Tuesday, April 11, 2017

WICKED TREASURE - by Jordan Elizabeth

WICKED TREASURE
Book 3 of the Treasure Chronicles
A young adult novel of romance and the paranormal set in a steampunk world.




An asylum patient has a cryptic vision: Clark will overthrow the presidency. She's just insane...right? 

When a clockwork lion kidnaps their daughter, Clark and Amethyst's calm new life shatters. Hunting down the beast leads the Grishams and Treasures to a conspiracy not just against Clark, but also against the country. 

The conspirators attacked their little girl. An offense like that can’t go ignored. With his old gang at his back, Clark is ready to take on an abandoned circus, dethroned royalty, a corrupt orphanage, and the presidency itself. 


WICKED TREASURE is available now on Amazon from Curiosity Quills Press.
Check out early reviews on GoodReads!





Can’t wait to read the next installment in the Treasure Chronicles world?  Check out the first chapter:
They washed her hair, so she knew it was coming: the next visit. The nurse shoved Samantha’s head beneath the water in the tin tub, the liquid already cold from the air, and she stayed still; if she fought, they might bind her wrists. Last time they did that, the linen ropes had cut her skin.
Droplets splashed over the edge as the middle-aged woman shoved her deeper, Samantha’s chin striking the bottom. Blood filled her mouth where her teeth had nipped her tongue. She fought to not gasp as the nurse pulled her up to drench her hair in lavender oil.
The gas lamps shone too bright in the ceiling. Yellow glows twirled around each other like macabre dancers. She could drift back into the soapy water and inhale; death would take her to join that dancing.
“Filthy nits,” the nurse mumbled as she yanked a silver comb through Samantha’s ginger curls. Oil splattered onto Samantha’s bare shoulders, pooling along her collarbone.
She could say the nits weren’t her fault. She could request regular bathing.
Samantha stared out the room’s lone barred window as tears stung her eyes. Each jerk of the comb snapped more hairs from her scalp, and the oil’s scent burned her lungs.
A bell rang from somewhere deep within the asylum, muffled by brick and wood. Two nurses laughed in the hallway. They all got to go home at the end of their shifts. They had families and houses.
Samantha could have pushed them into the tub until the final air bubbles burst past their lips.
The comb clattered onto the side table, where cosmetic products had been lined up on a silver tray like medical instruments. Her gums where they’d ripped out her molars ached at the thought. Whatever rich sod received her teeth better have taken care of them.
“Ugly thing.” The nurse jabbed pins into Samantha’s hair to keep her curls up. “Should shave your head, we should. Get rid of those nits and all this fussing. Get you a wig then. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, chit?”
If it kept away the suffering of bathtime, then yes.
“Rise.” Nurse Hairy Molethe huge brown mole grew at the tip of her noseslapped a ragged towel against Samantha’s frame. “We’ll put you in the sitting room this time. He didn’t like the parlor, said it was too cold. That man doesn’t like a thing.”
And Samantha didn’t like him.
#
Captain MacFarland gritted his teeth as he took the front concrete steps two at a time. The stone plaque beside the door matched well with the asylum’s cold interior.
Wade Asylum. The only institute in the northeast for the mentally unhinged.
He hummed under his breath to keep away morbid thoughts, and the bronze attendant opened the door for him with a nod that sent the machine’s gears grinding. They might think him off, bringing music into the darkness, but the walls tended to close in around him, as if he too might become strapped into one of the cribs.
He’d seen the cribs once when his friend had insisted they come to visit his wife. The cribs, Captain MacFarland understood, were reserved for those who fought confinement, and his friend’s wife had screamed as though a banshee had possessed her.
Come night, dreams of Wade Asylum plagued him, and she’d haunted the majority for the past year. He could still hear her shriek, “You only put me here so you could be with that slut!”
His friend had stroked his fingers across her arm, her wrists bound to the sides of the metal crib. “Of course. I’ll always love you, but you didn’t like my mistress. You’ll need to stay here until you can accept her. They’ll help you right your mind here.”
The woman had spit at him, one of her eyes swollen shut. No one had told them who had punched her.
Captain MacFarland hummed louder as he approached the mahogany front desk where a young nurse in a low-cut white bodice wrote in a journal.
“Hello, Captain MacFarland.” She closed the journal and clasped her hands atop the leather cover. “Always so punctual, aren’t you?” The girl bent forward to expose more of her pale bosom. The song faltered in his throat as he pictured hopping over the counter to push her against the wall. He could push up her skirt, he imagined her without bloomers, and take her there in the waiting room that smelled of lamp oil. Those pink-painted lips of hers would part in a gasp, and she might even bite his neck. He loved it when they bit.
“I pride myself on punctuality.” He pulled the brass pocket watch from his brown jacket to flash her the time, and she smiled enough to show her straight white teeth.
“I made sure to assign you the sitting room in her ward, Captain. I recall how much you loathed the parlor.”
How anyone could call that drafty room a parlor escaped him. “Wonderful. I was wondering, Miss Nurse, about how you would feel meeting over a meal this evening. We could talk more about what it’s like here at Wade.”
“Captain, yes! I get done here at six if that works.” She chewed on her fingernail before she tipped back in her seat, her bosom bouncing. “I’ll get an orderly to show you to the patient, sir.”
He leaned one arm on the desk and winked. “I’d like that.”
His pleasure diminished with each step as he followed the brass orderly, who moved on wheeled feet, toward Ward 8. The machine unlocked door after door, and sealed them behind, until he seemed he’d entered a box he could never escape. Bars covered the few windows; bare bricks replaced wooden paneling on the walls. Gas lamps flickered close to the ceilings.
The air adopted a damp, musty odor, mixed with medicine he didn’t recognize.
The orderly unlocked a final door and entered what he assumed counted as a sitting room. Unlike the parlor with a table and chairs, this space offered velveteen settees. Light shone through two windows across the chipped tile floor.
Samantha sat on the settee closest to the door. Iron cuffs fastened her ankles together, visible beneath her black velvet skirt. The material matched the collar of her purple brocade jacket.
“I see you’re wearing the clothes I sent.” He cleared his throat when it rasped, and he glanced at the orderly, but of course it couldn’t make judgments on what it overheard. By order of the government, the orderly who attended them had to have its recorder removed so the conversation wouldn’t leave.
Someone had painted her lips a too dark red. “You can take them with you when you leave. I never get to see them again.”
“What do you wear normally?” Captain MacFarland had always imagined the girl posing in them before a mirror whenever he departed. He chose the highest fashion for her to make her feel… well, like she wasn’t a mental patient.
“A shift.” Samantha shrugged. “We’re not allowed anything else, and it’s sewn on us, didn’t you know. If we had loose sleeves, we could strangle ourselves.”
Her matter of fact tone made him shudder. He dropped onto the settee across from her. The last time he’d sat beside her, she’d lunged toward his eyes, and the orderly had pinned her down while administering a sedative from those brass fingers. The trip had been wasted.
“Do you remember,” he murmured, “when you were a child and I brought you peppermint sticks?” He should have done that for her again. Her green eyes had always adopted a life then, rather than the bloodshot, bulging quality they possessed otherwise.
“Better than the toys. They took those away after you left.”
He coughed. “How are you, Samantha?” It seemed wrong to take what he wanted and leave. She deserved a social call; he knew he was her only visitor, and his boss only required one visit every two months.
“They don’t allow me to take lessons anymore now that I’m sixteen.”
Captain MacFarland winced. Her birthday had occurred earlier in the month. He should have given her more than the clothes, no matter they would vanish. A nurse probably commandeered them.
“What do you do with your days then?” When she was younger, before she realized what it meant to be in Wade Asylum, she would have chatted with him about nonsense, like shapes she spotted in the clouds. He could have told her about the upcoming date with the nurse, and she could have told colors looked best on him. Brown, he already knew, but hearing from her had always brightened him.
Then, she asked questions he couldn’t answer. She learned about life outside from the nurses. She came to hate him as her jailer.
Samantha tipped her head as if judging his query. He’d brought her a hat this time, and it slid cockeyed across her head. Sixteen… young lady now despite her frail frame. He was thankful he’d delivered the white blouse with the high lace collar, fastened with a cameo one of the nurses must have supplied; it fit with a more mature age.
“I’m drugged up,” she said. “They didn’t give me anything, because of you I suppose. This is Ward 8. I hear stuff, you know. Ward 9 is the toughest. Constant lockdown. Violent criminals. I’m just in the criminal wing.” She scowled, her yellow teeth crooked. “We can’t wander. Oh no, that would be too dangerous. We get ropes and medicine.”
Ropes and medicine. Bile burned his throat. It wouldn’t help if he voiced aloud his wish for a different life, one where his boss didn’t make her stay under lock and key. One where he didn’t have to venture into the sterile building to see her on a clockwork basis.
“I’m not crazy.” She’d said that at every visit since she turned ten. “I know why I’m here. Someday the doctor’s going to believe me.”
“Oh, sweetie.” The doctor could believe her all he wanted. Money kept him quiet and her confined, and so long as he kept getting his checks, he wouldn’t so much as whisper the truth in his sleep.
Her pale face hardened, and she stuck out her hands, the fingernails broken, blood caked under them. “Come get what you want.”
He pulled off his leather gloves and placed them in his jacket pockets. Something told him he’d be doing this for the rest of his life, and was only thirty-four. “Tell me what the country needs to know.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed through her mouth, the sound loud and harsh in the room where the only noise came from the tick-tock of the orderly’s body. He gripped her hands and interlaced their fingers, hoping it would lend her strength.
Perspiration dotted her skin despite the frigid winter air. Snowflakes stuck to the window glass. A trickle of blood seeped from her left nostrils and her teeth chattered. Her eyeballs rolled back in her head as her lids fluttered.
“Tell me what the country needs to know,” he repeated.
“Clark Grisham will overthrow the presidency.”






Jordan Elizabeth became obsessed with steampunk while working at a Victorian Fair.  Since then, she’s read plenty of books and even organized a few steampunk outfits that she wears on a regular basis (unless that’s weird, in which case she only wears them within the sanctuary of her own home – not!). Jordan’s young adult novels include ESCAPE FROM WITCHWOOD HOLLOW, COGLING, TREASURE DARKLY, BORN OF TREASURE, RUNNERS AND RIDERS, GOAT CHILDREN, PATH TO OLD TALBOT, and VICTORIAN.  WICKED TREASURE is her sixth novel with Curiosity Quills Press.  Check out her website for bonus scenes and contests. 


In honor of WICKED TREASURE, check out book one, TREASURE DARKLY, on sale now for 99 cents!




Wednesday, April 5, 2017

SPAY AND NEUTER – BENEFITS and DEBATE

OVERPOPULATION CONCERNS-

A fertile cat typically produces 1-2 litters a year with an average of 4-6 kittens each litter. A fertile dog comes into heat approximately every 6 months, and can produce two litters a year with an average of 4-6 puppies per litter.

Each year in the USA, approximately 7.6 million companion animals (3.9 million dogs and 3.4 million cats) wind up in shelters. Around 2.7 million shelter pets are adopted each year, but sadly about the same number are euthanized.

The sad truth is that there will never be enough homes for all the homeless animals. The only guaranteed way to not contribute to overpopulation is to spay and neuter your pets.


Once you've worked in one or more animal shelters or pounds,
you'll realize the sad reality pictured in this photo is the truth.



BEHAVIORAL BENEFITS-

-       When in heat (a 4-5 day cycle repeated every 3 weeks during breeding season), female cats often yowl and spray indoors. This urine marking increases with estrus and decreases post spay.
-       Neutering of male cats decreases marking behavior (urinating in the home) by 78%.
-       Neutering male cats cuts inter-male aggression and roaming in half, decreasing the chances of cat fights and hit by car injuries. Fewer cat fights means less cat abscesses and reduced transmission of the viral diseases Feline Leukemia and FIV.
-       Spaying or neutering dogs before the age of social maturity decreases the chances of developing aggression threefold. The old wives' tale assuring that a female dog is nicer if it has a litter of pups before being spayed is unfounded, and if the maternal dog becomes overly protective of her pups, the opposite is true.
-       Neutering male dogs decreases inter-male dog aggression by 60%, urine marking by 50%, and roaming by 90%. Statistics reveal that as many as 85% of HBC (hit-by-car) dogs are not neutered.



MEDICAL BENEFITS-

Health benefits to spaying female dogs and cats:
1)    Prevention of pyometra, a life-threatening infection of the uterus (literally means "pus in the uterus"). Pet insurance data from Sweden (where many do not spay their pets) revealed that 23% of intact females developed pyometra. This dangerous condition often requires emergency surgery to remove the infected uterus. Some patients do not survive the surgery.
2)    Decreased risk of mammary cancer. In Norway (another country that doesn't promote spaying), 53% of malignant cancers seen in female dogs are mammary in origin. A high percentage of breast cancer in pets is malignant—50% in dogs and 90% in cats. Spaying before the first heat provides the best protection—less than 0.5% chance of breast cancer. When spayed after 1 heat, there is an 8% chance. When spayed after 2 heats, a 26% chance.
3)     Spayed pets also avoid the risks of pregnancy and giving birth: false pregnancies, dystocia, mastitis, uterine rupture, and life-threatening post partum hypocalcemia. Small breed dogs with narrow birth canals are especially at risk of dystocia, particularly those with large head to body ratios (such as Chihuahuas), risking emergency C-section or death.
4)    Spayed dogs have a decreased risk of developing painful perianal fistulas.



Health Benefits to neutering male dogs:
1)    Testicular tumors are the second most common tumor in male dogs (second to skin). These tumors can metastasize or secrete estrogen, which suppresses the bone marrow. Those with undescended testicle(s) are at even greater risk.
2)    Neutered male dogs experience less prostrate disease including prostatitis or benign hypertrophy where the continued presence of testosterone enlarges the prostate to the point where it becomes increasingly difficult and painful for the dog to urinate or defecate.
3)    Neutered male dogs have a decreased risk of developing painful perianal fistulas.


Regarding Male Cats:
The main benefits of neutering male cats are behavioral and population control since testicular disease is rare in this population. Although first thought to be a concern, studies have shown that early neutering does not increase the risk of male cats developing a urinary blockage.



The Debate over Spaying and Neutering:

Regarding cats, there isn't much debate. The American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP) report that "studies suggest that early neutering is not associated with serious health problems and does not seem to adversely affect skeletal, physical, or behavioral development in the cat."

In dogs, primarily due to a 2013 UC-Davis study in golden retrievers (a breed well known for increased risk of several cancers, hypothyroidism, epilepsy, and numerous orthopedic problems), there is some debate whether or not spaying and neutering causes an increase in some diseases.

Spaying and neutering does decrease the metabolic rate, which will lead to weight gain (and other associated health problems) if the diet is not adjusted. Spayed female dogs do have an increased risk of urine incontinence, generally easily treated with either an estrogen supplement or another medication to improve the urethral sphincter tone.

Other diseases that the UC-Davis study suggested are associated with spaying and neutering are cruciate disease, hip dysplasia, osteosarcoma, hemangiosarcoma, and hypothyroidism. However, these diseases are still common in the mainly non-spayed or neutered pet populations in Europe, which makes one question the full validity of the UC-Davis study.



Dr. Philip A. Bushby, a professor of humane ethics and animal welfare at the Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine, cautions people not to ignore a key statement included in the UC-Davis study: “An important point to make is that the results of this study, being breed-specific (to the golden retriever, which already has an increased rate of many of the diseases targeted in the study), with regard to the effects of early and late neutering cannot be extrapolated to other breeds, or dogs in general.”

Dr. Bushby also suggests that spaying and neutering is no longer a "one size fits all" decision. The answers are only simple if the points of interest are narrowed to one at a time. Regarding overpopulation, the answer is simple: spay and neuter your pet to avoid more suffering in the homeless pet population. Regarding many unwanted behaviors, such as urine spraying or roaming, the answer is again simple: spay and neuter your pets. Regarding the possibility that early spaying or neutering might affect growth plates and therefore cause orthopedic problems later in life is a more complex question. Larger breeds are much more at risk than smaller breeds for many of these issues.

Please feel free to discuss these issues with our staff. Since this is a complex issue, different people will choose to do different things, but the choice of delaying or declining to spay or neuter your pet does increase your responsibility to ensure you don't add to the already staggering overpopulation problem. Not spaying or neutering also increases the chances of some diseases (mammary and testicular cancers, for example), while potentially decreasing the chances of other diseases.

In time, the answers may become more clear, or else opinions on the subject will continue to become more polarized.





Resources used for this article:
-       Websites of the following organizations - ASPCA, SNAP, SPAYUSA, AAFP
-       Johnston, Shirley D., questions and answers on the effects of surgically neutering dogs and cats, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol. 198, 1991, pp. 1206 – 1214
-       Southwest Veterinary Symposium 2016 (www.vin.com)
-       http://veterinarymedicine.dvm360.com/breaking-down-optimal-spay-neuter-timing-debate


FRAGMENTS of DARKNESS - COVER REVEAL



Fragments of Darkness
An Anthology of Thrilling Stories
release date: September 13, 2017

From between the cracks of imagination, among the splinters of the unknown, and upon the winds of mystery, lurk the Fragments of Darkness.

With legends of killer mermaids to tales of Civil War era ghosts, ten passionate story-tellers come together to bring you yarns of fantasy, paranormal, and chills and thrills that will entertain, intrigue, and enchant young adult and new adult readers.

Lisa M. Basso -- Heart and Bone
C.L. Campbell -- Reckoner
Dorothy Dreyer -- Under the Surface 
Pat Esden -- Black as a Dark Moon, Scarlet as Sumac 
E.M. Fitch -- Between Shadows
R.A. Gates -- The Collector
Jessica Gunn -- The Ghost
Debra Jess -- Blood & Armor
Melanie McFarlane -- The Transgressions of Faithe Eileen 
Daphne René -- Story of the Unknown Soldier