotes an IDC Report to say that it shipped more tablets in India during the fourth quarter of last year, than its competitors.

As many as 20.7% of the tablets sold in India during that period were by this Canada-based company that makes computer hardware, mainly for emerging markets. It had hit headlines in October 2011, when it manufactured Akash tablets for Government of India priced at just $60, under Rs 3,000 during that time.

According to the report, DataWind was followed by Samsung (15.8%), Micromax (15.5%), Lenovo (13.8%), and iBall (10%).

DataWind quotes another study to say that the company holds 58% market share in the sub-Rs 5,000 tablet segment (approximately $75).

An obviously ebullient Suneet Singh Tuli, president and CEO of DataWind, says the IDC report "demonstrates how our transition to local manufacturing and improvements in our sales channelshas allowed us to meet the phenomenal demand”.

Updates on the upcoming release

Hello!
I'm taking a break from my homework because well I'm going crazy. I will say instead of the end of March, Off the Beaten Path, would be released. I will say though I changed it to the beginning of April. It is currently with the editor and I rather not rush that part. I will also say the cover revealing will be soon so keep your eyes out! There will also be a cover change of End of the Line so that the series covers would go together. :) Also thank you for those who have been downloading Going Rogue (End of the Line 1.5)! I hope you all are enjoying it!
~Ottilie 

Will you shop online if there are no discounts?

Most of us have shopped online - either on Flipkart or Amazon or Myntra or any other e-commerce site. But why do we shop online? Everyone says it's convenient. But my gut feeling is it's the price factor.

If we plan to buy something, most of us check the online price. The general impression is it's cheap online. Most of us fall for the discount (even if it'sn't very substantial), and click "buy".

Many people buy something online (even if they don't need to buy it) only because they have got a good deal. I know a few friends, who keep looking for them.

After giving lots of discounts, most of these sites, aren't making profits. They are just managing to stay afloat, aided by funds from venture capitalists, who are investing based on extrapolated growth curves.

The moot question is: if the online price is the same as offline, or not considerably less than offline, or if there were no more "daily deals", will people still shop online?

What is your take on this?