Military Romance Novel Co-Authors to Give Away a Kindle Fire on July 1st

(This is a guest post by Bonnie Bartel Latino.)

YOUR GIFT TO ME, a new military romance novel by Bonnie Bartel Latino and Bob Vale, shares the subtle but central theme of the transformative powers of love and laughter to triumph over grief found in TOP GUN and STEEL MAGNOLIAS.

The male and female co-authors are a unique collaboration. Bonnie and Bob met online in 1996 in CompuServe's military forum. Although they have never met in person, their CompuServe correspondence evolved into a professional writing team that has lasted for over a decade.

The ability to seamlessly blend their individual points of view results in a single captivating voice with broad appeal. YOUR GIFT TO ME, their debut novel, is the culmination of that collaboration.

An award-winning writer and former freelance columnist for Stars and Stripes newspaper in Europe, Bonnie is a correspondent for the Mobile (AL) Press-Register Living Arts book page. She lives in Atmore, Alabama, with her husband, retired Air Force Colonel Tom Latino.

Bob Vale is an award-winning graphic designer, writer, and photographer. He founded and is president of Graphic Word, a full-service creative agency on the East Coast. He and his wife Janice live in New Jersey.

Bonnie and Bob are members of the Military Writers Society of America.

Brief synopsis: Nearly a decade after Emily Meade’s husband died in a fiery Special Operations helicopter crash in the 1991 Gulf War, she moves to Hawaii, clinging to her vow never to get involved with another man committed to a dangerous profession … until she meets charismatic F-16 pilot, Colonel Ted Foley.

However, he is assigned to a fighter wing that recently lost two pilots in unexplained air crashes.

Lowering her emotional barriers, Emily discovers a man who makes the ordinary feel sublime. Healing in shared confidences solidifies their relationship. As she becomes the vivacious woman she was before her husband’s death devastated her spirit, her fears resurface. Ted’s squadron suffers another F-16 crash.

Emily must find a path through her emotional minefields or risk never discovering that she's rejecting the only type of man to whom she is genuinely attracted, a man whose life could be in danger!

Kindle Fire Give Away: To promote the launch of their novel, the authors will give away a Kindle Fire to one lucky reader on July 1. Entering is as simple as sending a brief email about YOUR GIFT TO ME to 10 friends. Easy contest details may be found at www.yourgifttome.net/blog
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of the fiction books MRS. LIEUTENANT and CIA FALL GUY as well as the co-author of the technothriller LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS. Click here to read about her books on her Amazon author page.

Phyllis is also the co-founder of the marketing consulting company Miller Mosaic LLC, which builds websites for clients and works with them to use online marketing. Read her posts at the company's online marketing blog.

Military Writers Society of America Names People’s Choice Finalists

The Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) recently announced eight finalists for its 2009 People’s Choice Award.

The open format competition presented over 800 MWSA members with an opportunity to write a story, poem, song or essay inspired by one of four patriotic pictures or sketches by MWSA photographers or artists.

Entries were required to be short enough to be read aloud in under five minutes in order to be read on the Veteran's Radio Show -- "Talking with Heroes" -- hosted by Bob Calvert of Colorado Springs, CO. The eight finalists' entries will also be read at the society’s annual convention on October 10th in Orlando, FL.

This year’s finalists are Mindy Phillips Lawrence, Springfield, MO; Jack L. Wells, Lakeland, FL; James R. Jellerson, Oahu, Hawaii; Jerry Yellin, Vero Beach, FL; Bonnie Bartel Latino, Atmore, AL; John Cathcart, Miami/Fort Lauderdale, FL; Marlyce Stockinger, Branson, MO; and Jeff Senour & CTS, Phoenix, AZ.

Their entries may be read as PDF files with links from this MWSA web page: http://tinyurl.com/oj9exl. After reading stories which interest you in the PDF file format, you can go back to the bottom of that web page and click on the name of the author you’d like to vote for, enter your name, and click the vote button.

Or you can vote by sending an email stating that you vote for (name of author) and (title of work). The e-mail address for each entry is listed at the bottom of each story. One vote per person or email account. Note: You do NOT have to register to vote.

Today Mrs. Lieutenant features the first 300 words of Bonnie Bartel Latino’s flash fiction entry “The Rush of Butterflies.” Bonnie is one of only two women who are finalists. You may remember Bonnie from her guest blog here about how she came to write for Stars and Stripes in Europe.

As her inspiration image, Bonnie chose an untitled sketch by MWSA artist Bob Larkin (see above). Although Bonnie was an active-duty Air Force spouse for 30 years, she gave her story an Army setting.

The Rush of Butterflies by Bonnie Bartel Latino:

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jerry Pruet loved America and the U.S. Army as if they were his blood relatives. Alone in his parked UH-1H “Huey” helicopter, he was a long way from the comfort and safety of family or country. He peered through the windscreen. Fog clouded his view as the sound of a northbound F-105 “Thud” reverberated overhead.

Not far away, somewhere in this godforsaken Quang Tri River Valley, six exhausted Rangers had been on the run all night. Radio reports painted a bleak picture. The North Vietnamese Army surrounded their long-range reconnaissance patrol.

Scanning the airfield perimeter for his launch signal, he saw no one. He pulled a snapshot of his wife from his flight suit. His mouth curved into a grin. Yen brought more than the "peace" her name implied. As fair of spirit as of face and form, she had proven as faithful as dawn. To thrive, he needed Yen, just as his helicopter needed JP-4 to soar.

# # #

The somber tones of Walter Cronkite reporting the daily body count from Vietnam filled Yen Pruet’s Honolulu apartment. She constantly rotated the gold band around her finger. When she and Jerry left her homeland, she never dreamed he would volunteer to go back.

Chills raced along her arms raising tiny bumps. Hawaiian friends called the unexpected sensations chicken skin. The description fit perfectly. From the day she and Jerry met in Soc Trang, they shared a sixth sense connection. It had never felt stronger.

# # #

“Mr. Pruet,” an operations sergeant said from outside the Huey. “The major says the Rangers are taking a heckuva lot of fire. We’ve got to get ’em outta’ there ASAP. Cobras aren’t available, and fixed-wings don’t have visibility in the zone.”

. . . To read more of “The Rush of Butterflies” and to read the other finalists’ entries, please go to Bonnie Bartel Latino’s PDF file found at http://tinyurl.com/oj9exl
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She is also an Internet business consultant and the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show YourMilitaryLife.com.

Phyllis' company provides Internet marketing training as well as social media marketing to promote your business more effectively.

Former Columnist for Stars and Stripes in Europe Visits MrsLietuenant.blogspot.com

Freelance journalist Bonnie Bartel Latino is a member of the Military Writers Society of America. She is also a licensed Lay Eucharistic Minister in the Episcopal Church. She and her husband Tom (retired military) live in South Alabama. Contact Bonnie at BonLatino@aol.com or follow her at www.twitter.com/BonnieBLatino.

FYI -- When my husband Mitch and I were stationed in Munich, Germany, we read the Stars and Stripes newspaper daily. I still have articles almost 40 years later that I saved from the paper.
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Thanks to Phyllis Zimbler Miller for inviting me to share a bit about my life as an Air Force spouse and how I came to write a column for Stars and Stripes newspaper.

Writing is embedded in my DNA. As a teenager, I was a columnist for my weekly hometown paper. I also hosted a weekly radio program during those four years in Atmore, Alabama. At Mississippi State College for Women (now MUW) in Columbus, I doubled majored in journalism and speech.

During college I met Tommy Latino, a Mississippi State University senior and guitarist in a popular campus rock band, “T. Tommy and the Tyrants,” a name that could only have been born in the 1960s.

Alas, my long-haired, Italian-American musician was simply a poor college student letting his love of music pay his tuition. By the time I realized that ROTC was as close to Tom’s heart as was music, it was too late. I had fallen. Hard. Quicker than I could burn my bra, I found myself married.

The campus rock star morphed into a second lieutenant, and we were off to Lubbock, Texas, for Tom’s Air Force flight training.

Each year brought a new assignment, another home, often a different country. At each new base, I penned our squadron’s column for the spouses’ club magazine. I wrote for base newspapers around the world.

At Andersen Air Force Base Guam, I hit the air waves on Armed Forces Network Radio every week as the base “story lady.” This, despite my southern accent that was as thick as day-old cheese grits. In the 1980s while Tom was assigned to Hellenikon Air Base. Greece, I wrote several travel articles for Military Times newspaper.

By then, I sometimes loved and loathed the military in equal measure. By the time my second lieutenant had matured into a colonel in the mid 1990s, I had a realistic understanding of what it meant to be a military spouse.

When Tom was stationed in Germany, Stars and Stripes (S&S) newspaper hired me to write a freelance opinion-editorial column as accompaniment to their SUNDAY magazine’s lead story. My assigned topics ranged from the exquisitely painful (the ache many childless women experience on Mother’s Day) to the sublimely ridiculous (computer sex in America).

Occasionally, I also wrote travel articles for the paper, plus human interest features that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

S&S is like a hometown newspaper to U.S. military, Department of Defense civilians and contractors and their families serving overseas. The publication is also coveted by other civilian American expatriates who live overseas in a variety of capacities. Above all, it is a First Amendment publication that operates without censorship from military brass.

When I wrote for S&S/Europe during the mid 1990s, the circulation in Europe, Africa, and parts of the Middle East was around 125,000 readers. Today the paper is said to reach around 350,000 world-wide. The paper is published daily in the Middle East, Europe, Japan, Korea, Okinawa, and weekly in the United Kingdom, where Americans have easy access to other English-speaking media.

As a freelance journalist, I am humbled to have been a small part of the history of a uniquely American publication that began in the 1860s as a paper for Union troops during the Civil War.

The military isn’t just a job or even a career; it is a way of life. As a former S &S columnist and an officer’s wife of 30 years, I intimately know the professional and social nuances of that lifestyle. I have incorporated that knowledge into an unpublished novel I co-authored with Bob Vale of Ocean Township, New Jersey.

YOUR GIFT TO ME is a mystical love story about finding love after tragedy. Set against the realm of the contemporary fighter pilot, YOUR GIFT TO ME is best described as Top Gun meets Steel Magnolias. The website created for the manuscript includes a short video book trailer at www.YourGiftToMe.net.

I suspect readers who love Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s MRS. LIEUTENANT might also enjoy YOUR GIFT TO ME.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also writes articles as a National Internet Business Examiner and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life.

Phyllis' company has launched the monthly program WeTeachWebMarketing.com to help people promote their brand, book or business online. Her company also does Twitter tutoring -- see TeachMetoTweetNow.com