Category: News

Best Summer Novel Ever!

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Are you looking for a great summer novel? An escape, an unexpected story that you can lose yourself in? Stop looking, and download Blue Moon Bench!

Every woman’s dream is to find the perfect soul mate, the man who has everything. Jessica meets her handsome husband, a wealthy ranch owner, intelligent, tall, dark and loving, and knows this is what every woman dreams.  They marry after knowing each other only three months, and she leaves her career in San Francisco to move into his amazing ranch house built by his family a generation before. He even renovated the old ranch house into an art studio so she can continue to do illustration with every detail down to the beehive fireplace in the corner. How could any woman resist?

Then one day, while visiting the Hopi reservation, her husbands best friend takes her aside and says, “Did you know his alibi the night his wife died is a lie? I’m worried about you. I’m here if you need a friend.” Did she marry a murderer? How well did she really know this new husband of hers and could she trust him? Hurt and determined Jessica begins the journey of finding out just what happened that night out on Blue Moon Bench, a vast and beautiful area of the Navajo Reservation on the Grand Canyon’s edge. Rachel’s car was found deserted; her dead body at the bottom of the canyon. Jessica knew if it was murder, her new life on the ranch was about to get very complicated.

Amazon, iBook or Barnes & Noble. Thanks for reading my novel!

 

Desert photo in the desert

What Happened on Blue Moon Bench?

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Barnes & Noble Nook

Blue Moon Bench, a mystery novel of the southwest, has now been published! It can be downloaded through most major ebook distributors such as iBookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble.

The cover art has gone through many stages, but has now come to it’s final version. Illustrator Ashby North went through several iterations before author and illustrator arrived at the final artwork with it’s vibrant and engaging image. You can visit Ashby’s illustration website at  – northartist.com to see other examples of his work.

Please visit “Buy the Book” page and come back often to see the progress of Blue Moon Bench publication.

Dawn dancing on the Chinle formations

Blue Moon Bench Editing Completed

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Finally the first publication of BMB is finally edited and ready to go to press as an e-book. We hope to take it to Smashwords this month, so you will see it available in all their ebook formats soon.

If you haven’t already, please be sure to contact us so we can send you a notification when it’s available, or make sure to bookmark this site for the latest news.

Oh boy! Almost there!

The Story of the Story

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Author D. L.  Blanchard was living in Northern Arizona, working as a public relation specialist for a major utility company when she married and had to move to the southern part of the state because of her husband’s job.  While living there she missed the culture and color of northern Arizona so much she decided to write a novel that could take her back to the area of the world she loved so much.

“When I first wanted to write the novel, I had no idea where to start, until one day I was watching one of my favorite classic black and white movies – Alfred Hitchock’s ‘Rebecca’.”  The movie is a story about a young, naive woman who meets an older, wealthy man in Monte Carlo and falls in love. They immediately marry and move  to his large estate in England, and her life seems picture-perfect until the story of his dead first wife begins to surface.

“I decided to use ‘Rebecca’ as inspiration for the novel, immersing myself as I wrote it in the beauty, drama and rich culture of northern Arizona that I missed so much. I wanted to use the setting of the southwest as the foundation for the story, with the characters and drama’s rising up out of it.”

While living in northern Arizona, Blanchard worked on the ski patrol while hiking in her spare time into remote canyons to study Native American petroglyphs and pictographs. She wrote a paper title “Shaman’s and Master Artists: Understanding the Parallels in Rock Art”  which was published in 1997 in the American Rockart Research Association’s publication “American Indian Rock Art – Volume 23”. Wanting to gain more credibility in writing to help get the novel published, she wrote several articles for local magazines and newspapers, as well as a national artists publication, Southwest Art Magazine. 

Having made a twelve year career of her design talent as a web/print graphic designer, Dawn has finally decided to self-publish the novel so she could offer it to the public, hoping they could appreciate and love the same things she still finds mesmerizing about the southwest and all it’s layered dimensions.