I started Dragon My Feet as a place to talk about all those things I’m doing instead of the things I should be doing, but I kept procrastinating, and somehow this blog turned into a book blog instead. If you would like me to post an excerpt from your book, please follow the directions below:
Please Note: This is NOT a free service. If you wish me to promote your book via this excerpt, you MUST do something in return to promote my books.
Directions: please include a short synopsis (blurb) of the story, short bio, a link where I can find a photo of you and one of your book cover, and whatever links you would like me to add. Post the excerpt along with the rest of the information/links as a comment/reply on this page. Keep in mind, I cannot post what I do not have, so be sure to include everything necessary to make an interesting presentation. Don’t forget to tell me your name and the title of your book!!! The excerpt should be no more 700 words.
I will post the excerpts in the order I receive them. If you want the information posted on a particular date, such as for a blog tour, be sure to let me know that, too.
I also have another book blog where I interview authors and characters in books. http://patbertram.wordpress.com If you have not yet done so, I would like to interview you and/or your character! If you would like me to interview you, you can find the questions and instructions here: http://patbertram.wordpress.com/author-questionnaire/ If you would like me to interview your character, you can find the interview questions and instructions here: http://patbertram.wordpress.com/character-questionaire/ Feel free to do both
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Dragon My Feet 
September 22, 2010 at 11:09 am
Dragon Feet is a sure sign…
December 10, 2011 at 7:25 am
Hi Pat…..know a bit about writer’s block, after Upcountry. My second, untitled novel, a follow-on from Upcountry but not quite a sequel, got off to a rousing start last spring. I took a 3-month hiatus to thiink things through but now I’m going great guns. If you liked Upcountry, you might like this one too. Still not sure how I can post an excerpt here. Do I just post it in this reply box? Best to you this season….Rick
December 14, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Pat, I would love to leave you an entire short, and an interview if you like. I am very impressed with your work-
David Rhodes
December 15, 2011 at 4:23 am
I would love to do another interview for your blog, as i have much more material to discuss – more anthologies on the way, in my own horrid but tasteful fashion. As you know, I am published, and now have too much to published – I am still shopping around for the right people. I would love to give you another short for those readers who can appreciate it.
January 6, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Will you post an excerpt if it’s a non-fiction book?
January 6, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Carter, yes, I’ll post an excerpt from a non-fiction book.
January 7, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Thank you Pat! I think it’s great you support other authors the way you do, thanks for doing this! I am getting it all together now and will post it shortly. Again, thank you.
Carter
June 26, 2012 at 10:25 am
An eBook copy in PDF is available for $3.99. Other formats will be available soon.
Order a paperback copy through Lulu here.
Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and Amazon copies will be available soon!
Excerpt:
When she reached the bottom of the slope, she came across two hundred mules tethered to two hundred desks. They were facing two hundred computers. Every once in a while they moved keys on the keypads with their snouts. She asked a stout looking male mule what he was doing. “Navigating for my hawk!” snorted the male mule. “It’s a living!”
“Are all you mules navigating for hawks?” asked Sarah.
“Yes!” snorted the male mule. “My hawk has a dozen navigators!”
“Careful!” sniffed a nearby female mule. “They may hear you!”
“Oh dear!” snorted the male mule.
Among the mules there were a dozen human sized praying mantises. They were cracking whips with their spiked forelegs and reading out loud from a book of rules.
“If I am seen talking to you, Human beast,” said the male mule Sarah had been chatting with, “they will punish me! If they ask you, could you please tell them that you talked to me first!?”
“Why?” asked Sarah.
“We’re not supposed to talk unless spoken to first!” he told her. “It’s one of the rules!”
“I shouldn’t have spoken to my mule friend!” confided the female mule who had spoken. “I shouldn’t be talking to you!”
“Are there many rules?” asked Sarah.
“Lots!” said the male mule. “I’d best get on with my navigating!”
“Goodbye,” Sarah told the mules as she began to walk away. “Good luck with your navigating.”
Then, from the other side of the hill, came the roar of a dozen low flying World War Two Japanese Zeros. They were being chased by a dozen American Hellcat fighter planes. The Hellcats were hot on the tails of the Zeros and managed to shoot down two before the remaining planes disappeared into the distance. One Zero did drop a bomb before going away. It exploded a short distance from the mules.
This has nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, thought Sarah. Hellcats didn’t come into that war until much later. Even so, these Hellcats are like dark mules with wings and the Zeros are like great big butterflies with bombs and a work ethic strange for butterflies.
Out of the bomb dust a figure stirred. What was it? The sky was darkening and a savage wind was stirring. It hammered at the desks of the mules and threatened to drive the hawks from the heavens. Then a flash of lightning revealed the presence in the bomb dust of an old Asian witch with her face painted white and her lips decorated a cherry red. She had on a white flowing gown that moved swiftly. It moved as rapidly as her black fluid hair. She ventured closer to the mules. As she got nearer to them the intensity of the wind increased.
A desk was overturned in the ensuing gale, freeing a mule from his tether. The mule then kicked the witch, sending her into a dozen computers. Sparks flew as the witch, choking to death from a crushed windpipe breathed her last.
“God help us!” cried the male mule that was closest to the dead witch. “God help the one responsible!”
The mule who had kicked the witch, who also happened to be a male, cried out: “No! I didn’t want to do it! I didn’t mean to do it!”
“She was bad,” said Sarah.
“Was she really?” questioned one of the praying mantises. “Or was she simply doing what one would expect a wind witch to do?”
“A wind witch?” questioned Sarah.
“Yes,” hissed the praying mantis in Sarah’s face. “Would you deny a wind witch her ancestry? Would you deny a wind witch her culture? Would you do these things for the sake of some puny computer slave? Well! Would you, my dear, would you?!”
“I don’t know!” cried Sarah in confusion as the wind faded to nothing and hideous insect like orbs bored into her eyes.
“I don’t know!” Sarah screamed after a moment of heavy silence as the air became still, the fog came in and so did the static.
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October 20, 2012 at 7:07 am
Hi Pat,
I posted a request here yesterday and it disappeared? Can we talk about an excerpt from my book when you have time?
October 20, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Hal, your comment didn’t disappear. I still have it — You posted it on a different page on this blog. I sent you an message via facebook. This is what I said: You can find the instructions here: https://dragonmyfeet.wordpress.com/dragging-my-feet/ The best excerpts are about 700 words — long enough to give people a feel for your book and short enough to read quickly. I can get your book cover from your blog but the rest of the information must be posted according to the directions. Thank you.
December 12, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Excerpt from Chapter 2 of the new novella, “The Body in the Bed”, available from Amazon as a Kindle book.
“The Body in the Bed”, a suspenseful whodunit novella, and the newest entry in the South American mystery series, brings Roger and Suzanne back to Montevideo, Uruguay where another bloody murder needs to be solved. http://www.amazon.com/South-American-Mystery-Series-ebook/dp/B00A1PZZ86/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1352084384&sr=1-6&keywords=the+body+in+the+bed
Chapter2. The body in the bed
Neither of us won the bet about when the first body would appear. Or maybe we both did. Clearly it turned out to be a bit less than a 50-50 chance whether we’d find it before or after we had been in our hotel room for a while. When we got to our hotel room in Montevideo the supine body of our old acquaintance, Bernardo Colletti, was lying dead on the bed. As usual, Bernardo was dressed expensively and well, in a suit and tie that had obviously cost a lot of money, which he could afford as a practicing physician. He looked a lot like a much older, deeply suntanned, copy of Clint Eastwood, 60-ish, tall, with chiseled features that had begun to sag with age. He was obviously on display to make sure we got the message, whatever the message was intended to be.
I saw the body, recognized who was there on the bed, and quickly turned to Suzanne who stood just inside the room holding on to the door. She looked startled but completely in control of the situation. If nothing else, our experiences in South America had gotten both of us used to seeing dead bodies.
I’m afraid that I spoke ill of the dead, who was definitely not a friend of ours, in those first few seconds. “This is the best I’ve seen that bastard look since we met him. Let’s get out of here without touching anything else.”
Suzanne had already grasped both the situation and the bellboy and was hustling the now gagging bellboy, who had frozen just inside the room and quite literally turned green, out into the hall. Now he was able to vomit without contaminating the crime scene, and he proceeded to do just that.
I took a longer look to memorize the scene in front of me, followed Suzanne and the shocked bellboy out of the room, closed and locked the door, and called Martin Gonzalez, who was still only a few minutes away from the hotel on his way to his office. Martin took care of the formal report to the police and hurried back to get a careful look at the crime scene before the room got too crowded or the case became too territorial for him to take charge of it. Suzanne and I shared a sense of deja vu as we stood next to a mutilated corpse being interrogated by Martin Gonzalez as suspects in a murder; that was exactly how we had met him for the first time. The only thing that was missing this time was his former partner Detective Gonzalez (no relation), who had been killed just before our last visit to Montevideo, taking notes of the questions and answers.
Suzanne and I had first met Bernardo and Martin during our initial visit to Montevideo when we found the Ambivalent Corpse’s body lying in a park less than a couple of miles from our current hotel room. We met both of them again during our recent visit to Montevideo when we solved the Matador Murders. Bernardo was far from being a friend, but finding the dead body of someone you know is always a shock. When the corpse has obviously been murdered, as was the case here since his throat had been cut from ear to ear and he’d bled out all over the bed, it’s an even bigger shock. Bernardo was no great loss to society; in fact, he was probably at the top of the very short list of people I’d least regret to discover dead in my bed in Montevideo. But, there was a principle here. Someone was trying to scare us or misdirect us away from something else, and that wasn’t acceptable.
March 18, 2015 at 8:03 pm
Very nice
July 15, 2015 at 3:44 pm
Dear Ms. Pat Bertram,
Thank you very much for submitting the excerpt for “Practical Obsession” by N. Nosirrah.
I was wondering about the procedure for having a book review published on your blog.
If it is possible, I would like to request a review of either “Practical Obsession” or another recent title, “The Essence of Enlightenment: Vedanta, the Science of Consciousness.”
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Yours,
Connie Shaw
July 20, 2015 at 10:44 pm
Both books sound interesting, but I’m sorry, I don’t do reviews. I do, however, post reviews other people have done if they send them to me. Best of luck with N. NOsirrah’s books.