Yes, I'm unprofessional. Very much so. And this post will prove it, haha.

Alright, time to thank the sweet Katie Jennings for the award she gave me yesterday. That's the most professional thing you'll see in this post...so brace yourself.

By the way, her blog, and her mention of me, is located here:
http://katieajennings.wordpress.com/
There, now that my plug is out of the way...

I'm supposed to follow this format thingy to return this favor. Well, I've never been one for following the rules, guidelines, or any kind of formal format. So, with that in mind...um, do you have a safety belt? Now would be a good time to use it. Just sayin.

Rules, rules, rules. BLEGH. Er, bah humbug even. Though it's not Christmas. Well, Christmas in July at some jewelry store, I'm sure, so I'm safe there.

Sigh, 7 things that you may not know about me:
(Grumble)
1. I like to grumble a lot. Er, I mean, write a lot. Shhh. Write a lot, yeah, that's it. Engrave that on your mind. *Passes my hand over your head like a souped up magician*
2. David Copperfield, David Blaine, Chris Angel, etc. I am not. I'm just your normal, everyday, average guy who's blazing his own trail in this world. Shocking, I know.
3. I truly do like to help others. As long as...it's appreciated, paid back in some way to someone who truly needs it (that may even be me one day), and I'm not totally burned in the process. Which I have been. WAY too many times.
4. I want MASSIVE success. But then who doesn't, when you're truly being honest about things.
5. I absolutely crave dark chocolate. With Almonds. Or Swiss chocolate. Can't leave home without it.
6. I absolutely love city life and beach life. So much so that I want to have a place in both California and Florida when the day comes that I see my book numbers actually...moving. And not making the sounds of a cricket. When I'm in the position of an Amanda Hocking, J A Konrath, John Locke, Gemma Halliday, CJ Lyons, Andrew E Kaufman, or tons of others, that's when I'll be looking at getting a place like that. In case you don't recognize all those names, here: http://ireaderreview.com/2012/05/03/top-100-indie-authors-for-may-28-authors-to-watch/ 
Then I can truly sit back and enjoy life whilst writing. And hopefully write MORE.
7. Though I get aggravated by them daily...I truly adore my family.

Now, the other part of these arbitrary "rules" are...I'm supposed to tell you about and link you to FIFTEEN other blogs. Ummm...I don't READ 15 blogs! LOL. I don't have time to. So, with two kids running around that just woke from slumber, three WIPS on my desktop that I need to wrap up and push out, marketing to do, food I need to eat, and a much needed mental break from it all, here a couple other blogs you should probably check out: 

http://wade-inpublishing.blogspot.com/
http://nicolestorey.weebly.com/

Having said that...enjoy your weekend!

As always, check some of the books in my right hand column. You just may find a new author you like ;)
 
And now, time to introduce Seumas...fully clothed:

Seumas Gallacher
IT”S AS MUCH FUN AS YOU CAN HAVE WITH YOUR CLOTHES ON

Now I’m on the tiger, I can’t get off..
  … and I really don’t want to get off. You know these crazy bucket lists, somewhere between ‘saving Africa from Justin Beiber’ and ‘getting everybody in France to speak English'? I’ve had tons of them. As a kid I wanted to be a drummer, then a football player, Scottish style (very elegant ball dribbler). That was superseded by a yearn to make tons of money as a gambling bookie. Next up came the Stones and Eric Clapton and Freddy Mercury…all change again, front man in a great band it had to be. Then along came that thing that John Lennon spoke about, ‘life happening when you’re busy doing other things..’ Oh, yeah, life. That thing. Well that thing triggered off with the standard Glasgow practice issue of punching my father out when I was fifteen, and off I went with a duffle bag and an old acoustic guitar, into that big wonderful world out there.

Now, over forty years on, the history I look back on astounds me. That surely wasn’t me becoming a bank employee, then a bank officer, then, Oh God help us, the man in charge running banks all over the planet. Sounds too proper, too correct, too boring. Well it would’ve been except… except along came a twenty year war with booze that I didn’t win. I hammered it in Europe and Asia, got my licks into it in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, but bugger me, it never gave up…by the time we got to round fifteen in Singapore, it had me beat on a points
count. I declared a truce. Round about then I was sent (a slum lad no less) to Harvard to re-tread the brain box. To get their money back, my employers made me corporate Mr Fixit, jumping on planes to this, that and the other mess that needed the surgery applied. Why I am I telling you all this? Because that’s where the boredom stopped and all the great experiences started to pile in. Hong Kong has its own magic for any foreigner. Asia gave a range of cultures…Bangkok, Seoul, Japan, China, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei,…and the characters that zone in and out of these places are just that…characters that you’d normally only see in books and the movies. I loved all of it.

I’ve been in Abu Dhabi since 2004 but the workout before that was a stricken ferry company in Manila in the Philippines. The first thing I did was fire 600 trade union dockside workers. That got me to the top of the Christmas Card list, and a present of an armoured car with half a dozen armed body guards. These lads were SAS-trained, and so were born the guts of the characters in my debut novel THE VIOLIN MAN”S LEGACY. There’s things which work within the law, but the stuff that goes on under the radar is always more fascinating.

So, back to the ride on the tiger…the writing. The book was finished three years ago and was promptly despatched to forty agents. Just as swiftly it attracted forty rejection slips. So, what to do? Give up there? No bloody way. This was my baby. There was too much of me in it not to let it see the light of day properly. I got it appraised professionally, then re-edited a couple of times. Now what? The 'now what?' was amazing. In the middle of last year, someone suggested Kindle. Now, understand this. As a 24 carat computer Jurassic, I’d never heard of
Kindle. It was explained to me single syllable words. On to Kindle it went. In the first three weeks it got 80 downloads and I thought “Karamba, I’m a published author!” I then started asking email pals, to get email pals, to pass it on. Within the next three months it exceeded 7,000 downloads, and at the last count it’s now tracking well over 16,000 paid hits. The writing‘s the easy part, getting the mother out there is the real work. As a businessman, the decision for me is easy. It calls for a proper campaign of blogs, review sites, Twitter, visibility, visibility, visibility, and oh, by the way, write a decent piece of work. 

The second novel, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK, is well in progress with three other story concepts to follow, all in the same series, all about the ex-SAS guys taking on a host of various criminals, using their black operations skills. It’s a helluva blast, and I don’t see it being any less fun for the foreseeable future.


As always, if this author intrigues you, please patronize their work by clicking on their book cover to the right, which will take you to their Amazon page.