Great for people who don't take life too seriously.

Sales are climbing for my Granny Smith series and I'm loving some of the reviews on Amazon - here are a selection.

 

"A great easy read which had me giggling out loud in parts. Very well written. Great for people who don't take life too seriously."

 

For Granny Smith click HERE

 

 

 

 

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, 30 April 2014

By 

Linda Mercer - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Granny Smith Investigates (revised edition) (Kindle Edition)

It was well written, suited any age and transported one back in time and to another place. A good read

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Book, 15 April 2014

By 

Zoe Skelton - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Granny Smith Investigates (revised edition) (Kindle Edition)

Easy to read and keeps you interested.
Silly Granny Smith, she reminds me of my Granny.
A most enjoyable read.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good read, 24 Mar 2014

By 

Christine Williams - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Granny Smith Investigates (revised edition) (Kindle Edition)

I've now read two books in this series and found both books entertaining and funny, really made me laugh, suggest people read them

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful & Amusing tale, 24 Feb 2014

By 

Kay (Cheshire) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Granny Smith Investigates (revised edition) (Kindle Edition)

The eccentric Welsh pensioner gets her teeth (usually gripping a corn-cob pipe) into solving the mysterious murder of a friend in the village. Despite being ignored and warned off by the police, she persists. This delightful short story makes great family reading with plenty of humour. I can just imagine a nice TV comedy series from this.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Cozy With A DIfference, 22 Feb 2014

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Amazon Customer - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Granny Smith Investigates (revised edition) (Kindle Edition)

I love Cozy Mysteries, but this book has all the elements of a good cozy, plus a bonus. The main character, Granny Smith, is a real character. Some of her antics will bring more than a smile to your lips. She gets into all sorts of scrapes, but comes out the other side intact - just. Well worth a read.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

I picked up this DVD at an incredibly low price on Amazon. I'd seen it before, I think on TV, but that had been many years ago and I couldn't really recall it.

This is another telling of the story of the James/Younger gang, or at least a part of the story and depicts the events leading up the infamous raid in Minnesota during 1876 which resulted in the death of several gang members and the capture of most of the others. Only Frank and Jesse James managed to escape after the botched and bloody bank raid.

The movie's got a great cast, headed by Cliff Robertson and Robert Duvall. Robertson plays Cole Younger and he is portrayed as the brains of the bunch, while Duvall's Jessie James is presented as the meanest young psycho this side of Emilio Estevez's Billy the Kid in the Young Gun movies. The films is made in a king of semi documentary style - the Wild West is given the Dragnet treatment, the original advertising boasted. And  this does indeed give the movie the feel of looking in on events as they happened, almost as if this was some news reel footage from a time before news reels were invented.

The film does drag a bit but it's certainly not a bad movie and the detail in recreating the period is quite meticulous. One particular scene where Cole Younger watches a Baseball game - it's the new thing. Everyone's playing it back East - is excellent and the final shoot out is brilliantly staged.

'Anyone can get shot down. It's the getting back up that's the thing.'

Duvall's performance alone makes the film a must see, but the real star is Cliff Robertson who gives us a realistic portrayal of Cole Younger, basically a good man caught up in violent times. The film ends with the immediate aftermath of the botched raid and tells us that Jesse James was killed in 1882 by that coward Bob Ford, while Cole was captured during the raid shown in this movie and ended up in prison. He lived though until 1916 when he died a free man after being paroled in 1901.

Not exceptional but a damn good western all the same.

Barnes & Noble heading the way of Bordersaurus

Industry experts are predicting that Barnes and Noble will be gone by the New Year - B&N has been closing about 20 stores per year since 2012 and has said it will continue to do so for the next several years. But its financial position is bleak. This follows a period of growth where the store moved into areas where private bookshops thrived, but where put out of business by the aggressive pricing of big chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Well now the digital revolution has done the same for the big book stores.

According to Focus Magazine there are five reasons why Barnes and Noble are failing and these are:

First, Amazon makes it so easy to buy books.
Second, publishers thrashed B&N by selling best-sellers at deep discounts in non-traditional outlets such as supermarkets, Wal-Mart and Costco, thus removing a key source of revenue for the chain.
Third, the woefully underfunded Nook is competing with Amazon’s Kindle, which is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Fourth, the antiquated model of printing books on spec, putting them on trucks, and crossing your fingers that they’ll sell doesn’t work in the internet print-on-demand era.
And fifth, book buyers want decent customer service. At B&N these days, the only way to find a sales clerk is to attempt to shoplift.

FULL STORY

Tainted Stats

Weekly Stats Report: 5 May - 11 May 2014
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	148	146	130	137	104	143	115	923	132
Unique Visits	132	127	111	123	96	134	100	823	118
First Time Visits	127	119	103	118	92	132	97	788	113
Returning Visits	5	8	8	5	4	2	3	35	5

A Dead Dozen - 12 dead authors you should follow on Twitter

There's a great article HERE that list twelve dead authors you can follow on Twitter - Find out what Edgar Poe's been up to lately or thrill at Hemingway's latest adventures. It's all a bit of fun you know, and often quite witty.

Tainted Stats

Weekly Stats Report: 28 Apr - 4 May 2014
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	151	126	192	155	166	149	153	1,092	156
Unique Visits	134	119	143	137	144	137	131	945	135
First Time Visits	127	111	129	127	129	129	124	876	125
Returning Visits	7	8	14	10	15	8	7	69	10

I cried as I typed those final words....

MEN ENLISTING FOR THE PALS 1914

For the best part of a year now I've been working on a non-fiction book, provisionally entitled Cardiff During the Great War which will be published by Pen and Sword Books later this year. I'm getting very close to completing the work now and only minutes ago I wrote the final words in the section detailing the 11the Welsh Battalion, The Cardiff Pals and I literally cried, I still have the moisture from those tears in my eyes as I type this.



The Wiki tells us of the famous Pals battalions - The pals battalions of World War I were specially constituted battalions of the British Army comprising men who had enlisted together in local recruiting drives, with the promise that they would be able to serve alongside their friends, neighbours and work colleagues ("pals"), rather than being arbitrarily allocated to battalions.

Herbert Paine Smith 1914

The center-piece of my section detailing the Pals are the memories of one particular soldier - Herbert Paine Smith. I am deeply in the debt of his son, the late Major Bob Smith who in 1981 sat down with his father and a tape recorder and recorded the priceless memories. Anyone interested can listen to these HERE and I do urge you all to do so. Mr Paine Smith was an intelligent and eloquent man and the recordings he made with his son sum up the experiences of an ordinary man during the Great War, or as we call it these days World War One. I'm also in touch with his granddaughter Gilly Smith who has supplied me many photographs and interesting documents. Gilly has said that both her grandfather and son would be deeply honoured by their inclusion in my book, but in truth it is I who feel honoured to write this story. These are great men who gave more for their fellow man than I could ever hope to do.

Paine Smith survived the war but only because he received serious injuries on the night before the assault which would see the 11th Welsh Battalion annihilated by fierce Bulgar machine gun fire as they attempted to attack the Grand Couronne peak in Macedonia. I started the Pals section by saying that the cream of Cardiff went to war one sunny afternoon in September 1914, and I ended the section with the words, and now four years later most of them lay dead or dying as the blood red dawn started to rise over Grand Couronne.

It was then that the tears came - throughout my period working on this book I have learned much about the Pals, heard many interesting, horrific and funny stories of some of the characters that made up this brave band of men, and I now feel their loss on a very personal level.

 Ah well I've got to get on with completing the rest of the book, my deadline runs out in just over two weeks. The cover's already been designed at the so that it  was ready for this year's  London Book Fair, and I should get a firm publication date very soon. Expect news here soon.