Just wanted to share a really rough couple of weeks… My mom being hospitalized two weeks ago, my book launching on Thursday, my mom passing yesterday and my birthday today. I was built with strength, provided by God and cured by my mom. So I can handle pressure. Especially under stress. I wrote the tribute below from the hospital room while watching her… 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝 The clock ticked slower there. In that wing of a medical center in São Paulo, time stopped being in a hurry. You heard every tick. You felt the space between them. And you would have given anything to fill that gap with something other than what was coming. My mom (Mamis to us) spent her last fourteen days in that hospital. Tough as nails to the very end. Eighty years old, on the 21st floor, fighting until her last breath. Giving out a little more each morning, her breathing heavier and heavier, her strength fading like a tide going out and not coming back. That fight came from somewhere deeper. She had a rough life. Unfortunately, her last weeks followed suit. On the flip side, you don't raise two kids who turn out better than okay without being tough as nails yourself. On that wing, nobody talked about it out loud, but everybody knew. No patient walks out of that floor alive. It's not a hospital ward. It's a waiting room for the inevitable. A death sentence with soft sheets and the kindest nurses and doctors you will ever meet in your life. They are not there to perform miracles. They are there to provide abundant love to the patients and their families. I know death. I've been close to it four times myself. But here's the thing: facing your own death and watching someone you love face theirs are not the same thing. Not even close. In those four instances, I was the main actor. I had my own will to throw at it. My own body to fight with. There was something to do. With my mom, I was the spectator. And that's a completely different weight. You can't fight it. You can't fix it. You can't trade places, nor can you buy more time or hope.

Hi everyone. My name is Hank Quense and I just joined up. I've written nonfiction about fiction writing, publishing and book marketing and have 8 books published on this topics. My current project is a series of short (20 pages average) called Beginner's Guides. I've published eight of them so far and have 6 (maybe!) more to go. I'm looking forward to meeting all of you.

If anyone has an author website that they’re particularly proud of, can you share a link? I’d just like to see some good examples in order to get some ideas for my own page. Thanks in advance!

Got an email saying Perfect Keto was up. So, I bought the first copy to make sure the kindle version was okay. The link is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJ3Y8LH3. 229 drafts over two years off and on. Without the help and support from Book Launchers and the folks at skool, this would have taken longer. Okay, enough celebration, back to finishing the SEO work on my webpage.

In this authorized biography set in twentieth-century Black America, Arlinda Willis, a sharecropper’s granddaughter from Jim Crow Alabama, fights to earn a love she does not yet know she already has, while a healthcare system she trusts dismisses her. Born in 1951, in Toxey, Alabama, Arlinda grows up in the shadow of Jim Crow racism, raised by grandparents on a small farm while her mother builds a new life in Cleveland, Ohio. When she finally travels north to reunite with her family, she believes love must be earned. She earns love as a teenager, dancing on Upbeat, Cleveland’s nationally syndicated music television show, performing alongside Stevie Wonder and James Brown, integrating the American airwaves while the Civil Rights Movement is reshaping the country on the streets below. She competes in the first Miss Black Cleveland pageant. She builds a distinguished career at one of San Francisco’s most prestigious law firms. Each achievement quiets the voice that tells her she is not enough. At the law firm in 1994, she meets Rob Cole, a white British immigrant, who spends the next eighteen years as her closest friend, caregiver, and biographer. Their honest, funny, and sometimes difficult friendship crosses generational and racial lines. When esophageal cancer strips away her independence and her carefully constructed image of strength, Arlinda encounters a healthcare system that dismisses her pain, minimizes her symptoms, and tells her one story while recording another in her medical notes. The gap between what her doctors say and what they write is a pattern. That pattern has a name. For Once in My Life is the authorized biography thirty years in the making, a portrait of what can be gained and what is lost to care for someone you love. It follows Arlinda Willis from the sharecropping communities of the Alabama Black Belt through the Great Migration, the stages of Cleveland’s Black entertainment scene, the corridors of San Francisco’s legal world, and into a final chapter defined by medical racism, unconditional love, and the hardest lesson of her extraordinary life: That she is enough as she is.