MSI Press Blog

  Chapter 1. Lip-Tied For my 40th birthday, my husband got me a gift I’d always wanted but could never afford. He paid for me to have the gap in my two front teeth fixed. With the advent of social media and selfies, the gap—about the thickness of a Susan B. Anthony dollar—became like a chasm to me; a dental Grand Canyon of sorts, which seemed to pull camera flashes to it. If I tilted my head a mere inch toward the light, the gap would fill with a shadow that stood in stark relief against my white, never cavitied smile.   I’m sure it seemed extra large to me in part because of its meaning. I associated it with where I came from: a trailer park in West Virginia. The only people I knew with a gap in their teeth (other than the occasional high-profile David Lettermans or Lauren Huttons) were too poor to get their gaps fixed. I hated admitting that I held these beliefs, especially at 40, especially as an academic heavily invested in celebrating Appalachian culture.   Although

  Book Description: Savannah is a young woman set out to make a difference in the world. But she plans to do it alone. With no family to connect with and no man in her life, she is ready, willing and able to face the challenges life has to offer. She is fearless, or so she thinks. She has planned her life out carefully never realizing that the best plans are sometimes altered. This story is about her journey as her life plan changes its course. Book is available at Amazon . Reach the author at glscott333@yahoo.com.

  MSI Press is happy to announce the release of the e-book version of Practices That Work   (Thomas Garza). The paperback edition was released in October 2021. To read posts about this book, including excerpts, and its author, click HERE .

It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. 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 topic addresses an author's self-presentation, the look-and-feel of your work and yourself. Here are some things to think about as you go about designing the cover of your book (even if a professional designer does the work, you will need to approve it), putting together a website, deciding what social platforms you will use, designing advertising materials, deciding where and how to promote your book, and more. Who are you?  What are your strengths? If your strengths are in the networking area, then you might set up meetings with local organizations interested in your topic to discuss the topic of your book

I have put off talking about this topic on Cancer Diary for a while because the memory is so painful. However, it did happen, and therefore it probably happens more often than one would think or hope. When it became time for Carl to go on hospice, we chose home hospice and looked forward to him being back home from the hospital with his family and having the support of professionals in our own.  Alas, that did not happen. Whatever could go wrong did go wrong -- and it would appear that with this particular hospice, it might have been regular practice rather than something going wrong. The easiest way to share is probably just to provide a list of everything that went wrong. (Any one of these might go wrong with any hospice, something caregivers should be prepared for. All of them going wrong is simply incompetence, uncaring, and abuse on the part of the hospice.) [In this list, Hospice C is the first hospice we worked with, the bad one, and Hospice B is the second one, the good one. Ho

  MSI Press is happy to report the release of Life, Liberty, & Covid (Dr. Dennis Ortman)  as an e-book. The paperback version was released in December 2021. Congratulations to the two authors! To read posts about this book, including excerpts, and its authors, click  HERE .

  photo of Sula, looking for more of her books, by Stacey Gentry Sula, parish cat at Old Mission San Juan Bautista, is back in the news again. This time, an article about MSI Press LLC in the San Francisco Post details the role Sula and her books play in raising money for the presentation fund of Old Mission San Juan Bautista. Check it out! Nicely written! For more posts about Sula and her books -- and lots of neat pictures, click HERE .