Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning (Hardcover)

By Danette Haworth

Spunky, headstrong Violet Raines is happy with things just the way they are in her sleepy backwoods Florida town. She loves going to the fish fry with her best friend, Lottie, and collecting BrainFreeze cups with her good friend Eddie. She loves squeezing into the open trunk of the old cypress tree, looking for alligators in the river, and witnessing lighting storms on a warm summer day. 

But Violet's world is turned upside down when Melissa moves to town from big city Detroit. All of a sudden Violet's supposed to want to wear makeup, and watch soap operas, and play Truth or Dare! It'll take the help of Violet's friends, her Momma, a few run-ins with lightning, and maybe even Melissa, for Violet to realize that growing up doesn't have to mean changing who you are.

Reading level: 9-12
Hardcover: 176 pages
ISBN: 0802797911
Walker Books for Young Readers

Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning is available through Amazon.com, B&N.com, or any independent or chain bookstore.

Participate in Danette's tour! Email us: blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com. If you are chosen to host, you will receive a copy of Danette's book.

Upcoming Author Tours:
If you have a blog or website and would like to host one of our authors below, we are still accepting a few choice blogs to participate in our Partnership Program. Come and join the fun! Please email Angela & Jodi at blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com and put "Blog Tour Partnership" in the subject line. We currently have 4 more authors that are launching their tours in the next few weeks. Please tell us the author you are interested in and your available dates. We'll get back to you with the details if you are accepted. We look forward to hearing from you!

Content for your blog: All of our touring authors are available for interviews, or they will provide a guest post on a topic relating to the writing process or their book.

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Tour Dates: May 11, 2009 - June 11, 2009 Title: All Men Are Cremated Equal: My 77 Blind Dates Author: Elizabeth Fournier Genre: Memoir (reads like Chick Lit) Synopsis: Elizabeth chronicles her true life dating spree as a marriage-minded mortician in her mid-30's. Set off by her broken engagement, she enlists everyone in sight to set her up on blind dates in a passionate quest to meet just one really great guy. Armed with a 10-point list of dating criteria, skintight jeans, and flash cards on Nascar, football, and micro-breweries, she spends one full year doing the blind meet and greet. Names are changed to protect the rejected as she humorously dishes dot-com hotties, compulsive bloggers, and tattooed graduates of the Gene Simmons School of Dating. Bridget Jones would be proud of her American cousin. About the Author: Elizabeth arrived in 1968 and was clearly a performer even though she was born to an engineer and a school teacher. She began her career at the young age of ten when she was picked out of her entire class to be the co-host of JUST KIDDING, a children's program shown on the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon. She was asked to come back three more times, and thus began her love for the performing arts. She spent summers at Portland Civic Theatre learning the ropes acting, and performing to a large audience. Elizabeth earned her Bachelor's Degree in Mass Communications and Broadcasting in 1991, and soon became a local radio personality at KBOO-FM in Portland. Elizabeth is currently the voice of the autopsy exhibit in the forensic wing at the United States National Museum of Medicine. You can also see her online as the Video Spokesperson for Chinook Winds Casino Resort. She and her dance partner, Scott, teach Ballroom Dance at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Oh, and she's also a full-time mortician. Author's Websites: Elizabeth's website: http://elizabethfournier.com/

Tour Dates: May 18, 2009 - June 18, 2009 Title: Love from Both Sides A True Story of Soul Survival and Sacred Sexuality Author: Stephanie Riseley Genre: Memoir Synopsis: In this memoir, memorial, and celebration, Stephanie Riseley shares the deeply emotional and powerfully physical story of the continued relationship between her and her husband Dan after his sudden death. Exploring the ways in which love and forgiveness can transcend the boundaries of life and death, the book intends to change perceptions of the emotional and spiritual relationships two people can share. Problematic marriages and challenging relationships will take on positive new dimensions. About the Author: Stephanie Riseley is a writer, teacher, and hypnotherapist. Her book, Love From Both Sides: A True Story of Soul Survival and Sacred Sexuality, tells the story of her husband dying in her arms and coming back to chat. Besides being a writer, Stephanie has studied hypnosis since 1971. Over the years, she's helped hundreds of people get healthy, quit smoking, and make empowering lifestyle changes. Because she's also a teacher, she explains how our computer-like brains work and then teaches her clients a skill-set that helps them to re-program their own brains. It's like fixing a glitch in the wiring, or like ridding a computer of a pesky internet virus. Scientific research proves that once people change their thinking, they actually change the physical structure of their brains. Because of that, they're freed of self-destructive behaviors that ruin lives and steal happiness. To do this, Stephanie uses hypnosis, along with techniques from Cognitive Behavorial Modification and Guided Interactive Therapy. Author's Websites: Stephanie's website: http://www.stephanieriseley.com/ Goodies: You will receive a signed copy of Stephanie's book, Love From Both Sides: A True Story of Soul Survival and Sacred Sexuality. Participate! Please email us with "Blog Tour Partnership" in the subject line and your available dates. We schedule 2-3 stops per week from May 18th - June 18th. We look forward to hearing from you!   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tour Dates: June 1, 2009 - July 1, 2009

Title: Secret Keepers a novel

Author: Mindy Friddle

Genre: Southern Fiction

Synopsis: At age seventy-two, Emma Hanley plans to escape small-town Palmetto, South Carolina, and travel the globe. But when her fickle husband dies in undignified circumstances, Emma finds herself juggling the needs of her adult children. Her once free-spirited daughter Dora turns to compulsive shopping and a controlling husband to forget her wayward past. Her son Bobby still lives with her, afflicted with an illness that robbed him of his childhood promise.
 
When Dora's old flame Jake Cary returns to Palmetto with a broken heart and a gift for gardening, the town becomes filled with mysterious, potent botanicals and memories long forgotten. Soon enough, Jake and his ragtag group of helpers begin to unearth the secrets that have divided the Hanleys for decades.
 
Written with the warmth of Lee Smith and the magical touch of Alice Hoffman, Secret Keepers is a beguiling second novel by the acclaimed author of The Garden Angel.

About the Author:

Mindy was awarded a 2008-2009 Artist Fellowship in Prose from the South Carolina Arts Commission. She is a two-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Prize and the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open.  As a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction at the 2005 Sewanee Writers' Conference in Sewanee, Tennessee, she worked with Alice McDermott and Mark Winegardner.  She was awarded a residency at Ragdale in 2003 and attended Bread Loaf in 2000.

Her book reviews have appeared in the Charlotte Observer and her column, "Author to Author," featuring interviews with authors, have been published in the Greenville Journal. A Master Gardener***, she lives in Greenville, South Carolina where she directs the Writing Room, a community-based nonprofit program she founded in 2006 to bring writers to Greenville for paid seminars and readings. Secret Keepers, forthcoming from St. Martin's Press, is her second novel.

But her father was in the service, so she did get to see the world in her formative years. She moved in the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades-such a childhood encourages one to observe peer groups from a remove, cultivating the narrator within. As an Army Brat she lived in Germany, Virginia, and Washington D.C. before returning to South Carolina as a teen.

As a reporter she covered tobacco auctions, town council meetings, "grip and grin" check donations; she wrote obituaries, interviewed quasi-celebrities (Pat Boone, remember him?) and failed university presidents accused of embezzling (try to forget that one), and, eventually, wrote features on people who did interesting things (such as growing gourds that resemble world leaders.) 

Her yard is a certified wildlife habitat. She composts and grows vegetables in her front yard. In the city limits. She is considering adding a few chickens.

Tour Dates: August 3, 2009 - September 3, 2009 Title: Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir Author: Sue Williams Silverman Genre: Writing Synopsis: Everyone has a story to tell. Fearless Confessions is a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper--or in a Web site or e-book. Enhanced with illustrative examples from many different writers as well as writing exercises, this guide helps writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing and will be useful to both beginners and more accomplished writers. The rise of interest in memoir recognizes the power of the genre to move and affect not just individual readers but society at large. Sue William Silverman covers traditional writing topics such as metaphor, theme, plot, and voice and also includes chapters on trusting memory and cultivating the courage to tell one's truth in the face of forces--from family members to the media--who would prefer that people with inconvenient pasts and views remain silent. Silverman, an award-winning memoirist, draws upon her own personal and professional experience to provide an essential resource for transforming life into words that matter. Fearless Confessions is an atlas that contains maps to the remarkable places in each person's life that have yet to be explored. About the Author: I was born in Washington, D. C., where my father was a high government official in the Truman administration. Later, we moved to the West Indies where he was president of a bank. He was also a child molester. The juxtaposition of this double life-seemingly perfect in public, dark and scary in private-is what I write about in my memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press, September 1999). In my second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction (W.W. Norton, February 2008), I show how I replicated this double life as an adult. In public, all seemed fine-I attended Boston University, worked on Capitol Hill, was married. But this image was a mask that hid my secret world of sexual encounters with dangerous men, a shadowy life of obsession. From about 1980 to 1992, I tried to tell my story as fiction. Looking back, I realize that the five or six (unpublished) novels I wrote during this time lacked an authentic voice. It was my therapist, ironically, who finally suggested I write my own story. At first I resisted. I had never considered nonfiction and thought I had nothing to say about myself. Finally, just to humor him (I told myself), I acquiesced, even though I believed I'd only be able to write a paragraph at the most. Maybe a page. The moment I began to write "Terror, Father," however, I felt as if I'd just learned to speak, that I heard my real voice for the first time. I completed the manuscript in three months. And even though it took much longer to write Love Sick, I was finally writing what I knew. One thing I most love about writing memoirs, is that they provide me the opportunity to meet many courageous women. In fact, the responses that mean the most to me come in whispered phone calls and handwritten notes from my readers who thank me for telling their stories, too. Now, in my upcoming book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (University of Georgia Press, June, 2009), I share my experiences learning how to write, with the hope it'll help and encourage you to tell your story, too. Author's Websites: Sue Silverman's website: http://www.suewilliamsilverman.com/ Goodies: You will receive a signed copy of Sue's book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (University of Georgia Press, June, 2009). Participate! Please email us with "Blog Tour Partnership" in the subject line and your available dates. We schedule 2-3 stops per week from August 1st - September 1st. We look forward to hearing from you!   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please Note: Apply early. We only schedule a maximum of 15 stops per author. To be included on one of these tours, query now! We'll let you know asap if you are accepted and what happens next. Email Angela & Jodi at: blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com