Text Styles: Consistent Work Flow from Word Processor to Page Layout

by Henrietta Flores

Working with the Text Styles that are built into the software we already use, we can simplify and speed up the process of turning a manuscript into a completed book or document. This guide is aimed at writers, editors, and designers who work freelance or in small organizations that don’t have the resources to acquire beginning-to-end publishing systems. Using text styles removes the ambiguity of the intentions of writers and content creators, and saves the people doing design and layout from guesswork.

Camera Ready

by Adele Royce

Camera Ready offers a compelling version of a love triangle at its center, as L.A. executive Jane Mercer follows a tortuous path toward her version of the American dream.

Jane finally has her life together. She is vice president of accounts at the advertising agency Warren Mitchell & Partners. She has a stable long-term relationship with classical violinist Derek Lowell and a bright future full of family, close friends, and success. But a surprise encounter with Craig Keller—managing partner of Keller Whitman Group and a powerful advertising magnate—stirs up emotions from her disastrous liaison with him two years earlier. This meeting and an unexpected photo of the two in a popular tabloid topples her secure world, threatening to destroy everything she’s worked to gain.

As Jane anxiously watches, Keller Whitman Group buys out her employer, resulting in the savagely handsome Craig becoming Jane’s new boss. In addition to his alluring yet reprehensible behavior, he now has authority and control over her. Jane feels her autonomy stripped away as Craig ties her promotion to a consensual relationship with him. Worse still, Jane’s visceral attraction to him still burns, despite her wishes to keep him in her past. Forced to face up to her emotional bondage to Craig, Jane must find inner strength to live with integrity—or risk sinking into the morass of decadence and greed that is Keller Whitman Group.

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“Riveting, vulnerable, wicked—the Truth, Lies and Love in Advertising series is fun, Fendi, and all the other f-words in between.”  —Doug Elfman, author, journalist, and award-winning critic (former writer for Las Vegas Review-Journal and Chicago Sun-Times)

Beyond What We Can See: The Afterlife and What Awaits Us

by Beverly Holliday

What happens when we die? And what happens after that?

Drawing from more than two hundred conversations with departed family members and friends, Beverly Holliday takes readers on a journey into the afterlife. She answers the questions many of us have contemplated about Heaven. What happens the moment we leave our physical bodies? Where do we go? Who do we see? What do we do?

Beyond What We Can See offers both fascinating and comforting details about an existence currently beyond our wildest imaginings.

“A fresh view of the afterlife in amazingly relatable details. You will find yourself surprised and delighted by the hidden life of the spirit.”  —Donna LeMole Saucier, author and educator

The Sasquatch People: Guardians of the Earth

by Leanna R Saylor

My husband Jerry and I stayed busy seven days a week running our commercial construction company. After we moved out to the country, we enjoyed the peace and quiet during our off-work hours. More than a decade later, extraordinary things began happening.

“There was one big question I asked myself over and over, but I knew an answer was not forthcoming. I was all alone—or was I … ?”

“This book contains some of the most powerful and moving stories I’ve ever heard about working with other beings and dimensions. Learning about the Sasquatch has changed my life—and I am so excited for other readers to have the same experience.”  —Teja Rhae Watson, author of Light Reclaimed: Billie Knight

Saunderstown

by David Osborn

Author David Osborn wrote Saunderstown as a memoir of his childhood summers with his brother and best friend ninety-five years ago while at his grandmother’s home on Narragansett Bay. With the sole restraint of respect for adults as well as prompt appearance at meals, and with little or no rules as to where they went and what they did, the bay was theirs and an endless source of adventure, some of it pretty hairy-scary. Adventures over, it was the magic of Grandma’s ancient horse and buggy–days barn, and make-believe war with Grandpa’s great opposing armies of lead soldiers lined up on the outdoor paddock dirt and grass between flanking box stalls occupied by silently watching horses. Then, at summer’s end, it was riding and the unrestrained joy of racing those same horses down a long mile of completely empty white sandy beach.

Footprints of the Montford Point Marines: Strides in Overcoming Racial Disparities in the Marine Corps

by Eugene S. Mosley

The Footprints of the Montford Point Marines explores historic information about the Montford Point Marines and also my dad, Corporal Thomas Mosley, while serving with the first group of African American Marines in the United States. This is the story of a brief period of his life, from Montford Point Camp to the Pacific in World War II, and seventy years later being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Congress.

These men came from all parts of the United States to the South to train at a segregated facility called Montford Point Camp, adjacent to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the largest all-purpose Marine base in the world. It had the best equipment for all types of military training, but these new black enlistees at the adjacent Montford Point Camp were not allowed to enter unless accompanied by a White officer—Camp Lejeune was exclusive to White Marines and their families only. With World War II looming, the government needed all hands on deck and created millions of new jobs in preparation but continued keeping Blacks out of the job market and housing.

With the pressure imposed by groups such as the NAACP, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to rethink these exclusions, at least in the federal workplace, and through negotiations with many groups, led by A. Philip Randolph, Executive Order 8802 was issued by President Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, to counter racial discrimination. The U.S. Marine Corps was part of the defense industry, and as a result had to open their ranks to African Americans who wished to serve. The Montford Point Marines became giants in the Asiatic Pacific and were some of the greatest heroes this country has ever known.

Through swamps, hills, and worse terrain, under heavy enemy gunfire, they were able to supply ammunition, fuel, food, and medical supplies to troops on the front lines where most others had failed. They were also charged with removing the dead and wounded back to the safety of the ships waiting offshore. Eventually they were called to the front lines and fought in every major battle in the Pacific islands.

Some seventy years later, on June 27, 2012, approximately four hundred of these brave men, mostly in their eighties and nineties, finally received their just recognition by receiving Congressional Gold Medals. Other families received the medal posthumously. From 1942 to 1949, the 19,168 Montford Point Marines paid the price so others could follow in their footprints to continue the legacy of the few, the proud, the Marines: Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful). They were also known as “The Chosen Few.”

“Eugene Mosley’s Footprints of the Montford Point Marines is much more than a moving tribute from a son to his father. Told largely through the eyes of Thomas Mosley, one of the nation’s first African American Marines, who trained at Montford Point, a portion of Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, it also contains additional research on the White officers and Black noncommissioned officers who trained them and accompanied them into battle in World War II’s Pacific theater. Mosley’s work, easily accessible, is a valuable contribution to the literature on the gradual, and often grudging, acceptance of African Americans into the American military.”  —Melton McLaurin, Professor Emeritus of History, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and author of The Marines of Montfort Point, America’s First Black Marines

Night on the Water

by Christopher Church

A chance encounter on an airplane with the woolly academic Rovski leads psychic investigator Mason onto a college campus, where he works to figure out why math professor Emily is hassling the guy. As he digs into the mystery, his psychic mentor Hanh instructs him to connect with his client in the dream world. Mason works to get lucid in his dreams and struggles to understand the symbolism and the meaning of his experiences in that realm, and how it intersects waking life. It soon becomes clear that he’s seeing things that other people don’t, and the plucky redhead has to grapple with the classic psychic’s dilemma: how to relate paranormal experiences back to mundane reality. His boyfriend, Ned, and their roommate, Peggy, help Mason keep his feet on the ground, and old friend Gilbert shows up in ways that transcend helpful and dive into annoying. As Rovski gets more rattled by Emily’s behavior, Mason gets closer to the truth, sailing across a mountain lake in the dead of night, chasing his quarry on his trusty bicycle, and ultimately unfolding a hidden part of reality.

“Church vividly constructs a world peopled with characters I did not want to leave behind when I finished the book.”  —an Amazon reader

Light Reclaimed: Billie Knight

by Teja Rhae Watson

It’s June 2020, and on top of the Covid shutdowns and racial justice revolution, Billie Knight’s dad just died. She soon realizes he wasn’t the one who hurt her when she was a kid—but then who the hell was?

Billie, a fifty-year-old muralist and art teacher, sets out to solve the mystery of her trauma—from the off-grid queer community she built on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, through Seattle’s autonomous zones and underground theaters, to her wild childhood home of Humboldt County—with her long-lost bestie, Randall, as her partner. Between stakeouts, suspect-snatchings, witness interviews, and flashbacks, Billie and Randall must confront the conflicts that kept them apart for so many years.

The truth is like a feral animal—the closer they get, the more it claws and hisses. Will Billie and her spirit army find the answers she needs to bring the perpetrators to justice and reclaim her place in the universe?

Teja Rhae Watson’s website

“Teja Rhae Watson writes with the emotional depth and beauty of someone who has seen what the characters in Light Reclaimed: Billie Knight have seen: trauma and darkness, but also powerful friendships and glorious, spiritual redemption.”  —tammy lynne stoner, award-winning author of Sugar Land

Attic.doc

by Teja Rhae Watson

On sale Monday, December 22

In January 2010, after an unmentionable incident, Nara flees Kamakura, Japan, for a communal Victorian on the Oakland/Berkeley border. In a Word doc, she tracks the half-truths she’s telling her new roommates, Lily and Asha, along with her field notes on their queerdo hippunk vibes.

In February, Nara accidentally tosses Lily’s sourdough starter. In March, Nara crushes on Asha. In April, she escapes all the drama, isolating in the attic. In May, when the house hosts a naked party, Nara falls hard for the new butch next door.

But come June, Nara’s past catches up with her. Then, in July, tragedy strikes. Can Nara reassemble her house of cards before year’s end?

A thriller–turned–love story that delves deeply into death, Attic.doc details the divide between self-delusion and authenticity, the dangerous decisions we make to survive our trauma, the fine line between codependence and selflessness, and the liberating power of letting go.

“A fun, weird, queer read … with butoh dancing!”  —Katia Noyes, author of Crashing America

News from the Unconscious Realm: Hard-Nosed Journalism to Plumb the Depths of the Psyche

by Chester Henry

News from the Unconscious Realm is an extensive collection of vivid news dispatches from the dream world. If the experiences we have in our sleep are just as valid as waking life, these reports are of vital interest. Far from being imaginary, the unconscious is full of ideas and actions, and it’s literally the source of our conscious world—the pool that material reality emerges from. The opposite of breaking news, these stories, presented in hard-nosed journalism format, have helped to bring our world into existence.

Secondhand Inertia

by George Bixley

Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap.

A chance conversation in his neighborhood with an astrology-obsessed merchant leads Slater deep into the Mojave Desert, where he digs into the last days of a junkie who overdosed in the wilderness near Twentynine Palms. He hooks up with Zeke, and hires him as a guide to the backcountry, where he soon discovers the guy has some odd beliefs about the land.

After Slater confronts some bougie lowlife rock climbers, the case leads him to small-town twelve-step meetings, where he finds out that things aren’t as they seem. Jason from the group loans him a motorcycle, and Slater gets involved with a classic car guy named Wheels, a smoke-show who’s obsessed with lucid dreaming. Hanging out with the twelve-steppers, an uncomfortable realization strikes him—Slater isn’t just undercover in this world; he’s an addict like they are.

Meanwhile, Pike is getting exasperated that Slater has accumulated more classic cars and that in his work he’s pushing the boundary between what’s legal and what might get him tossed in the hoosegow. Taking a job in a thrift store to stalk a local grifter, Slater tries to avoid the goons who are after Jason while staying below the radar of the cops. As things heat up, Slater gets roped into an illicit gig, out in the Mojave wildlands, to rob a train.

Freelance investigator Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with the back-channel support he gets from main squeeze Pike, business partner Max, and operatives Andy and Etta.

The Newsroom

by David Osborn

When a young scholarly student of pre-Homeric ancient Greek poetry gets a job researching neo-Nazi hate groups with a local weekly newspaper, she escapes the hail of death from a bump-stocked AR-15 that that kills six of the paper’s staff, but not the following chain of events that threatens her own life in turn.

“A sharp, taut adventure story … leads a trail through mystery and destruction that is elusive and enthralling …”  —Glasgow Herald