HELP! I’VE BEEN ABDUCTED! BY Vonnie Davis

I’m begging Leah to post this for me. You see I bought a new computer with Windows 10. The new version abducted nearly all my passwords. I can’t blog anywhere including my own place. I have an online charge account I can’t pay. And I can’t renew our drivers’ licenses. 

I’m trying to fix it all. I really am, but it takes time. Time when I’d rather be writing. When I need to be writing and promoting. I hate when life gets in the way and it has at our house recently.

I’ve got kidney stones. Calvin keeps falling and no doctor can figure out why. He lost his main hearing aid and I’ve yet to find it. And today he lost the other one in the garage. Thank goodness we found it. My sweetheart decided he’d make a frozen pizza so I could keep on reading over a galley. Ten minutes later, the house was filled with smoke and every smoke detector in the house was blaring. We had tomato soup and grilled cheese for supper while fans worked overtime.

But life is still good. We’ve got each other and our sense of humors. And I’ve got a fairly new release. It’s steamier than I usually write and there’s a scene in a BDSM club that is more comical than sexual. The novella is part of Kindle Worlds. It allowed me to bring to life a heroine I’ve been dreaming of for three years or more. A female coach of a male collegiate basketball team. 

Men coach women’s teams and no one bats an eye. Why can’t a woman coach the men? I did some Google research and found there had been a female coach of a men’s team. And I thought if there was one, maybe there was two or three. So my female coach, Gracie Luera, would work. She also writes erotic romance during off season and is working hard at her strong attraction to bad boys.

She travels to NYC to RWA and is mugged. Who comes to her rescue? Football bad boy Webb Mohanty. It’s laughter and pure steam as they fight their attraction for each other…even at the BDSM club where she’s gone with another writer to do research for a book. 

Buy link: http://a.co/6dS5zUH
www.vonniedavis.com

May is For Writing Memories, Too...by Glenys O'Connell (Book Giveaway)

I love the Internet.

I have always loved the Internet.

Right from way back in the early 1980’s when it first became available to the very rural area I lived in. In those days you had to plug a telephone cord into your computer, none of this cable or satellite technology. And it was slow, at times painfully so. But then, at that time computers were also very slow, and the slowness did nothing to diminish the wonder, the sheer joy of being able to send an article or a newsletter to people in places as disparate as South Africa, Australia, The US and Jamaica, and have it arrive within hours.

Well, yes, I did say it was slow. But in those days it could take anything up to four weeks for a letter in what we now call 'snail mail' to reach any of those destinations from here in rural Canada.

To be able to send copy for articles, promotional materials, web content - this was in the pre-blog days, if you can imagine that - in so short a time was a miracle in communication terms. These days I can send an entire manuscript to a publisher in minutes, send article proposals to magazines far away, write web content for companies across the Atlantic who then use the miracle of the Net to disperse them to clients in other countries…

There's no doubt that writers have benefited hugely from the arrival of computers and the Internet. Sure, people argue there are drawbacks, such as digital books threatening the very existence of real paper books (as if!) and some bemoan the fact that anyone at all can put out an ebook or a dvd or a cd without having to go through the filters of 'professional' gatekeepers such as publishers and record companies.

Well, phooey!

This will all shake out in time. There are awful ebooks out there, unedited, badly written, plotless and pointless. But the simple fact is that, once bitten, the reader will be twice shy. People putting out poor quality work won’t find a market for their next work.

And, as someone who loves writing, I can't see any real reason to deprive others of the fun of putting out their words into the EtherNet.

My first computer was only black and white, and worked on a rather dowdy, extremely limited word

processing system. Then Windows was invented and - wow!
One company I worked for as a journalist proudly presented me with a Macintosh Computer - the Apple trademark was still in the pipeline. This computer, with its tiny monitor, needed a large floppy disc to be inserted in the top drive, and another in the lower drive. The top disc held all the programming information, and without it, you weren't going anywhere!

The bottom disc contained all the material you diligently typed in, and this disc, closely guarded, was the one a courier took to the company's editorial headquarters two or three times a week.

Yes, I can hear you youngsters out there snickering. But that’s fine. Someday your kids or grandkids will compare you to a dinosaur, too.

The daily newspaper I worked for provided portable electric typewriters to its staff, and quickly scented the benefits of a computer network in the office. For myself, running a fairly remote satellite office, they purchased a portable computer. People these days might laugh, but then it was state-of-the art.

To be honest, with its case closed it looked just like a large, square portable typewriter. Oh, but the joy it brought - I could type in all my articles and features, then - get this - I fitted the telephone receiver into the two rubber rimmed holes on the top, made a few adjustments, whispered "AbraCaDabra" or, on bad days, a prayer to St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases,  and all my work flew across the ether to my boss, the Managing Editor. I might finish work at 3:30 am, but it was in his computer 100 km away, when he started work at 6:30am

The only glitch, really, was that digital cameras weren't available then. I'm a photojournalist, took my own pix to go with articles and stories, and these were on the old fashioned rolls of film. Where once a courier stopped by my mailbox in the wee small hours and whisked my paper copies of articles off to head office, now he stopped by only on the days I called and asked him to pick up film.

Now everyone has a digital camera - sometimes several if you include the pocket one, the laptop one, the computer one, and the cell phone one…..

Sometimes as sit on my front porch with my laptop, I imagine I can see words and pictures flying by my head, carried on unseeable waves, from thousands of computers and cameras and phones…..

Yes, I love the Internet.

Do You love the Internet? There's your choice of one of my ebooks for the best reason to love the Net.

Glenys O'Connell's love affair with the Internet continues to grow as she dabbles with Indie publishing. Click here to take a look at her list of traditionally published and Indie published books here.

Women as Secret Weapons

We’re all familiar with the photo to our left. “Rosie the Riveter” was one of the weapons of World War II. While our men were off fighting, women back home left their kitchens and worked traditionally male jobs in factories. But there were “Secret Rosies,” too. And the more I read about them, the more I’ve come to respect their unheralded contribution to the war effort.

In 1942, a secret US military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort—female mathematicians who would become human “computers” for the army. The Rosies in the factories made the weapons; the female computers, the Secret Rosies, made them accurate.

These women worked in top-secret areas, which made it difficult for their actions to be publicized. One of the most significant areas of contribution was in mathematics. Large numbers of women trained in mathematics were recruited to do highly classified work in computing gunnery tables.

They did what we now would call number crunching and were largely unheralded, but their work was perhaps even more groundbreaking than those that used their muscles and were immortalized as Rosies, for it demonstrated that women were the intellectual equals of men, capable of being logical and precise.

Don’t ya love it?

In today's world we think of a computer as a thing, but back in World War II a computer was a person, and in many cases it was a woman.

My journey into awareness of these computers started with Ben, a World War II pilot, who sometimes comes to me at night, whispering to me about his girlfriend, Pearl, and would I tell her story. (No, I am not nuts, this is how my mind works. Or as Calvin would say, “I’m wired differently.”) When I asked Ben what made his Pearl so special, he just smiled and told me it was a secret.

What secret?

 

One night Calvin downstreamed a video from Netflix about female computers. We were only 5 minutes into watching this PBS documentary made by Professor LeAnn Erickson when the gears clicked in my mind. Possibilities meshed. My heart rate kicked up. Ben’s Pearl was one of those computers! Not really, but don’t we often take a historical fact and run with it to create our stories? Thus, my research of those fascinating women began.

When the war ended, a small group of those women went on to be the first programmers of the original ENIAC computer, as well as the next generation of computers.

 

Unfortunately, once they did their initial work, they were ignored, not even receiving invitations to attend the party celebrating the initial success of the machine. So, what else is new? Their story is told in great detail in this video, which consists of images, newsreel video, narration and interviews with the women that did the job. The women clearly loved their work, deriving satisfaction from having made a significant contribution to the war effort as well as helping make technical breakthroughs.

 

Wouldn’t this story be of enormous value in courses in women’s studies, the history of computing and technology, the history of World War II, and the history of mathematics?

 

It is hard to overstate the significance of the contribution of these women to the Allied victory in World War II, a fact that few people are aware of. Lipstick wearing computers who left home and traveled to strange cities to use their brain power to help win the war. Female pioneers we can all take pride in. Thank you, “Secret Rosies.”