GIVE THE GIFT OF SAFE TRAVEL

What do you and your friends miss most during the pandemic? #Travel?

Why not give family members and friend a safe trip to an exotic place for the #holidays? Buy a book in which the heroine travels. These blurbs might start you thinking about traveling to:

CUBA. In Malignancy, Sara Almquist accepts an assignment from the State Department to arrange scientific exchanges between scientists in the U.S. and #Cuba. She hopes to escape violence in her past, find an old friend, and see the tourist sites in Havana. Neither her work or sightseeing goes as planned. She’s disappointed by La Floridita (the bar made famous by #Hemingway) and the memorials to fallen heroes (like #Che Guevera) but she’s fascinated by the way black marketeers and scientist circumvent the U.S. embargo to Cuba. She also finds #romance in the most unlikely situation. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0960028528

INDIA. In Dirty Holy Water, scientist Sara Almquist is frustrated by the slow progress in the investigation of a friend's murder. Thus she's in a funk as she begins her trip to India and is disappointed by what she sees initially. The pollution of the holy rivers (Ganges and Yamuna) is staggering. The overcrowding and filth in markets make her happy to retreat to the safety of the tour bus. But the Taj Mahal is breathtaking as it appears among the mists rising from the Yamuna River at sunrise. The folk dances of the nomads of Rajasthan are mesmerizing. Eventually, Sara realizes her friend, like India, was a complex mixture of good and bad - but always interesting. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0960028587

BOLIVIA. In Ignore the Pain, Sara Almquist couldn't say no when invited to be the epidemiologist on a public health mission to assess children’s health in Bolivia. Soon someone from her past in New Mexico is chasing her through the Witches' Market of La Paz and on to the silver mines of Potosí. Unfortunately, she can't trust her new colleagues because any one of them might be under the control of the coca industry in Bolivia. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0960028501

I hope these blurbs whetted your taste for an #adventure #novel. Now where do you want to go?

Does the book title resonates with readers?

#Book titles are important sales tools. Most editors agree on the following statements. 1) #Titles should give a hint about the protagonist, the setting, the theme or the plot of the book. 2) Short titles are best. 3) Titles should catch the reader’s attention. 4) These rules are meant to be broken.

The net result is most writers spend hour ruminating over the title of their next novel. I’m no different. I always name a novel when I start working on a project. Then I rename it at least twice as I write and edit the novel. How about you? Maybe you’ll find my process of titling my adventure novel IGNORE THE PAIN useful or amusing.

I started out with the title Why Does It Hurt So Much? because I wanted the novel to address how individuals differ in their responses to physical and emotional pain. But that title was too long. I’d learned from my experience publicizing another novel Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight that long titles even if they’re funny are hard to fit the title on the spine of the book or in twitters. 

That title also gave no hint to the inner strength of my heroine — Sara Almquist, an epidemiologist and world traveler. Sara is a tough cookie. She knows being a public health consultant in Bolivia, where over 6% of the children before five years of age, won’t be a picnic when she accepts the assignment. The title also didn’t fit a suspense story with lots of action. Sara is chased through the Witches’ Market of La Paz and fights to avoid a trap in the silver mines of Potosí as she helps to capture the drug czar Mazzone, who used to be her neighbor in New Mexico. 

The next title I chose was Dull the Pain. It was short, established pain as recurring theme in the novel, and hinted the heroine was tough. Amazon listed no other book with that title. 

I include tidbits of science in all of my novels and really strive to get the facts correct. Thus, I had Sara learn that laborers in the silver mines of Potosí carry little food or water into the mines. In order to endure the pain caused by thirst, hunger, and heavy exertion at a high altitude (13,000 feet), they chew coca leaves. The active ingredients in coca leaves and its derivative cocaine are not analgesics; they do not dull pain. They are stimulants and help users ignore pain. 

I changed the title from Dull the Pain to IGNORE THE PAIN. 

Now after all my explanations on the title, do you want to read IGNORE THE PAIN? Or would you give it another name?

Why don’t you enter the ebook #GIVEAWAY for a chance win IGNORE THE PAIN at: https://www.amazon.com/ga/p/367493f0856741b2

Or buy it at:https://www.amazon.com//dp/0960028501