A to Z Challenge: V is for Violets (and Denise Vega and "Voodoo Ridge" by David Freed)

 V turned out to be easy, thanks to a wonderful Northern Colorado writer of books for young folks and an upcoming book release from David Freed (who will return as my guest blogger on May 22nd).

Four more posts to go, folks. We're almost done for another year. This is the only challenge, blog hop, or blogfest I sign up for each year. It helps me get back to blogging because I tend to turn into a slug after the holidays. And it proves to me (once again) that I have more time to write than I claim I do. When I turn the blog-writing and blog-hopping and comment-responding time into writing time, I should be good through NaNoWriMo in November.

So here we go.

Featured Author:  Denise Vega

Denise lives in Colorado where she writes for both kids and teens. Here's what she says about herself on her website:

"I always wanted to be a writer and I always wrote but I started out writing a lot of magazine articles, computer books, and other stuff like that for adults to help keep our family in toilet paper and chocolate chip cookies.

Then, in about 1998, things began looking up and I was able to devote my free time to writing what I really wanted to write–underwear labels. Just kidding. I really wanted to write books for kids. So I started. But right about then, we had our third kid–Rayanne. So I often had to stop in mid-sentence to change a diaper or make sure someone wasn’t creating their latest work of art on the wall–out of oatmeal."

Denise has a blog called Blab-o-Denise, and her books (Rock On, Click Here, Facts of Life, and Access Denied for older readers and Build a Burrito and Grandmother, Have the Angels Come for kids) are listed on her website. She also teaches middle grade and YA writing classes. I don't have a photo of Denise in my file, but if you go here, you'll see her short bio on amazon.com and all her books in a nice tidy list.


Featured Book:  Voodoo Ridge by David Freed

This book releases in May, so if you haven't read the first two mysteries in Freed's Cordell Logan series (Flat Spin and Fangs Out), you have time. The protagonist is a pilot, a flight instructor, and a bit of a cynic. I like the Logan character a lot.

Here's the scoop on Voodoo Ridge.

"It’s 1956. A plane bearing a mysterious cargo takes off from a small airport outside Los Angeles and disappears into a raging storm. Nearly 60 years later, while flying over California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, retired military assassin-turned-civilian flight instructor and would-be Buddhist Cordell Logan catches a glint of sunlight on metal and spots what appears to be an aircraft wreckage. His life will never be the same.

Logan and his beautiful ex-wife Savannah, plan a reconciliation in posh Lake Tahoe. But upon landing in the Ruptured Duck, his beloved aging Cessna, Logan agrees to put those plans on hold when he’s asked to help guide a search and rescue team to the remote, mountainous crash site. The team finds not only a long-missing airplane, with the mummified remains of its pilot still at the controls, but something much more recent and far more sinister: the body of a young man, shot to death only hours earlier. Someone has beaten the rescuers to the site and will clearly stop at nothing to profit from what the plane was carrying – including kidnapping and threatening to kill Savannah if Logan refuses to help them carry out their getaway plans. With the clock ticking and the love of his life in peril, Logan is drawn into a vexing vortex as personal and potentially deadly as any he’s ever known."

So go on, give Freed's series a try. You know you want to.


Word of the Day:  Violets

When I was a kid in Illinois, there were violets all over our yard every spring. In Indiana, I'd trek to the woods and see violets everywhere.

Now I'm in Northern Colorado, and wonder where have all the violets gone? I know they're around here somewhere, but there aren't any in my yard. Too dry? Not enough shade from trees?

I have to do something about this. I need violets.