Saturday Snippet: He Had Good Instincts

The following snippet is taken from  

Millwright's Daughter by Zina Abbott, 

one of nine novellas in the Under a Mulberry Moon anthology:

          As he slowly rose from his chair, Kit Halsey’s gaze never left Caroline Arnold. He agreed to accept this short-term job, hoping it would prove interesting and as financially lucrative as Mrs. Arnold indicated it would.

            Kit realized one of the keys to his success as a railroad detective had been he possessed good instincts. He hoped those same instincts would serve him well once he passed the bar and practiced law.

            Right now, his instincts screamed to him the old woman had not told him everything there was to know about this case.

          

Under a Mulberry Moon is still available at its pre-order price of 99 cents. After it is published on July 17th, it will resume its regular price of $2.99. To purchase this book on pre-order, please CLICK HERE.

Also, to get a sampler of what you can expect in this anthology, CLICK HERE for a copy of Medleys and Musing by authors of Under a Mulberry Moon. The price is right -- FREE!

 

My First Book Trailer-Bit by Bit

In the past, I have put together little videos of family history topics. Then there was the one I helped my grandson do for his fourth grade (or was it fifth?) California missions project. However, last night I completed for the first time a book trailer.

It was not a snap to do. What fouled me up was not the images or the music since I have royalty-free for both. It was the combination of programs and computers.

I have a big 17" HP with lots of clock speed and memory, which is my main computer. Since I did not wish to risk it on a recent vacation/Wild Deadwoods Reads book signing/WWA conference/historical research trip, I bought (after three tries and sending the first two computers back) a 15" lightweight Lenovo which has plenty of memory, but the clock speed is s-l-o-w-e-r than s--l--o--w.

First issue I ran into was my favorite Microsoft photo editing program loaded just fine on the HP, but would not load on the Lenovo. That is when I learned my HP was 32-bit and my Lenovo was 64-bit. That proved to be a bit of a problem for me. So, I installed my Adobe Photoshop Essentials 18 on the Lenovo. Problem is, I hate Photoshop. To me, it is not intuitive and it does not do half of what I can do on my Microsoft photo program.

Before I left on my trip, I made a point to create all my visuals for the video on my HP and put them in my Dropbox account. While on my trip, I uploaded on the Lenovo the Vegas Movie Studio program I purchased. One late night after traveling across the wind-swept prairies of the great plains, I started combining images with music using Movie Studio.

All well and good, but when I arrived home and transferred everything using Dropbox back to my HP, I discovered Movie Studio would not work on my 32-bit computer. I have the version for 64-bit. I have photoshop Essentials, which is a video program, but it would not accept the file type for the working video created on Movie Studio.

What to do -- what to do. I was in a bit bind.

I cleaned up my images, sent them via Dropbox BACK to my Lenovo, finished off the video, created the movie, and uploaded it to my Zina Abbott YouTube account. It is my very first video under that account. 

Ta-da! Click on the above to see my trailer for Under a Mulberry Moon. It is a nine-author anthology of Western historical romance novellas written by myself, Patricia PacJac Carroll, Caroline Clemmons, Carra Copelin, Keta Diablo, P.A. Estelle, Cissie Patterson, Charlene Raddon and Jacquie Rogers. Like I warned all the involved authors, I'm not a professional at this, but for them, the price was right.

Under a Mulberry Moon is currently on preorder on Amazon at a special preorder price of $.99. The regular price is $2.99. To purchase, please CLICK HERE.

If the video trailer is not enough of a sneak peek for you, you might like to download Medleys and Musing from Authors of Under a Mulberry Moon. It is available at no cost. To download it, please CLICK HERE.