Make Way for California Talent Linda Carroll-Bradd, Don Simkovich and Michele Drier

Can’t Leave California Behind -Linda Carroll-Bradd

I’m a native Californian, and I say that with pride. Born in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, I grew up in a new subdivision where all the houses contained young kids--like 25 kids within the closest 8 houses. My fairly average upbringing consisted of games of Hide and Seek or Red Rover on the front lawns after dinner, Roller Derby or playing store in the garage on rainy days, and the men congregating around any vehicle with a raised hood. Having everyone cheer when the training wheels came off the bicycle and I wobbled down the middle of the street bolstered the achievement. But also those houses contained my first secret and unrequited crushes.

The lure of a big city never hit, but I did want to get away for college. I attended college in Chico when the 18,000 students doubled the town’s population.  The town became fascinating because places were named for the people instrumental in establishing them. The creek running through the middle of campus was beautiful but also served to orient you--it marked the division between the north and south parts of town and “streets” were above and “avenues” below. Plus farmlands surrounded the town, and I’d never had to drive through rice fields and almond orchards before. The seed of love for historical times developed. (It was first planted as I walked old graveyards with my dad on family vacations, and he pointed out details about deaths grouped around a short period of time or short life spans.) I bet my hometown has an interesting history, too, but I never thought to research it before I left.

Three times a relocation has been prompted by my husband’s employment. We made a home in Corvallis, Oregon, for three years then returned to the house where my husband lived as a kid and stayed in southern Californian cities for 19 years.  Then we moved to San Antonio, Texas, for twelve years. Since our latest return in 2012, we’ve lived in the San Bernardino National Forest--first on-site at a year-round church-run camp and now in a small quasi-rural community. Just over the next  is Holcomb Valley, a spot with a history of gold mining that I can’t wait to research.

My short story, Dipping in a Toe, was written with Chico in mind, although I gave the town a different name. But the small town atmosphere was the same that I remembered. BLURB: Jessa Landers has a secret crush on her teens’ years-younger swim coach. A widow for three years, she’s managing her life and enjoys her freedom—except for long, lonely evenings when she craves an attentive man. Coach Rick Grant loves being a high school teacher and swim coach. Surrounded by families has him yearning for his own romantic connection—and his eye is on Jessa. Will Jessa protect the balance of her family life, or take a second chance on love?

One lucky person who leaves a comment and contact info will win a copy of a backlist title of his or her choice. Visit my website to browse.

BIO: As a young girl, Linda was often found lying on her bed reading about fascinating characters having exciting adventures in places far away and in other time periods. In later years, she read and then started writing romances and achieved her first publication--a confession story. Married with 4 adult children and 2 granddaughters, Linda now writes heartwarming contemporary and historical stories with a touch of humor and a bit of sass from her home in the southern California mountains.

 

To stay in touch with Linda

Website  www.lindacarroll-bradd.com

Blog  http://blog.lindacarroll-bradd.com

Facebook  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linda-Carroll-Bradd-author/440814942635289

Amazon Author Page  https://www.amazon.com/author/lindacarroll-bradd

And Don Simkovich Author of Tom Stone Sweltering Summer Nights:

 Experiencing California’s array of cultures and languages is like browsing a Sunday brunch buffet with food available for every taste. Los Angeles is perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in not just the state but in the world. Hundreds of languages are spoken by families within the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, while enclaves of families hailing from China, Mexico, Iran, Ethiopia and every other country on the globe live and work together. 

The Golden State’s is filled with natural beauty and in the greater LA area, nature clashes with urban life as coyotes and mule deer roam streets in the foothill cities just fifteen miles away from downtown Los Angeles. The Angeles National Forest encompasses Mount Wilson at a full mile above sea level with television and radio towers visible across the LA basin. 

Winter snows that blanket the San Gabriel Mountains provide a refreshing lightness to the ground that turns from green to brown during the rest of the year. 

Los Angeles and its surrounding towns have pockets of neighborhoods that are like small towns and these neighborhoods are the setting for the Tom Stone detective stories: Tom Stone Nitty Gritty Christmas, Tom Stone Sweltering Summer Nights, and the soon-to-be-released Tom Stone Day of the Dead. 

A group home and blue collar neighborhood in Van Nuys to the traffic-laden streets of Boyle Heights and the upscale docks of Marina del Rey. Crime is no respector of zip codes and Tom Stone pursues a wanna-be druggie entrepreneur who goes from dealing cocaine-laced candy bars to opening a marijuana dispensary and fights against a crime syndicate that’s out to totally own him.

My co-author Lon and I wanted to capture not just the details of the crime scene but some of the “nitty gritty” details of the vast numbers of apartments lining the streets, the hills, and the fog of the docks.

Greater Los Angeles is home to plenty of celebrity actors and athletes but there are many others who live in the grime of the city. For example, the foster care system in Los Angeles County is enormous and Tom Stone encounters a boy who knows he has no family and home except for the boys’ group home and his counselor, a wonderful man named Luke.

Our novels aren’t a tour of homes in Beverly Hills, but hopefully a realistic and friendly slice of real life, including a nosy neighbor Mary Anne Bostovich who tries in vain to get a neighborhood watch going on the street where she and her husband had moved about 40 years earlier. Her son works for CalTrans.

Los Angeles, like all of California, is rich in languages and cultures and we hope that some has been captured in the Tom Stone detective stories.

Sweltering Summer Nights is available on Amazon or check the website CarvedinStone.media/Tomstonedetectivestories.

 

Get introduced to the stories by commenting for a chance to win a digital copy of Tom Stone Sweltering Summer Nights (Book 2 in the Stone-Angelino trilogy).  Please leave a form of contact.

Finally Michele Drier: California is Burning.

In the middle of the holidays, Southern California is experiencing one of the worst fires in the state’s history. 

As I write this, with the calendar at the end of the year, close to 300,000 acres have burned and even the tony Santa Barbara suburb of Montecito is threatened. This is where people like Rob Lowe, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey have homes. By the time you read this, I hope the fires are over, but most predictions are that it will be into January before they’re fully out.

Much of the rest of the United States joke that California has no seasons. It’s true that we don’t have the swings of temperatures and noticeable change the year brings, except in the Sierra. In the mountains, heavy winter snows are a Mecca for skiers, snowboarders and everyone who lives for the clear, crisp white days of snow. Summers bring temperatures in the 90s when people flock to the rivers and streams for swimming, boating, rafting and lazy days.

Ironically, while the mountains are snow-covered, big swathes of the state are in the midst of another season that everybody recognizes—fire season.

Usually October and November are the height of fire season. I remember one Thanksgiving standing in my yard in Southern California with a hose, trying to douse embers as they flew around. Another Thanksgiving, I watched the Panorama fire burn the outskirts of San Bernardino and up sides of Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel range.

The largest fire this season, called the Thomas, has burned almost 1,000 structures. About 300 homes were lost in the Panorama, thousands in the Santa Rose fire in October.

California’s geography and weather patterns give us its terribly beauty and its precarious balance between fires and safety. In a wet year, winter storms sweep in from the Pacific and the hillsides and mountains explode with plant growth.

After a couple of dry years, these miles of brush and trees have dried out and become what fire experts call “fuel load.” All it takes is a spark to set this off. Link this with the prevailing winds, the ones that come roaring toward the coast from the drier, hotter inland deserts, and you have the prime requirement for explosive fire storms.  

California is mountains and desert and a better than thousand-mile coastline on the Pacific. It has extremes of altitude. You can ride the tram from Palm Springs, the spendy desert city with temperatures in the 90s in the winter, to the top of Mt. San Jacinto and cross-country ski. Extremes of rainfall. Better than three feet fall in the coastal rainforest areas of Humboldt and Del Notre counties to less that five inches in some of the Mojave desert places in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

I live in Sacramento, both the state capital and the nexus of California. Capt. John Sutter built a fort here in 1839, along the American River, not far from the Delta where the American and Sacramento rivers join to flow into San Francisco Bay. One of his employees found gold in the river while building a sawmill about 30 miles upriver in 1848.

The pony express started here in April 1860, carrying mail overland to St. Joseph, MO in ten days, a speed unheard of until eighteen months later when the first telegraph lines crossed the land, bringing an end to the pony express in October 1861.

Four Sacramento businessmen, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington, formed the Central Pacific and built the railroad east, meeting with the Union Pacific in Utah in 1869. Their names continue in California with the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and…

oh yes…Stanford University in Palo Alto. 

Now home to about 12 percent of the United States population, California rests on its geographic diversity and takes hold of the imagination of people around the world. A land of contrasts, beauty, creativity and challenge.

It may be burning, but like the Phoenix, it’s too ingrained in the minds and souls of residents who will rebuild from the ashes. And there will be a fire season next year.

Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz and is a fifth generation Californian. During her career in journalism—as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers—she won awards for producing investigative series.

She is the president of Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime, and the co-chair of Bouchercon 2020.

Her Amy Hobbes Newspaper Mysteries are Edited for Death, (called “Riveting and much recommended” by the Midwest Book Review), Labeled for Death and Delta for Death, and a stand-alone thriller, Ashes of Memories, published in 2017. 

Her paranormal romance series, The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, has consistently won awards and was the best paranormal vampire series of 2014 from the Paranormal Romance Guild. The series is SNAP: The World Unfolds, SNAP: New Talent, Plague: A Love Story, Danube: A Tale of Murder, SNAP: Love for Blood, SNAP: Happily Ever After?, SNAP: White Nights,  SNAP: All That Jazz, and SNAP: I, Vampire.

 

As my prize, one lucky person who comments can have their choice of either a Kindle edition or a paperback of Ashes of Memories. Your form of contact helps me award your prize!

Visit her facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/AuthorMicheleDrier, her website www.micheledrier.com or her Amazon author page, http://www.amazon.com/Michele-Drier/e/B005D2YC8G/

(All article info provided by authors and:https://www.flickr.com/photos/penner42/3029578450/   https://www.flickr.com/photos/nealwaters/27195051699/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/riobranden/8989292527/)