FRIDAY FUN VIDEO -- Chiquita Chihuahua takes on a cougar

Before we moved to East Tennessee, after selling our Phoenix home we lived up at our mountain cabin, which was out in the middle of an old growth forest on an unmarked forest service road, sixty miles from the nearest town. We loved it there, and it was a place of glorious solitude for writing, but our only phone service was run by a woman out of her kitchen -- which wasn't exactly the most dependable and forget about Internet -- and it got a little inconvenient having to arrange to meet the FedEx man at a certain milepost on the highway, especially during winter when blizzards could pile snow up six feet deep.

True story, it once started snowing on Good Friday and by Easter morning my car was entirely covered and there was no way of telling where it was. Here's my sweetie trying to dig out the road so if we did find the car we could drive the sixty miles to church for Easter services. Needless to say, we didn't make it.

Anyway, it did serve as a good base of operations while we searched the southeast for a new state/town/house. Living up there, we had deer, elk, coyotes, foxes, bunnies, squirrels, hawks, owls, herons, and even a bald eagle visit nearly every day. Once, we were sitting on our front porch and watched a fox stalk a bunny across in front of us. What he didn't realize was a coyote was stalking him. Also, the occasional bear would wander by. All that nature was a bit like living on a Wild Kingdom TV show.

But one evening, I heard a cat screaming on the back porch and thought that Kitty Scarlett, our tiny, three pound insane Alzheimer's Siamese, must have somehow gotten outside. I opened the kitchen door and came face to face with a cougar! I'm not sure which of us was more surprised. I screamed. He screamed. Then, thank heavens, he ran away.

That was as close as I ever want to get to a cougar again. But I also wonder if he had snatched Kitty Scarlett, if our beloved hound/springer mix, Allie the Wonder Hiker, would've leaped in to save the day the way Chiquita the Chihuahua did for Rosie. Enjoy:

Embedded video from CNN Video

COMPARING BREAKPOINT PHOTOS TO FINAL VIDEO

My fabulous agent's equally fabulous assistant just sent me my first review for Breakpoint, hottie Dallas O'Halloran's High Risk story and I'm super, super pleased: "Fire and ice make for an incendiary mix in the newest High Risk novel by the always excellent Ross. These strong-willed protagonists were once on opposite sides of a court-martial, but now they must work together. Watching their stimulating relationship develop while they're immersed in a murder case shows how skillful a storyteller Ross is. Brava!" ~ Jill M. Smith, RT Book Reviews, 4 1/2 Stars

When I was thinking about what to blog about today, I decided that perhaps people might enjoy some insight into how book videos get created. Now, I'll admit to being a control freak. Which is why I prefer finding my own photos to use in my book trailer videos. (And besides, who has a better idea of how people and locations look than the person who wrote the story?)

Some photos -- such as the Lowcountry or Italy ones for Crossfire and Freefall -- I've taken myself. Others I buy from stock companies, or find in the public military galleries. Needless to say, it's hugely important not to break copyright law by just stealing a photo from the Internet. Which would have been a lot easier when I was looking for Julianne in a white Navy dress uniform. You've NO idea how many stock photos there are of women in white bikinis wearing a sailor hat and saluting; not exactly the image I was looking for!


I finally found this one late the night before the video was completed. That she's holding a flag works well, because if people didn't die in this book there wouldn't be a murder mystery for Dallas and Julianne to solve.

I also had to alter this one of Dallas skydiving. It was impossible to find a photo I liked that didn't have lots of people in it, so I cropped it as tight as I could, then used my Photoshop "clone" tool to turn that other jumper into the cloud Dallas is diving through.

The green night scope picture of him as an Air Force Combat Controller also required tweaking before I sent it on because it was actually taken on a training mission in Texas and there was a fence and buildings behind the team. (Which isn't exactly Afghanistan!) They became that smoky, cloudy stuff you see in the background.

I really liked the noose photo I found, but wasn't wild about the yellow color. Fortunately, Michael, the COS artistic genius, not only turned it blue, but layered it over the aircraft carrier, which I think is a way cool effect.

The photo of Dallas and Julianne at the end was originally a black, gray and blue silhouette. (And I did really buy this one! Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the purchased copy instead of the watermark one from my computer.) Again, Michael took out his magic brushes and turned it orange, which really, really works with the flames preceding it and, I think, gives it an end-of-the-world-survivor feel I hope readers feel while reading Breakpoint's climax.

I'm doing the happy dance over both the review and the video! The cherry on top of this very tasty cake will be if readers enjoy Dallas and Julianne's story when it comes out July 7th.