More about Lilly's Redemption from Ann Marie Jameson

I had been in a writer’s slump for two years trying to come up with a storyline for a fifth book in my series that would somehow get past the covid ordeal. I wanted to stay as far away from the issues as possible, but I couldn’t write a book that needed to take place from 2020 to 2021 without touching on the subject to some degree.

In 2022, I was asked to write a short story for an anthology book that my writers’ group was putting together for a fundraiser. I wasn’t keen on doing the story and really didn’t have any idea what I would write about, but eventually, I came up with the idea of an older lady dying of covid and having a near-death experience.

After I finished writing the short story, it occurred to me that I could make it into a novel using the villain in the first book of my series and having her be sent back to Earth to make amends with the family she had wronged in the original book. The only problem was that I didn’t think it would work as a fifth book in my series because I would be switching the main character from the one in it, so I decided to make it a spin-off to the series.

The ghost idea in the storyline came from my brother and he suggested it shortly after I started writing the book. He was visiting me over the Christmas holidays, and we had just finished watching an episode of the popular sitcom, Ghost, on TV. After he made the suggestion, we brainstormed together to come up with how I should work it into my present storyline. The result was Lilly’s Redemption.

More about The Earl's Ugly Mistress from Lynn Shurr

This story grew out of another, Lion in the Heather, where Lady Pandora, very much a feminist for her times, asks her mother to find a match for the homely, tart-tonged Lucia Stillwell, but a woman of strong character.

That was challenging for both Flora and me. So why not a lord, newly blinded, who will not notice her looks and who needs a strong hand to draw him out of his depression? 

As a college student, I was a reader for the blind, and they taught me how they could get around campus by themselves, use the cafeteria, and participate in many activities.

In Lucia’s time before the invention of Braille, the blind were often reduced to begging or were put in institutions. The earl, of course, has servants to care for him, but he craves his independence.

Lucia finds a way to teach him all he wants.

More about You Are Loved from Suzanne M. Hurley

My mother never missed a moment to perform an act of kindness for someone in need. I can still recall her saying, “If you are ever sad, do something for someone else and you’ll feel better.”

Unfortunately, she passed away when I was a young teen, but her compassion and giving nature left a huge impact on my life.

You Are Loved is a story rooted in an element of reality before my imagination soared, and it took off in a whole new direction. I am my mother’s daughter and years ago, while out walking daily with my dog, I noticed a camper trailer parked in various spots throughout town.

It was winter and cold, and I began to wonder if this person might be homeless and had nowhere else to go. I didn’t know for sure, but decided to leave the driver small gifts to remind him that people do care. I saw him one day from a distance, but never met him, and one day he disappeared.

Months later, I ran into someone who I used to see parked in the same parking lot and I asked her if she knew where he was. It turned out she had met him and his story had a happy ending, for although he had lost everything due to a personal tragedy, and was indeed homeless, he had found a job and moved away.

A few years later, a storyline hit me—I wondered what would happen if the driver returned to find out who gave him those special gifts. This story gave me the opportunity to wonder how the impact anonymous acts of giving can possibly have on someone.

This book has a lot of my mother in it and all the kindnesses she bestowed on people, which impacted my own life. If I could be half as kind as my mother was, I would be happy.

Mike Jennings Tribute

by Jeanne Rubba Smith

Executive Editor

Every once in a while in the life of an editor, something crosses her desk that is so well written, so compelling, that even its forbidding length of nearly 240,000 words doesn’t make it less worthy of contracting.

Michael Jennings sent his submission, Ave Antonina, back in September 2019. It was a massive work from which thousands of words had already been cut before I even laid eyes on it. My first inclination was to reject it because of its sheer length. Wings doesn’t usually contract manuscripts of that many words. But then I read it.

And thus my relationship with Michael Jennings began. For months, through good times and bad, we slogged through his massive manuscript until it was down to nearly 168,000 perfectly chosen words. To paraphrase a line from the film Amadeus, a favorite of both of us, there were just enough words, no more, no less.

His story followed the military career of Peter Dandridge, a reluctant soldier in a war he didn’t understand nor condone. The characters are tightly drawn, so finely illustrated we come to know well Dandridge, Rabinowitz, and all the people who tell the story of a slice of time during the Vietnam War.

Over those months, I came to know Mike as a sensitive person who had many loves: his wife and two daughters, his friends, his little corner of Kentucky, and the writing he did for various publications in the area. We wrote back and forth a lot as Ave Antonina took shape and ended up being released in February 2020. Its stark, black and white cover set it apart from the other books on my shelf, just as I’m sure it did on the bookshelves of his many readers.

In late 2020, Mike submitted a collection of seven short stories titled Like a Wary Blessing. Again, the writing was superb, the stories gripping. It was published in March 2021, and I was hoping to receive more of Mike’s work for later publication.

On July 27, I learned of his passing. He’d battled congestive heart failure for a very long time, with the ups and downs that disease brings.

Mike was an exemplary writer. He didn’t fear revealing his characters’ emotions, their struggles with life’s challenges. He knew how to write about them because he had lived them and was open and honest with the impact they had made on his own life.

The universe has taken Mike Jennings back, where he is in the company of others like him. He was a brilliant man and I regret not having more of his work to bring to the world. His memory will be a blessing.