Capital Media Enterprise, Inc. Publishing

01/31/2025

📖 We're doing our part to keep you healthy! Start reading! 📖

FUN BOOK FACT: A study at the University of Sussex found that reading can reduce stress by up two thirds – making it a much more efficient relaxation method than listening to music, drinking a hot cup of tea, or even taking a walk. Reading for just 6 minutes each day can help reduce stress by up to 68%!

Participants who engaged in just six minutes of reading for pleasure were also found to have a significantly slower heart rate and reduced muscle tension.

Another study, led by researchers from Yale University School of Public Health, revealed that adults who reported reading books for more than 3 ½ hours per week were 23 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, compared with those who did not read books.

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313429

01/12/2025

📚📖This just in: We are seeking reader opinions on a first draft of a new novella! The story is set in South Carolina and London in 1729 and 1730. Contact us to receive a PDF copy.📖📚

11/20/2024

South American terror birds, Pleistocene wolves versus the Tzar bomb, a crash on the Moon, SCUBA nightmare, and the horrors of yard maintenance in South Florida.

A Slaughter of Ornithes is a FREE Kindle download November 20- 24.

11/18/2024

FREE Kindle download November 18 - 22. It's a thoughtful, time-travel, dinosaur story.

11/18/2024

Last day for FREE Kindle download - November 18.

11/15/2024

🚀🚀Summer Read books Pitch & Roll and its sequel "Yeah Baby She's Got It" are FREE Kindle downloads November 16 - 17 and again November 22 - 24!! 🚀🚀

Amazing spacecraft ✅
exciting new technologies ✅
out-of-control beautiful vamps and space v***ns ✅
launches, landings, Cape Canaveral, and the Moon ✅
intrigue, deceit, and trouble ✅
a powerful love story ✅
Pitch & Roll has it all, and it starts with a racy yacht party.
This novel is for Jackie Collins fans but it will not disappoint hard science nerds. It is the raciest book in the Summer Read catalogue, so hot compared to the other books, which are for Young Adult readers, we’ve often debated about de-listing it. Give it a try and see what you think.

“Yeah Baby She’s Got It” picks up shortly after the thrills in Pitch & Roll, with most of the same characters. Space v***n Valkaria Grant is in the spotlight for a daring mission to Venus. The notorious vamp leads forty men to Earth’s sister planet to begin colonization. It’s a little bit more light hearted than Pitch & Roll but the science is just as solid and the practical possibilities this novella highlights for Venus colonization are amazing. 🚀🌔⭐️🚀🚀🌔⭐️🚀🚀🌔⭐️🚀

11/13/2024

FREE Kindle download November 14 - 18!!

In the 1990s and early 2000s a confluence of new technologies, experimentation, skill, and generational love of aviation history and flying developed into a phenomenon: a remarkable hobby, large scale-model remote-control aviation.
Many geniuses were revealed, world-class skills displayed, and incredible airplanes were built and flown. The hobby brought back many planes lost to history for crowds of fans to again see in the sky. Rapid technological advances by garage innovators, all over America and then the world, moved from gas engines to jet turbine to electric, as control moved from analog to digital, and materials moved from balsa and paper to carbon composite. It was a sight to behold.
The hobby brought elderly builders and flyers together with youth and taught new generations engineering and aviation, and, in this special field of large-scale model flying, it taught history.
The finished planes were perfect, working, miniature replicas of loved aircraft previously confined to old pictures or museums.
The fan base for this hobby expanded to include packed airshows. I attended a few in Delaware, Kentucky, and South Carolina.
Caught up in the excitement, I wrote a screenplay, turned that into a low-budget independent film (shot on video), and then turned the screenplay into a short story, which published with four more. How many stories make a genre?
These five stories, accompanied by a little illustrative artwork (each story getting “cover art”), are in this single volume, Rapunzel In Control.

11/12/2024

The magic of Waikiki inspired this short magical realism romance novella. The “magic of television” is an essential element in the recipe as this is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into reality television, specifically, a cooking contest show. And oh, yeah, it’s also a murder mystery with a delicious twist.
Available for FREE Kindle download November 12 - 16.

11/10/2024

FREE Kindle download November 11 - 13!!

A simple short story turns the entire CO2 greenhouse gas threat on its head and for any careful reader, any thought of de-carbonization will thereafter lead to nightmares.
Another short story is the very definition of gothic, literally and literarily. It’s also a perfect one act play candidate and was seriously considered for a radio drama production.
Another, a very short story, is poetic, haunting, and subjective.
There are six other stories in the collection, Nine Eerie Romance Stories by Summer Read. They are eerie in the ironic and unexpected sense, none are macabre. There are no ghosts, ghouls, or goblins. There is plenty of mystery though.
Original, thought provoking, fun, and unique, if these are qualities you seek in a quick read before bedtime, these little nuggets of writing gold will satisfy.

11/10/2024

FREE Kindle download November 19 - 23!!

About 2008 I read South by Ernest Shackleton and anticipated an English-speaking worldwide centennial celebration of his 1914 Endurance expedition. I imagined an adaptation of his historic account but on the Moon. I wrote and published Shackleton Crater in 2009. Set in 2014, some of what I imagined in the novel became reality early, when a new President of the U. S. determined to end American manned space exploration, content to see China colonize the Moon.

I was not as prescient as I hoped however because 2014 came and went and Ernest Shackleton was ignored. South was ignored, and alas, Shackleton Crater was ignored. The early years in the new century were not the time for heroes. It was a time for historical revision in which heroes were reviled, in Britain and America. In just a few more years the statues came down, all of them removed in my home state, Virginia.

Readers of science fiction always want to know what of the science and technology is real, what they can reasonably hope to see in the future, and what is impossible. For Shackleton Crater, I drew upon what I learned in my twenty year attempt to become a full-time freelance aerospace journalist. Nearly all of the technology in the book was either working hardware in 2009 or easy to predict. I speculated and imagined about the Moon’s magnet flow from solar wind and followed the hopeful but at the time totally unfounded idea that there might be water ice in lunar dark regions. I took a wild guess, or perhaps artistic license, for the existence of lunar combustible complex hydrocarbons. Time will tell.

What inclusions might be impractical or even impossible, yet were necessary for the story, were mostly confined to the notion of astronauts living and operating in a cold trap. I read what I could find, which was not much, and in the end, simply, purely fictionally, wrote in suits and devices that functioned in that unique and still unexplored realm. I am very happy with some guesses since proven to the correct, and can say with confidence here, in 2024, that I believe there will be a robot dog (or surely a pack mule), on the Moon and Mars.

I wrote Shackleton Crater to entertain and educate readers, to participate in my own way in the expected big 2014 Endurance Expedition centennial party, to honor Ernest Shackleton and his crew, and I wrote it too, very much hoping to inspire as many readers as possible to take up and enjoy Shackleton’s South.

The phenomenally inspiring story of South and the science fiction novel version of that history, will be the most rewarding preparatory reading for when, in just a few years, the whole world will turn its attention to Shackleton Crater on the Moon.

11/08/2024

FREE Kindle download today and tomorrow, November 8 - 9!
Here's the mockup book cover for the sailing romance adventure novel, All Barque and No Bight.

11/08/2024

In 2024 natural areas and state parks in Florida faced the threat of commercial development. Floridians, Florida visitors, and all who hope to preserve the unique nature of the state should be involved in the effort to save all these areas from any development.

A good way to inspire interest in Florida wildlife, flora and fauna, is to encourage reading about these blessings. Florida fiction has a place in this work.

The novel, Love On The Loxahatchee by Summer Read, inspired by a real nature photography tour company, is a clever, fun, light-hearted and engaging, novel about a young woman in Palm Beach County, who leads such tours. The story includes detailed descriptions of parks that in real life have already suffered degradation and one that the public recently saved from being turned into a golf course.

The main character in the novel, Jessica, leads a tour and of course romance blooms. Below the surface a most unlikely romance develops for Jessica after she encounters a young man who has a few secrets. The novel has several happy surprises at the end. Readers might see at least one of those surprises coming, but definitely not the others.

Okay, a little spoiler, but regular romance readers might suspect this turn about halfway through; story settings include state parks, botanical gardens, private gardens, the Loxahatchee River, wild areas, water management canals and wetlands, and Palm Beach Island, where Love On the Loxahatchee lands in the ever popular romance novel category of “secret billionaire story.”

The book probably best fits in the Young Adult Literature mold in style, length, ease, and subject matter, but it has been praised by old (senior citizen) readers, men and women, enthusiastically endorsed by teen girls, and enjoyed, too, by young men.
It can definitely help educate and motivate conservationists in Florida.

09/06/2024

Trying to figure out what to read on National Read a Book Day? We can help! Check out our catalogue of books at www.dartans.com and www.summerread.dartans.com 📖📚

The Honorable L. Douglas Wilder, Former Governor of Virginia and Former Mayor of Richmond, with his copy of The Vicar of Church Hill.

07/25/2024

Giddy up! Time for Summer Read's latest novella, Yeehaw: Romance on the Cracker Cattle Trail.

In the original old West, Florida cattlemen drove herds over the vast palmetto prairie, all the way to Punta Rassa. When a teenage boy joins cracker cow-punchers and the neighbor woman he hopes to marry goes to work in an infamous crossroads establishment, the cruel facts of frontier life confront them. Through swamp, miasma, bandits, storms, heat, fever, and tragic death, the boy prevails, but can he reach his girl before it's too late?

This book includes an afterword essay by a 7th generation real life Florida cracker cattleman. Rick Modine tells about his family history, the Cracker Cattle Trail, and the future of the industry.

Available in paperback here: https://www.amazon.com/YEEHAW-Romance-Cracker-Cattle-Trail/dp/B0D9WBKJS3

and on Kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/YEEHAW-Romance-Cracker-Cattle-Trail-ebook/dp/B0D9WBKYK5

04/27/2024

Visit Harlem of today and the past in Summer Read's new novella about the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Christmas is a contemporary, young adult, romance novella that teaches and inspires. Homeschoolers, high schoolers, and college students now have the perfect immersive introduction to the amazing Harlem Renaissance. Available in print and Kindle ebook.

Harlem Christmas