Traveling the Writing Journey with Author Lorie Hardy

How did the idea for your book There Are No Good Men because There Are No Good Women present itself to you?
I've always had a passion for women and the struggle they have with obtaining suitable companionship. But I guess I decided to put my learned experience in words when I decided to end my marriage and got back into the dating world. I would have these conversations with men and most of them would tell me how I should share my knowledge with other women. Listening to their stories gave me the insight from a male perspective as to what women were doing wrong and what they could improve or change to be in a good relationship.

[Buy your copy of There Are No Good Men because There Are No Good Women today from The Empowerment 4 Life Website!]
This book is about situations and actions that women accept from men who continually treats the women badly; and the advice and solutions women can use to gain back their power.



Let's talk about your journey of writing the book. How easy, difficult was it? What pushed you to write this idea to its completion?
It was very difficult for me to complete my novel, only because I was a huge procrastinator and had so many ideas in my head that I felt overwhelmed. At first I would try to work on a different book everyday to feel as though I had accomplish something, but in actuality I wasn't really accomplishing anything. My first boost came from Steve Harvey when he completed his book in the same genre as mine. But what really got me to get going, focus on one book and complete it, was a conversation with my fiance' who has always been supported and whom I have daily conversations with most of the time about relationships. We were talking about an article on-line regarding a relationship and the title of my book just came out of my mouth and I knew immediately after I said it, that was going to be my title and that motivated me to complete my book.

How was your journey to get the book published? Did you attempt to get an agent? A publisher? How did that fare? Did you go the self-publishing route? If so, talk to us about that journey.
The journey to publish my book wasn't a road paved in gold...lol. I absolutely did everything by myself, except the editing and book cover. I didn't get an agent because agents aren't cheap and I'm a single mother with 3 kids, 1 just graduated from college and 1 going into college. Also, agents can't guarantee you that you will get your book published. Their job is to get you in front of the major publishers, but it's your job to write something they deem as a best seller. I did a whole lot of research and didn't understand the royalty process. How do you get a much larger percentage than I do and I wrote the book and paying you to print it? So I found out lots of avenues I could take that could save me an enormous amount of money. I got it copy written myself, because the cheapest place I found that would was charging me $220, when it only cost $35. I sent it to a POD and sold them off of my website or at book fairs because paying someone thousands of dollars to only get 2 to 5 copies, didn't sit well with me. And if I wanted more copies I had to pay for them and you would get 80 percent of my sells where I would only get 20 percent. Now, that didn't work for me, I'm definitely not discouraging or encouraging anyone to use this agency or that one. But I am suggesting that you do the research for yourself. There is nothing like finding out for yourself what you think will work for you. By all means, get other people's opinion, but you make the final decision.

What avenues have you used to promote your book? Which ones have been the most successful? Why do you think that is?
I used a lot of blogtalkradio stations to promote my book, did a few Internet shows, still doing a weekly show that I have an opportunity to promote, social media, email, word-of-mouth. I think I did a good job of promoting and thought I would fair a little better than I did, especially since I have such a controversial book title. But there are so many books out there, especially since more authors have the ability to self-publish. It takes a lot of consistent effort to get your book out there to the masses. In that area, I think I could have done more, but my focus has been more on my play off the book that I haven't really applied myself to the promotion end.

Lorie Hardy, is CEO/Founder of Empowerment4life.com, an organization focusing on the four main aspects of life; finance, health, employment and love, with an emphasis on love. Blessed with a genuine love for humanity, a positive outlook on life, she believes there is someone for each of us and desires to see everyone in happy and healthy relationships.

Lorie works as a Compliance Manager for the County, but has a passion for writing. She is the mother of three beautiful children, Amanda, Shannon, and Houston who were partially responsible for the completion of her first published book There Are No Good Men, Because There Are No Good Women. Her goal was to take what she’d learned through her troubling relationship experiences and share it with them to ensure that they would be better equipped to understand and to deal with the complexities of similar problems that might arise in their futures.

During her life journey, Lorie experienced things that would cause her to question God, "Why am I going through all of this grief?" She was a good person and didn't think she deserved being treated in such an extremely undesirable way. We always think we know what is best for us. I had to learn that God was in control and knew what was best for me and mainly to seek Him before we make decisions.

Without pointing the finger at anyone else, she learned from a previous involvement, that you can’t always put the entire blame on the other person when your relationship isn’t working. “Even if you’re not causing the friction, you are equally as responsible if you’re not holding the other person accountable for the friction they’re causing.” It took 17 years for Lorie to understand and acquire the knowledge to pen her first book.

Once out of the storm, she realized that what she had experienced, wasn’t just for her personal growth and benefit. She had a testimony and a duty to share her story to empower every woman she encountered. She slowly began the task of writing her book, but it wasn't until random women, strangers with similar plights, began to share their personal stories with her that she really became driven to complete her book.

Listening to the women, she began to realize that at some point in time, women had lost their self-esteem, their self-worth, and their power. “We as women have so much power, but we have relinquished it just to say that we have a man or simply because we don't wish to be alone.”

There Are No Good Men, Because There Are No Good Women is geared toward single women, single men and married couples who desire to be in healthy, successful, and loving relationships.

Lorie is currently a Board of Director for Praying Single Mothers and is a weekly guest on the “Straight Talk” show broadcasting on starplanettv.com.

Lorie also is currently working on her second book and a play that will coincide with her first book. Lorie can be booked for speaking engagements through her website, www.empowerment4life.com, Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.

AND NOW... A Peek into There Are No Good Men because There Are No Good Women

If I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard women say it a million times. “There are no good men!” And I’ve heard men say, “There are no good women!” Now we’ve got the blame game going. Men are blaming women and women are blaming men. There can’t be a resolution if no one is willing to own up and make a change. Time after time I have heard women say, “I don’t know what happened. He wasn’t like that before. How could I have been so blind? When did he change?” Women are emotional creatures; men are visual creatures. Both have the tendency to get caught up in a persona and ignore the obvious.
Some women get so desperate to have a man that they will tolerate bad behavior just to say they have someone. Ladies, don’t get caught up in a person just because you are tired of being lonely. Loneliness makes you very vulnerable to men who don’t have your best interests at heart. I know everyone wants to be loved and love somebody, and I believe there is someone out there for everyone, but you have to make sure that you relinquish your heart to a person who will take very special care of it. You don’t want someone who will stomp all over it, bruise it, or cut it up and out.

It’s so humorous to hear women say that there are no good men. Women will get involved with a man they know isn’t any good, and when he does them wrong, the first thing out of their mouths is, “He wasn’t any good anyway!” Huh? Are you serious? If you knew he wasn’t any good, why are you involved with him? In response I get the gaze of a deer in the headlights. Ladies, we can’t keep blaming men for their inappropriate behavior.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some straight, no good dogs out there. They have got to have every attractive woman they see. They couldn’t remain faithful or treat you correctly if Jesus were holding their hand. It’s just who they are, they don’t see any wrong in it.

But the majority of men are influenced by the response they get from women. Men only do what works. If they are with a woman in one town and another woman in another town, and both women find out about each other and still stay with the man, whose fault is that? It surely is not the man’s fault. He’s only doing what he thinks will work, what he can get away with. And my question is, “Why? Why would you allow a man to be with another woman when you are in a relationship with him?” Yeah, I know there is a high infidelity rate. No one is faithful, everyone is cheating, marriage isn’t sacred, blah, blah, blah. But even though we all know this, do we have to follow suit? Can’t you step out of the box? Can you be the leader and not the follower?

Traveling the Writing Journey with Author Niyah Moore

How did the story idea for Major Jazz come about?
I was visiting San Francisco with my best friend, and she lived in the Fillmore District. She took me on a little tour of the jazz history, and we went into a few jazz clubs like Yoshi’s and Sheba Piano Lounge. I became so fascinated with everything I'd heard and seen that I felt inspired to write a book about love, the neighborhood, and jazz in the 50’s. I always knew about the Jazz in Harlem, but it’s rare that people actually know about Harlem of the West aka The Fillmo’.

[Buy your copy of Major Jazz today from Amazon and the publisher!]
"Our heated passion created some of my best compositions, but I was cursed with my daddy's blood." Major Ingram knew better than to get into a committed relationship. As much as he witnessed the heartbreak his father inflicted upon his mother, he didn't want to make the same mistakes. When his father finally walked out on them for good, his mother was broken. Something he saw and she felt for years. Major didn't want to hurt any women that same way, but it seemed as if he could never tell Sallie Aquino he loved her because there was only one her and that was his music. Major's father was a saxophone player who played the blues. He spoon-fed Major the love of music from the first day he opened his eyes to the world. Though the sax was in his blood, Major fell in love with the ivory and ebony keys the first time he heard a piano. Major developed his own passion with jazz music and by the age of sixteen, he had landed a paying gig at Bop City, an after hours nightclub in Fillmore. Fillmore, the 'Mo, was like Harlem on the bay. Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Duke Ellington all fell into San Francisco the way they had in the Big Apple. Back in '51, the Victorian styled homes, housed finely dressed black people who owned their own businesses from cleaners to restaurants to jazz spots. They worked mornings during the week and enjoyed local and celebrity musicians at night. Up and down Fillmore Street, clubs and restaurants lined up one next to the other. On Friday nights, they went from club to party to bar until the early hours of Monday while music played nonstop. Loosely based on true testimonies, the Fillmore Jazz Era comes back to life through the fictional characters: Major Ingram, Kae Taylor, Sade and Sallie Aquino, and Frank Blue. They made jazz heartfelt through their own stories. This love story just isn't about falling in love, but how they each fell in love with a neighborhood, a scene and her, jazz music. The Fillmore Jazz Era is gone, most of the neighborhood was torn down by the Redevelopment Agency by the 1960's, but it's not forgotten, and the love for Bebop, Jazz, R&B, and Blues music that once existed remains in the heart and soul of Fillmore forever.


Let's talk about your journey of writing the book. How easy, difficult was it? What pushed you to write this idea to its completion?
I moved to Fillmore for ten months with my best friend when I lost my baby girl so I could really regroup and get my head in a clear space. I wound up absorbing the atmosphere, and I came across so much history, and I also was able to talk to a few musicians that were in the Fillmore at that time. It was pretty easy to gather the research and that was so much fun for me. It was a little difficult to really tie in the characters without getting lost. I did a lot of rewriting to make sure it was authentic. I had to play a lot of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Coltrane to really put me back into time like I was in a time machine. The passion I had for the music was what pushed me to write this idea to completion.

How was your journey to get Major Jazz published? Did you attempt to get an agent? A publisher? How did that fare? Did you go the self-publishing route? If so, talk to us about that journey. 
I attempted to get an agent, and a very well-known agent in the industry told me that the project was so rich and authentic that it deserved to stay the way it was and that I had to choose a publisher that would love the book just as much as I do. She encouraged me to not let the book get “watered” down. So, I approached Elissa Gabrielle about doing the project, and she loved it, but it wasn’t an immediate yes. She made sure I did enough research to be sure that Peace in the Storm was where I truly wanted to be. I feel like I’m at home with PITS. It was a very warm welcome, and Major Jazz has been able to remain exactly the way I wrote it. The cover was developed by Elissa with a few of my ideas. It was really cool because we both wanted the same look and feel. It really worked because I love the man on the cover. He is so gorgeous. The editing process was absolutely amazing. S.D. Denny did a beautiful job.

What avenues have you used to promote your book? Which ones have been the most successful? Why do you think that is?
I’ve used social media such as Twitter, FB, Instagram to promote, but I’ve also done a virtual book release party and a blog talk radio tour. I also created my own book trailer and uploaded it to YouTube. I want to start doing some Ustream as well. So far so good. Major Jazz is making its way around. I think it has been successful because my followers are starting to really enjoy reading my work. Everyone uses social media these days.

Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Niyah Moore was touched at an early age with the precious gem of prose. Just like any loving relationship, Niyah’s love affair with words began to bear fruit. After she submitted a short story to the Mocha Chocolate anthology in 2008 and was accepted as a contributing author, she submitted to other works. Her works include novels, Guilty Pleasures and Bittersweet Exes. She’s in the 2012 AALAS nominated anthology, Heat of the Night and the 2008 AALAS Winning Erotic Anthology, Mocha Chocolate: Taste a Piece of Ecstasy. Niyah’s short story “After Dark” will be included in the anthology, Zane’s Busy Bodies: Chocolate Flava 4, releasing in the summer of 2013. She is also one of the contributing author duets to the groundbreaking anthology, Pillow Talk Duets in the Heat of the Night. Niyah is a mother of two, who loves sharing her love for words with the world and who looks forward to the publication of her new novel, Major Jazz, which is scheduled for release under the Award-Winning Independent Publisher of the year, Peace in the Storm Publishing.

You can learn more about Niyah at/on: [Her website] [Facebook] [Twitter]

AND NOW... A Taste of Major Jazz

We went out dressed to kill. You hear me? You couldn’t tell us we weren’t knockouts in our first-class clothes and nice hats. When we dressed, literally to the nines, baby, we strut our stuff! To Fillmore Street was where we were headed because the music called our names one by one: Lucille, Sallie, and Sade, in that order, from oldest to youngest, sisters. While we walked and laughed, never ending music poured into the streets out of the windows of our neighbors’ houses. Music in the Fillmo’ felt organic and it belonged to us and to the community.

That summer of ‘51, our neighborhood, the corner of Buchanan and Webster Street, was mixed and we didn’t have any racial outbreaks of violence or madness of any kind. No, honey! The Jewish welcomed you into their delis and the Japanese rented to everyone in their hotels and rooming houses. They served you good in their restaurants. See, we came from a mixed background. My Filipino father and Black mother were hard-workin’, great dressin’, good dancin’, and the most respectable people like the rest of the people in our neighborhood. Together, they raised us the best way they knew how, all while being the owners of Aquino’s Cleaners on Fillmore Street.

As the baby sister, I was most stubborn and quick-tempered. I didn’t take shit from anybody. As much as I enjoyed hot steamy nights with no good fast talkin’ two timin’ hustlers who razzed my berries from the pool halls, I still had my own mind, and didn’t let anybody’s dope or abusive ways stand in my way of a good time. No, sir, I didn’t play around. I worked at our family’s cleaners from early morning until closing, five days a week. When I was off work, I let my hair all the way down, you know, got real loose.

The oldest was Lucille and she had just graduated college. She was working at being a school teacher, but you couldn’t let that preppy act fool you. She was one heck of a tough cookie, married to a jailbird, cursed like an angry drunk man when she felt the need, and was just as stubborn as a donkey.

Sallie, the middle child, was enrolled in beauty school and studied Cosmetology. From what everyone said, she was the prettiest out of the three of us. I begged to differ. The pretty one was me, but anyway, Sallie was madly in love with Major Ingram, a man who played the piano with everything he had inside of him. I didn’t like to call her naive, but sometimes I wondered if she really thought that man would ever be completely hers.

For sisters we were close, a year between each, best friends, and always broke beans together. What was mine was theirs and vice versa. What one didn’t have, we came together to make sure she had. We walked down the street, a few blocks to the ‘Mo, our playground. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was my twenty-first birthday. Men in long coats, satin ties, and Stacey Adams shoes with bleached white shoestrings saturated the streets. We were in a heaven of our own. Three ladies, the Aquino girls enjoyed our lives to the fullest whenever we possibly could. It was a night I’ll never forget because it was not only the night I became legal to drink, it was also the night I met him.

I was wearing a dark flowered print dress and fancy pearl earrings that I borrowed from Lucille without asking. She saw them on my ears and rolled her eyes, but didn’t say a word, though I knew she truly wanted to yank them off me.

We were almost near bootlegging Minnie’s Can-Do, a petite nightclub. A Doo-Wop group was on the corner singing with perfect harmony. A lot of singing groups at that time showcased their talent up and down Fillmore Street, but that group in particular was real good. I gave them a wink and a smile as we passed them.

Lucille complained, “I’m starvin’. My stomach is talkin’ as if I haven’t fed it all day. I don’t know why, but I’m craving some peach cobbler. What about y’all?”

“You sure you ain’t pregnant?” I asked. “You’ve been cravin’ peach cobbler all day.”

Lucille sucked her teeth and replied nonchalantly, “I’m not pregnant.”

“How you know? You’ve been to the doctor?”

“I don’t need a doctor to tell me somethin’ I already know!”

“Ever since your husband got out of jail, y’all sure have been sexin’ a lot.”

“It’s called make-up sex. Mind your own damned business, Sade. If I’m pregnant, you’d be the first to know. Trust me, Daddy don’t want any of us whores to get pregnant while still living under his roof. I’m too smart for that. Plus, Johnnie has to keep his ass out of jail long enough,” Lucille asserted.

I laughed at her. Johnnie didn’t know how to keep his ass out of jail long enough. He was a dope dealing fool that spent the past five years going in and out and would probably spend the next five doing the same damned thing. There wasn’t shit she could do about it.

“What’s so funny?” Lucille asked while putting her hand down her blouse to scratch her double D’s. “This powder got me itchy.”

“I don’t have to tell you how impossible it is to turn Johnnie into a square.”

“I’m not trying to turn him into a square, Sade.” Lucille then changed the sensitive subject, “What we gonna eat? I’m still starvin’.”

Sallie offered a suggestion, “Ooooh, why don’t we take our fine behinds on over to Bop City? They have a group deal, fried chicken in a basket for five dollars before midnight. You know how they run out of chicken all the time, so let’s get goin’.”

Traveling the Writing Journey with Author Cynthia Vespia

How did this story idea come about?
I was on a trip to the mountains, on the way we passed a prison compound and the idea jumped out at me. It was later developed when I visited Alcatraz in San Francisco. In the truth is stranger than fiction category when I finished writing the novel, I wound up running across a real life story that embodied similar circumstances to what I had been writing about: a hostage befriending their captor.

[Buy your copy of Sins and Virtues today from Amazon and S&V's publisher!]
Fantasy novelist Ben Haskins has taken a remote cabin in the wilderness to revive his shaky marriage and failing career. Within the peaceful surroundings he runs into real trouble when convicted murderer Sam Mitchell breaks into the cabin after she escapes from prison. Marked by a dark past of abuse Sam is volatile and ready to snap. It is up to Ben to use his writer's gift of words to diffuse the situation before time runs out for them both.


Talk to us about the journey of writing the book. How easy, difficult was it? What pushed you to write this idea to its completion?
The journey ebbed and flowed. I wrote it a few years back when I wasn't so jaded as a writer and still had my young ideals...ha ha. In all seriousness, I was able to get into both the antagonist Sam Mitchell and the protagonist Ben Haskins a bit easier than I have been some of my other characters. Sam is a woman dealing with a great deal of angst from her past, and Ben being a frustrated writer were things I could really explore as they related to my own life very much. I know I sound nuts, but all artists are to a degree. The reason I was driven to complete this particular tale is because it addressed some very real topics such as abuse, infidelity, etc. I felt a lot of passion in these characters, and I wanted to see them through to the end if nothing else to see what happens. When I write, it is like I'm reading it for the first time as well.

Talk to us about your journey to publish your book. Did you attempt to get an agent? A publisher? How did that fare? Did you go the self-publishing route? If so, talk to us about that journey. 
For Sins and Virtues, I felt it was a strong contemporary piece that would do well on the market. I shopped it around for a while. A name over at Mira Publishing was very interested in seeing it, but as we all know you need to submit to them through an agent (which didn't make sense to me at the time, if she like the premise why not just accept it from me right then and there?) For whatever reason, I couldn't get an agent to represent the piece, even going in with the fact that Mira was interested in it. See, this is the part of the business that gets very, very frustrating. I decided on Musa Publishing because I know the ladies who run the company, and they work their collective asses off! I knew Sins would find a nice home with them, and I really wanted this story to see the light of day. The process through Musa runs very professionally and very smoothly. I had an editor and a line editor go through and clean up the pages, pacing, etc. The cover concept was mine, I wanted to depict a bit of a yin-yang quality, and I had seen some pictures of a woman that was half devil-half angel. I told them what I was looking for and Kelly Shorten at Musa developed a stunning and grabbing cover for me. I'm very happy with how it all turned out overall.

What avenues have you used to promote your book? Which ones have been the most successful? Why do you think that is?
Ah marketing and promotion...this is where writing becomes your full time job if it isn't already. You have to put in the time. Unfortunately as I juggle so many different things, I don't get as much time to visit certain aspects of promotion as I would like. In my experience, not only with this novel but others as well, I have found reviews to be the best sales ticket. Reason being is because you have an outside, unbiased third party that is reading your work and giving an honest opinion about it. For the most part I've received some really awesome reviews so I feel comfortable in the fact that I'm doing good work. Basically I just want to know the reader had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

Cynthia Vespia, "The Original Cyn," has a background as a certified personal trainer; licensed private security guard; award winning video editor, and graphic designer. But the allure of writing has always remained her first love.

As a skilled wordsmith she established a successful career as a journalist and promotional writer. Throughout that time she remained true to her pursuit of writing novels, a passion she's held since she was a very young.

Today Cynthia writes quality, character driven novels full of suspense as well as dark fantasy. With a plot pace to stir the adrenaline and keep the pages turning, Cynthia likes to refer to her novels as "Real life situations that you could find yourself in but hope to God you never do." In her spare time she enjoys reading, movies that involve a strong plot/characters, and keeping active through various forms of martial arts and as an active fitness competitor.

You can learn more about Cynthia at/on: [Her website] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Advertising Site]