Welcome to our world. It is a place of great creativity, filled with wonderful stories. There is lots of heart and lots of imagination here. Like Santa’s elves we bend and shape and snip to make manuscripts more finished and complete. But we are only as good as the material presented to us, and in 2014, we were overwhelmed with superior stuff.

This has been a year of strong novels – and we have edited them in every genre:

 Paranormal and fantasy:

• Past lives intersect with current ones over a major flood and lost love
• When a young man is sentenced by a cadaverous judge to 100 days in a certain academy, the gates of hell are unleashed

Chick Lit:

• A troubled young woman with a wealthy LA background finds reasons to live
• A feisty young woman fakes a case of amnesia to get attention from her family
• A romantic comedy of mistaken identities all around

Children’s:

• Learn about the environment with Professor Onestone Bear
• More adventures with Anna and Andy Hummingbird

 Mystery/Suspense:

• House of Homicide – the title says it all

Science fiction:

• A daredevil CIA agent faces off against a super human raised by a mysterious global committee bent on world domination
• Public fear caused by wars, terrorists and a spread of disease has been used by a tyrannical, industry-based corporation in 2023 to take over the world, transforming all governments into a one-world power and creating bloodshed and violence in the process.
• In 2028, the globally renowned golf tour progresses in suspenseful match after match, played by a colorful and suspicious cast of international characters, heading to ground zero in Tehran, little realizing that a psychopath al-Qaeda leader has intricate plans to unleash a weapon of mass destruction at the final event.

 Thriller:

• The south rises again – with nuclear weapons
• Strange things happening to the environment are tracked by a group of friends who discover
• Uncovering the murderer of a young woman takes us from the beach to the snow-covered mountains of California

 

Young Adult:

• Around an annual campfire, kids compete with stories that creepily come to life.
• Struggling to get an education in rural Togo, where school costs a prohibitive dollar a year
• A coming-of-age, relationship novel in an exotic island setting that raises questions about independence and its consequences.

 

Mainstream:

• The heartbreak, and redemption of two Appalachian women whose lives connect through a moonshiner
• A sprawling sharecropper family migrates north to Baltimore and establishes a community of saints
• Irish folklore collides with an amusingly satirical description of Hollywood in a novel that is part mystery part comedy.
• Local civil rights struggles seen through the eyes of a bright young black girl in 1950s North Carolina
• A suspenseful look at the personal ramifications on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• A tale of growing up in Iran before and after the 1979 revolution.
• A multi-generational family saga from pre World War Two to the present.
• 9-11 up close and personal through the eyes of a worker who missed the World Trade Center elevator that fateful morning, and thus was spared.

Memoirs made a small comeback in 2014 after a year when we did not have so many. We have reviewed books that took us to exotic locations in Haiti and Nigeria and stories that centered on:

• Escaping a church cult
• The nightmare that can result from your spouse’s former spouse
• Living with heart disease
• Being the only woman on an oil rig
• A prison romance between a black prisoner and his white art teacher, described by both participants
• The tragic effect multiple suicides have on a family and the inner redemptive powers that enable us to go on in the face of adversity
• The ramifications of a black woman marrying a white man in 1960s Mississippi

From your how-to books this year we have learned about martial arts and ways…

• To teach with love, nurturing students to their full potential
• To take off pounds with quick and easy weight loss recipe
• To take psychological steps to improve your marriage on your own
• To have a revolutionary retirement, exploring the next chapter of life with enthusiasm, thanks to longer life spans, better health, and myriad opportunities
• To escape an abusive relationship
• To learn to cope and go on after the death of a child
• To get a kinesthetic edge in golfing
• To discover the code to understanding all of life

You have had a great publishing year as all the postings on Twitter and our Facebook page attest. Some of you have found traditional publishers and numerous others have self-published. Others are working with agents or are in the process of publishing. It has been exciting to see your books in print and to post your accomplishments as our trophies. 🙂

To all our authors and would-be authors: skip the resolutions and just continue to follow your muses. We can’t wait to see what you produce in 2015.

 For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”