☀ℚ Off Season - E.S. Ruete

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Off Season, a contemporary Women's Fiction novel by E.S. Ruete (28 February 2017, Making Space Publishing, 128 pages).

Don't miss our promotional interview with author E.S. Ruete.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and the Kindle Cloud Reader Preview below.

Off Season is FREE on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner's Lending Library. Or grab your copy for ONLY 0.99 during the tour!

Author E.S. Ruete will be awarding a $50 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.   Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

|| Synopsis || Teaser: KCR Preview || Author Q&A || About the Author || Giveaway & Tour Stops ||

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Synopsis

One Woman's Journey from Victim to Survivor Dottie woke up wondering where she was and why she was so cold. The first thing she noticed was that she must be outside – she was lying on cold ground and snow was hitting her in unusual places. That’s when she noticed the second thing. Her skirt was pulled up past her waist and her panties were gone. Damn those bastards. It started to come back to her.

Dottie is now on an odyssey; a journey not of her choosing; a journey of healing, integration, and reconciliation that will involve her partner, her friends, her enemies, her church, her whole community. And her rapists. As she fights her way through social stereotypes about rape and rape victims, she also finds the strength to overcome society’s messages of who she should be and lays claim her true self. But the memories, the loss, the anger – and the fears – never go away.

No woman chooses to be raped. I asked Dottie why she chose to tell me a story of rape. She said that millions of women, hundreds every day, have stories of rape that never get told. She told her story because she could. Because she had to. Because maybe people would hear in a work of fiction a Truth that they could not hear in any other way.

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Teaser: KCR Preview

One Woman's Journey from Victim to Survivor. The rare novel where the victim is the protagonist, not a hapless pawn.

Off Season
ONLY 0.99 until 25 May 2018!

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Author Q&A

A very warm welcome to E.S. Ruete; thank you for joining us on BooksChatter!

Do you have any tattoos? Where? When did you get it/them? Where are they on your body?

"I think I’m the wrong generation for tattoos. Either that or I was the wrong side of the officer/enlisted split in the Navy."

Is your life anything like it was two years ago?

"Of course there are a lot of things the same. I live in the same house, I’m married to the same woman, I still haven’t made my pilgrimage to the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY. I’m taking responsibility for more of the household as my wife’s faculties continue to slip away, and I’m having daily to adjust how much I do of my wife’s personal maintenance. And I’m just beginning to figure out how to use being a self-published author to make changes in what I do and what I am."

How long have you been writing?

"I’ve been writing most of my life. I was 12 or 13 when I wrote a parody of Poe’s “The Raven” called “The Seagull.” In Eighth grade I wrote an Italian sonnet just to prove it could be done in English. Of course it wasn’t very good and it wasn’t a love sonnet, but it fit the meter and the rhyme scheme.

Almost every job I had in 40 years of work involved some sort of technical writing. I have written procedures, policies, statements of work, proposals, requests for proposals, and test analyses as I progressed through careers as a technical editor, technical writer, defense analyst, government contracting officer’s technical representative, business analyst, and methodologist. I have always prided myself in being able to transcend the mundane and tell a story in my test analyses and statements of work, and yet when required I can write procedures that are unenduringly boring to read but have a clarity of structure and content that make them extremely easy to use.

In 1991 I wrote my first book, The Strategic Information Resource Management Planning (SIRMP) Facilitator’s Handbook in support of the U.S. Coast Guard."

What advice would you give a new writer just starting out?

"Write at the same time every day. I have friends who say they need to set aside a whole day to write, but they never do. One day very quickly becomes some day becomes hardly ever becomes never. But four o’clock – or whatever your chosen time is – rolls around every day."

Tell us something about Off Season that is NOT in the blurb.

"One of the mysteries of Off Season is the gender of Pastor Allen. When I started writing, the pastor was a man who defied expectations by being empathetic with a rape victim. As I wrote, she became a woman who defied expectations by being a strong figure taking a stand against the entire Methodist church. Finally I went through and deleted all personal pronouns and other gender references in relation to Pastor Allen. In Chapter 23 we find out that “Allen” is the pastor’s last name. I think of it as a Rorschach test. People will make assumptions about the pastor’s gender based on their expectations or their escaping their expectations."

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About the Author

E.S “Ned” Ruete is an author, speaker, group facilitator, women’s rights activist, LGBTQIPA+ ally, lay preacher, guitar picker, and business analyst. He is the author of Seeking God: Finding God’s both/and in an either/or world and Lead Your Group to Success: A Meeting Leader’s Primer.

Now retired, Ned lives in Niantic, Connecticut with his second wife. He continues to offer pro bono group facilitation and facilitation training to schools, churches, community groups and not-for-profit organizations. He has led strategic planning retreats for United Action Connecticut (UACT), Fiddleheads Food Co-op, and ReNew London.

He is actively involved in LGBTQIPA+ advocacy and annually attends and presents sessions at the True Colors Conference. He is a member of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) formerly served on the Association Coordinating Team (ACT, the IAF Board of Directors). He was associate editor of Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal and has contributed articles to Group Facilitation, The Facilitator, and other publications on group facilitation and management consulting.

Off Season is Mr. Ruete’s first fiction work

Follow E.S. Ruete:

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Giveaway and Tour Stops

Enter to win a $50 Amazon/BN GC – a Rafflecopter giveaway
Remember to comment to win!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Follow Off Season's tour at:

Apr 30: Rogue's Angels
Apr 30: Fabulous and Brunette
May 1: Edgar's Books
May 2: Sharing Links and Wisdom
May 2: A Chick Who Reads
May 3: Laurie's Thoughts and Reviews
May 4: The Reading Addict
May 4: BooksChatter
May 7: Reviews by Crystal
May 8: Uplifting Reads
May 8: Stormy Nights Reviewing and Bloggin' ✍
May 9: Archaeolibrarian - I Dig Good Books!
May 10: The Avid Reader
May 10: Lampshade Reader
May 11: books are love
May 14: Long and Short Reviews
May 14: B-Gina Review
May 15: Bookaholic
May 16: Hope. Dreams. Life... Love
May 16: Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer
May 17: Emily Carrington ✍
May 18: Readeropolis
May 18: Author C.A.Milson
May 21: T's Stuff
May 22: Deal Sharing Aunt
May 22: Rainy Day Reviews
May 23: It's Raining Books
May 24: Leaving the Nest to Touch the Sky ✍
May 24: Musings From An Addicted Reader
May 25: Locks, Hooks and Books ✍

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