Saturday Spotlight: Carla Rossi & Unexpected Wedding

Good Morning Friends,

It is always my pleasure to bring to Saturday Spotlight a fellow author, and most particularly a fellow Pelican Book Group author!

Today's guest, Carla Rossi was here in March talking about her book, The Living End of Cancer, but this week she's talking about her PBG release, Unexpected Wedding!

Rocky Lionakis has been a wheelchair user since a fall in college. He plays bass guitar in Cornerstone Fellowship’s worship band and shares his testimony every week with the campers at Towering Pines summer church camp. At peace with his chair, he has settled into a boring but successful career in technology...but then stunning camp counselor, Gia Rinaldi, enters his life and turns it upside down. 

Lifelong preacher’s kid and occasional wild child, Giavanna Rinaldi, has always learned things the hard way. With a trail of bad choices in her wake, she has finally grown up and found her niche as a student of Christian child psychology. She returns to Camp Towering Pines where she’s worked since high school, but unsettling dreams and an unexplained illness lead her to a harrowing discovery. 

Will Rocky and Gia’s budding romance survive her trauma? And is their bold decision an answer from God, or a serious step outside of His perfect will?

Excerpt: Rocky Lionakis didn’t know what hit him. Last he remembered, he’d tucked his Bible beside him in his wheelchair and turned to leave the platform. Now he was flat on his back on the wooden ramp, gazing at the blue east Texas sky through a canopy of tall pines. It would have been a beautiful summer afternoon sight if he’d meant to be looking at it.

He lifted his head and then decided it felt better to stay down. Voices grew softer, and bubbly chatter faded as camp staff herded the junior and senior high audience for his last talk away from the outdoor stage and down the path toward the dining hall.

Somewhere the wheel of his chair spun with a rhythmic swish and put him in mind of an old bicycle he had as a child. It slowed, and he closed his eyes.

Normally a tumble from his chair ended with a quick recovery. Propelled by sheer embarrassment, he could usually steady the lightweight titanium contraption and be upright in seconds. This time his scattered thoughts and developing headache told him he’d fallen harder than he realized. For all he knew, his chair had landed in another zip code because it sure wasn’t beside him on the ramp.

He felt for his Bible and discovered it under his left hip. Everything was quiet except for the coo of a mourning dove somewhere high above him and the scrape of a squirrel’s feet as it scampered up a tree.

As he started to relax, all pain dissipated.

Maybe the fall had killed him...

The scent of something earthy and sweet reached his nose. He sniffed the air. Heaven smelled like strawberries.

He opened his eyes and looked up into a warm chocolate-brown gaze. An angel stood over him. Strands of long dark hair slid off her shoulders and hung almost to his face as she bent over him.

She smiled and knelt beside him. “Fall off your horse there, cowboy?”

He blinked. If this was Heaven, God had sent him one sassy angel to welcome him home. Nice......

Sounds like another great story! Now here's a little more about the author....

Carla Rossi is a multi-published, award-winning author as well as a cancer survivor, life-long music minister, and speaker. She has been writing inspirational romance for Pelican Book Group since 2007. Carla lives north of Houston with her husband. She has three grown children and two grandchildren. 

Connect with Carla:

carlarossi.com

carla@carlarossi.com

@carlarossiwrite

facebook.com/carlarossiauthor

You can get Unexpected Wedding at the following places....

Kindle:  http://tinyurl.com/ncdchzt

Pelican Book Group:  http://tinyurl.com/ktb9a76

Nook:  http://tinyurl.com/l7t23xu

Well Friends, I'm sure you enjoyed this week's Saturday Spotlight. Stay tuned next for more Tuesday Treasure, Thursday Thoughts and of course, another Saturday Spotlight!

Until next time....Take care & Be Blessed!

PamT

Saturday Spotlight: Carla Rossi & The Living End of Cancer

Good Morning Friends,

It is my pleasure to bring to you once again my friend and fellow PBG author, Carla Rossi! This time though Carla is discussing her independently published non-fiction book, The Living End of Cancer...her personal journey through this dreaded disease!

Carla Rossi is a multi-published, award-winning author as well as a cancer survivor, life-long music minister, and speaker. She has been writing inspirational romance for Pelican Book Group since 2007. Carla lives north of Houston with her husband and writing partner - a Maine Coon Cat. She has three grown children and two grandchildren.

Connect with Carla

carlarossi.com

carla@carlarossi.com

facebook.com/carlarossiauthor

@carlarosswrite

In April of 2010, multi-published, award-winning author Carla Rossi felt the best she ever had. That all changed with one routine doctor visit. Tossed into diagnostic tests, surgery, chemotherapy, procedures, and targeted drug therapy, Carla gives us a transparent glimpse into what the journey was really like – good and bad. With friends and family at her side, Carla takes us through the ups and downs of her non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer battle with practical and scriptural faith, humor, and her own understanding of the medications that helped save her life.

Excerpt:

My First Pet Scan

Friday, June 4, 11:15

John and I arrive at the PET scan place. I fill out paperwork.

The technician calls my name. The milligram of lorazepam I ingested only slightly keeps the panic at bay.

“I’m an anxiety patient,” I announce to anyone within earshot. “And I’m claustrophobic. The tube scares me.”

The technician smiles and tries to steer me from the waiting room.

I keep talking. “I can’t get into the tube without my husband. He is the only one who can keep me calm. I need him with me through as much of this as possible,” I explain. “If I can hear his voice and talk to him it will help me to not panic. He must be in the room with me.”

He cannot be in the room with me.

At least for a while.

“You’ll be all right,” he assures me. “I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

I decide I can’t be finished with all this until I get the tube over with so I walk on.

The nurse/technician is awesome. She tests my glucose and injects the radioactive fluid. I sit in a room alone with a television and a warm blanket while the neon juice flows through my body and finds the disease. Now that the extra-large cancer-clad ovaries are gone, maybe it’s a tiny patch of luminescent color the radiologist will see. I pray I don’t light up like an old-time pinball machine.

I fidget in the recliner and fly through the channels to find anything that will distract me. I stumble on Family Feud. Wow. That’ll do it.

After forty-five minutes, the nurse comes to get me. I explain again how anti-tube I am as I take off my earrings and wedding rings and place them on the counter. I am still sore and uncomfortable form the ovary removal so I have on my stretchy capris and a loose shirt. I lie on the moving slab and she puts a wedge under my legs and a warm blanket across my middle.

“Hurry,” I say and put the sleep mask over my eyes.

“I’ll get your husband when we’re about done,” she says. “He can sit at the end and talk to you, OK?”

“OK,” I agree like it’s really OK.

“It will take twenty to thirty minutes,” she tells me. “Do you want me to talk to you as we go or give you time updates only?”

I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t know what will help. “Let’s try updates.” I adjust my head on the pillow.

“Stretch your arms over your head. Make sure you’re comfortable. You have to be still for the whole test.”

She leaves me alone.

I hear her voice through the speaker. “First we’ll do CT scan. Then we’ll start the PET scan.”

What? There’s two parts to this madness?

Now I’m moving into the tube. My arms touch the sides and I become aware of how small the space is. Deep breaths, deep breaths... I pull them in closer and make a mental note to be more streamlined next time so I don’t have to suffer this surprise again.

Now back out of the tube.

“You’re doing fine,” she says. “We’re starting the PET scan now.”

I’m moving back in the tube and then stop. Flashes of light penetrate the darkness of my covered eyes and the whirling sounds tell me this is real. Air swishes through from the other end, giving me hope I’m not lost in here forever, that sometime in the next twenty-five minutes I’ll pop out the other side. I imagine my guardian angels are in the tube with me and that Jesus is reaching to pull me out at the end. It’s a comical visual as well as a comforting one.

I move again, deeper into the tube. “You’re doing great,” she says. “Fifteen more minutes.”

I resort to mentally quizzing myself. I list the seven dwarfs, the twelve disciples, the fifty states. This keeps me focused and takes a surprising amount of time when one stops repeatedly to begin again and scan one’s brain for the missing dwarf. Ah, yes, Happy. I forgot Happy. No wait. Is that six or seven? I start over.

I’m moving again and she announces she will get my husband. I hear him come in the room and speak to me like freedom at the end of the tube. He talks as if there is nothing unusual about this.

“It’s almost over,” he says and is able to touch my hand.

“That’s it,” she says. “I’ll come push you out.”

I remove the warm blanket and eye mask. My mascara has clumped and stuck to the silky material. I blink hard and fast, hoping to somehow re-separate my lashes. This is a futile exercise.

As I leave the office, the receptionist offers me a small handle bag and reaches into a mini-fridge to give me a Very Berry juice box. The oddity of this cracks me up, but I understand and appreciate the juice and snack since I know now most people leave here sick, starving, worried, and exhausted. There is also a book of encouraging quotations and anecdotes inside.

“They gave me a goodie bag,” I tell my husband. “It’s like I was at an awards show or something. And the award for the most uneventful PET scan goes to...”

“Well, the least you deserve is a goodie bag,” he says. “You conquered the tube.”

“Hardly,” I answer. “But thanks.”

I immediately stab the juice box with the straw.

Wow! Sounds like a great book to read yourself and/or give to someone you know who has or is going through this or something similar! You can purchase The Living End of Cancer on Kindle or Nook!

Holiday Romance - Almost Home by Carla Rossi!

Hello Friends!

Today we continue spotlighting Holiday Romances with Carla Rossi and her novel Almost Home.

Carla Rossi has written everything from Christmas Pageants and school newsletters, to poetry, stage plays, and Christian music. After another thousand pages of humorous essays about friends and family, she completed a novel. In 2004, she joined RWA and her local chapter, and set about the business of learning to write romance. When she’s not squirreled away in her office with her writing partner – a Main Coon cat – she’s adding piano, bass and vocals to her church’s worship band. She has three grown children and lives north of Houston with her husband and the muse cat.

Carla is the author of two inspirational romances, Limited Light and Almost Home, and two inspirational short stories, Under the 5^th Street Bridge and It Happened One Hurricane. Under the 5^th Street Bridge was a winner in White Rose Publishing’s Easter Lilies Contest, and Almost Home, a holiday romance, landed in the HOLT Medallion Top Five and was a finalist in the WisRWA Write Touch Readers’ Award Contest.

Check out Carla’s blog at http://authorcarlarossi.blogspot.com or contact her at authorcarlarossi@yahoo.com. All current stories are available at whiterosepublishing.com.

The perfect road trip: 2 strangers, 1 truck, and 1500 miles to fall in love.

Detective Justin Hatcher and Cameron McAlister are in a hurry to leave North Carolina-for totally different reasons. He wants to confront his family about a five-year-old betrayal. She wants to escape the remnants of a failed marriage.

Thrown together as unlikely and unexpected travel partners, their trip is filled with both dramatic and humorous situations along the road. But, with God's constant hand in their journey, can Justin and Cameron discover that...

Yes, you can go home again...especially at Christmastime.