Captain's Log, Stardate 12.15.2009
I’m over at Girls, God, and the Good Life blog with a semi TMI post so I hope you’re not too grossed out. :)
Camy here! I was just thinking about this the other day—when we’re truly ourselves with someone and they don’t run screaming in the other direction, that’s got to be love.
Camy here: I have had the honor and privilege of meeting Lori Copeland and chatting with her, and she is one of the most wonderful women on the planet! She's warm and sweet and energetic and just a really nice person. Her personality and love for Jesus really shines through in all the books that I've read from her. I hope you see it too as you read this excerpt!
The Christmas Lamp
by
Lori Copeland
Christmas trees, twinkling lights, skating in the park, and holiday displays are the hallmark elements for celebrating Jesus birth for the sentimental residents of Nativity, Missouri. Will fiscal responsibility replace Christmas their traditions when times are tough? Though their priorities and methods clash, Roni Elliot and Jake Brisco want the same thing, for the town to prosper. As the two get to know each other better, each begins to gain a new perspective on what the real wealth of Nativity and the season might be.
Lori Copeland has been writing for twenty-five years and has over three million copies of her books in print. She began her writing career in 1982, writing for the secular book market. In 1995, after many years of writing, Lori sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honor Him. It was at that time that she began writing for the Christian book market.
To date, she has more than 95 books published, including Now and Always, href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310263506/camysloft-20" target="_blank">Simple Gifts, href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310272262/camysloft-20" target="_blank">Unwrapping Christmas, and href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310263492/camysloft-20" target="_blank">Monday Morning Faith, which was a finalist for the 2007 Christy Awards. Lori was inducted into the Springfield Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.
Lori lives in the beautiful Ozarks with her husband Lance. They have three sons, two daughter-in-laws, and five wonderful grandchildren. Lori and Lance are very involved in their church, and active in supporting mission work in Mali, West Africa.
Excerpt of chapter one:
Captain's Log, Supplemental
I’m on Janalyn’s blog in an interview! Come by and say hi!
Captain's Log, Stardate 12.14.2009
Hey guys,
I'm giving away FIVE BOOKS in my newsletter this month, so for the rest of December, I won't be giving away any more books on my blog. However, I'll restart my blog giveaways in January!
Click here to find out how to enter to win the FIVE BOOKS I'm giving away in my December newsletter
Click here to read about the differences between my contests
Captain's Log, Stardate 12.11.2009
I just sent out my December update, so it should be in your email inboxes now! I have a new December contest only for newsletter YahooGroup subscribers, so click here to find out how to enter.
I also have a new discussion thread on my Facebook Fan Page (I only recently discovered I actually have a discussion forum board—yeah, I’m a little behind the times) asking people for recommendations for Christmas themed novels.
Click here to post your recommendations!
(You will need to log in to your Facebook account (or create one) and also be/become a fan of my page before you can post your comment.)
Her Patchwork Family
2nd in Gabriel Sisters series
by
Lyn Cote
Christmas is for Families…
And Felicity Gabriel intends to build a family right away! When she inherits a mansion, she decides to turn it into a home for orphans. But her first charges test her resolve. One child is a thief, suspicious of her kindness. The other is the local judge's traumatized daughter.
Broken by war, Judge Tyrone Hawkins is devastated when his little girl runs from him to Felicity. But Felicity's courage despite the town's scorn for her orphanage and her caring way with his daughter restore his lost faith. Now he wonders if they all can find the family they seek…just in time for Christmas.
Excerpt of chapter one:
Captain's Log, Stardate 12.10.2009
So recently, I’ve done a self-makeover. I talked about it on Faithchick today:
Camy here! Recently I’ve been working on my personal style.
This has mostly been instigated by the book, Women, Work, and the Art of Savoir Faire by Mireille Guiliano, the author of the book French Women Don’t Get Fat (which I loved).
Camy here: I met Debbie for the first time at Mount Hermon Writers Conference this past year, and she is a wonderful woman! She and her buds have a very popular blog called Novel Matters where they strive to connect readers who love "Book Club fiction." If that sounds like you, be sure to check it out!
Debbie writes contemporary fiction from an historic Gold Rush town in Northern California. By day, she manages after school and day camp programs, and she burns the midnight oil to write what she loves. Her first book Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon, is a Christy finalist. Raising Rain, her second book became available September 2009.
Captain's Log, Stardate 12.07.2009
Update 12/14/09: The winner of this book is Deborah! Congratulations!
The winner of
White Picket Fences
by
Susan Meissner
is
Angela
Congratulations!
Didn’t win the book but want to read it?
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Blog book giveaway:
Please click here to read giveaway rules and why I had to change them.
To enter to win today’s book, leave a comment on this blog post, giving your name and US state. Sorry, no international entrants (see post above for why).
Please also leave an email address or website where I can contact you (please use this format--you [at] yourmail.com--or something like that to prevent spammers from trolling for your email address). It is the winner’s responsibility to check to see if you won and to email me if you haven’t yet heard from me.
I always email the winner and give them a week to reply, but if I don’t receive an answer, I will pull another person to win the book. I am not responsible for a lost opportunity if you are on vacation or leave an email address you don’t check frequently.
Only one entry per person. The winner can expect their free book in 4-6 weeks.
You have a week to comment--I'll pick a name out of a hat on Monday, December 14th. (BTW, you can post a comment and NOT enter, too.)
Today I’m giving away:
The Final Crumpet
by
Ron and Janet Benrey
(This book is gently used)
No wonder the tea plants in the garden didn’t grow!
When Nigel Owen and Flick Adams—the new director and curator of The Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum—dug up two stunted Assam bushes, the last thing they expected to find was the body of Britain’s most famous missing person. Etienne Makepeace, England’s renowned "Tea Sage," disappeared forty years ago without a trace. But there he lies, in the museum’s Tea Garden, buried in a shallow grave—and every policeman and reporter in the British Isles wants to know why.
So does the stodgy English bank that will fund the museum’s acquisition of a major collection of tea antiquities. They’re ready to pull the plug on the deal.
Nigel and Flick have no choice: to save their beloved museum, they must delve into the 1960s and discover what even the spymasters of Her Majesty’s Government don’t know—Etienne Makepeace brewed more trouble than tea during the Cold War.
In no time at all, Nigel and Flick are up to their teacups in ancient spies, modern femme fatales, and a mystery that threatens to turn deadly. . .unless they give up their quest to find the secret of Etienne Makepeace.
Excerpt of chapter one:
"I can't bear to watch this," she shouted, as the small machine began to roll along the garden's serpentine redbrick path. "I'm having second thoughts about tearing out our Assam tea plants. It's hardly fair to chop them down just because they didn't grow to full height."
Nigel didn't feel much sympathy for the two scraggly evergreen shrubs planted in the Indian Tea area of the garden, but Flick clearly did. He bent close to her ear. "Those Assams have led long and happy lives. If they could talk, they would applaud your decision to uproot them."
"Then why do I feel like a vandal?"
"Because you have focused too closely on the fate of two individual plants. Think of the big picture. We have twenty-two tea bushes in this garden. Replacing ten percent of them represents prudent husbandry of the museum's precious resources."
"Okay, so maybe I'm not a vandal. But what do you call a person who destroys history? Our predecessors planted those Assams decades ago."
"Yes, they did-for the specific purpose of educating visitors to the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum. However, these particular tea plants routinely confuse our current day visitors. As you have repeatedly explained to me, there are three major varieties of tea plants grown throughout the world: the China, the Assam, and the Indo-China. The Assam is supposed to be the tallest of the three; consequently the founders planted only two of them. But our Assams look more like bonsai miniatures. You sensibly chose to replant this corner of the tea garden with new Assam seedlings." He gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. "As the newly appointed managing director of the museum, I hereby certify that you are doing a wise and proper thing."
"You may be right, but you may also be wrong. While it's perfectly true that a healthy Assam plant can soar to more than sixty feet, tea growers routinely prune them back to a height of four or five feet for convenient picking of tea leaves. Our stunted bushes are really quite realistic."
Nigel squeezed Flick's shoulders again and fought the urge to laugh. How could Felicity Adams, PhD, who knew everything about tea, think of any tea plant growing in Kent, England-tall, short, or in-between-as being "realistic"?
The very existence of this tea garden was a tribute to the extraordinary lack of realism exercised by the museum's founders some forty-one years ago. They began by surrounding a fifth of an acre of land on the eastern corner of the museum building with a twelve-foot-high brick wall to block out chill breezes. Then they ordered a grid of iron pipes buried three feet below the surface. Two powerful pumps circulated heated water through the subterranean plumbing by day and by night, to keep the Kentish soil, and the sheltered garden itself, balmy enough to raise tropical tea plants.
Nigel gazed up at the ugly gray sky and decided that this very day provided a fine illustration of the founder's accomplishments. Outside the garden, one had to endure an icy Friday morning in mid-January, but inside the wall, one could relish springlike surroundings. He and Flick had both left their cumbersome winter trench coats upstairs, in their respective offices.
Of course, if one thought about it, there was a touch of the implausible about the whole of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum. There it stood on Eridge Road: an imposing, four-story, Georgian-style building dedicated to the many different aspects of tea. The history of tea, the geography of tea, the economics of tea, the cultivation of tea, the processing of tea, the blending of tea, the tasting of tea, the serving of tea, the food that accompanies tea-if a topic had something to do with tea, one could probably find a relevant exhibit in the museum's galleries, library, meeting rooms, garden, or laboratories. How could sensible Brits give over such a significant institution to the veneration of a mere beverage?
Don't forget the most improbable thing of all. The trans-formation of his own life. He had come to Tunbridge Wells ten months earlier as the museum's acting director, a one-year-long temporary position intended to tide him over between "real" jobs. He had had every intention of returning to London, no desire at all to make a sea change in his career. And not the least notion of falling in love with the chief curator.
That had happened the previous October during a re-markable chain of events that even now seemed inexplicable. What magic had transformed a woman he disliked into a woman he loved-a woman who loved him back? And how did one explain the two bizarre side effects? Managing a tea museum abruptly seemed an utterly logical job for him, and Royal Tunbridge Wells-Nigel had grown fond of the prefix bestowed on the small city south of London by King Edward VII in 1909-had begun to feel like home. And so, against all odds, Nigel Owen-a lifelong Londoner, a financial whiz trained to lead major corporations with thousands of employees, a man who didn't even like tea-had gleefully accepted the trustees' invitation to become the museum's managing director.
The mini excavator's diesel engine roared even louder as it approached its prey. Nigel looked across the garden and saw Jim Sizer, an enormous smile on his bearded face, wave happily at him from the driver's seat of the rented machine. Jim, who admitted to being seventy but was undoubtedly older, served as the museum's jack-of-all-trades utility person. He had once again lived up to his reputation as a problem- solving genius by figuring out how to get the mini excavator into the tea garden. For all their ingenuity, the founders had not thought to provide a door through the brick wall. Jim had taken ten different measurements and calculated there was just enough clearance to wheel the pint-sized earthmover through the aisles of the museum's greenhouse.
Jim steered the mini excavator in line with the pair of Assam tea plants and pushed a lever that activated the hydraulically powered digging arm.
Flick shouted above the noise, "This is like witnessing an execution!"
Nigel moved behind Flick and wrapped his arms around her. "This garden party was your idea. If you don't stop shifting your mental position like the pendulum in a clock, I shall change your nickname to Tick."
She looked up at him and smiled. "You wouldn't dare."
"I'd have centuries of tradition on my side. Ask your Anglophile parents back in York, Pennsylvania-Tick and Flick are both acceptable short forms of Felicity."
Jim revved the diesel again.
"We can postpone this," she said hurriedly. "We don't have to rip out the Assam plants today."
"Need I remind you that our two-week shutdown is about to come to an end. We plan to reopen on Monday; Jim Sizer will need all of Saturday to get the restored tea garden ready for visitors."
"You're assuming that the vultures will finish this afternoon."
"The appraisers will be finished by noon-as you well know."
Nigel thought of the two teams of professional antiquities valuers-twelve experts in all-who had worked their way from floor to floor in the museum. They were a lean, sallow-faced crowd who did resemble a flock of vultures. The recent death of Dame Elspeth Hawker made it necessary for the museum to purchase the many antiquities on display that were owned by the Hawker family. The first step of the process was to value the thousands of paintings, books, maps, woodwork, and pieces of crockery that served tea, praised tea, honored tea, celebrated tea, and explained its long history. One appraisal team was hired by the Hawker family, the other by the museum; their respective findings would be averaged to establish the collection's value.
"Yikes!" Flick cried as the toothed bucket on the end of the arm tore a tea bush out of the ground. Nigel felt her shudder.
"Steady on, Dr. Adams." Nigel tightened his hug. "The worst is almost over."
Jim Sizer made a dozen more careful swipes with the bucket to knock down the other Assam tea plant and scrape away enough top soil to make a trench about seven feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep. He finished by maneuvering the excavator close to the back wall and killing the engine.
"I finally understand the true meaning of 'blessed silence,'" Nigel said.
"What happens now?" Flick asked.
"I believe that Jim takes over with a shovel." Nigel looked over his shoulder. "Isn't that right, Conan?"
"Quite right, sir," said Conan Davies, the museum's over-sized chief of security, who today was also acting as excavation supervisor. Nigel noted that the big man was smiling; the museum's staff seemed to approve of the blossoming relation-ship between their director and chief curator.
Will the trustees feel differently? One of these days, we'll have to find out.
Conan went on in his gravelly voice. "We can't risk damaging the heating pipes. Jim helped to install them forty years ago. He knows the layout better than anyone else alive does. He'll dig slowly and carefully around the pipes to prepare the bed for the new tea plants." Conan cocked his head toward a flat of seedlings sitting on a table.
Nigel studied the foot-high replacement plants. They had arrived the day before on a flight from India, the gift of a tea estate in Kerala, a renowned tea-growing region in southern India. The seedlings had begun life as cuttings from established Assam plants. Flick had told him that mature tea plants were almost impossible to transplant successfully because their long taproots rarely survived the shock of a move. He and Flick had thought about cultivating cuttings in the museum's greenhouse, but she decided to make a wholly new beginning for the Assam tea plants, starting over with imported seedlings that had a proven pedigree.
Flick unwound from his embrace. She moved closer to the trench, studied it intently from a distance, and then crouched down to dribble handfuls of loose soil through her fingers. Nigel chuckled to himself. The tea tree-loving softy had given way to the hard-nosed scientist with impeccable academic and industry credentials. Her encyclopedic knowledge of tea spanned the entire life cycle-from growing tea plants, to processing and blending leaves, to brewing a good cuppa, to preparing and serving a classic English afternoon tea. In short, a surfeit of skills for someone only thirty-six years old. Flick had so impressed the museum's trustees that they took the radical step of appointing an American as chief curator of England's leading tea museum.
Nigel remembered his initial meeting with Flick when she came on board the previous summer-and winced. He had deemed her pompous, arrogant, dreary, and much too good-looking to be an effective curator. It had boggled his mind that a stunning brunette with big brown eyes could also be a serious scientist.
So much for the perspicacity of your first impressions-and your deep understanding of women.
"The soil feels and looks healthy," Flick said. "I wish I knew why our Assams didn't thrive."
"Well, ma'am," Conan said, "one of our security guards set up a modest betting pool that has generated many different suggestions as to the exact cause of the stunted plants. One thought is bad soil in this corner of the garden. Another is a leaky uncharted gas pipe somewhere beneath the bed. My belief is that we'll find a layer of construction rubble further down that prevented the plants' roots from reaching the proper depth. We're really quite close to the building proper; the workmen may have inadvertently buried a stack of unused bricks."
"My money is on moles," Nigel said. "I think the little blighters built a subterranean city and ate the roots as fast as the plants sent them out." He extended his hand and pulled Flick to her feet when Jim Sizer arrived with his shovel.
Nigel took a step backward to make room for the clods of earth that Jim removed from the trench at shockingly high speed. Doing all manner of odd jobs at the museum had kept the lanky septuagenarian in such vigorous shape that he steadfastly refused to retire.
"I should be so healthy at his age," Nigel murmured. In February he would be thirty-nine, a painful milestone he found difficult to contemplate.
A deep thunk from the trench interrupted his reverie.
"What did you hit?" Flick asked.
"Not sure, ma'am." Jim poked about with the shovel. "It may be that Mr. Davies thought right. It could be a layer of rubble, except ..."
"Except what?"
"It's not rubble," Jim said excitedly. "This is a roof slate. Someone laid a layer of roofing tiles about three feet down."
"Well, now we know what blocked root growth."
Nigel watched Jim lever two slates loose with the tip of the shovel. He lifted them out of the way.
"Why would someone bury roofing tiles?" Nigel asked. No one answered him; Flick, Conan, and Jim had directed their complete attention to the trench.
"Do you see anything below the tiles?" Flick asked.
"Only one way to find out." Jim thrust the shovel into the earth-and immediately brought forth an ominous crunching noise.
"Blast!" Conan said. "I hope that wasn't a heating pipe."
"Oh no, sir. They go clang when you bang 'em. I can see some sort of green plastic sheeting, perhaps a tarpaulin. Whatever is there is beginning to crumble."
Nigel leaned over to look into the trench. "What do you make of that yellowish object?"
Jim used the tip of his shovel to draw back the plastic sheeting. Nigel at once recognized a discolored skull and several human bones.
Jim made a throaty moan. "Blimey! It's a skeleton!"
Nigel might have fallen face first into the trench if Conan had not grabbed his belt and tugged him away from the edge.
* * *
Flick perched against the edge of the windowsill and said, "I feel it in my bones. I don't care if you laugh at me for saying that." When she peered at Nigel, she didn't see any laughter-merely an indifferent shrug.
A few moments later, he finally spoke. "More than one detective inspector serves in Kent Police's Major Crime Unit. It's hardly likely that the plods will dispatch the only investigator in the county who has had the opportunity to yell at you."
"Want to bet?"
"Not especially." Nigel was sitting behind his desk, tilted as far backwards as his swivel chair would allow.
"Come on. You're always game for a wager. How about dinner tonight, at Thackeray's on London Road. If I'm right, you pay.... If you're right, I pay."
"Okay-if that's what you want to do."
"Make reservations."
He rocked forward in his chair and reached for his telephone, but stopped in midstretch. "Shouldn't we first arrange for a sitter for Cha-Cha?"
Flick looked across Nigel's office in time to see a pair of pointy ears perk up. The smiling mouth below them emitted a yodel-like yip. Cha-Cha had raised his head at the sound of his name, although the rest of him lay sprawled along the sofa, a piece of furniture he now considered his own.
Cha-Cha, a Shiba Inu, an ancient breed of dog from Japan, was compact and foxlike, with a heavy reddish coat and white puffy cheeks. He had become a ward of the museum upon the death of Elspeth Hawker. He spent alternate nights in Nigel's flat on Lime Hill Road, near the Royal Tunbridge Wells' town center, and Flick's apartment on the Pantiles' Lower Walk, opposite the three-hundred-year-old colonnaded walkway that was one of the Wells' leading attractions.
"I have custody of the hound tonight," Flick said. "We'll drop him off at my flat; it's on our way to Thackeray's."
"That's true."
"And you can withdraw the necessary funds to pay for dinner from the cash machine in the Pantiles."
Nigel sighed. "I adore scintillating small talk, my dear, and I appreciate your valiant attempts to amuse me in times of trouble; but when do we tackle the elephant standing in the corner of the room?"
Flick rolled to her feet. Nigel's melancholy mood had begun when Jim Sizer unearthed the skeleton and had grown worse as they waited in his office for the police to arrive. His enthusiastic "hail fellow, well met" demeanor had vanished, and his usually ruddy complexion looked strangely colorless compared to his reddish-blond hair. Even his tall, slender build seemed to have compressed several inches.
Let's find out what's bothering the poor dear.
"What would you like me to say, Nigel?" Flick asked. "We don't have enough information to discuss the corpse in the tea garden. For all we know, he-or she-is a two thousand-year-old Roman expatriate."
Camy here:
I really love this book. Debbie’s voice is warm and encouraging, and I especially enjoyed the tip she gives of starting a gratitude journal. I did, and it has really helped me see God’s hand in so many different aspects of my life (I blogged about it on Faithchick.com). The format of this book is convenient for a quick devotional or just reading at odd times (like while waiting for the pasta to boil).
and the book:
Howard Books (November 3, 2009)
In her first non-fiction title, mega-bestselling novelist Debbie Macomber illustrates the profound impact of simple acts of generosity and how lives are changed in unimaginable and wonderful ways when we share the gifts of time, encouragement, hope, laughter, prayer and even forgiveness.
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
 
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