CONTACT: Donna M. McDine

Children’s Author

Email: dmcdine@optonline.net

Phone: 845-721-7802

For Immediate Release

Three Indie Debut Authors Share Their Experiences about Publishing with a Small Press

Take advantage of this wonderful opportunity sponsored by The Ferguson Library Harry Bennett Branch http://www.fergusonlibrary.org and the Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators of Lower Fairfield http://lowerfairfieldwriters.blogspot.com as they offer a unique panel of three indie debut authors on Saturday, September 25, 2010, 11:00 am at 115 Vine Road, Stamford, CT. The author’s panel will consist of an open discussion on their personal experiences with publishing with a small press with an opportunity to ask questions.

Lori Calabrese’s first picture book, The Bug That Plagued the Entire Third Grade, was named Dragonfly Publishing, Inc.’s 2009 Best Children’s Book. Her articles and stories have been published in Boys’ Life, Odyssey, Appleseeds, Focus on the Family Clubhouse, Jr., Turtle Magazine for Preschool Kids, and Stories for Children Magazine.

Donna McDine placed twice in the top 100 of the Children’s/Young Adult category in the 78^th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Her book, The Golden Pathway, was published by Guardian Angel Publishing.

Jo Ramsey is a former teacher. When she was five years old, she wrote her first story and hasn’t stopped since. Her first published YA novel, Connection, was published in January 2010 by Jupiter Gardens Press.

Event location:

The Ferguson Library

Harry Bennett Branch

115 Vine Road

Stamford, CT

203-351-8292

www.fergusonlibrary.org

We look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you in advance for your interest.

Des Moines, Iowa – August 17, 2010 – Heidi Telpner, an RN with over twenty years’ experience, shares her stories from working as a hospice nurse with you. She describes her work as a labor of love, and with honesty and humor, details the stories of the many patients with which she’s worked. Her writing transcends all the divisions that separate us, and instead, brings us closer to the humbling experience of caring for those in the last stages of their lives.

Available in both print and electronic formats, One Foot In Heaven, will share the various, and yet similar, experiences of the hospice patient, friends, family, and the nurse. This book can be purchased direct from the publisher or from your favorite book seller.

Contact:
Jupiter Gardens Press
http://jupitergardens.com/onefootinheaven

I’ve suffered from allergies and sinus problems for as long as I remember. As a child, I was frequently prescribed the big brown bottles of cough syrup from the doctor. Yellow was Actifed; purple was Sudifed. I preferred the Actifed, and back then pseudoephedrine needed to come from a prescription. The fact that I have vivid memories of these big brown glass bottles with their fruit-flavored contents is a testament to how much I took. The older I got, the more my allergies bothered me. In a nutshell, Mother Nature hates me. I don’t know why. But she does, and this time of year, when the corn is pollinating and the ragweed is blooming is my worst. Add to that the fact that I like to be outdoors, that I have a horse, which means all the dust and hay that a barn can bring, and well, I’ll take anything that I can use to help my sinuses.

The problem is, since I’ve had such large amounts of “sinus medicine” poured down me from a young age, my body is like “hah!” when I take Sudifed or anything over the counter. When the formulas were changed to remove pseudoephedrine from them, my sinuses just laughed even more.

I’d been getting “chemical cautery” of my sinuses, but since I’m in my “deductible period” for my health insurance, this every-six-month procedure would cost me $700. Add to that the fact that I still need sinus meds, well…I’m searching for alternatives.

I’ve found them in peppermint tea and peppermint oil. But I’ve also found an alternative in an $11 neti pot.

What is a neti pot? It’s a small pot that looks like a cross between a teapot and a magic lamp. Made from plastic (recycled) or ceramic, they’re filled with water and salt, then used to irrigate, or rinse, the sinuses. By washing away allergens, they help the cilia of the nose move more freely and help encourage draining.

I’ve found it especially helpful when I get back from the barn to do a complete wash. I shower, change clothes, and then do a sinus wash to remove the allergens that usually linger. On a daily, or every-other day basis, I also try to sinus wash, and if I do something such as mowing that will aggravate my allergies, I also redo the wash.

Simply fill the neti pot to a predetermined line with lukewarm, body-temperature water. Mix in the recommended method of salt, then put the end of the spigot in your nose, tilt your head to 45 degrees, then wash one side. When you’re done, repeat on the other.

I’ve found this to be a simple, non-medical, non-pharmaceutical, way to help my sinuses. It keeps the sinus headaches, pain and pressure, at bay, and it’s something I can do pretty inexpensively. While your mileage may vary, if you’re looking for a natural way to fight allergies, sinus washing may be something to help you.

Further Reading:

WebMD, Do Neti Pots Really Work? http://www.webmd.com/allergies/sinus-pain-pressure-9/neti-pots

Himalayan Institute: http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/netipot/netipotgateway.aspx

A NPR Article on Sinus Irrigation: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7108546

To say our cats are spoiled is a bit of an understatement. Although we have six, circumstances allow both myself and my partner to work from home, and this means that our feline babies get nearly 24/7 attention from us. For example, Baxter, one of the kittens we adopted last fall who is now a year old, knows that he can climb on the back of my desk chair, touch my shoulder, and I’ll lift him down into my lap. He’ll get petted and talked to, and lots of attention. Plus, he gets reiki.

When he snuggles into my lap, I feel my left hand start to tingle. Usually I’m using this hand to support his hindquarters to make sure he doesn’t fall (or start to fall and accidentally claw me). With my palm flat against his side, the reiki energy starts to flow and he purrs. Boy does he purr. With his eyes closed and rubbing his face against my chin, he purrs and he purrs. After usually five or ten minutes of this, the reiki stops, and he hops down to go about his kitty business.

Other cats seem to use reiki in this manner. When Nermal, one of our elder cats who is on medication now for some health issues, hops into my lap, immediately the reiki starts to pull. So strong sometimes that my hands hurt. I always tell him it’s okay, he can go slowly and take as much as he needs, as long as he needs it for, and generally, my hands stop hurting as the flow of energy moderates.

To me, I see reiki when used in this manner as an extension of my love. I can pet their fur, feed them treats, talk to them, but cats being the independent creatures they are, sometimes don’t care for hugs or extensive cuddling. So when they do get attention, they get reiki like an extra big hug, or warm blanket of love surrounding them. And, of course, they can take this reiki with them.

In fact, as I’m typing this blog entry, Delta, our youngest cat adopted at the same time as Baxter, has crawled into my lap. She’s quite the little snuggler, and she is purring her little kitten heart out. And you guessed it, the reiki began to flow almost as soon as she settled against me.

For animals that either due to their personality or because of their species, who don’t seem to receive, or need, a lot of interaction from their owners, reiki can be a way to send “Yes, I care. You’re a part of our family” to them without interfering with their natural movements. Just because my cats tend to come to my lap to request their reiki, it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t send to them across the room, or even if they were in a different part of the house.

It’s the hug that warms from the inside. That’s how reiki is most often used in our household.

It’s no secret to those who know me that I really, really, really don’t like thunderstorms. Okay, I’ll take that back. I like the soft rumbly-thunder kinds of storms, with the gentle rain where you know it’s a nice, cozy night, and not one to hover by the weather radio. The storm we had last night though…that one was a doozy.

My dislike of storms stems from many reasons, not the least of which is that I watched my house get holes punched in the siding, and vicious green and purple bruises on my forearms from egg-shaped hail. I had to park about a quarter of a block away from the storm shelter, and I put my arms over my head and ran. I hate to think what would have happened had I been hit in the head. My car was dented too, but as that was a Ford Aspire, that I daresay was aspiring to be a car, well…it happens.

However, I also saw the fire station in the small town where I grew up literally blown apart by a strong downburst. The bricks hit my grandma’s house half a block away. After witnessing that, suffice to say, I am humbled and scared out of my wits when storms get severe.

Last night the winds were a good half an hour ahead of the storm. And my house (okay it’s a trailer) was shaking. Like I could watch my computer monitor vibrate on my desk, shaking. Since by the time the winds got bad, it was too late to run to the storm shelter, I sat there and gave myself reiki.

And boy did the reiki flow. My hands tingled, almost to the point of hurting, from the strong flow of reiki as I envisioned a bubble around my house of protective blue light. “I’m all right. We’re safe. We’re going to be all right. We’re safe.” Or some variation of that became my mantra for the twenty-or-so scary minutes.

And I took deep breaths. Every time the house rattled, every time I felt my heart pounding, or I jumped at a crack of lightning, I took deep breaths. The calming breaths and the reiki helped me get through a very scary time.

I’m finding myself turning to reiki more and more as our storm season heats up. The truth is, living in a mobile home, and spending most of my time in my office, which is the NW corner (and all our storms come out of the north and west), my space is usually the part of the house that gets “hit” first. Add to that my beloved lilac bushes, which sound like the great clawing hands of beasts as they whip against the side of my trailer, and well, when you’re not that fond of storms to begin with, it can sound like an episode of Storm Stories rather quickly.

Since reiki is a method of stress-reduction and relaxation, using it to keep calm and collected during difficult times is a natural fit. It’s the first thing I think of once I have the radar refreshing on my computer. And it’s something on which I’ve come to rely. Any tense, or worrysome, situation benefits from reiki. And I hope by sending reiki to myself in the universe, perhaps it’ll make Mother Nature look a little more kindly on me. Maybe.

Jupiter Gardens has just published my young adult novel Connection. I’m thrilled to be working with Mary Wilson on this, and even more excited to see Connection finally in print. You see, it’s a story that has a lot of meaning for me.

One day in 2005, I walked into a metaphysical store near my home in Maine. I’d been there a couple times before, seeking and trying to learn. For various reasons, I’d decided that my spiritual path lay outside the Christianity in which I’d been brought up, and I wanted to find out what else existed. However, this particular day, I returned to the store to talk to the owner about my books. On my first visit, I’d spotted a children’s book on her shelves that was written by a woman I knew from a Yahoo loop for children’s authors, and that had led me into a conversation with the owner about my own books.

Today, the owner listened patiently and with at least a little excitement while I told her more about the young adult series I’d been writing. Then a voice piped up from behind the cash register. “I’d like to read your books.” He was a skinny guy with glasses and a ponytail, and his interruption irritated me. But… he wanted to read my book! Since I just conveniently happened to have the manuscript in my car, I brought it in to him. His name was Chris.

After that, I spent hours at the store talking to him about writing. About spirituality. About a lot of things. We became friends, and then took the friendship out of the store. He practiced and taught energy healing, channeling, and yoga, and after a few months began teaching these things to me. He also used the skills to help me work through issues from my childhood and my marriage, things that I’d never told anyone about or that I’d buried so deeply I had to dig through layers of mental detritus to find them.

Over the time that I knew him, I went from a timid woman, afraid of nearly everyone and everything and unable to touch anyone other than my children, to a stronger woman, unwilling to let fear get the better of her. I worked through the issues, and I ended my marriage and moved on to a happier life. Chris and I talked during this time, and agreed that my story might help others.

So Connection and the rest of the Reality Shift series isn’t only the story of Shanna and Jonah. It’s my story as well, told about teens so that maybe even one person who’s going through what I went through–or what Shanna goes through–will read it and try to change their situation. Will realize they’re worth helping.

Sadly, my friendship with Chris ended not long after my marriage did. Our paths diverged. Still, even though I forgot to get the information to Mary in time, Connection is dedicated to Chris. Without him, the story wouldn’t exist today.

Without him, I might not either.