Ambition

Ambition...

Sam Stein was the drummer for the band, Shattered Glass. Although the band was successful, Sam had only one ambition, to be a lawyer. He wanted to specialize in representing artists in the music industry and as soon as he passed the bar, Shattered Glass would become his first clients.

Although Milo was the band leader, Sam managed the group from the very beginning.  When Sam left to study for the bar, the guys were left with hiring a new drummer.  Even after Sam passed the bar, and he opened his offices, he let Milo continue doing for the band the things that Sam, in his capacity as manager and representative should have handled.  Because of Sam's inattention, the group, who were once as close as brothers, began to drift apart primarily due to the deliberate machinations of the new drummer, Bart Hedge, Sam's replacement.

Shattered Glass tells the story of the men who formed and played in the band.  Throughout the book, each member of the band bears some semblance of responsibility for the breakup of both the band and the love affair of the band's leader and lyricist, Milo Stamis and his lover, the band's composer and lead singer, Liam O'Shea. Milo and Liam are the focus of the book, yet every member of the group played their hand to the detriment of their brotherhood.  Sam became so wrapped up in himself and his new vocation  that he failed to notice Bart's poison and his own brother, Rick's descent into alcohol and drug addiction.

Even when Liam desperately needed help the first time, Sam convinced himself that it wasn't his place to interfere between the lovers.  It wasn't until Sam finally faced Rick's addiction that he woke up and discovered what was going on right underneath his nose.

All of us get lost in our own concerns to the detriment of those we love.  Sometimes we wake up soon enough, sometimes it's too late.  Sam's ambitions cost him a price he couldn't afford. All the money and power in the world can't bring back that which you've thrown away.


Shattered Glass is available from MLR Press at www.mlrpress.com and from Amazon.com in Kindle format at www.amazon.com.  To find out more about Shattered Glass and my other books, visit my website at www.ackatt.com or my blog at www.ackattsjournal.blogspot.com.  Additional information on my world view can be seen at www.ackattspolitics.blogspot.com.  I can also be found at ackatt.livejournal.com, twitter, MySpace, Google Buzz and Facebook.

I always like to hear from readers.  I can be reached at ackatt@ackatt.com for your comments.

Shattered Glass Moves to MLR Press

Shattered Glass moves to MLR Press

Shattered Glass, my contemporary rock and roll gay romance has found a home with my new publisher, MLR Press.  You can find it at http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=AK_SHGLS.

Here is the blurb:

     Liam knew he loved Milo, even as a kid.  But their fame and fortune can't buy him the happiness of taking Milo out of the closet and be able to freely express their love. Unfortunately, there is someone out there who will do anything to tear them apart.  He conspires to break up the loves in the most vicious way possible. 


     Six years later, Liam is older, wiser and has rebuilt his life after the devastating loss of his lover. Forced by his loyalty to a friend, Liam agrees to a working reunion with Milo.  When they realize what was done to them, they band together to uncover the web of lies that pulled them apart.

This version is newly edited and has a spectular cover from my friend and fellow Flirty Author Bitch, Lex Valentine.  I will be blogging at Flirty Author Bitch on Friday, April 13th where I will talk about my book and Friday the 13th!

The original version had five star reviews which you can find by scrolling down the journal.  I hope you will take this new opportunity to buy and enjoy my book.

What I Believe

What I believe...

• I believe in equal rights and privileges for all Americans. Gay Americans should have the right to marry as citizens of this country.  Discrimination is unconstitutional.
• I believe that the focus of the nation should be on JOBS. Jobs are not generated by tax cuts. They are generated by repairing bridges, schools, highways, dams.
• I believe that both corporations and people with incomes over $250,000 should pay their fair share of taxes.
• I believe that a corporation should only get a tax break if they keep the jobs in America.
• I believe we should put money in NASA. So many of our technical advances came from prior space programs, any investment will be returned tenfold.
• I believe that education is a priority and the government should make it possible for all qualified children to go for a higher education whether they use grants, loans or a sliding payment scale for those with insufficient incomes. Education is essential to keeping the USA on top.
• I believe that Social Security, Medicare and the Medicare Prescription Drug program are promises made to any American who has paid into the program and that the government is bound to keep those promises.
• I believe that religion should be kept out of politics.  Any priest, pastor, rabbi, iman etc. who take a public political stand should immediately lose their tax-free status.
• I believe that the Citizens United ruling needs to be re-visited or made invalid by a constitutional amendment.  Corporations are not individual citizens.  If they are, their donations should be limited to the same amount as specified for citizens - $2,500.
• I believe that Political Action Committees are a plague on the American Political System.  There is no transparency as to where the funding originates.  It is tantamount to buying elections.
• I believe that there should be a ceiling on what a candidate can spend to campaign for office. This would allow average American to seek higher office and diversify the Congress and the Senate.
• I believe that we should increase the gasoline tax to pay for research into alternative fuels.

If you agree, I'd like to hear from you on facebook.

Mary Lynn Hansel writing as AC Katt.

Congrats to AC Katt for WINNING 1st Place in the Erotica Catagory of the NEC RWA Bean Pot Award

AC Katt 1st Place in the Erotic Catagory of the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America Bean Pot Award   You can learn more about this contest and company at http://www.necrwa.org/ Get your copy of this award winning novel at Placida Publishing http://placidapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=18_28&products_id=19 Find out more about this Award winning author at http://ackatt.com

Email Marketing provided by Dee Owens & Personalized Marketing http://personalizedmarketing.info pr_marketing@live.com

The American Working Class is Getting the Shaft...

The American Working Class is Getting the shaft...again.


It was supposed to be all about "jobs." That promise made to voters before the November 2010 election has been largely ignored by the new Republican Congress, state legislators and governors.

Instead the agenda pursued by the Republican Party has concentrated on the so-called culture wars. There have been bills introduced in Congress to reduce the availability of abortion, despite Roe v Wade being the law of the land. The new budget introduced by the Republicans actually kills jobs by cutting discretionary spending.  Instead of closing loopholes for oil depletion allowances and Big Agriculture, they restricted money to Planned Parenthood.  Then, they go off on vacation.

In the state capitols, the record of the newly elected Republican again has not served the American Worker. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, thinking he was speaking to David Koch, one of the infamous Koch brothers of oil, gas and chemical fame, told him that he was thinking about seeding the crowd protesting his attempt at Union Busting with outside agitators to make the so-far peaceful protesters look like hooligans.  Governor Walker intimated that with a little extra support (read dollars), governors of other states would follow the same agenda.

That, my friends, is trading worker's collective bargaining rights for campaign cash, a straight forward transaction.  And who is he selling down the river, YOU. By denying collective bargaining rights to workers in these hard times, he denies those rights for future workers in good times.

If your congressperson, senator, state representative or governor is acting in a similar unscrupulous manner and following an agenda that does nothing to produce the promised jobs, maybe it is time for a recall petition.

The Ubiquitous Bureaucrat

The Ubiquitous Bureaucrat...


Today I heard the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker take cheap shots at state and local bureaucrats.  This is nothing strange.  Most of us have an "attitude" regarding government workers. Most of us forget who exactly government workers are and what they do.

State and municipal employees include the teachers who man our schools, the policemen who guard public safety. Who jumps into a burning building to rescue your family - a fireman, a municipal employee.

Who clears your roads, collects your garbage, works in the public hospitals, visits a home a crisis - sanitation workers, nurses, aides, health technicians, social workers, all state and municipal employees.
We, the general public, are very quick to notice when a public servant doesn't do what we pay them to do. However, where are we when are public servants are fighting for a reasonable school budget to educate our kids, decent wages and benefits for school teachers.  We blame the teachers in the United States for the malaise that has hit our schools, yet, we refuse to spend the money to recruit the best and brightest for those positions and dismiss their requests for a living wage.  In truth, most anyone who goes into government service, just like our armed forces on a national level, get paid less than their contemporaries in private industry.  Yet we expect to draw from that same pool of college graduates competing with private industry for their service.

The same applies for nurses, nurse's aides, and hospital techs. Public hospitals pay less and demand more.

We never remark when our municipal employees do a fabulous job, we always comment when they screw up.  This winter the huge accumulation of snow up and down the east coast caused overburdened sanitation departments to fail to clean up the streets in what the public considered to be an appropriate time frame.  The public did not consider that this was a centennial snow event, they only considered that  their cars were block and the streets weren't clear.  They also never thought about the cutbacks in municipal service that helped to balance the budget.

Half the parents in this nation don't attend teacher conferences for their children, Back to School Night, nor a single PTA meeting.  They place the whole of the educational burden on the school system, ie the teacher.  They will shake their fist at municipal meetings whining that their children are undereducated, yet they will not pay the price to hire and keep decent teachers and give those teachers a budget that enables a spectacular education.  I'm often amused when they compare the number of dollars that the US spends per student in comparison to other countries.  Other countries do not have our cost of living. When we demand to have our children educated to be the best in the world we should remember that we must agree to pay for it.

We make demands of all of our municipal employees.  On average they are overworked and severely unpaid.  Now the Republican Right in Wisconsin are busy union busting.  This is on behalf of the infamous Koch brothers again.  No one noticed that they went all out to support Governor Walker who proposed this claptrap in Wisconsin, now they got their payback.  Business received millions of dollars in tax breaks as soon as Governor Walker entered office (payback for the Koch brothers support) now, the Governor wants to take that money out of the pockets of the largely middle class government workers.

Shame on Governor Walker, shame on all of us.  We want top notch service, but refuse to pay for it.  We let people who do not have our interests at heart lead us down a road of less, less, less for the average taxpayer and more, more, more for big business.  When are we going to stop leading with our chin.

The Race for Clean Energy

America has five percent of the world's population, yet uses thirty percent of the world's energy resources.  Oil has been the engine that drove the United States economy since the nineteenth century. With the invention of a cheap assembly line automobile by Henry Ford, America began its love affair with the auto.

The automobile gave birth to the suburbs, and the death of the "downtown."  It encouraged the birth of strip malls, chain stores and developments.  However, we now find ourself dependent on sometimes unfriendly foreign sources for the very substance that fuels our current economy.  If we are to maintain our current standard of living, we must do the research to find alternative fuels. The long term answers to our energy deficit does not lie in "Drill, baby, drill." Oil, even with the newest technology of extracting it from shale, is not the answer.  Oil is a finite resource and a pollutant that contributes to greenhouse gases and therefore to global warming.  If we look for a long term solution to our energy problems, we must look elsewhere.

Currently, forty percent of the country's oil consumption goes directly into the automobile.  One answer to our the problem is the electric car. However to make an electric car viable for long commutes and family trips, currently, it needs a backup fuel.  For the electric car to be able to take longer trips, America's research and development community needs to focus on smaller, more efficient batteries.

To be truly green, the electricity for the car has to come from a green source.  Currently scientists have been working on producing electricity from wind turbines and experimenting with solar farms. Although these methods are green, we do not, as of yet, have the capacity to produce enough electricity with these technologies to replace the oil used for generation of power.

Nuclear power is also a possibility but first we must deal with the problem of safe disposal of spent fuel rods and a safer plant design.

All of this new technology takes money for research and development.  In the past government has provided grants to scientists at universities to help develop promising new technologies.  But in the era of a Congress determined to cut budgets for everything, research dollars are harder to obtain unless the return is immediate.  Americans have traded long term planning for immediate profit.

Long term planning is what pushed us into space.  It is what is necessary to push us back into the forefront of the newer technologies that will not only release us from our dependence on foreign, unfriendly entities who use their windfall oil profits to train terrorists and undermine our country's stability. An infusion of stimulus funds invested in clean energy resources will, in time, bolster our economic growth, provide blue collar jobs and reduce the unemployment rate.

These jobs will need trained personnel.  Therefore cuts to educational programs in our high schools, universities and technical colleges is another bad idea from the Republican Congressional majority.

Investment in green technology can mean the difference between America as a fading superpower or the brighter alternative of an America at the forefront of technology, where we belong.  Investment in the future is necessary now.  We must take back the American Dream away from those who would let American jobs shift to foreign soil and line their pockets with the dollars earned off the backs of the middle class.

Write to your Congressman and Senators and let them know how important it is to invest in America by funding research.  Your standard of living depends on it.

If you wish to know more about my views, check out my website at www.ackatt.com.