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| News, Appearances, & Events | |
| Wednesday Nov 14, 2012 | We're visiting our daughter in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, a few miles east of Cedar Rapids. This Sunday, November 18, at 2 p.m., we'll be giving a reading from our book THE MONSTERS: MARY SHELLEY AND THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN at the Cole Library on the campus of Cornell College. And the following day, Monday the 19th, at 3:30, we'll have a reading and discussion of our YA series, the Samurai Detective. That's also at the Cole Library as part of the series "Cokes and Conversation." If you're in the neighborhood, drop by and say hello. |
| Thursday Oct 4, 2012 | A nice interview with us by Alison Horton appears on the Vook Blog site: vook.com/blog. It's also on the Facebook page of the Samurai Detective series. Let us know what you think! |
| Wednesday Aug 15, 2012 | At last we have been able to get all six of the Samurai Detective novels online as e-books. These are reasonably priced, and have brand-new covers that are, at last, numbered in the order they were written. You can get them at amazon.com, vook.com, and within a few days, on the other e-book outlets as well. Let us know how you like the new covers. |
| Wednesday May 23, 2012 | Tom has added a new post on his blog, scribblertw.blogspot.com. Lots of news! |
| Friday Mar 2, 2012 | Atheneum Books is bringing back into print our book REAL AMERICAN GIRLS TELL THEIR OWN STORIES. This is a collection of first-person accounts by real girls from three centuries of American history. We chose the selections for their true-to-life quality. Some are funny, some are touching, but we're sure our readers will enjoy them all. You can find it online at Amazon.com for $6.99. Let us know how you like it! |
| Thursday Feb 16, 2012 | Upcoming event and book signing: Our latest book, "From Street Fair to Medical Home: the Story of the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center," will be featured at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) at 6:30 p.m. March 1. This book is a history of an inspiring Chinatown institution that began 40 years ago as a free clinic and is now the largest business in New York's Chinatown (with a branch in Flushing). MOCA is at 215 Centre Street, one block north of Canal, and admission to the museum that day is free. |
| Tuesday Feb 7, 2012 | We had a nice telephone interview today with a girl named Shelby from the Kentucky Montessori Middle School. It's always interesting for us to chat with people who have actually read our books. Not only is it an inspiration but also an energizer. Somebody really is enjoying what we write. Thanks to Shelby and her teacher Mr. McGinley. |
| Friday Jan 20, 2012 | Two of Tom's YA novels, "Guns: a Novel" and "Be Careful What You Witch For" are now available free for subscribers to Kindle Prime on the amazon.com website. The first of these is a novel about the aftermath of a school shooting as a newcomer to the town tries to find out the reason why a boy killed seven people at the high school. His search leads him to the town's darkest secrets. The second book is a mix of humor and witchcraft, as Olivia comes to stay with her aunt in New York only to find out that a coven of witches meets regularly at the aunt's townhouse. Olivia seeks to turn this to her advantage by using a spell to get her crush to notice her--with unexpected results. |
| Tuesday Dec 6, 2011 | A very nice review, totally unsolicited, for T.W. Hoobler's book, GUNS: A NOVEL, as it appeared on the Kindle website: "This short novel won't take more than a few hours to read, but you'll be thinking about it long after you hit the last page. So many books that try to capture teen angst miss the boat completely, but this one never hits a false note. Part mystery, part thriller, but mostly an insightful and somewhat scary view of today's reality." |
| Thursday Dec 1, 2011 | Tom's book for older teen-age boys, GUNS, is being offered for free in both Nook and Kindle versions. Remember...NOT a children's book. |
| Friday Nov 4, 2011 | We just received the news that we will be on TV. The program is part of a Science Channel series titled "Prophets of Science Fiction." We're on the first program in the series, about Mary Shelley. They interviewed us because we wrote "The Monsters" about Mary and the people who inspired her to write "Frankenstein." The show airs Wednesday, November 9, at 10 p.m., at least in the Eastern Time Zone. Check your local listings. We haven't seen what we look like, and hope we're not too bad. |
| Monday Oct 17, 2011 | Tom has a new post, about the future of publishing, on his blog. scribblertw.blogspot.com. |
| Saturday Jul 30, 2011 | If anybody actually hears this interview, could you drop us a line to let us know where and when? Thanks. |
| Saturday Jul 30, 2011 | The NPR folks have told me their interview with us will air on Saturday afternoon, July 30, at 5:30 p.m. That's in the NYC area, at any rate. If you miss it, you can hear it online anytime after 7 p.m. The interview is about the theft of the Mona Lisa,100 years ago as of August 21. |
| Thursday Jul 28, 2011 | We were interviewed today by National Public Radio about the theft of the Mona Lisa, which was one of the stories in our book, "The Crimes of Paris." The interview will be played on air either Saturday or Sunday of this weekend. We'll post the time when we learn exactly what it is. |
| Saturday Apr 23, 2011 | Magaly Guerrero, who blogs about books on "the dark side," has a blog about Tom's book "Be Careful What You Witch For." You can win a free copy of the e-book if you answer her questions. Check it out until April 26 at this site: http://pagan-culture.blogspot.com/2011/04/meet-this-witch-olivia-giveaway.html |
| Tuesday Apr 5, 2011 | Tom has started a blog about writing and publishing. Here's the link, if you're interested: http://scribblertw.blogspot.com/ |
| Friday Mar 25, 2011 | One of our fans, Josephine Starfire, put up a Facebook page for our Samurai Detective series. It's really beautiful, and far more than our publisher ever did for the books. :o). Thanks, Josephine! http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Samurai-Detective-Series/201715683187119 |
| Monday Mar 14, 2011 | We had a great Skype session today with Denise Kelly's fifth-grade class in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Really good questions from a group that was so eager they wanted to keep going. Ms. Kelly is such a dedicated teacher that she purchased out-of-print copies of "The Trail on Which They Wept," using her own money. The kids got to dress casually today because they envisioned the life of authors to include working in your pajamas. One girl did, in fact, have her jammies and robe. We had loads of fun. |
| Saturday Mar 5, 2011 | Tom's online-only books are part of a special "Read an e-book" promotion. Starting March 6 and going to March 12, you can download one or all of his three books for FREE. Just enter the coupon number RE100 when you check out the book. Download it to your computer or any format of e-reader that you own. Here are the sites to download from. Dr. Chill's Project: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3321 Dr. Chill's Task: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19643 Be Careful What You Witch For: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3337 If you like what you read, please post a review. Remember: special offer one week only. |
| Monday Jan 10, 2011 | Last Saturday, January 8, 2011, we took part in a teleconferencing first (for us.) From our workroom here in New York, we spoke back and forth for an hour with students in Orange County, California. They were taking part in an academic competition that used our book "The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn" as a subject. It was really inspiring for us to listen to their comments and questions, and we wish it could have gone on longer. Thanks to Laura Dellisanti and Kristin Rigby of the Orange County Department of Education and Jonathan Schlesinger of Connexus (the tech people) for setting this up! The kids were terrific. Hope they enjoyed it too. |
| Thursday Jul 29, 2010 | Tom has just posted online a copy of DR. CHILL'S TASK, the sequel to DR. CHILL'S PROJECT, which is also online. You can find it at smashwords.com and download half the book for free. This book will only appear in an online version, so don't look for it in the bookstores! |
| Monday Mar 8, 2010 | For the next week, until March 15, you can buy either of Tom's two e-books for half price at smashwords.com. You can, of course, sample DR. CHILL'S PROJECT (new version) or BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR for free at the same site. But if you want the whole book (or both books) you can buy them for only a buck for DR. CHILL and $1.50 for BE CAREFUL. It's a great site to visit anyway, with thousands of books you can't buy in bookstores. |
| Friday Sep 25, 2009 | Tom posted a couple of his novels for kids/YAs online. One is a revised version of DR. CHILL'S PROJECT, which is about five young people with super powers who are recruited for a secret government project. One of them is kidnapped, and the others set out to rescue her. A fun book, and a sequel is on the way. The other book is BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR, which Tom thinks of as a wicca chick lit book. Olivia comes to visit her aunt in New York for a year. Aunt Tilda turns out to be a witch (a good witch, mind you). But her friend, another witch, teaches Olivia how to cast a spell on this cute boy at school. The trouble is, now he won't leave Olivia alone, and his old girlfriend is out for revenge. Wicca doesn't seem so powerful after all, until Olivia finds a book in her aunt's library....well, you can read most of the book at either scribd.com or smashwords.com. Tell us what you think! |
| Saturday Aug 15, 2009 | We've just posted two books on online sites where you can download them or read them direct on your computer. The first is a new, revised version of DR. CHILL'S PROJECT, which Tom wrote back in the 1980s. It's a scary story about a girl who has spent most of her life in asylums, but now is recruited by a mysterious doctor who coaches children with "special" talents. The other is a brand-new book titled BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR. It's the story of Olivia, whose movie-star parents send her to live with her aunt in New York for a year. Olivia soon discovers that Aunt Tilda meets with a coven in her back yard. One of the neighboring witches teaches Olivia how to cast a spell to attract a boy at her school who doesn't seem to care she exists. The spell works better than Olivia hoped for, and that's when the trouble REALLY begins. Read up to half of these books at scribd.com or smashwords.com, and decide if you want to read the rest. Let us know what you think! |
| Thursday Apr 2, 2009 | Vanity Fair, the magazine, is slated to print an excerpt from our latest nonfiction book, THE CRIMES OF PARIS, in its May issue. It should be on newsstands in the early part of April, but will probably sell out quickly because its cover has a sexy picture of some model on it. The excerpt is mentioned in the headlines on the cover, but nobody will be reading those! ;o) Anyway, lots of libraries subscribe to Vanity Fair, so you can probably read it there. The section of the book that is in the magazine deals with the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. But that's not all the book is about! |
| Friday Nov 28, 2008 | Our sixth book in the Samurai Detective series will be published in October, 2008. Its title is "Seven Paths to Death." Seikei and Judge Ooka are traveling in a northern province when they are called to investigate a badly wounded man found in a rice paddy. He has an elaborate tattoo on his back that the Judge recognizes as part of a map. It turns out that there are seven tattooed men, each with a different section of the map on their backs. However, someone else is looking for them: Tetsune, the mysterious ninja that Seikei defeated in our earlier book, "In Darkness, Death." Can Seikei and the Judge find the men before Tetsune does? And where does this strange map lead? You can be one of the first to find out by pre-ordering the book at amazon.com, or asking your local librarian to order a copy. Let us know how you like it! |
| Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 | Our fifth book in the Seikei series, "A Samurai Never Fears Death," is now in nearly 2000 libraries and also available through amazon.com. It has already received some good reviews. In the book, Seikei returns to his home town, Osaka, where he finds his brother and sister running the family tea business. They take him to one of the puppet shows for which Osaka is famous and murder breaks out! This time, however, Seikei becomes a suspect and then he has to prove that his sister's boyfriend is not involved. Along the way he is kidnapped by smugglers (wouldn't you know) and faces some of the spookiest criminals of his career. Let us know if you like it! |
| Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 | Our latest book for adults, "The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein," is now in paperback. Unfortunately, the biggest chain, Barnes & Noble, isn’t aware that it’s a nonfiction book about Mary Shelley and those who influenced her in the writing of her novel Frankenstein. The terrible fates that awaited all of them were the “curse” that haunted all those who were present in the summer of 1816 when Lord Byron challenged his friends to see who could write the best ghost story. Some Barnes & Noble stores are shelving this book under “fiction,” and others in a bizarre, hard-to-locate category called “Literary Theory.” Sorry, but the book is all true, not fiction, and as the reviewer for National Public Radio said, is “deliciously creepy.” |
| Thursday Jun 21, 2007 | Here's a blog that has an interview with us, along with some very nice things to say about our books. Check it out! Chasing Ray |