Wednesday Writing Wisdom (20) Anais Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Anais Nin
 (1903 - 1977)

Curious facts about:

She was trained as a flamenco dancer while living in Paris in the 1920s.

Anaïs Nin's first husband did not want to be mentioned in her diaries, but she did mention Henry Miller (the famous writer whose work was banned in the U.S. until 1962), whom she had an affair with while in Paris.

Anaïs Nin was one of the first female erotica writers.

When she was 44 in 1947, Anaïs Nin met Rupert Pole, a former actor, on an elevator in Manhattan. She later married Rupert (in 1955) despite the fact that she was already married. The new couple lived together in California and her first husband ignored the marriage.

Guest Promo (CII) Kimbra Kasch

Let's give a warm welcome to American author Kimbra Kasch who comes all the way from Portland and shares with us her latest release
                                               Demon's Ink

Blurb:

There are lots of dangerous things hanging (or, maybe I should say, dangling) around Portland lately but, when a Demonic tattoo artist comes to town, everything goes to Hell, in DEMON’S INK.

This young adult novel set in Portland, Oregon is available on Amazon now and with Halloween coming, you'll want to have a story to share...

Here's one: DEMON'S INK: It's about art, that's more than anyone bargained for.

Drake and Bartos come to the Pacific Northwest, where they open yet another tattoo shop but Bartos has no trouble dealing with the competition because there’s nothing normal about his art. And he’s stealing more than clients from the local skin artists. He's stealing their souls.

Customers fall in love with Bartos Slinderman’s tats but end up paying the ultimate price for their purchase because unlike Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, they can’t walk away from this art and it’s beautiful until the artwork takes on a life of its own...

EXCERPT:

DRAKE

Expectations can ruin everything. Like thinking my senior year was going to be something special. What a set up that was.

I should have known better than to get my hopes up.

Ever.

I’d never been lucky. No one in my family was. I was probably only six when I’d heard grandpa say, “We come from a long line of losers.” He was talking to my Dad. I don’t even know about what. But, now, I know I should have listened to him.

Dad had already gone to prison, leaving Mom and me worse off than ever. And we were never good but, at least while he’d hung around, she managed to act like things were okay. Now she wasn’t even trying to pretend. Really it was way worse than that; she wasn’t even getting up off the couch any more.

I’d come home from school to find her passed out. The first couple times it freaked me out. Seeing her face-planted in the front room and not knowing whether she was alive or dead, I didn’t want to be the one to find her like that, to turn her over, to have to check to see if she was still breathing but I did. . . and I had no idea if she was high or drunk. I didn’t even care because what difference did it make? She was out of it. That was all that mattered.

So, after Dad went to jail, I was completely alone until Bartos made me a deal I couldn’t refuse but that was later.

For weeks, I’d come home after class and make a sandwich—if there was bread—otherwise it was a bowl of cereal for breakfast and dinner, sometimes I’d eat it dry because the milk had gone bad.

I knew I was going to have to get a job if I wanted to survive and I’d started looking around but that was right before everything changed.

It was late one Thursday evening. I still remember because I was thinking, “Only one more day…” I just didn’t know how right I was.

I don’t know what woke me up that night. Maybe it was the smell, the heat, the sound of my Mom screaming. I really don’t know. But I opened my eyes to the thick burning haze of a room filled with smoke.

I’d gone down into the basement that night and fallen asleep.

Looking around, I already knew there were no windows. I was trapped.

BUY THE BOOK HERE:
Amazon

OR simply check out a sample and join me on Twitter or stop by and see what I'm pinning on Pinterest and, if you've read Demon's Ink and have a question or simply want to share a comment, please feel free to send me an email. I love connecting with readers.My Website:

http://kimbrakasch.com/

Other places fans and readers can talk with Kim:
Goodreads
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Blog 

Wednesday Writing Wisdom (19) Edgar Allan Poe

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809 - 1849)
Curious facts about:

Poe is regarded as the “father of the modern literary detective” after he created Le Chevalier C Auguste Dupin as the protagonist for The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. This book is widely considered to be the first detective-fiction story, and Poe brought back Dupin for two further works – The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844). Poe terms Dupin’s investigative talent as “ratiocination” – rational and exact reasoning – and this work helped to lay the foundations for the modern-day detective genre of literature.

He loved Cats. Really. Contrary to the famous and nasty depiction of a man gouging the eye of a poor feline in “The Black Cat,” Poe adored animals. His own kitty’s name was Catterina. After hearing of Poe’s death, his mother-in-law discovered that his beloved tortoiseshell cat Catterina had also just died.

 

 Poe was athletic and handsome, as well as mysterious and brooding. He held a record for swimming six miles up the tidal James River in Virginia, and he enjoyed rowing around Turtle Bay in New York City and hiking through the countryside. He was also a champion long jumper.

In the 1860s, the medium Lizzie Doten published some poetry she claimed had been dictated to her by Poe’s ghost. His fiancée Sarah Helen Whitman (after his first wife’s death but before his engagement to Elmira Shelton) hired a medium to move in with her because she thought Poe’s spirit was trying to communicate with her, too.