2018 Book Events

All the 2018 book events made for a busy year where I had fun around Southern California. At the L.A. Times Festival of Books I signed at the Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America booths. Those 2018 book events included author panels at several Southland libraries: Culver City Library, EP Foster Library, Thousand Oaks Library , Camarillo Library.

Ventura hypnotherapist Bunny Vreeland hosted a book event at her office, where she gave eight local authors a forum to display their work.  Another venue was the Latino Expo at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, Seaside Park. The Expo is held twice a year, it’s full of fun, vendors, free food and tequila. At one event, the Ojai Valley Retired Professional Businessmen’s Club, members bought a ton of books, which always makes me happy. Ventura Barnes & Noble hosted a writers panel. It was fun to be back and see my books in the store.

Check my calendar to see where I’ll be next. I’d love for you to come out and say hi.

New books about handwriting

The big news today is about the other side of my other career. I’ve just published three new books about handwriting.

After 18 years as an international bestseller, my first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis (2nd Edition), went out of print. Readers around the world have written to me, saying it helped them understand handwriting better. Graphology teachers use it to teach classes, too. So, I spent over 100 hours rewriting it. I added new samples of celebrity handwriting and gave it a new name: Reading Between the Lines: Decoding Handwriting. So far, handwriting analysts like even better than the first book.

That inspired me to combine seven of my monographs into a second book: Advanced Studies in Handwriting Psychology. This book is a deeper dive into personality through handwriting. Complex topics include childhood sexual abuse in adult handwriting, addictive personality, defense mechanisms, serial killers, and more.

The third book is Personality & Anxiety Disorders: How they may be reflected in handwriting and other important topics. It’s based on a series of online classes.

The book is about personality and anxiety disorders described in the DSM-IV. If you are a psychologist, you’ll know that’s the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual. Since then, the DSM-V came out, but its unpopularity led me to leave it as-is.

New formats, too

All three books are available in paperback and e-books, which makes it easy to look things up.

Amazon purchase links

Reading Between the lines: e-book, print book

Advanced Studies in Handwriting Psychology: e-book, print book

Personality & Anxiety Disorders: e-book, print book

Succeeding in the Business of Handwriting Analysis: e-book, print book

Signing at Barnes & Noble

What’s better than an author signing at Barnes & Noble? A group signing with six authors! That’s what happened on October 20, 2018, when fiction and nonfiction authors were hosted by the Ventura store.

Along with James F. Gray, Maryann Ridini Spencer, Mike Kennedy and I signed together at several events this year. We’ve also created a Facebook page called the WritersTable. Watch for notice of our first Facebook Live event, scheduled for January 24, 2019. Time TBA

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We were joined at Barnes & Noble by Crystal Marshall, a young author who wrote a wonderful children’s book about a hairless cat. Holly K. Thrasher’s book deals photographically with her journey through breast cancer, and Spencer Labbe, a young artist and author who has self-published his first fantasy novel.

My books are back at Barnes & Noble

Seeing my books back on the shelves of a major bookstore was a thrill. They are in the catalog, and with this signing, they are back, at least for a while. If readers go in and ask for them, they are likely to be around longer (hint, hint).

Mike’s wife, Andrea, memorialized the event with her mad photography skills as we answered audience questions and described our writing process. Afterwards, we signed books. After all, that’s what we were there for, right?

Book signings used to be more popular when meeting authors was unusual and exciting. Now, it’s easy to download a book and read it anywhere, and visit authors online. Besides, everyone is so busy, it’s not always easy to wedge another event into the schedule. And that’s why Mike, Jim, Maryann and I are doing the aforementioned Facebook Live.

Check back often for details. And if you have a question you would like answered by four experienced authors, we would love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send an email: sheila@sheilalowe.com

Santa Paula Library Author Fair

The Santa Paula Blanchard Library held its first author fair and people bought books! You might think it’s strange, but I was surprised by this. The fact is, I’ve found that people who attend library talks rarely buy books. It makes sense–they go to the library to borrow books. But the holidays are coming and people are already thinking about gifts. Books make the perfect gift!

I’ve reached an age where I dislike seeing myself in pictures, but a blog post is more interesting with visuals, so I’ll include a picture of the Library. I have been invited to give a talk at her early next year, which should be fun. And it’s exciting to see my books on the shelves.

A lovely woman who sat next to me at the Santa Paula Library today said, “Oh, I only write children’s books,” apparently not recognizing how important that is. Encourage your children, grandchildren, or other kids in your life to read.

There’s no better way to learn about the world. You can go places on Youtube, but reading an author’s impression of people or places takes you inside a story in a way that passive watching cannot. Children who learn to love reading at an early age will be readers for life. Whether you prefer to hold a physical book in your hand, or enjoy the convenience of carrying a hundred books around in your tablet or phone, just read (or listen to audiobooks).

Let’s hope that this Santa Paula Library Author Fair is just the first of many.

Where have I been?

Where have I been since my last blog post a month ago? There’s a good reason for my absence. I’ve been working my butt off to finish my new book, PROOF OF LIFE. Last Sunday night around midnight, I sent the manuscript Suspense, my publisher. Monday, I was brain dead and could barely move. By evening I looked like someone strangled me–stress rash. On Tuesday, I rewrote the last two pages. The big challenge now is to keep my hands off Proof of Life until my editor at Suspense sends comments a few weeks from now.

Today, I’m beginning to feel halfway human. I’ve been answering 70+ emails that piled up while I was elbows-down. Remember the Tribbles on the original Star Trek? Little balls of fur that proliferated astonishingly fast? That’s how emails are. The minute you send one off, ten more arrive. When I’m on a deadline and need to get something done, I have to discipline myself to power down Outlook and pretend it doesn’t exist for a while. That’s so hard to do!!!

Freddy Mercury

Again…where have I been? In the middle of it all, I took an afternoon off to go to the movies. Busy raising 3 kids on my own, I was never aware of Freddie Mercury or Queen. That is, unless they were one of the bands I used to yell at my daughter to “turn that noise down.” Bohemian Rhapsody, whether or not it accurately portrayed the goings on, was really good. It roused my interested in Freddie and I looked for his handwriting.

You probably want to know what it says about him, right? Freddie was 43 at the time of writing. Take into account that it’s lyrics and may be written faster than normal. The writing is highly simplified. Most extra strokes that are taught in school are stripped away, a sign of someone who cuts to the chase, gets right down to basics. He could be extremely impatient.

The extra-wide spaces between words point to his feeling isolated. However, the capital I in the 10th line down makes me smile, as it reminded me of Freddie’s strut. English is the only language (besides Cyrillic) where a single letter represents the personal pronoun I, so that letter is quite significant. It reveals much about how one sees themselves.

One other aspect I’ll point out is in the second line from the bottom. The letter “g” at the end of “living” pulls strongly to the right, symbolic of Freddie’s difficulty with male authority figures (his father, a boss, etc.). He pushed against anyone who tried to tell him what to do.

If handwriting isn’t proof of life, I don’t know what is :-).

There’s lots more, of course, but that’s enough for now.

Beyond the Veil

Proof of Life

What She Saw

Watch for a May 7th release of my new book, Proof of Life. The prequel, What She Saw, was published five years ago. Together, they introduce the new Beyond the Veil mysteries, which is paranormal mystery-suspense with a dash of romance.

In What She Saw, a young woman wakes up on a train with amnesia. Proof takes up her story five years later, when we learn she has been hearing voices. She’s not crazy; what she’s hearing comes from the world of spirit.

The Afterlife

My interest in the afterlife began when my daughter was the victim in a terrible murder-suicide in 2000 and I felt compelled to find out what happens when we “die.” I learned from my research that there is no death. Our loved ones continue to be involved in our lives on earth, and they want us to know they are okay. So, when a spirit comes across someone with the ability to pass along messages to those of us still in human form, they tend to glom onto that person and bombard them with requests (until otherwise instructed).

That’s what happens to Jessica Mack in Proof of Life. For five years she has ignored the voices from beyond the veil. Now, called on to help find a missing child, she can no longer ignore them.

Central characters tend to take on lives of their own, and Sage Boles wanted in, too. We met this man with a mysterious past in Written Off, the seventh Claudia Rose Forensic Handwriting mystery. in Proof of life, Sage and Jessica team up, turning to the spirits for help in finding four-year-old Ethan.

Ballona Wetlands

One of the locations in the book is the Ballona Wetlands, near where Claudia lives in “Playa de la Reina,” where Jessica is drawn in her search for Ethan.

If you plan to be in Ventura on May 7th, you are invited to my book launch party. Sign up here for notification. Or RSVP on Facebook.

The books!

I thought it would be fun to make a little video to show off all of my books, so here it is. And if you would like to visit my Author page on Amazon Central, click here.

Analyzing handwriting for Adobe

Analyzing handwriting for Adobe. Imagine the fun of getting to do what you love and having your best friend along for company. Linda Larson, who is a colleague as well as a friend, said yes when the software company, Adobe, asked her and me to work at some of their huge conventions. The idea was to use handwriting analysis to promote their Adobe Sign product.

Sheila Lowe and Linda Larson with Adobe employees, Peter and Kira

The company sent us to San Francisco for Adobe conventions a couple of times, and to San Diego, where we analyzed the handwriting of people who wanted to try the app. Visitors to the booth would write and sign their name on an iPad, then Linda or I would tell them what their handwriting revealed about their personality. Interestingly, they didn’t like their writing as it appeared on the screen, and preferred writing on paper, which we provided.

Hotel Zeppelin, San Francisco

In San Francisco, more than 80,000 people attended the event during the week. Adobe put us up in the Zeppelin Hotel, a boutique hotel that charged over $600/night! For any Led Zeppelin fans, here’s the bathroom wallpaper. The ceiling light projected the Peace sign.

We walked to the Convention Center each day and got lost several times. When we got to the booth, people were always lining up to have their handwriting analyzed.

We also worked at the offices of their client, Apptus, analyzing  their employees.

During that gig, I took time out to be interviewed on a local TV news show about the presidential candidates. That was fun.

We’ve been doing these big conventions for many years. Without exception, we bring hundreds of visitors to the booth. Most of the time, the companies who can afford to hire us are in the medical field.

Written Off Launch Party

Dozens of friends gathered at Mimi’s Cafe in Ventura on November 14, 2017 to help me celebrate the release of my latest book, Written Off. Food, prizes and lots of fun. As she has for all my other releases, Debbie Mitsch of Mystery Ink drove all the way up from Huntington Beach to sell books at the Written Off launch party.

We had such a great time, I plan on doing it again when my next book, Proof of Life, comes out early in 2019.

Local author and buddy James Francis Gray also had a table with his books.

Sheila Lowe & author James F. Gray

Bookseller, Debbie Mitsch

James is the best-known author in Ventura. He belongs to every networking group there is and he’s the best person to know if you need the word spread about something you are doing. He touts the Latino Expo and has made Tatiana’s Coffee & Tea the most popular independent coffee house in Ventura. Tatiana and Diego display local vendors’ wares there, several of which are authors, including yours truly.

Everyone seemed to be having a great time. I gave anyone who brought a prize a 30-second commercial to talk about anything they wanted to. There were all kinds of prizes. My good friend Tracey Bolton, a phenomenal psychic medium, donated a reading. The person who won really lucked out. Everyone who buys books gets a free ticket for each one they purchase. Then I do a drawing free handwriting analysis.

Since moving to Ventura in 2004 I’ve made some great friends, many of whom became my readers. When I got published, they all came out and supported me. It’s warm feeling to know you belong to a community.

Hillside Book Club Halloween

hillside book club halloween

Amy and Jim Herron as Claudia and her FBI contact

Hillside Bookclub Halloween

Hillside Bookclub at Halloween

At the end of October, 2017, the zany ladies of the Hillside, Ventura, Book Club read What She Saw (a young woman with amnesia. For the second time, my friend Amy Herron invited me to attend their meeting as guest author. They met the night before Halloween and they dressed up as characters from the book. What a thrill to see my characters come to life that way! Almost as good as having it made into a movie (almost).

Irene Mefford (in mermaid green) hosted the event at her home in Ondulondo, a neighborhood in the hills high above Ventura. Imagine the view of the lights at night, the Pacific Ocean during the day. Irene went all-out with fabulous Halloween-themed food. She created claw-shaped meatloaf, witches head apples in cider, Jello shots in huge syringes. As you can imagine, by the time we got around to judging the costumes, everyone was in a great mood.

hillside book club halloween

Winner Teri Casey

Teri Casey dressed as Jessica Mack’s backpack! How’s that for creativity? She won a prize for that great costume.

Tragedy strikes the book club

Tragically, few short weeks later, Irene’s beautiful home became one of a thousand casualties of the Thomas fire, a heartbreaking loss. Other club members in the neighborhood were also evacuated. These terrifying experiences teach us a lot about what is really of greatest value in our lives.

The good news is, the book club continues to meet and I hope to be invited back again some time. How would they dress up for my upcoming book, Proof of Life, which is the sequel to What She Saw.

What She Saw, a young woman with amnesia. Imagine waking up on a train and realizing that you don’t know who you are, where you are going. or where you came from. Furthermore, something tells you that you can’t call the cops.

Book Clubs

If you have a book club and would like a visit, contact me  If your club is too far for me to drive, I’m happy to show up via Zoom or Skype.