MSI Press Blog

  The following guest post was buried in the Christmas mail, but it is still worth reading: ONE BIG BREATH “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” --Luke 1: 35   I just started participating in yoga classes. I wanted to breathe a little more life into my old, slow, stiff body. The instructor from India invites us to assume many seemingly unnatural positions with our bodies, which I think of as “pretzel poses.” We stretch like rubber bands, hoping not to snap. She asks us to hold those poses for several minutes and breathe slowly and deeply. She instructs us to be aware of our bodies and breathe into the physical sensations we experience. I experience mostly pain, which she tells me is “just discomfort.” She says, “Just follow your breath. It is your life energy,” which she assures us will bring relief. Each session ends with one big breath and the exchange of a solemn greeting, “Namaste” (Bow to you.). The classes have chang

  MSI Press managing editor, Dr. Betty Lou Leaver, recently returned from conducting a workshop at Emory University, a follow-up to a workshop she conducted there last spring. For more posts about Dr. Leaver, click HERE . Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Planning on self-publishing and don't know where to start? Our  author au pair  services will mentor you through the process. Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy  of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com. Want to communicate with one of our authors? You can! Find their contact information on our  Authors' Pag

  Excerpt from Typhoon Honey (Girrell & Sjogren) -  Defining transformation The nature of everything in this world we know of and in which we live is change. Nothing is static and immutable—nothing. Neither concrete buildings nor stones. Not mountains nor oceans. Nothing lasts forever without changing. Not only is everything in a constant state of flux (though admittedly at different rates and speeds), but the nature of those changes is purely chaotic. The universe is chaos that moves in patterned forms which we call fractals (self-repeating patterns). So when we begin to talk about change and what change is, we start with the idea that change is natural and continual.   This is no new concept. The ancient sages observed changes happening around them and sought to understand the nature of change and changing systems more than three thousand years ago. The “Book of Changes,” called the I Ching , is probably the most widely known of the systems for understanding change. Presumably c

  It is Tuesday. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.  Today's post, as a follow-on to last week's discussion of the  seismic change in the book publishing industry over the past 5-10 years,  discusses the difficult nature of today's book market for new authors. The nature of book marketing today is more than anything a matter of getting seen, of the hand of an author (or publisher) to be able to hold up his/her book above a sea of raised hands. I doubt that any publisher (or author) will say that they have a great answer to this problem (including to those "specialists" who promise such solutions to authors for a hefty fee -- with many authors disappointed with the results

  Gregg Bagdade, author of Mental Health Mayday , recently participated in a podcast called "Chicago FireWives: Married to the Job." Listen to it HERE . For more posts about Gregg and his book, click HERE . Award Literary Titan Gold Award Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy  of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com. 

  Excerpt from Tucker & Me (Harvey) - RIDING THE WILD MATTRESS               I was a planned Cesarean birth. The doctor gave my mother a choice of several dates for delivery, and she picked the seventeenth. This was because her birthday was on the seventeenth, albeit in a different month. This was part of an inordinate role the number seventeen played in our family.                      I was brought home as a baby to our residence in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. I only lived there until I was two years old, but it was always referred to as the Hermosa Vista House, in reference to the name of the street. The street number was 417, thus continuing an odd streak of the number seventeen in our family residences. After that house, we lived in the city of Alhambra, with a street address of 1717. The next home we moved to the address was simply 17. Ultimately, the family settled in another town, where the house numbers were 1728. That’s an awful lot of seventeens for one fam