Happy Birthday, Siobhan Fahey

Happy 67th birthday to the Irish singer Siobhan Maire Deirdre Fahey of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister fame. 

Bonus '80s music fun fact: Siobhan's sister Maire played Eileen in the "Come On, Eileen" music video.

"Bring Back Bananarama" post at Dorothy Surrenders

Back in Print (eBook): Oakley Falls, a Sapphic Vampire Fantasy

Back as a stand-alone ebook: Oakley is a lesbian, a vampire, and a stripper. She and her mortal lover Hollie have their issues, but Oakley's unlife is going well...so why does she find herself waking up chained to a chair in the basement of The Third Eye Gentleman's Club? Could it have something to do with her favorite pro basketball player, flamboyant, New Orleans-bred Johnny Lee Bayliss?

(Yes, I named a character after Timothy James Bayliss from Homicide: Life on the Street.)

"Oakley Falls" was originally published in the Vamps anthology from Torquere Press. Get the ebook for 99 cents now from these retailers:

Apple Books
Barnes and Noble
Kobo/Rakuten/Walmart
Smashwords
Tolino
Vivlio

Oliver's Famous Clam Chowder

Herbert: A Romantasy

New Audiobook Releases: Aesop for Children, Northern Drinking

Are you looking for an audiobook you can listen to with the whole family? Do you want to introduce your children to classic literature, help them gain an appreciation for books, and improve their vocabulary?

Aesop, according to tradition, was a storyteller who lived in Ancient Greece. This volume collects ten of Aesop's fables: 

• The Young Crab and His Mother
• Belling the Cat
• The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
• The Fox and the Grapes
• The Bundle of Sticks
• The Lion and the Mouse
• The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf
• The Frogs Who Wished for a King
• The Rat and the Elephant
• The Crow and the Pitcher

These are all good lessons to learn at a young age, but not too challenging for kids to understand. Find this audiobook for 99 cents on the following platforms:

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/712089234/Aesop-s-Fables-for-Children

Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/aesop-for-children-3?sId=fa7f94cb-4f8e-4cb8-82c3-d4bd43951de6

If you're in the market for something a little more adult to listen to and you enjoy nonfiction, maybe you'll prefer Northern Drinking.

Where did Anglo-Saxon drinking customs come from? To answer this question, John Ashton looked back at artifacts from Beowulf to drinking horns. The resulting drinking history is anything but dry.

"Northern Drinking" is a chapter excerpted by Ashton and James Mew's 1892 book Drinks of the World. You can find this audiobook for 99 cents from the following retailers:

NOOK Audiobooks (Barnes and Noble): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/northern-drinking-john-ashton/1148106371?ean=2940194978496

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/906020096/Northern-Drinking

Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/northern-drinking?sId=49df5acf-3519-4fa5-9ddb-d45dd8dcf39f

O. Henry at Overdue Podcast

In this episode of Overdue Podcast, hosts Andrew and Craig discuss O. Henry's short story collection The Four Million.

If you like listening to O. Henry short stories, you might enjoy Art and the Bronco.

Apparently, I've never mentioned Overdue Podcast on this blog before. I'm surprised, because I've been listening to this books podcast for years. A brief list of some of the many, many books they've covered since February 2013:

The Amityville Horror

Animal Farm

Bad Feminist

Bunnicula

Charlotte's Web

The Color Purple

The Da Vinci Code

Fifty Shades of Grey

Frankenstein

Gone Girl

Gone With the Wind

The Haunting of Hill House
The History of Love

How to Win Friends and Influence People

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Little Women

Ready Player One

Rosemary's Baby

Till We Have Faces

To Kill a Mockingbird

Wuthering Heights

...You get it: A combination of classics and popular literature. 

Jokingly, I say that I theorize that Andrew and Craig of Overdue are secretly Ghost Beach, the dj duo named after a Goosebumps book. 

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 7: Firestarters, the Final Verse

"We Didn't Start the Fire," Part I
Part II: British Beatlemania 
Part III: Julie S. Howlin
Part IV: Firestarters Podcast
Part V: Firestarters Podcast Continued
Part VI: Firestarters Podcast Continued Some More

[Verse 5]

Birth control, 

Ho Chi Minh

Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, 

Woodstock

Watergate, 

punk rock

Begin, 

Reagan, 

Palestine

Terror on the airline

Ayatollahs in Iran

Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, 

Sally Ride

Heavy metal suicide

Foreign debts, 

homeless vets

AIDS, 

crack, 

Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores

China's under martial law

Rock and Roller cola wars

I can't take it anymore...

O. Henry Audiobook "Art and the Bronco" for Sale at Walmart and Everand (Scribd) Now

 

In the mood for a Western? Stream Art and the Bronco by O. Henry, a Western short story available now on Kobo (Rakuten, Walmart) and 

Walmart/Kobo Link: kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/art-and-the-bronco-1
Everand/Scribd Link: https://www.everand.com/audiobook/906020046/Art-and-the-Bronco

Here's a sample:

That's my campfire from this past weekend, by the way. The husband and I stayed at a camper in Niles, Michigan. 

Back in Print (eBook): Oliver's Famous Clam Chowder

Back as a standalone e-book: Their vampire friends insist that werewolf couple Natalie and Matthew really must try Oliver's famous clam chowder. When the wolf pair meets the vampire chef, though, it's Oliver himself who's on the menu.

Heat level: Spicy. This is a male-male-female erotic romance.
Ending: Happily-for-now. This story continues in "Oliver's Good Night Kiss."

Oliver's Famous Clam Chowder is available for 99 cents at the following ebook retailers:

Apple Books
Barnes and Noble
Everand
Kobo at Rakuten
Smashwords
Tolino
Vivlio

If you prefer the audiobook format, get it for $1.99 at Apple Books.

Would you like to listen to a completely free short story on YouTube? Sample Grimm's Fairy Tales with the spookiest story in the collection, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was." Unlike Oliver's Famous Clam Chowder, which is definitely for adults only, the Brothers Grimm's folk tale is appropriate for most ages. Adults listening with young children should be aware that it mentions death, ghosts, and corpses. 

When the audiobook drops, all 60+ tales, in one collection, will also be 99 cents.

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 6: Firestarters, Part III (of IV)

"We Didn't Start the Fire," Part I
Part II: British Beatlemania
Part III: Julie S. Howlin
Part IV: Firestarters Podcast
Part V: Firestarters Podcast Continued

Part VI: Firestarters Podcast Again is as follows.

Hemingway,

 

Eichmann

Stranger in a Strange Land

Dylan,

Berlin

Bay of Pigs invasion

Lawrence of Arabia

British Beatlemania

Ole Miss,

John Glenn

Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul,

 

Malcolm X

British Politician sex

J.F.K. blown away

What else do I have to say?

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it...

Back in Print (eBook): "Herbert: A Romantasy" by Erin O'Riordan

Available now as a stand-alone erotica ebook: "Post Op" by Erin O'Riordan. 

Liv Stenke prefers to keep a level head when it comes to romantic entanglements. When she meets the mysterious, and occasionally downright weird, Dante Sugar, all of her usual reservations are overcome. 

What exactly is Dante's deal, though? Is he even human?

eBook on Apple Books
eBook on Smashwords
Barnes and Noble

Rakuten Kobo

Tolino

Vivlio

Heat level: Steamy. 
Ending: Happily-for-now.

"Herbert" previously appeared exclusively in The Erotica Anthology. Read a sample here. 

Back In Print (eBook): "Post Op" by Erin O'Riordan

Available now as a stand-alone erotica ebook: "Post Op" by Erin O'Riordan. 

Dr. Maggie Keller is a respected surgeon and a good girl. So why can't she stop thinking about her patient Joey and his beautiful boyfriend Max?

Heat level: Steamy. This is a guy-guy-lady menage erotic romance.

Get the ebook for 99 cents on Smashwords!

Also available, and also 99 cents, on Kobo at Rakuten (for iOS and Android), at Apple Books and at Barnes and Noble

And also available at Everand and Vivlio 

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 5: FireStarters II

Joseph Stalin, 

Malenkov

Nasser

and Prokofiev

Rockefeller, 

Campanella

Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn,

Juan Peron

Toscanini,

Dacron

Dien Bien Phu Falls,

"Rock Around the Clock"

Einstein,

  
James Dean

Brooklyn's got a winning team

Davy Crockett,

Peter Pan

Elvis Presley,

Disneyland

Bardot, 

Budapest, 

Alabama, 

Khrushchev

Princess Grace

Peyton Place

Trouble in the Suez

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 4: FireStarters Podcast

Happy Saturday, people of the books. My husband and I went to Terre Haute, Indiana, to do a small plumbing repair at a business this morning. On our way, we stopped at the Oasis Diner in Plainfield. 

On the way back to Indianapolis, we heard "We Didn't Start the Fire." At that moment, I suddenly remembered that which I'd completely forgotten when I originally posted that Billy Joel-themed post:

That's right: FireStarters podcast, the podcast that went over the references in "We Didn't Start the Fire." How could I have forgotten this podcast that I used to listen to regularly? 

The podcast ran for 120 episodes, and that would be a lot of content to cover in a single blog post, so for now, we'll look only at the first verse. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more FireStarters!

[Verse 1]

Harry Truman, 

Doris Day

Red China, 

Johnnie Ray

South Pacific

Walter Winchell, 

Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, 

Richard Nixon

Studebaker, 

Television

North Korea, 

South Korea

Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs,

H-Bomb

Sugar Ray,

Panmunjom

Brando,

The King And I,

And The Catcher In The Rye

Eisenhower,

Vaccine

England's got a new queen

Marciano,

Liberace

Santayana goodbye

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

Short #HistoricalFiction Audiobook for #Summerween: Rhapsody in Blood

Stream "Rhapsody in Blood" now on Spotify.

For fans of historical fiction and readers of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, this vampire fantasy features fictional versions of blues singer Bessie Smith and composer George Gershwin. Vampire Bessie senses that George is not long for this world and offers to pass on her dark gift to him.

ZombieBoy

August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette. (Bummer August)

My screen capture, fair use

Stream 'Eminent Domain' Now on Spotify

A young couple buys the waterfront home of their dreams. After years of rehab to their home, they find it was all in vain. The government is going to take it from them. Feeling robbed of his liberty, Jeff is left hopeless and is willing to lose it all.

Stream the Eminent Domain audiobook by Tit Elingtin and Erin O'Riordan, narrated by Michael E., now on Spotify.

Eminent Domain is also available for Kobo on Rakuten and at Barnes and Noble for the Nook e-reader.

Get the 'Eminent Domain' Audiobook Free with B&N Audiobooks Subscription

Do you have an audiobooks subscription with Barnes and Noble? If so, you can listen to the Eminent Domain audiobook for free.

Listen to a sample here. 

Don't have Barnes and Noble's Nook app? Download it for free from Apple or Google Play to hear this suspenseful crime novel on iOS or Android device.

You can also find Eminent Domain at Rakuten and listen to it on your Kobo app. If you have a Kobo Plus Listen subscription, it's one of the thousands of books included in your subscription.

Look for Eminent Domain on Spotify soon. You can stream Cut, a Pulp Fiction-style thriller, right now.

Amazon Prime Days: More Ideas to Spark Creativity

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Amazon Prime Days: Ideas to Spark Creativity

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Bummer July

 This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer July post with the update.

July 1, 1996: Model/actress Margaux Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, is found dead inside her home in Santa Monica, California. She has died by suicide after overdosing on the barbiturate medication Luminal.

July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. 

July 3, 1999: Musician/artist Mark Sandman, perhaps best known as a member of the band Morphine, collapses while playing a Morphine show in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. He is pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The 46-year-old’s fatal heart attack is thought to have been triggered, in part, by the extreme heat of the day.

July 5, 1932: Z. Smith Reynolds, an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, dies of a gunshot wound. Three other people are inside the house with Reynolds at the time: Reynolds’s wife Libby Holman (a noted Broadway singer/actor), Holman’s personal assistant Ab Walker, and friend Blanche Yurka. A party has taken place at the home earlier and all of the witnesses are drunk when the shooting occurs. It’s unclear if Reynolds died by suicide, accident, or murder. Holman maintains she was too drunk to remember what happened that night. She and Walker are indicted on murder charges, but the Reynolds family insists that the charges be dropped.

July 6, 1819: Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon as a professional balloonist, dies in a hot air ballooning accident. Performing balloon ascents for a crowd at Tivoli Gardens, the Parisian amusement park, she included fireworks in her show. The fireworks ignited the helium in her balloon. Blanchard became entangled in the balloon’s net and subsequently falls to her death.

July 6, 1944: A fire at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, kills an estimated 167 people.

July 6, 1962: Author William Faulkner dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1971: Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1983: Model/actor Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18 years old at the time, is seen for the last confirmed time getting out of a friend’s car in a parking lot in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The friend confirms he and Leppert argued and that he dropped her off in a parking lot; Leppert has never contacted her friends or family since then. Leppert appears briefly in the movie Scarface. 

This is an affiliate link

July 6, 1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland kills 165 oil workers and two rescue workers. Although no one from the platform’s owner,  Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited, was ever charged with a crime, neglected maintenance and inadequate safety procedures contributed to the disaster.

The platform collapses and sinks. 61 survivors are rescued.

July 7, 1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies of a heart attack at age 71. Reportedly, his last words were to his wife Jean: “You are wonderful.”

July 8, 1822: Poet Percy Shelley drowns while out sailing with a friend. He is 29 years old.

July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway is wounded while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I.

July 10, 1861: After asking for a cup of coffee, Frances “Fanny” Appleton Longfellow dies of burn injuries she sustained the day before. Fanny’s dress caught on fire when either a spark or hot wax made contact with her dress as she melted sealing wax to seal an envelope containing locks of her children’s hair. 

Her husband, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was napping when he heard her screams and attempted to smother the flames with a rug. Longfellow also sustained burns to his arms and face to the extent that he was too injured to attend Fanny’s funeral. He wore a beard for the rest of his life to conceal his facial scars.

July 10, 1873: French poet Paul Verlaine shoots his inappropriately younger lover/fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist, wounding him, although the injury is not serious.

July 11, 1807: Vice President Aaron Burr shoots U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel in New Jersey. Hamilton dies the next day.

July 11, 1906: Pregnant, 20-year-old Grace Brown, a worker in the Gillette Skirt Factory, is intentionally drowned and murdered by her boyfriend Chester Gillette, nephew of the factory owner. Gillette is subsequently executed in the electric chair.

The murder inspires Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which in turn inspires the 1951 film A Place In the Sun. The character based on Brown is played by Shelley Winters.

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July 12, 1562: Bishop Diego de Landa orders the burning of Maya codices of the Yucatán, to the utter horror of the Maya people who witness the act. Only three manuscripts are known to have survived into the 21st century.

July 12, 1979: Singer Minnie Riperton dies of breast cancer. She’s 31 years old.

July 12, 1996: Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Melvoin, at the time touring with the Smashing Pumpkins as a keyboardist, dies of a heroin overdose. He’s 34 years old.

July 12, 1997: The bodies of Lela and Raymond Howard, a couple from Texas who’ve been missing for over two weeks, are found in their Oldsmobile about 350 miles away from their home. The couple had been making their annual visit to the Pioneer Days fiddle festival on June 28th when they apparently become disoriented and lose their way, ending up near Hot Springs, Arkansas. No foul play is suspected; their deaths are apparently accidental. The Oldsmobile is found at the bottom of a ravine with Lela at the wheel.

Raymond was 88; Lela was 83. They’d married 11 years earlier after each had lost their previous spouse. The incident inspired the Fastball song “The Way.”

July 12, 2014: 30-year-old John Christopher Wallace, who went by Chris, dies after running deliberately into a burning wooden effigy at the Element 11 festival in Utah. The effigy was formed in the shape of one of the monster characters from the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Volunteers attempted to stop Wallace before he got too close to the fire, but were unable to prevent the suicide.

July 14, 2015: Arthur Cave, the 15-year-old son of Australian musician Nick Cave and English fashion model and designer Susie Bick, dies after sustaining a brain injury in an accidental fall from a cliff in the family’s home of Brighton, U.K. Arthur has used LSD before the accident. He’s survived by his twin brother Earl.

July 14, 2017: Stunt performer John Bernecker dies from injuries he sustained the previous day. While filming stunt footage for the TV show The Walking Dead, Bernecker had fallen 20 feet off a balcony onto a concrete floor.

July 15, 1958: John Lennon’s mother Julia Lennon is struck and killed by a car while walking home.

July 15, 1974: During a live broadcast of the digest news program on which she appeared, 29-year-old journalist Christine Chubbuck pulls a loaded handgun from her purse, places it behind her left ear, and shoots herself in the head. She dies at Sarasota (Florida) Memorial Hospital fourteen hours later. Her family gets a court order to keep the tape of the broadcast from ever being aired again.

July 17, 1935: Cudjoe Lewis dies. The formerly enslaved man’s story of being kidnapped from his home in what is now Benin is the subject of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon. 

July 17, 1959: At 3:10 a.m., Billie Holiday passes away under arrest in her hospital bed. Her death comes from heart failure and fluid in her lungs brought about by a failing liver. She’s 44 years old.

July 17, 1967: 40-year-old jazz saxophonist John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Although he has been sober for the last 10 years of his life, earlier struggles with heroin and alcohol use may have contributed to his cancer.

July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.

July 19, 1374: Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) dies on the eve of his 70th birthday.

July 19, 1850: Journalist Margaret Fuller returns, with her husband and child, from assignment as the New York Tribune’s European correspondent aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth. The vessel’s captain has died of smallpox during the 5-week voyage. The Elizabeth, being piloted by her less-experienced first mate, strikes a sandbar off of Fire Island and is run aground. Many of the crew abandon ship and are able to swim to shore, but Fuller and her husband are never found and are presumed to have drowned. Their son’s body is found washed up on the shore.

July 21, 1796: The poet Robert Burns dies at the age of 37, leaving behind his wife and five children.

July 22, 1934: Criminal John Dillinger is shot dead by FBI agent Melvin Purvis outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. 

July 23, 1846: Henry David Thoreau is put in jail for refusing to pay a $1 poll tax. He’s protesting the poll tax on the grounds that it supports slavery. 

July 23, 2011: English jazz singer Amy Winehouse passes away, having recently completed rehabilitation for a severe alcohol addiction. 

July 25, 1966: Poet Frank O’Hara dies from a ruptured liver. The previous night he had been struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island while standing near a beach taxi that had broken down.

July 25, 1984: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the first artist to record “Hound Dog,” dies of a heart attack and liver disease at age 57 in Los Angeles.

July 26, 2015: Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, dies in a hospice care facility at the age of 22. She had been in a coma for the previous six months after being found unresponsive in her Georgia home by her fiancé, Nick Gordon. Brown was discovered face-down in her bathtub less than three years after her mother died in a bathtub at a hotel in Los Angeles. Eerily similar to her mother’s passing, Brown was found to have been intoxicated with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, and other substances when she apparently drowned in her bathtub.

July 28, 1841: Either the police or a pair of fisherman (accounts vary) discover the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. Rogers, who was 20 or 21 years old and worked as a cigar seller in New York City, was last seen by her family on the 25th. Although the case is officially unsolved, it’s suspected she was either murdered by her boyfriend Daniel Payne or perhaps died as a result of an illegal abortion. 

Payne killed himself by overdosing on alcohol and laudanum on October 7, 1841. The discover of Rogers’s body inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”

July 29, 1974: Cass Elliot dies of a heart attack. Years of heroin abuse and cycles of rapidly gaining and losing weight have weakened her body. Cruelly, urban legend will afterwards contend that she died by choking to death on a ham sandwich. 

July 30, 1918: American author Joyce Kilmer is killed in action, shot by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne in the First World War.

July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe is locked in a pillory as a punishment after being found guilty of seditious libel. He has criticized church officials in a pamphlet.

The Cut audiobook is now available to stream on Spotify! Add it to your audiobook library today.