KUDOS:

Patrick Murphy - Pushcart Nominee
The New England Review has nominated the short story "Extended Care," by TWA author Patrick Murphy, for the Pushcart Prize. The story centers around a mother taking her retarded child to a South Florida care facility.

Robert W. Beard has four new books for sale on Amazon.com. Titles include Astride the Sea Cow, The Runaway, Halcyon, and A Boy Named Shawn. The last book, though, fiction, is based on a student Beard taught in an honors class. At the age of 13, the title character, a genius, applies for admission to Florida State University and is accepted for the only available opening—an unfilled slot for a football player who failed to qualify. By mistake, Shawn plays in the game against FSU's rival, the University of Miami, and becomes an overnight sensation, both as an athlete and teenage idol. That is only the beginning of Shawn’s story. He later develops an idea for a new source of electrical power that will make gasoline-powered engines obsolete.

Elizabeth Kinzer O’Farrell and Charles I. Titus also have a new title out: A New Gomorrah. It is the story of a Midwestern city so steeped in crime a new minister feels forced to act against the evil he sees around him. A local reporter joins with him to fight corruption. The book is the collaborative effort of the now-deceased Charles Titus, a minister who labored for years on this story, and Elizabeth O’Farrell, who obtained the manuscript from Titus’s wife and rewrote and edited the material for publication. The book will be released by Xlibris in October.

Susan L. Womble has a new title out, the second book in the Newt’s World series, Newt’s World: Internal Byte. The first book won the gold medal in the Florida Book Awards children’s literature division last year. Susan is currently working on the third and final book in the series. Newt is a boy in a wheelchair with uncanny gifts for programming video games. The holographic worlds Newt creates are so realistic the line between reality and fantasy become blurred. The stories blend conflicts as everyday as bullying with high-tech espionage and intrigue.

Kiki Belmonte-Schaller, TWA member, just won first place in the Multicultural Fiction category of the 2009 National Best Books competition with her novel Gray Rainbow Journey.  It was also a finalist in the Religious Fiction category. The contest is sponsored by USA Book News. Belmonte-Schaller lives in Miami and attended our conference last spring.

TWA President Donna Meredith won a first place award in the Royal Palm Literary competition sponsored by the Florida Writers Association. Her novel, The Glass Madonna, won in the unpublished women’s fiction category. FWA is a statewide nonprofit trade association with some 1,000 members. The award was announced at the awards ceremony at FWA’s recent three-day annual conference in Orlando, Florida. The same novel also won an honorable mention in the Pottersville Press novel competition.

Richard Edward Noble, a recent TWA member, has released his latest endeavor on Amazon, Noble Notes on Famous Folks. This book is written in the Willy Cuppy tradition – history with a sense of humor and maybe a bit of cynicism and sarcasm to boot.Earlier this year he issued, via Amazon, the revised edition of his “best seller” – A Summer with Charlie.” This work is gaining a modest “cult” following, back in his hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts. It has even caught the eye of an ex-Lawrencian movie maker who may be interested in chronicling, via the “SilvaScreen,” the old hometown. The misadventures of Richard and his wife, Carol, living under bridges and equipment shelters, picking oranges and apples, hoeing cucumbers and laboring among the hazards of Chicken factories and processing plants around the U.S.A. is also listed on Amazon and doing well. It is entitled Hobo-ing America. Richard now has six books currently selling on Amazon and will be issuing number seven, possibly in January of 2010.

DOWNTOWN MARKETPLACE BOOTH: If you have published a book, TWA rents a booth at the Downtown Marketplace on Saturdays. Bring copies of your book to sell to visitors to our downtown. For more information on this TWA service, contact Ted Simmons at treasurer@tallahasseewriters.net9

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YOUR BOOK:

If you are a TWA member and have published a book in the last year, please send us jpegs of the cover and the author, and a brief paragraph about your book for this page on our website. Email materials to Marci Elliott at vice-president@tallahasseewriters.net5

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NEWS:

If you have news about your writing, please send it to Marci Elliott at vice-president@tallahasseewriters.net3

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