Northstar titles in the market

Audiofile Earphones Award Winner

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PROJECT CHRYSALIS The First in a Trilogy - Quinton Skinner Summer 2022
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Mykol is a worker in a shop on a mysterious project involving uploading vast amounts of personal data to a huge network after the Grip, a plague that killed ninety percent of humanity twenty-five years before. Jenn is an officer in the Authority, which has taken control of the planet and stockpiled power and technology; she works on another mysterious project utilizing human-controlled robots mining the moon. They meet when Jenn asks Mykol to upload data belonging to her late father, which eventually unravels secrets dating back to the pre-Grip era and the hidden intentions of the mysterious Thomas Gibson, the leader of the Authority.

​After Jenn is expelled from her post and is forced to live outside the Authority walls, she and Mykol fall in love and plot to regain memories of her Authority work that have been removed from her mind, as well as planting the seeds for a new future. After Gibson reveals his true nature, his essence escapes the Earth and he uploads himself into the dataverse and joins others of his kind in the cosmos. This is a projected series of three books.  Book Two The Path Upstairs / Book Three Monarchs Return 

FORTHCOMING - Open to Publisher Inquiries 

Happy To Be Here - The Inspiration Behind the Joke - Ali Sultan
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Ali Sultan’s comedy album Happy to Be Here debuted at #2 on iTunes. The album explores his life as a Yemeni immigrant and his life in the United States.
His book, Happy to Be Here: The Inspiration Behind the Jokes are the personal stories that have been forged from the hard life of a Muslim immigrant seeking to belong. While reading the inspirations you get to know the man telling the jokes, about his life in Yemen and Somalia, the struggles to adapt, learn a new language and different way of life in the United States. The jokes are the output of those experiences.
Sultan’s strength is favoring stories over one-liners. No matter how much people laugh at a joke he says, laughter itself is not memorable. It’s a point of view that’s memorable.
 
While his stories work on their own, he frequently ornaments them with verbal craft. For instance, Sultan claims no one in Yemen knows precisely when they were born. He tries to pin down his mother on his birth year, and she sighs definitively: He was born when his uncle got diabetes. “Time is relative,” Sultan concludes, “and that relative is my uncle.”
 
There are subtle emotional layers lurking below this patter. The inspiration behind the jokes provides a narrative bridge to the gap of understanding between race, religion and cultures. Ali examines religious differences, food (trying bacon for the first time), desire (taking his cousin to Wal-mart for the first time), freedom (is it overrated?) and he hilariously questions his idea of capitalism (over family). 
This manuscript is complete at 60,000 words.

The Governor And The Gangster - Rick Shefchik

In 1934 and 1935, two Minnesota journalists were murdered, gangland style, on the streets of Minneapolis, while investigating the governor for his alleged ties with mobsters. This story has faded from our state's consciousness, but if it happened today, the investigation and subsequent trial would dominate the nation's news cycle for weeks. From the author - "I have chosen to fictionalize the story because the actual investigation appears to be a political cover-up, and the mainstream media of the mid-'30s had no intention of digging beneath the surface to get at the truth of the killings. With little in the way of provable fact on the public record, I decided to fill in the blanks of the story as accurately as I could, with informed speculation and the conjecture of a few sources who were present at the time. The characters are all based on real people, and the events are almost exactly as they occurred. The presumptions of motives are mine. This story has bootlegging, bank robbery, prostitution, political corruption, scandalous sexual affairs and, of course, murder.
This novel is complete at 125,00 words. 

Rethinking Green Architecture - Patrick Duron 
Rethinking Green Architecture will illustrate how aesthetically beautiful "green" spaces embedded organically as part of an architectural building plan can be envrionmentally important and aesthetically beautiful at the same time. A passionate argument of why people should choose to blend landscape considerations into their building plans featuring internal courtyards integrating water elements, living walls, berms for geothermal benefits and sighting considerations. Work in progress

Painted Pies and Message Pies - Heather Keough
Not just another pie book. Heathers Pies a home based business has built a strong customer base. Heather creates unique and beautifully designed hand pies and "Message Pies” that usually have a compassion filled and inspiring story behind them from the person requesting the message pie. Step by step instructions along with stories and inspirations behind each style featuring unique flavors and extraordinary designs. Work in Progress.