Books by Melissa Bowersock

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Book Launch Party - Part II

It’s July, and the Friendly Ghost Party is getting closer! Just so you know, this online party is a celebration of the launch of my new book, Stone’s Ghost, not a Tupperware party. What I mean by that is that I hope you’ll all come and have fun, enter the contests, share your stories and mingle with the other party-goers, but I am not expecting everyone to buy the book. If you do, super-duper, but the main thing is to have fun. Just want to get that out of the way.

As promised earlier, I am ready to reveal the cover of the book. I want to thank Brenda Remlinger of www.coversbydesign.net for her artful expertise in turning my cover design into perfection. I typically snag pics off a Google search and cobble them together to match the idea in my head, then send the whole mess to Brenda to do the full-up legal, hi-res version. As always, she did a fabulous job. I heartily recommend her to any of you who are searching for a cover designer.

So without further ado …



To add to the excitement, I have ordered the first proof and am waiting anxiously for it to arrive. LOVE holding a new book in my hands!

Now, back to the party. It’s already getting started, and will go on all month until July 26.



There’s a lot to it, so I want to plot this out for you.

If you have a blog and would like to co-host the party with me on that one day, please go here and sign up. I can provide content and graphics and/or am open to suggestions, author interviews, whatever. While my blog and the Facebook page will be the primary locations, I will be encouraging party-goers to visit the co-hosts and share the love.

Contests

The first contest is on the Friendly Ghost Party Facebook page. I’m encouraging everyone to post ghost-related pics here, and we’ve already got quite an assortment. We’ve got pics of haunted places, pics of possible ghosts and some not-so-ghostly but still fun, and we’ve even got some video. Don’t have a pic of a ghost? No problem. Post pics of your kids in their Halloween ghost costume, your dog or cat doing sneaky, ghostly things, anything remotely ghost-related. Then go through the pics and vote for your favorites by liking the posts. The post with the most likes at the end of July 26 will win a Stone’s Ghost Prize Package.

The second contest is here on my blog (but could spill over to my co-hosts’ blogs, as well). In the comment section below, type in or paste in your short ghost story. This could be something that really happened to you, something that happened to a friend or relative, something you heard about or something you just made up, but share your stories in the comment section here and on subsequent blog posts. (Please keep your story to ~250 words or less.) At the end of the day July 26, I will pick a random winner and they, also, will win a Stone’s Ghost Prize Package. I am going to kick off this contest with my own story below. Please feel free to comment and/or add your own.

The final contest will be a giveaway on Goodreads. I will post the giveaway about a week ahead (and will post a link here) with a giveaway date of July 26, and the winner will get an autographed copy of Stone’s Ghost.

Discounts

To commemorate the launch, on July 26 the Kindle version of Stone’s Ghost will be available for .99 cents for that one day only. I’ll post a link when the sale price is viable. In addition, to further the celebration, all the books in my back list will also be available for .99 cents that one day only. If you’ve seen one of my books that you thought looked interesting but weren’t quite ready to buy, this will be the time.

Timeline

Having an online party is complicated. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to wear, you don’t have to drive anywhere and you don’t have to keep track of how many drinks you’ve had (but you do have to stock your own fridge). The bad news is that a party like this can extend all around the world and we’re not all in the same time zone. I’m using Mountain Standard Time because I’m in Arizona (and we don’t do Daylight Savings Time here—yeah, I know, we’re weird), so the party will start at 5am MST (same as PDT) on Friday, July 26, and will go until 5pm. For my friends “across the pond,” that means it starts at 1pm London time (if I’ve done my calculations correctly). For my friends across the slightly larger pond, that means it starts at 8pm on July 27 in Perth, Australia. Is that perfectly clear? I hope so.

What else?

What else is going on? I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go along. I’ll reveal the prizes later on, maybe announce some spot prizes during the day just to keep things interesting. The most important thing is YOU—I’d love to have you come to the party. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and the more the merrier. If this sounds like fun to you, please mark your calendar.


See you there!

11 comments:

  1. Years ago, my husband, Bud, and I liked to play around with a Ouija Board and we normally had good luck with it. One evening we had our niece, Denise, and Bud’s sister Jean over, and we pulled out the Ouija Board. Jean was a complete skeptic and pooh-poohed the whole thing as a fake, but agreed to try it just for fun. We sat around the board, Jean with her back to the wall, Bud, Denise and I around the other three sides of the table. When we all put our fingers on the planchette and it immediately began to zoom around the board in response to our questions, Jean protested that Bud, Denise and I were moving it. Nothing we could say could convince her that we were not moving the planchette, that we had no more idea about where it was going as it spelled out words than she did. No matter how we showed her that our hands were barely making contact, she was still convinced we were tricking her somehow.
    Then our nephew, Bob, arrived. He knocked on the front door and let himself in, knowing we were all there. Bud, Denise and I all turned away from the table to greet him, while Jean could easily see him from her position against the wall. While we didn’t plan it that way, the three of us had inadvertently pulled our hands from the planchette to talk to Bob, and suddenly Jean let out a terrified scream. We all looked back and saw that her fingers were still on the planchette—and it was zooming across the board. She was so shocked by the movement that she seemed unable to pull her fingers away, but just watched with paralyzing fear as it continued to spell out words for her alone. When she finally managed to break contact with the planchette, she resolved to never touch one again. But she never accused us of faking, again, either!

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  2. My beloved mother-in-law died on her 59th birthday the month before i got pregnant with our first child. As My husband, my father-in-law and I sat around our living room reminiscing there was a lull in the conversation, each of us deep in our own thought for a moment. Something made me look up over my right shoulder. There was my mother-in-law, just head and shoulders, dressed in her favourite green, looking happy and well, just as she had when mark and I married. She grinned at me and I heard her characteristic giggle as she twirled around in a dance to show me she was whole again and all was well. It was so comforting and reassuring. I think she chose me (I was the only one to experience this) because I was the only one in the family that could accept that she didn't want to fight anymore and wanted to rest.

    Then, the next Christmas eve, (her favourite time of year) Mark was changing our then 13 month old son's diaper when said son suddenly looked away, waved at something only he could see and squealed a happy "Hi". Mark swears it was his mother checking up on the grandson she never go to see.

    I miss her to this day.

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  3. Yvonne, thanks so much for sharing. Great story!

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  4. When we lived in Listowel my daughter claimed she sensed two separate ghosts in out house. I did my best to minimize this idea by not asking for too many details, poo-pooing it a little. Then, I went to a medium, just for fun, thinking she would be a fraud. It turned out she was one of those rare real deals.At the end of out talk, in which she told me things that absolutely no-one knew about that I could verify she looked at me and said, "There are presences in your house you know - two of them." I asked for details. She described a girl of about ten who sat on the stairs looking into the family room through the spindles,and a man dress in a short dark coat who lingered in my daughter's bedroom and wandered about a bit. The girl seemed fine but the man was creepy. Since I had not heard these details before I asked my daughter to describe what her experiences had been. They were identical in every detail. That creeped me out a bit, as we were still living there. My sister, also sensitive, confirmed that she, too, had seen the man in the bedroom and didn't like him. Both of them said he spied on them while they slept. My daughter took to keeping the closet door closed. He seemed to stay away as long as she did that but she saw him several times standing at the foot of the bed looking at her. The girl didn't bother either of them at all.

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  5. Creepy! When my husband and I first got married, we lived in a tiny little one-bedroom house. We were using the Ouija Board then, and found we had a ghost named Noop who lived with us. He said he had worked in a stable and died there in a fire, and would not show himself to us because he looked like he did when he died. Luckily he was a very nice ghost and said he would watch over our children. The kids seemed to like knowing a ghost was looking out for them.

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  6. The Facebook link does not work...it just brings me to a calendar of events, and your Ghost Party event is not listed!

    Please double-check this, Melissa!

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  7. Lorraine, thanks for letting me know. When I click on it, it goes to the party page, but here's another link: https://www.facebook.com/events/142948992566792/

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  8. When I was a teenager, my girlfriend, I will call her D, and I used to fool around with a Ouija board. We used a homemade one, made out of markers and piece of bristol board. One time, a bunch of us were in the basement of an old building, in someone's old apartment, and we were using the Ouija board and had lit candles around us. It was a spooky setting.

    We were trying to summon some spirits to talk to, but I thing we ended up summoning an evil one. We began to hear tons of banging on pipes in the bathroom, in the next room. It was really loud, and very, very scary. I felt as though we were summoning the devil himself, and jumped up, turned on the lights, and loudly proclaimed my belief in God, and my love for Him. I am not religious, much, but at that moment in time, I was scared sh**less! We got out of there pretty quickly...

    I think that was my last time with the Ouija board...

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  9. Yeah, that would pretty much scare the crap out of me, too! Whenever we got a spirit that we didn't like the feel of, we would wipe the Ouija Board with a towel and put it away for a while. Thanks for sharing!

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  10. Here in Las Vegas I once worked in a professional full service photo lab. The area for color printing was a long hallway; a big workroom was at the end of the hallway, and the processor for color prints was in a room off the center of the hallway - there were several rooms along the hallway. Because of the color printing the hallway was pitch black, unlike black and white printing where safelights can be used. I had been told there was a ghost in the photo lab, but I never paid any attention. One night several months later I was working late, which wasn't unusual - the lab promised a customer his work order would be ready first thing in the morning. I was making my way to the processor room with a sheet of paper when the hair on the back of my neck and head did the proverbial "stand up straight" and a sudden chill went down my back. I hurried down the hallway, put the paper in the processor, and went out into the main, well-lit area of the photo lab. When the paper came out I turned on the lights in that hallway, made my way to the room and shut everything down - all the while praying the lights wouldn't suddenly go out. I went home leaving the job incomplete. In the morning when I told the lab manager why the job wasn't ready for the customer, he didn't say a word - just called the customer to say the job would be a couple hours late. As a matter of fact, when my news of my experience circulated no one laughed or said anything about it. I worked late again quite a few more times but nothing else ever happened.

    Stan
    SS Hampton, Sr., author

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  11. Stan, thanks for sharing. How nice not to have anyone pooh-pooh your experience; maybe they'd all felt the same thing!

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