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Now available to own from Lucasfilm on Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray +DVD+Digital HD) is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first standalone adventure set in the Star Wars franchise. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen, and Forest Whitaker.

Set just prior to the events that took place in the original movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, Rogue One tells the story of the small group of rebels who stole the plans to the first Death Star, which will eventually finds its way to Princess Leia.

The rebel group consists of Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones), Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), Chirrut Îmwe (played Donnie Yen), Bodhi Rook (played by Riz Ahmed), Baze Malbus (played by Jiang Wen), and K-2SO (played by Alan Tudyk), all of whom must (Spoiler Alert) sacrifice their lives in the attempt to stop the Empire's greatest weapon - the Death Star.

The special features are a little lacking for this release. There are no deleted scenes, bloopers, or commentaries. However, there are several short behind-the-scenes features.

These bonus features are:

• A Rogue Idea – Hear how ILM’s John Knoll came up with the movie’s concept – and why it’s the right film to launch the Star Wars stand-alone films.

• Jyn: The Rebel – Get to know Rogue One’s defiant, resourceful survivor, and hear what it was like for Felicity Jones to bring her to life onscreen.

• Cassian: The Spy – Diego Luna shares insights into his complex, driven character, who becomes a hero through selflessness, perseverance and passion.

• K-2SO: The Droid – Explore the development of this reprogrammed Imperial droid, from initial pitch and character design through Alan Tudyk’s performance.

• Baze & Chirrut: Guardians of the Whills – Go deeper into the relationship between these two very different characters, with Chinese superstars Jiang Wen and Donnie Yen.

Now available from author LM Preston is the paranormal romance series The Purgatory Reign.





When did you become interested in storytelling?

I’ve always enjoyed writing. Story telling was something that came easy to me and I used to talk out loud to myself while pretending to be different characters. I started writing poetry, then songs (my father was a song writer) and then fan fiction. After college and being married awhile, my son refused to go to the bookstore since he said none of the books had guys on it that looked like him. At that point, I wanted to write to his enjoyment.

What was your first book/story published?

Explorer X- Alpha was a middle grade science fiction novel. Where, for most kids, a trip to space camp is the trip of a lifetime—for Aadi it was life altering.

What inspired you to write PURGATORY REIGN SERIES?

This story was inspired by a short story written by my husband twenty years ago for a college class. I was cleaning out some old boxes and found it. After reading it, I asked him if I could develop the story and change a few things. He gave me freedom to do so and collaborated with me on it.

What character in PURGATORY REIGN is the most/least like you, and in what ways?

Now available from Common Deer Press is the science fiction novel MOM, book one in the Magic Circles series, by Collin Piprell.



When did you become interested in storytelling?

I’ve loved reading ever since I learned how. By the time I was a teenager, I found myself favoring novels with anti-heroes for protagonists, many of these fictional characters themselves being writers. In my mid-teens I left my village home in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains and moved to Montreal, where I encountered ample opportunity to slip into my anti-hero persona, which often had me imagining I was a writer on the road to perdition.

I managed to get a fair way down the road to perdition, but I didn’t write any fiction till many years later. But the idea lurked there in the back of my mind the whole time.

What was your first book/story published?

I moved to Southeast Asia because the whole region stimulated me, and I thought that if I couldn’t write fiction here I couldn’t write it anywhere and I’d have to think about learning a trade. While I girded my literary loins, I taught writing in a Bangkok university, traveled, partied, scuba dived, and whatnot till one day a Thai colleague asked whether I’d ever considered modeling. A friend of hers ran a modeling agency and was looking for a Western male about my age to play a businessman in a series of ads for a hotel chain. Later, as I tried to describe this very interesting adventure in a letter to my parents, it got so long and, I believed, so amusing that I ended it by saying they could read the rest of it in the newspaper story to follow. And sure enough the Bangkok Post Sunday magazine section ran it over a full page or two as “My Career as a Model.”

That gave me a real buzz, and I was inspired to write more, mostly humorous articles and then a few short stories under the penname Ham Fiske. I imagined my readership as Western ex-pats needing diversion from their Sunday morning hangovers. Soon these pieces became regular features, and friends were encouraging me to find someone to publish a collection. But there weren’t enough good ones to fill a book, plus I believed Ham Fiske could do better work than this. So I wrote a number of longer and meatier short stories to punctuate those I’d already had published. The result was Bangkok Knights, a collection of stories described instead as a novel by Asia Books, its last publisher, since the stories are linked by overlapping characters and an implicit plot development involving, surprisingly enough, the nameless narrator who hovers above all the farce and tragedy, the ironic old hand who himself comes to feature more and more in the stories till in the end he’s revealed to be as great a blunderer as any other in the story.

Over the years quite a number of people told me they thought these were merely a collection of anecdotes — that they were all “real” stories that “really” happened to me. Not so. It’s fiction. But I’m flattered that many chose to believe they came so freighted with verisimilitude. (I couldn’t resist that phrase. Sorry.)

Two of the longer stories I wrote to flesh out that book were too different in voice from the others, and I held them back. These gave birth to Kicking Dogs, my first proper novel and in some ways the most successful one, which had three different publishers over the years and is currently available on Amazon in digital and print-on-demand self-published versions. ... covers and https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Dogs-Collin-Piprell/dp/1452802726 ...

What inspired you to write MOM?

I had read about the “gray goo scenario,” something that might well follow the escape into the wild of just a single self-replicating nanobot. I couldn’t help wondering how anyone could survive a disaster than would turn the surface of the planet into a sea of microscopic robots within a matter of hours. The problem niggled at me till the outlines of a story started to emerge. I’d actually begun to draft the story before I realized I was writing a science fiction novel, something it hadn’t occurred to me I wanted to do.

What character in MOM is the most/least like you? And which is your favorite part?

Now available from Wild Thorn Publishing is the coming of age adventure Age Six Racer by Joe Vercillo.




When did you become interested in storytelling?

I started songwriting when I was about 12, which is sort of like storytelling I guess. But I’ve always had a wild imagination, and Age Six Racer was a combination of that and life experiences.

What was your first book/story published?

AGE SIX RACER is my first!

What inspired you to write Age Six Racer?

Last summer I found a dead mouse in the garage. I made a joke about the mouse’s back story to my fiancé, who is an indie author, and she encouraged me to turn it into a book (haha).

What character in Age Six Racer is the most/least like you, and in what ways?

Available today on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack, DVD and On-Demand from Lucasfilm is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story!

Directed by Gareth Edwards ("Godzilla"), the film marks the first standalone Star Wars movie. It stars Felicity Jones (“The Theory of Everything,” “Like Crazy”), Diego Luna (“Milk,” “Elysium”), Ben Mendelsohn (“Bloodline,” “Animal Kingdom”), Mads Mikkelsen (“Casino Royale,” TV’s “Hannibal”), Alan Tudyk (“Frozen,” “I, Robot”), Riz Ahmed (“Nightcrawler,” “Jason Bourne”) and Forest Whitaker (“The Last King of Scotland,” “The Butler”).

Best Buy; Walmart

Bonus Features include:

A Rogue Idea – Hear how ILM’s John Knoll came up with the movie’s concept – and why it’s the right film to launch the Star Wars stand-alone films.

Jyn: The Rebel – Get to know Rogue One’s defiant, resourceful survivor, and hear what it was like for Felicity Jones to bring her to life onscreen.

Cassian: The Spy – Diego Luna shares insights into his complex, driven character, who becomes a hero through selflessness, perseverance and passion.

Thomas Nelson; 226 pages; $12.99; Amazon

One of my go-to authors I can always rely on for a good read is USA Today bestselling author Colleen Coble, who has written dozens of novels, from historical romances to contemporary ones. Whenever any of her new titles becomes available to review, I eagerly sign up to review each one; which happens to the case for Because Your Mine. I had signed up to review it back in late December or early January through the Book Look program from Thomas Nelson, but I'm just now getting around to reviewing it.

The novel centers on Alanna, a pregnant Irish singer who's husband, Liam, was killed in a car bombing while their Celtic band was on tour in Charleston, South Carolina. Why would someone kill her husband? Well, at least that's the question both Alanna the police are asking.

Before she can even mourn Liam's death, her father-in-law is threatening to fight for custody of her unborn child. Fearing the possible loss her child, Alanna agrees to marry her agent, Barry, so she can stay in the country, and hopefully protect her child.