“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

My rose is ready to show to the world....again. "Night of the Tiger" is as corrected as it's going to ever be, the proof arrived today and is as perfect as I was hoping it would look. The cover is as fine in print as it was in Dee Jae's files on the computer (and to be honest, I think it looks even more awesome in the print form, better than I ever expected it to look).

So, the proper approvals have been accomplished. Amazon has been properly notified and is finalizing the entry onto their site. The Kindle, I'm told, will be up for sale within the next 48 hours, and the book should appear, with the title "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut", within the next week. We're still trying to work out the details for the listing, but Northern Bard Publications wants to do a "Buy Two, Get One Free" sale through January 1st on the Northern Bard editions....

And, even as we complete this book, my mind is already turning back to the historical romance. All the advances I've made recently in the search for my ancestors has me looking back, and it seems time for this one to come next.....

It is, after all, already over 600 pages strong.....

*sighing as I settle in to begin editing first, as I suspect there is a lot more history than most will want to read in their historical romance......*

So, my "rose" becomes a fireblossom....

Maybe I'll explain what that means before the next book is published...

Maybe not....

*evil grin rising*

UPDATE: November 28 - After a couple of minor issues (I love - note the sarcastm - how advance emails don't always prevent minor issues from happening, no matter how many t's I cross and how many i's I dot), we have the newest edition on Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/Night-Tiger-Authors-Cut-Book/dp/0578172690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448717933&sr=8-1&keywords=debi+emmons ), but we've hit a little snag on the "buy two, get one free" until January 1st deal...

Amazon tells me they don't offer that deal any more, so if you're interested in that one, and you don't mind a little "one on one" interaction between yourself and an author, I have a Pay Pal account attached to my web site that will allow you to purchase the books direct through me. If you live outside of the United States and don't mind paying the shipping charges, I'll even discuss that option with the printer, allowing you to get the delivery hot off the presses.....

Unless you would like me to sign the book(s) and send the package from the local post office, in which case, you can drop me a line at debi.emmons.author@gmail.com....

And since I'm in sales person mode, how about a nice piece of swamp land in Northern Maine, just off the snowmobile trails, with great hunting options......

Yeah....

As necessary as it is to play the salesperson from time to time in these blogs, I really hate to be "pushing the brand" that hard...

Thank you for reading my blogs, even when I have my salesperson hat on.

A December release for the third Northern Bard offering and finding Kunta Kinte

We're in the last stages of the publishing process for the Northern Bard Publications editions of all three of the books (so far) in The Tiger Series - and will be offering a special "if you buy all three you save [an undecided amount]". I'd like to see it be along the lines of "third one free", but the finance director would like to see more money come in toward expenses and our cover artist is working on the next projects....talking to me excitely about cover ideas when we haven't decided which book is up next.....

I'm still reeling from the fact that our first "Northern Bard Publication" was just last year - this month in fact - and we've already managed to re-edit, re-cover, and re-release two more books already.

I wonder if my compadres at Northern Bard will get upset if I start calling them both slave drivers....

In the meantime, while waiting for my daughter to see a lawyer about a divorce, I had an "aha" moment in the special room for Maine genealogical research in the city. There was a statement written out by a lawyer from Somerville, Maine that another researcher had spoken of that mentioned my great-grandfather's name. (I've been trying to find my great-grandfather's parents for 35 years, but a lot of records were destroyed by fires before there was a central place for them to be kept....) I had read it once, but didn't fully recall the entire piece, so I looked it up again, as the first time, I was answering a question from the other researcher as to whether I might have information about this woman, as she and her husband had spent six weeks with the James and Susan I was seeking information on....

The second reading proved I had overlooked a few important things that coincided with what I was seeing in census reports.

As Kurt Vonnegut says  "Listen"

The only time I see James and Susan together in census reports is in 1870 in Albion, Maine. Per that record (as well as in the family bible recording such things), they were wed in April of that year, and he is listed as 19/her as 17. (Census reports used to be done when someone showed up at your house and started asking questions. A lot of times, in my experience, incorrect ages were given, but when my own father had to carry our birthdays in his wallet and do the math when asked ages.......)

Earlier this week, deciding to try to find more about the mysterious Mary Dow Evans who spent time with James and Susan in Albion for the six weeks prior to the birth of their second child (one of those things that I keep thinking would be more of a "family" type thing to do rather than a :"kind neighbor to Susan's parents" type thing), I started looking at the census reports for Palermo. Elisha and Mary are right next to Susan's parents in 1870. Mary, whose husband is listed by the other researcher as having died in October 1880, is listed as alone in the June census of Palermo - right next door to the now widowed Susan Dow and her three children. Susan's parents, James and Fannie, live on the other side of her.

An earlier foray into the census reports on a hunch, as several family members insist that James Parker Dow was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts and was adopted had been done. There is a city in Maine, incorporated in 1851 as Chelsea, as well - and there is a small family in the 1860 census that has a father, William, mother, Mary, a married daughter, Eliza, her husba -nd, and two children under the age of 5. Going back to the 1850 census, there are William, Mary, Eliza - and an older son named Llewellyn (my father's middle name, which we never figured out where it came from, since his mother named all her children after related people). In 1860, William was listed as 70 and Mary as 54. In the 1870 census, Mary is listed as 65. In 1880, she is listed as 75.

I suspect that I have my great-great-grandmother in my sights at the moment, so I decided to re-read the paper that the other researcher recommended....

And I heard the theme from The Twilight Zone as I read through the entire paper the second time.....

Written April 10, 1878, (and from the sound of the piece, to explain that Elisha and Mary hadn't abandoned their farm in Palermo, but had spent some time elsewhere), A. B. Bowler notes that, after marrying in 1864, Mary and Elisha moved to Palermo in 1867 - and into a farm right next door to James and Fannie Belden, per the 1870 census, which, in my mind, gives James, who would have been about 16 at the time of the move, three years to fall in love with his neighbor, Susan, and properly court her. They note that they moved some of their things to Albion for "temporary purposes" in the spring of 1873, returning to Palermo on June 10 (my grandfather's brother was born on June 14) after "five weeks and six days" in the home of Susan and James Dow (whom it is noted in this piece was "now deceased", as family records show James passed away in February of 1876). They moved back into their house in Palermo and had been there for almost two years at the time of the disposition by the lawyer, which was listed as having been marked by an "x" from both Mary and Elisha, neither of whom, it seems, could read or write.

Going back into Ancestry.com when I arrive home, I look back at Llewellyn Dow, whom a couple of relatives are trying to claim couldn't possibly be related because he was in northern Maine and the rest of the family I'm investigating live close to Augusta in the southern part of the state. Once again, the theme from The Twilight Zone again begins to play when I find Llewellyn's death certificate, listing his father as William Dow, no mother listed at all (perhaps one of the "family feuds" that make it impossible for me to share such information without hiding everyone's emails, as there are certain family members who don't speak to other certain family members?) - and his "place of birth is" (drum roll please): Somerville, Maine.

My little inner Sherlock Holmes is jumping for joy, as all of these little "connections" are making me feel that, after all this time, I've found the right leads to try to locate my great-grandfather's line.

Now I just have to have a couple of days to travel to places like Enfield, Maine, whose records on this era appear not to have been shared with Ancestry.com and also don't appear in the Portland Room (where the Maine records for the area), so I have to go to the source - the town office, local library, or perhaps even the cemetery - to get the confirmations on William, Eliza and the two children who seem to have died there.

Hopefully, Enfield didn't have a fire that destroyed their records.

And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes.....

My mother used to say what I used as the title A LOT when we were growing up in reference to the fact that, even though my dad worked as an oil delivery person for the store next door, he would often forget to deliver to his own house until the tank was so dry that he had to clear sludge out of the lines before the furnace would run. She still says it in reference to my own husband, especially when I share with her what I'm about to share with you....

You see, my husband is what they call an HVAC Tech. HVAC stands for "Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning". He's been doing this for 30 years, so he's highly respected at his work site as the "go to" man for any answers to difficult problems that they may be having.

Unfortunately, in our own home, we have a furnace that has seen better days. When we moved in 17 years ago, it was soon discovered that the automatic water feed for the steam heat boiler no longer worked, so when the heat doesn't kick on when expected, it means that there isn't enough water in the boiler for it to work, so it shuts itself off rather than burn out any parts.

The current rate of having to fill the boiler should be about once a day, but it's usually accomplished by yours truly when I, the first one out of bed every day because I was raised in a farm-like situation in which my eyes open between 4 and 5 a.m. and I just can't stay in bed once I'm fully awake, will discover that the house is much colder than it should be. I then have to go out to the bulkhead in the garage - totally unheated and generally cold enough to see one's breath, even sometimes during the summer - or risk life and limb to go down the interior staircase, which has been slowly rotting since well before we bought the house and may well just collapse one of these mornings. Once in the basement, dodging the hanging spiders and spider webs, I make my way to the furnace and slowly add cold water until the level reaches a certain spot in the "sight glass" that indicates how full the water is, usually getting deafened in the process when the furnace hits the point that it has enough water to run and starts itself up...

Many discussions have gone on about this boiler, starting with my husband stating shortly after we first moved in that he would fix the auto-fill before he decided that, even with the proper auto-fill, the furnace (which at that time also provided the hot water for the house) wouldn't be able to keep up. Instead of the auto-fill, we bought a water heater to allow us to shut the furnace off during the summer months, saving heating oil. There has been talk of replacing the old furnace with something newer and more efficient, but we can't just replace the old piece of junk in the basement, because steam heat isn't as efficient as forced hot water heat, which would involve somewhere around 130 hours of work to re-pipe the whole house. There is also an argument about the cost.

In short, the work that he gladly does for other people on weekends to put money into his private savings account for the fishing trips he likes to do all summer can't possibly happen in his own house because it would take away his "free time"....even though the end result would be more money in the family budget at the end of it all because of the savings on the oil we have to use each winter to heat this poorly insulated farmhouse.

And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes, because the thing that he does every day (and therefore is well paid for) can't possibly happen for free for his own family.....

Which is why, even though all my Christian friends keep telling me that "money is the root of all evil", I keep playing the lottery, praying to win the kind of money that would allow me to either hire someone else to come in to replace the furnace or, if I got REALLY lucky, would allow me to have this house torn down and a better, more efficient building put up with brand new electric wires (as this place has the old fabric-wrapped electric wires from the early days of electricity and may well cause a fire at any time) and the furnace my husband thinks of as the best possible solution for heating the house equally.

If course, if we were still young chickens with healthy bodies, I could take a page from my first novel and go work at a local strip club to earn extra cash for such a venture, but who wants to pay to see an almost 55-year-old woman with belly fat and saggy boobs dance around naked?

*le sigh*

Ah well, at least we have the new cover for the Northern Bard Publications version of "Night of the Tiger" (to be marketed as "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut" because we made some corrections to the tale). Hopefully I'll have the PDF of the interior ready for the printer tonight and we can release this one - with the option of doing all three books of The Tiger Series as a special priced set for Christmas 2015.

For those interested in seeing the new cover, here it is, with many thanks to Dee Jae Dow for all her hard work:

Thank you for letting me rant.

Now, for my next trick, I need to find the source of the "rodentia carcass" smell that is permeating my office space because my daughter's cat obviously mauled something enough to kill it, but didn't manage to keep his teeth on it long enough to produce it for us to praise him over it. Considering that the 9 bodies he's managed to show us over the past two months included mice, moles, and even a chipmunk (he's an indoor cat, so how that happens is beyond me), I'm almost scared to find the final resting place for whatever is stinking up the joint, but it has to happen before my nose hairs catch fire....

Laterz.....

Addendum 11/12/15: I think I might be in shock!

After the "freak out" I did on Monday (mostly because the rickety stairwell has started shuffling around when I go down it, which scared me half to death) and letting him see me go back down on Tuesday to refill (at which point he tried to pass off that I hadn't added much water, so I told him he was in charge of Wednesday, while he had a day off and I had to work), he came back from fixing a friend's heat with an automatic water feeder for our furnace!! He put it in this morning before going to work! Apart from going down now and then to check on the amount of oil in the tank, I don't have to go visit the spiders in the cellar any more!!!

Maybe it's just going to be a good day, as I also went into my email to find the message that the new version of "Night of the Tiger" meets the printing tests, so I've ordered the proof copy to make sure it prints to my specs...(and the digital file for the Kindle looks awesome, I must say!)

Thank you if you prayed for a fast resolution to this issue! I'm seriously in shock, and it may take a few days before it sinks in that I won this little battle!  *BIG grin as I go off to see what other mischief I can get into with the dog and cat today*

Addendum # 2 - 1/14/16:  Thinking of how much my legs love the auto-feeder....

My husband asked me last night if I had noticed anything about the automatic water feeder he put onto the furnace. I've only been downstairs since the original post to check the oil in the oil tank, so I had to admit that I barely looked at the nifty box with the glowing red light...

He told me that the box recorded how many times it's added water since he attached it, and in curiosity, I finally went downstairs just a few moments ago to look....

281

That's how many "add ins" the auto feeder has recorded in just two days over two full months.

281

And he didn't understand why I didn't want to be going down over those rickety stairs, possibly waking the raptor who lives in a dark corner under said stairs and making it opt to collapse the stairs with me on them, in order to enjoy the warmth from the furnace so far this winter.

281....

In 63 days...

Shall I make my hubby something special for dinner on my next day off for saving my legs all those trips?

I suspect I might.....