MADreads

In the current romance publishing climate, it’s not unusual for ‘debut’ authors to have multiple titles in print through self-publishing houses before they’re picked up by conventional publishers. While the quality of self-published titles are definitely hit-or-miss in terms of quality, self-publishing gives authors the possibility of publishing stories that traditional publishers pass on or to hone their writing chops in different directions.

I know channel surfing is becoming a thing of the past as more and more of us are moving to streaming at will, but I'll date myself and admit I'm still a frequent surfer. And when I'm bouncing around the dial (for the kids reading: a dial is what we used to have to physically move on the tv to change channels) there are a few movies that will always make me stop and watch. One of those? Die Hard starring Bruce Willis as a New York cop loose in a skyscraper where terrorists have taken his wife and a bunch of her co-workers hostage.

Drew's art club takes a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and something unexpected happens. The doodles in her notebook come alive and run away. Her doodles are imaginative and playful and have the best personalities. But they aren't super well-behaved and get into trouble. 

In 1951 two British government officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, left on a boat sailing from Southampton to France and then disappeared. Though there were suspicions that they had defected to the Soviet Union, this wasn't confirmed until five years later when they appeard at a press conference in Moscow. In the years after this it became clear that they were not the only two British "gentlemen" to have been recruited by the KGB, there were at least 3 others and they all became known as the Cambridge Five.