Prolific author Hank Quense shares his wealth of knowledge regarding fiction and nonfiction writing, self-publishing and book marketing in his new, free, interactive e-book, My Stuff: A Comprehensive Guide for Today’s Authors. Quense been writing for over 20 years and has published 45 short stories, a dozen novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books on the process of creating stories, publishing and book marketing.
My Stuff is practically an entire library of material distilled into one source containing Quense’s best tips, strategies and practical wisdom for anyone hoping to write and publish a book. My Stuff is available in two versions: a pdf or an interactive e-pub edition. The e-book contains live audio clips and videos, and new information will be added over time. Both editions contain virtually everything that a writer needs to turn their original stories into books and get those books into the hands of their target audience.
“The book provides links to a wealth of relevant content that is written in plain English, not technobabble or the usual marketing gibberish,” Quense said.
In the e-book, users will find links to Quense’s helpful materials for writers, including: • Articles • Books • YouTube channel • Checklists • Video classes • Do-It-Yourself courses • Personal coaching services • Free e-books
Additionally, Quense walks readers through his process of creating a story, provides fiction writing exercises and shares his book publishing and marketing insights.
About the Author
Hank Quense has been self-publishing his books for over 12 years. His nonfiction books cover fiction writing (Creating Stories), self-publishing (How to Self-publish and Market a Book, Self-publish a Book in 10Steps), marketing (Book Marketing Fundamentals) and author business (Business Basics for Authors). He also lectures on these subjects in schools, libraries and on webinars.
Reviews, photos, links to previous interviews and Q&As are available upon request.
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In the important new children’s book, Bad Touching, author and retired OB/GYN Dr. Tiffanie Tate tackles the difficult topic of inappropriate touching in a way that young minds will understand.
The 32-page picture book uses simple language and lyric rhyme to tell the story of two young sisters, Lillie and Linda, who just want to make every adult happy. They live alone with their mother, and when she gets a new boyfriend, he helps take care of Lillie and Linda. He is nice at first, but that changes. Lillie and Linda learn that there are times when making everyone happy is not a good thing if it hurts them in the process. This story helps children understand and identify abusive situations and provides directions on how to seek help.
Bad Touching is Dr. Tate’s second book and is based on her personal experiences as a child. She did not disclose her abuse until she was an adult, she explained.
“My desire is to educate children about safe people they can confide in,” Dr. Tate said. “My hope is that this book will help children who are affected by abuse know they are not alone and let them know that it is all right to tell. I don’t want them to feel afraid or scared to talk about what is happening to them and wait for decades like I did.”
Then, amid her activism to help others, Dr. Tate was “badly touched” in a medical provider’s office while receiving care on January 24, 2023.
“It was a trigger that was traumatic, but instead of waiting like I did before, I immediately reached out and got the help I needed,” Dr. Tate said, adding that she reported the event to the office manager, filed a police report, and that the individual is in the process of being held accountable.
“There is still a lot to do,” she added, “but I want to be an advocate for women and children.”
About the Author
Originally from Compton, California, Dr. Tiffanie Tate is a Christian, mother, servant, listener and medically retired medical doctor. Her interest in becoming a physician began when she was in middle school, while volunteering with her church to help the homeless in Los Angeles. She saw people who were both hungry and sick. She wanted to do more than serve food. She wanted to help them in meaningful ways, so she became a physician.
Both of her biological parents were addicted to drugs. And while she never met her father, she had heard that he was homeless, and she couldn’t help but wonder whether he was one of the homeless she and her church were helping. With the loving support of her maternal family and, specifically, her maternal aunt who raised her (known as “Momtee”), Dr. Tate received the love, support and stability she needed to thrive and achieve her professional goals of becoming a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist. An injury led to her medical retirement, which inspired her to pursue her second passion: writing.
Dr. Tate is also a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served during the Global War on Terrorism. She believes in giving back and currently teaches residents by providing lectures on subjects in obstetrics and gynecology.
She is also the author of FloweTry: A Collection of 108 Poetic Flows on Life, Love, and Liturgical Issues, and the upcoming release, Little Engine Mia Sings, a children’s book that teaches about bullying and how to discourage it.
Bad Touching Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing ISBN-13: 979-8886850093 (paperback, 32 pages) Available from Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes
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Reviews, photos, links to previous interviews and Q&As are available upon request.
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Matthew Kenslow has amassed over 1 million followers on Instagram, nearly 70k on TikTok and over 65k YouTube subscribers by sharing his insights, real-world experiences and pearls of wisdom when it comes to navigating the world around him. At 6 years old, Kenslow was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (now referred to as autism spectrum disorder).
“My autism awareness and acceptance videos should, hopefully, not just encourage the families of those on the spectrum, but also educate those who still need to learn about autism and then accept us for who we are, learning what we’re going through,” Kenslow said during an interview.
Today, Kenslow is a pianist, college graduate, substitute teacher and the author of the book Juggling the Issues: Living With Asperger’s Syndrome, in which he takes readers inside what it’s truly like for someone living with the disability.
“My main message that I tell hundreds of people is that I have not given up on my goals,” he writes in the book’s preface. “I persevere on my aspirations. If I can do that, certainly everybody else can too.”
Told through a series of stories about his personal experiences, Kenslow sheds light on the ways in which certain challenges have impacted his everyday life. The way his mind works is different, he says, and he has struggled with social and conversational skills, and poor eye contact. He explains that simple tasks take longer for him — like reading or organizing his thoughts — while remembering things like the president’s birth, term and death dates; the elements of the Periodic Table; and the books of the Bible come more easily.
Juggling the Issues: Living With Asperger’s Syndrome is an important read for anyone whose life has been touched by autism spectrum disorder. Kenslow’s insights aim to lend understanding, provide inspiration, and encourage readers to put aside differences and embrace the gifts that others have to share with the world.
“Behind the disability we have a heart and a mind; we have a calling and a purpose,” Kenslow added.
About the Author
Matthew Kenslow has grown up with a form of autism that was once referred to as Asperger’s syndrome. Life has been an adventure as he pieced together all of his surroundings amid both praises and taunts. His mission is to teach others from a firsthand perspective about how people with autism interpret things differently from the rest of the world. He feels he has been blessed with the gifts to juggle, play piano and recall facts about the American presidents, geography, science and mathematics. He juggles at elementary schools and encourages the students to never give up on their passions.
He has earned the Gold Medal of Achievement (which is equivalent to the rank of Eagle Scout) through Royal Rangers, a program he has been in since he was 5. Now, he is giving back to children and teenagers, teaching and mentoring them in a wide set of skills and knowledge. He graduated from Orange Coast College with an Associate of Science degree in Chemistry and with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry fromVanguard University of Southern California. He aspires to be a middle school math teacher. Recently, he earned a full math credential after student teaching Enhanced Mathematics at his former middle school, Ensign Intermediate School.Currently, he is going for a Master of Arts degree in Education at Vanguard University and is an employed substitute teacher for NMUSD, often being called by students as “the best sub” and begged by them to come back the next day or to sub for their class soon.
Follow Kenslow on Instagram (matthew_kenslow), Facebook (JugglingTheIssues), YouTube (@matthewkenslow722), Twitter (@matthewkenslow) and TikTok (@matthewkenslow).
Juggling the Issues: Living with Asperger’s Syndrome Publisher: River Birch Press ISBN-10: 1951561325 ISBN-13: 978-1951561321 Available from Amazon.com, BN.com and many other online retailers
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Reviews, photos, links to previous interviews and Q&As are available upon request.
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What parent doesn’t want their children to willingly pitch in and complete routine household chores? In his eye-opening new book, How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning, Cornelius N. Grove, Ed.D., explores five “traditional” societies where children do just that on their way to becoming mature adults. Yet they spend little or no time in classrooms. How do those children learn? How do their parents parent?
Dr. Grove defines traditional societies as those unaffected by industrialization and urbanization and untouched by modern values. They still can be found in small villages and camps where people engage daily with their natural surroundings (including raising or finding their daily food) and have little or no experience of classroom instruction.
Why seek fresh insights from these societies?
“One reason is that doing so reveals that, in traditional societies, children very largely learn on their own how to become family- and community-minded adults,” Dr. Grove said. “A second reason is because it’s insightful for modern parents to find out how traditional parents deal with their children. You’ll be astounded by how uninvolved they are!”
Anchored in the published research of anthropologists of childhood, How Other Children Learn takes a close look at the following five societies: the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, the Quechua of highland Peru, the Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, the village Arabs of the Levant and the Hindu villagers of India. Each society has its own chapter, which overviews that society’s background and context, then probes adults’ mindsets and strategies regarding childhood learning and socialization for adulthood.
The book concludes with two summary chapters that draw broadly on anthropologists’ findings about dozens of traditional societies and offer examples from the five societies featured in the book. The first summary chapter reveals how children in traditional societies learn to willingly carry out family responsibilities and suggests how American parents can attain similar outcomes. The second contrasts our middle-class patterns of child-rearing and school-attending with traditional societies’ ways of ensuring that their youngsters have opportunities to learn and develop into mature, responsible adults.
“Like their traditional peers, our children have a natural capacity to learn on their own and with other children by freely exploring, imitating adults and engaging in all sorts of activities serendipitously occurring in their community,” Dr. Grove added. “How do our children’s opportunities to freely explore and engage with others compare with those of traditional children? With school, extracurriculars and screen time, ours have very few.”
About the Author After attaining a Master of Arts in Teaching at Johns Hopkins University, Cornelius Grove taught high school history, worked in educational publishing, traveled extensively in Europe and Africa, and completed a doctorate in education (Ed.D.) at Columbia University. He then served for 11 years as director of research for AFS, the student exchange organization, simultaneously holding adjunct teaching posts at Columbia and New School Universities. In 1986, he taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University, after which he co-authored Encountering the Chinese: A Modern Country, An Ancient Culture (3rd Ed., 2010). During the 2000s, Dr. Grove became curious about the belief of many Americans that inborn ability is the main determinant of a child’s academic performance. This led to The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today (2013). He then figured out why East Asian students always outperform U.S. students on international comparative tests and wrote two books on his findings. The first addresses differences in parenting: The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about RAISING Students Who Excel (2017). The second explores contrasting approaches to teaching in pre- and primary schools: A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about TEACHING Students Who Excel (2020).
A charter fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research, Dr. Grove wrote lengthy entries on “pedagogy across cultures” for two encyclopedias. He retired in 2020 after 31 years as managing partner of Grovewell LLC, a global business consultancy. He and his wife have three sons. For more details, visit www.howotherchildrenlearn.info or connect with the author at www.LinkedIn.com/in/cngrove-author/.
How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Release Date: March 1, 2023 ISBN-10: 147587118X ISBN-13: 978-1475871180 Available from Amazon.com and BN.com
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‘Letter to Progressives’ Shares Cautionary Message
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Entrepreneur, investor and lifelong educator David Parker refers to his new book, A San Francisco Conservative, as “a letter to progressives,” and in it, his message is clear.
“Stop trying to tax. Stop trying to distribute. And stop trying to solve problems by spending money,” Parker said in a recent interview.
In his book, Parker discusses both ends of the political spectrum and everything in between, and he reminds readers that the timeless principles of economics are essential to the preservation of American democracy.
Parker went back to school at age 50 to gain a deeper understanding of these enduring ideas — and the missteps of nations that deviated from them — to write A San Francisco Conservative. Just as his first book, Income and Wealth, provided readers with a thought-provoking examination of the foundations on which this nation’s freedom rests, his latest book also serves as a message of reassurance and challenge to the conventional political thinking of the day.
The issues Parker addresses are those he has focused on for more than half a century, throughout his 40-year career as a teacher in San Francisco public schools. In A San Francisco Conservative, he reminds readers that “crises” have affected the American economy numerous times over the nation’s history — but they pass.
Parker provides well-researched support for his belief that economic opportunities always exist. He cautions that government leaders — especially those who identify themselves as progressives — are jeopardizing the very democracy that has produced prosperity.
Themes covered in A San Francisco Conservative range from education to taxes and the political process itself. Parker challenges the widespread belief that a “conservative” (whether a resident of San Francisco or elsewhere) lacks empathy or a personal commitment to help those who are less fortunate. Government programs supported by many in today’s progressive movement to counter this misunderstanding merely increase the nation’s deficit in dangerous ways, Parker says.
Parker began his career in education at the age of 24 and served students at San Francisco’s inner-city public elementary schools for four decades as a music teacher, followed by 10 years as a volunteer. While pursuing his career in education, Parker became a successful real estate investor. It was success in business that focused his writing, teaching and career as a professional musician. Parker spent 20 years as a member of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, then 20 years as leader of the Dave Parker Sextet, which twice headlined the San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Festival. His essays have been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times and prestigious law journals.
Scheduled to coincide with the publication of David Parker’s playfully titled newest book, A San Francisco Conservative, a new podcast series sharing that title showcases Parker’s views on the proper role of government and how individuals can arrange for the principles of a free-market economy to work in their favor. As the podcast’s co-host, longtime journalist Tom Martin, has noted, “David Parker’s scholarly approach to the study of political economy provides much-needed historical context to important topics dominating the news, including the progressives’ call for dramatically increased government spending.”
A San Francisco Conservative: David Parker Essays Volume Two Publisher: Waterside Productions ISBN-10: 1956503064 ISBN-13: 978-1956503067 Available from Amazon.com and anywhere books are sold
Trish Stevens Dea Shandera-Hunter Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone.
Could ‘Unknown Factors’ in Schools Stop Active Shooters in Their Tracks?
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While politicians wring their hands and debate complex gun control legislation, military expert and historian Dr. William R. Forstchen offers a strategy that could be implemented in time for the upcoming school year.
“We arm some teachers,” Forstchen said in a recent interview. “We should select people who are ex-military, ex-law enforcement. Train them, train them, train them. Compensate them. Put them in the schools, armed. They become the ‘unknown factor.’ I think this could make a major difference.”
Besides exhaustively vetting and evaluating these chosen members of the school faculty, anonymity is paramount. In fact, Forstchen added, “If they ever tell anyone or boast, ‘oh gee I’m armed now,’ fire them. You want these people to be anonymous.”
Forstchen’s perspective is informed by his 45 years of teaching and by the Beslan school siege in 2004 — an Islamic terror attack against a Russian school that left 333 people dead, including 186 children.
He believes that arming teachers could serve as a deterrent, or at the very least, a way to stop school shooters in their tracks.
“They would be the ‘unknown factor’ in every single school,” Forstchen wrote in a recent opinion editorial in The Washington Times. “They would be the men and women who, in those first precious seconds, would react rather than hide, be it against a lone killer or even a trained team of killers. They could buy time for other responders to rush in, rather than wait outside while mayhem runs rampant within.
“They would be the ones who would willingly put their lives on the line … but would be the surprise factor in a school that would fight back when seconds counted. They might not stop, but they would at least slow down an aggressor and buy time for a swift response … In so doing, they just might prevent a Beslan massacre from happening here.”
The Beslan incident also prompted Forstchen to write the book, Day of Wrath, which presents the unsettling scenario of ISIS-inspired teams launching a coordinated attack on schools — a threat he views as all-too realistic.
William R. Forstchen is a New York Times bestselling author and holds a doctoral degree from Purdue University with a specialization in military history and technology. He is a noted expert historian and public speaker and has been interviewed on FOX News, C-SPAN, and Coast to Coast on topics ranging from history to technology and cultural issues, to space technology development, to security threats.
Angel Faces Retreats Facilitate Emotional Healing for Women Disfigured by Trauma
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Since 2003, the nonprofit Angel Faces has helped transform the lives of adolescents and young women who have suffered severe, permanent scars and disfigurements from burn injuries and traumatic events through intensive, residential retreats, and ongoing support.
Founder Lesia Cartelli was severely burned by a natural gas explosion when she was just 9 years old, and as an adult, she recognized the psychosocial needs of adolescent girls and young women with disfigurements.
The next retreat takes place June 11-16 on a private compound (courtesy of an anonymous donor) on lake Winnipesaukee in beautiful Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.
The theme for this retreat is “Let it Roll,” and sessions led by licensed mental health professionals will focus on managing healthy relationships, boundaries, post traumatic growth and understanding the impact of trauma on our lives.
Professional artist Kate Lemay will lead an art project, “Let It Scroll,” during which participants will create beautiful scrolls on canvas decorated with both words of forgiveness for their past selves and motivational messages for their budding, future selves.
Additional program elements include yoga, climbing and journaling, plus one-on-one instruction from professionals in the cosmetics industry to teach the women how to minimize scarring while enhancing their individual beauty.
“Our six-day retreat is a unique gathering of women who have been left marred by severe trauma (abuse, car crashes, bonfires, explosions, war and house fires) to find the courage to heal,” Cartelli said. “We encourage the participants to not waste their pain, and to use their trauma as a gift to discover their resilience and strength. Time at the retreat is inspiring for attendees and those who are privy to volunteer.”
Angel Faces Founder Lesia S. Cartelli has witnessed and experienced the struggle with social interactions, boundaries, and self-esteem issues that plague adolescent girls and young women with scars. In her 40 years of experience in developing educational and psychosocial programs supporting trauma victims, she became aware of the intense need for a more in-depth program. She created Angel Faces to inspire and empower adolescent girls and young women with burn/trauma injuries to reach their optimum potential and develop meaningful relationships with themselves, their families and their communities.
Cartelli is also the author of Heart of Fire (Carlyle Publishing; ISBN-13: 978-0990430711), in which she shares the details of her own traumatic experience and the path that led to her founding of Angel Faces.
For more information and a schedule of 2022 retreats, please visit www.angelfaces.com, or follow the organization on Instagram and Twitter at @angelfacesinc.
Trish Stevens Beverly Moore Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone
