Cara Bertoia

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Ray and Cara have also produced the number one guide on walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The Desert Woman calls it inspiring.
Click the link to find the DVD Camino de Santiago a Walkers Guide at Amazon

Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. Well, I can tell you that after teaching high school, handling an unruly gambler was a piece of cake. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." I wanted to write the first realistic novel about casino life from the perspective of an experienced table games dealer. I spent the next five years circling the globe for Princess Cruises. Sometimes life exceeds your dreams. I was awed by the wonders of Venice, the fjords of Norway, and the Northern Lights in Leningrad. I returned from ships with a very special souvenir, my Scottish husband Ray. We went to work in Palm Springs. We now live in Hollywood, Florida, where I write about my casino years while wistfully gazing out at the ocean.

VINYL IS BACK -THE RETURN OF THE RECORD ALBUM

This year for Christmas I got a just released Coldplay album, yes an old fashioned vinyl album with a paper sleeve! It seemed so substantial compared to a CD. It all began last year when my husband told me that he wanted to buy a record player because he thought music sounded better when the needle hits the record. As a child his father - an opera buff, had owned a beautiful stereo and a huge record collection that was strictly off limits. Growing up Ray listened to most of his music on the BBC's Radio One and the television show Top of the Pops, so he never got to listen to the whole album, only the hits.

My husband is man of many interests, once he asked me to walk 500 miles across Spain, not only did we go we made a movie of our journey. He helped me write a book about our experiences working on a cruise ship. So the fact that we only owned a few albums, old Beatles albums that were framed and hung in our office, didn't faze me a bit. I said sure and wondered where this new hobby would take us.

Well it turns out this new hobby has taken us to thrift stores, the Salvation Army, and yard sales all over California. We attack a thrift store as a team, pull out all of the albums we might fancy, check them for scratches and buy the good ones. In a little over a year we have amassed a fantastic collection of over 400 classic albums for a little over $200. You can buy the same albums on E-Bay but nothing matches the thrill of the chase! Last week when traveling back from a casino reunion at Lake Tahoe we stopped in Bishop California and I found two great Frank Sinatra albums in premium condition. I felt like I had struck gold.

Our collection spans the decades from the fifties to around 1985 when CD's took over. We have records from performers as diverse as the Beatles, Jethro Tull, Blondie and Barry White. It has also introduced us to performers from our parent's generation. When you listen to the smooth sounds of Johnny Mathis or Frank Sinatra you realize why these crooners were so popular. There are also great Broadway soundtracks, like Camelot and The Sound of Music. But it's not just music; learn some history by listening to The First Family a comedic look at the life of John and Jackie Kennedy when they lived in the White House.

This year's Mad Men even had a scene where Peter Campbell proudly shows off his new console stereo housed in a massive wooden cabinet. Pete marvels at the size of the hi-fi cabinet: “It’s a beautiful piece of furniture. It’s seven feet long.”

Ray proudly displays his collection in the cabinets he built!

Actually records have been cropping up everywhere. In last year's movie Crazy Stupid Love, Ryan Gosling puts the needle on the record as a seductive move. In the show Girls they show Charlie's apartment - a marvel of carpentry. He had custom designed a one room apartment with built-ins to maximize every bit of space, but Ray only noticed the albums on the shelves. Ray had already designed custom shelves to hold his albums. He wanted his albums to face out and be accessible like they were at 'Rockaway Records' in Los Angeles. The store is a great player in the second hand record store scene.

Once you begin looking you realize that albums are everywhere, all the castoffs from all the homes across America, a part of our heritage. They are sitting in thrift stores begging you to take them home and remember what a thrill it was to open that album you had saved all week to buy. Even an article titled 'Turntables' in the July issue of 'Wired' magazine proclaims, "If you care about the sound of recorded music, there's nothing better than vinyl. Even casual listeners can hear how much richer vinyl sounds than MP3s or CDs." As I write this the room is filled with the silken tones of Johnny Mathis.So step back in time and visit that second hand record store and you too just might be seduced.

Cara Bertoia is the author of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Kindle Fire Dept says - If this one doesn't put a smile on your face, I don't know what will. Cruise Quarters is a romantic comedy about a woman whose unlucky-in-love past is about to meet its match on board a luxury cruise ship departing for exotic ports around the globe. Managing to be informative about cruises and richly detailed with the locales while offering a compelling romance and plenty of laughs, this novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships
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Click to find Cruise Quarters at Barnes and Noble

Ray and Cara have also produced the number one guide on walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The Desert Woman calls it inspiring.
Click the link to find the DVD Camino de Santiago a Walkers Guide at Amazon

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Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
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CASINO MOVIES THAT GET IT RIGHT

The April issue of The Atlantic ran a great article about gambling. The title was The Gambler Who Broke Atlantic City. It is a fun article to read and it really explains in an easy to read way about how to win in a casino. Don Johnson is the man who won millions in Atlantic City. The only factual problem was when the author was describing a double down hand; a dealer always turns up their hole card before they hit their hand. But as a casino professional we know that they always get it wrong. It is a rare movie or television show set in a casino that doesn't make some mistake. That is why we took so much care when we were writing Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos And Cruise Ships to get it right.

Don't even start me on 'The Cooler' there is no 'Cooler' it was just something made up to sell a movie. Walk up to any dealer and call them 'The Cooler' and watch them cringe, anyway 'The Cooler' wasn't a dealer but a player who stood behind the table. Casinos don't cheat, they may lure you in with bells and neon but the donations you make are purely voluntary.

After we both read the article my husband Ray and started talking about the few movies that have gotten it right. I enjoyed Casino and Bugsy Malone but they were a little before our time. I felt like Owning Mahowny was the best movie about the modern casino business that I have ever seen. This is a movie about an assistant manager at a Toronto branch of a leading Canadian bank. On the weekends he flies to Atlantic City where he gambles hundreds of thousands of dollars. The gambler is played by Oscar winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and his love interest is Minnie Driver. It is the most realistic portrait of a compulsive gambler I have ever seen, maybe because it is based on a true story. Set in the 80's before gambling had expanded into all corners of the country. It shows an Atlantic City at the top of its game.

Ray loved Croupier, which I also loved because who doesn't like to look at Clive Owen? Clive Owen plays Jack Manfred an aspiring writer who becomes a croupier to make ends meet and falls under the spell of casino life. Ray said it really replicated his experiences in casinos in London, he learned to deal there and we talk about his training days in our novel Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. The dealers all used to frequent a Greek Restaurant, The Grecian Grill, after the casino closed at night just like in the movie. What male doesn't like to relive his carefree bachelor partying days? There is a heist in the movie with the usual amount of holes in the story but don't let that get in the way because it is the mood and settings that make this movie so great.

Both movies are a few years old so you will probably have to download them or catch them on a movie channel. But if you like to gamble and are interested in what goes on behind the scenes in a casino they are worth a watch. Or you can read all about it in our novel Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos And Cruise Ships.

About the author:

Cara Bertoia is the author of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Her novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. Kindle Fire Dept. says, "This novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!"

Below is the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

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HORRORS! SWIMSUIT SEASON IS UPON US AGAIN!

What is normal these days? They sell a mixture that contains 15% pink slime and they call it lean ground beef, they put high fructose corn syrup in canned tomato soup, and when you fly on a plane you have to pay to check your baggage. These things happen and gradually we just accept them. And now in clothing sizes who the hell knows what the new Normal is?

I was dragging my husband with me shopping the other day. If he doesn’t like something I wear he lets me know it, so I decided he should go with me while I picked an outfit out, to bypass the insult. We were wandering around the department store where I was trying to find some new t-shirts. Well that might seem easy enough but I wanted a shirt that you couldn’t see through, that you could wash and that came past my belly button so that the top of my ass wouldn’t show every time I bent down.

My sweet husband picked up a t-shirt and held it up for me, “I like this it must be about your size.”

Bless his heart he had picked up a small. “A small are you kidding, have you looked at that shirt.” He held it up and I would have sworn it wouldn’t fit a young child but I looked around and we were in the women’s department.

“Well how about this one,” he reached for a medium.

“A medium, who do you think I am, Paris Hilton?’

“What do you mean - you aren’t a medium?”

“A medium, I hate to break it to you but for the last five years I have been an extra large, not a large but an extra large, and god forbid I ever throw it in the dryer.” I grabbed an extra large shirt and held it up to me.

I could see his confusion. I am 5”5’ and weigh 135 pounds on a good day, 137 on a bad one. A weight that shouldn’t be considered extra large. A weight that wasn’t considered extra large ten years ago. A weight that is a little below normal on the height and weight charts. A weight that I worked damn hard to get to in the last two years. I have lost weight but the funny thing is the more weight I lose the bigger my clothing size. I know there is something funny going on.

I am convinced that all the clothing manufacturers got together and said. Hey, how can we make the American woman feel even worse about herself? We can resize all her clothes. We will base all our measurements on a thirteen year old girl. And since everything is manufactured abroad the manufacturers can send anything over here slap any old size on it and save on materials! It doesn’t mean that the clothes will be cheaper. I keep hoping that since everything is made in China this is only a translation problem and XL really means Extra Lucky.

The perfect fit, a Grecian Slender Suit!

But if you won't tell anyone I will let you in on a little secret. I don't dread buying a bathing suit. Would you like to know how you will never again have to stand under those unforgiving fluorescent lights in a retail store fitting room? One of the happiest days of my year is when The Lands' End swimsuit catalog arrives. For the last ten years I have ordered all my bathing suits through the internet. I choose a size larger than my own a 12 instead of a 10, and god bless, besides a great selection they even have long waisted swimsuits.

No, I don't have any affiliation with the company, and I am not getting a free swimsuit. But if they happen upon this blog and they are feeling generous I would love a Slender Suit, holds you in at all the right places, in the Sweetheart or Grecian style in that pretty rose color I saw in the catalog.

In the meantime, we the American consumer will grit our teeth and swallow a Zanax every time we have to go to the mall. It just means that if we find anything that fits we will wear it until the seams dissolve. I don't think it is as bad in Britain when my husband and I go to Scotland to visit his family I always go to Frazer's to buy clothes because I seem to wear an average size there. As for gifts I never give anyone clothes anymore, I don’t want my friends to unwrap something labeled XL and get insulted.

Yes, our destruction is complete; the sexy, curvy American woman has been replaced by a botoxed, bleached, anorexic model. So I give up and surrender and wait for the day when I become an extra, extra large or extra, extra lucky.

Casino Queen (Night Hawk Casino Series Book 1) - Kindle edition by Bertoia, Cara. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

A SHOUT OUT TO THE AMAZON REVIEWER

I have a few things to say about the Amazon reviewer, thank you, thank you, thank you. Recently my book was featured at Women Writers Women's Books and the first thing that a potential reader will see will be my Amazon reviewer rating, a 4.8. It is the thumbs up that the people who read my book really enjoyed it and what more could any writer want. Everyone knows that writing is a solitary past time. There are so many hurdles to being a writer that sometimes you wonder why you do it.

I remember how I got started in writing. I was dealing cards in a Lake Tahoe casino. The casino owner was a plumbing contractor from Fresno. The head of security was an ex-Mossad officer and every few weeks we would be strapped down and given lie detector tests. They let porn movies be filmed in the casino and there were rumors that he rigged the slot machines. I’m not sure if that was true but he did manage to get his casino closed down by the Nevada gaming commission, no small feat. One day a sports agent with Hollywood connections played on my game and encouraged me to write down all my great casino stories. That was the day I became a writer, well my script got as far as HBO where it was promptly rejected but that didn’t matter, I was a writer.

A year later I went back to the real world and became a systems analyst by day, writer by night. I lived in Boston, the home of perpetual students and so I was able to take writing classes and join critique groups and get better. After a few years I began working on an MA in writing at Emerson because it had connections in Hollywood. Well, just before I was scheduled to intern in Los Angeles as a script reader I got the opportunity to join Princess Cruises as a croupier. My choice was spend my dwindling savings on an internship or get paid to see the world. I wasn’t scared of going - only staying. The Germans have a word for it torschlusskpanik, the fear of missing the boat.

I stayed at sea for five years and I would like to say that I wrote every day, but I didn’t. I spent those years soaking up all the history I could. The ship was my home and the crew bar was my living room and the nights I spent there were research since I planned to tell the story of all my crew-mates someday. And then on my last contract I met Ray and my novel became a love story and that surprised me more than anyone else.

We settled in Palm Springs and I began writing my novel 'Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships'. There were years of writing and editing, rewriting and more re-writing but finally I decided my novel was ready to face the world. You think that when it is published the hard part is over but it is only beginning. Then your job as an author is to do everything you can to get the word out to readers and then you wait for that special reader to find you.

But then you turn on you computer one day and you look up your book on Amazon, and you find something like this.

5.0 out of 5 stars Getting Ready to Embark on My Cruise

Janis "Janis in Oregon" (Grants Pass, OR USA) -

Amazon Verified Purchase (This review is from: Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships (Kindle Edition)

This novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. While I've been on many cruises, I am about to embark on a 2-week cruise and this book also is kind of a primer for setting sail. It is a fun read with interesting cruising tidbits. Go for it.

Janis from Oregon wrote a review so good that I think it is the perfect sales pitch for my book. She got it. Janis knew exactly what I was trying to do when I wrote my book. That alone makes all the hard work worth it.

It is not easy to write an Amazon review. In fact a large majority or readers never write a review. You have to go back to Amazon after you have read the book and write your review and submit it to Amazon. I also think reviewers like all writers suffer from performance anxiety. They are putting something out there for all they world to see.

But in my mind Amazon reviewers are incredible writers. Randy Benjamin (Netguider) wrote a fantastic review of my book and brought up points in the book that I had taken for granted but that really caught his attention as a reader. He always wanted to know what it was like to work on a cruise ship and now he does. Dafna Yee loved my three-dimensional characters. I re-wrote my dialogue a hundred times to make my conversations sound natural and nuanced. Patrice Fitzgerald a great writer and the author of the political thriller Running, took my book along with her on a cruise. R.A. Brittan said it was one of the most enjoyable books she had ever read. What author wouldn't be thrilled to read that?

I use Amazon reviews all the time as a reader. I love to know what actual readers are saying about a book because they are the ones who have purchased it. Their opinion can sway me to click that Amazon buy button. I particularly enjoy going back to the review page after reading a book, it is like having you own book club where you get to discuss the book with readers from around the country.

I know that other writers feel the same way about the Amazon reviewer. I belong to 'Writing Kindle Books' a fantastic network of writers. Writers love to post their reviews. They glory in every five star review. Because everyone knows you don't write for the money but to tell your story. And the Amazon reviewer doesn't write for money either but out of the love of books. So thank you to the Amazon reviewer, the people that make it all worthwhile, keep them coming.

Cara Bertoia is the author of the critically acclaimed Casino Queen, a new suspense novel published by The Wild Rose Press. She has drawn from her years in the casino industry to create a fascinating thriller. It is all true although the names have been changed to protect the guilty. It had been featured at The Big Thrill and Women Writers Women's Books and at many other sites. Read the blurb here.

Caroline Popov, alone, heartbroken, and deeply in debt ends up in glamorous Palm Springs, California where Native casinos have just opened, offering employment to thousands. She lands a job at the Palm Oasis Casino and is mentored by the charismatic tribal chairman, John Tovar.

Embraced by casino culture, Caroline works her way up to casino manager of the Night Hawk, in the High Desert town of Joshua Tree. There, she is responsible for managing multicultural team members, satisfying the demands of challenging guests, growing revenue while rooting out corruption.

In the process of rediscovering her inner strength, she learns, you have to gamble like your life depends on it. With her life on the line can she pull out a win?

Click the link below to order at Amazon, enjoy your stay at the Night Hawk!

Click the link below to order at Barnes and Noble

Casino Queen by Cara Bertoia | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)

To check out my interview in The Big Thrill, click the link below.

Casino Queen by Cara Bertoia | THE BIG THRILL

About the author:

Click the link to find at Amazon.com
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Click the link to find at Amazon.com
Click here to find at Amazon Canada
Click the link to find at Amazon United Kingdom
Click the link to find at Amazon Germany

'GIRLS' NEED A BASIC STRATEGY OF LOVE

I am a people junkie, I want to know what makes them tick. Why do they do the things they do? Why do they fall in and out of love? Now we need to talk about Girls, the new HBO series. I love it but I will add a warning here it may not be to everyone's taste because it is very graphic. Just like the wonderful British series, Pulling, it is a tale about women in their twenties, trying to find their place in the real world.

HBO GIRLS

I don't know how they did it but the show manages to make sex seem pretty unappealing. My husband says it's almost enough to put you off porn, because we all know that sex with the wrong person sucks, whether you are twenty or sixty. But it brought me back to that terrifying time when life is full of possibilities and fraught with loose connections. I dated guys like Adam, when I didn't know if he was my boyfriend or not, but I was too afraid to ask. I also dated guys like Charlie, who I promptly dumped because they were too nice. Sometimes a bad haircut was all it would take and once a guy gut dumped for bringing me a single rose, a very nice gesture.

In my twenties I was teaching school, high school and though I loved my students, why wouldn't I, we were about the same age!. But the thought of staying in my hometown and teaching for the next forty years filled me with torschlusskpanik, the German word for the fear of missing the boat. I left for California, got a job dealing in a casino and never looked back. My job was sorted out but I still kept dating the bad boy, the elusive, uncommitted one I was going to make fall in love with me.

It took me a long time to sort myself out get married and live happily ever after, but I finally met my Mr. Right, while working on a cruise ship. We decided to tell our story in Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Stand behind a blackjack table for years, deal to thousands of couples and you learn a thing or two about people. Gamblers know that to win at blackjack you have to play basic strategy. In our novel Sarah (my alter-ego) learns from her past mistakes to write her own basic strategy of love. Maybe hers can help Girls take some shortcuts, but probably not, we all have to suffer our own heart breaks. Girls need to throw away the self-help book they are reading and write their own. Below is Sarah's, if you come up with a new one leave a comment here or e-mail me at carabertoia@yahoo.com.

Click here for CRUISE QUARTERS

SARAH SELDON’S BASIC STRATEGY OF LOVE

1. It’s a sure bet that if someone doesn’t introduce you to his family, he thinks there is something wrong with you -- or his family.

2. It is a mistake to fall for a strong silent type; you will get tired of doing all the talking, and he will get tired of doing all the listening.

3. Don’t fall in love with someone who is a challenge; if you want a challenge, go climb Mt. Everest.

4. It is not important that you share all the same interests, only that you are both open to new and different things.

5. Some people think a relationship has to include drama; without drama it can’t be love. Drama is just drama, not love. If you want drama, go see a play.

6. The first time someone cheats is never the last time someone cheats; it is just the first time someone cheats.

7. Never get involved with someone who blames all his problems on others; you will soon be one of the others.

8. Never go to bed with someone if you aren’t sure he will be there in the morning, and you want him to be there.

9. If there is something wrong in a relationship, you know it. He stops looking you in the eye, he doesn’t call every day. People always have a tell. They always leave a clue, you just have to look for it.

10. The golden rule of love is this: always be with someone who likes you just the way you are, quirks and all. Always love someone just the way they are. You can change sheets, not people.

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THE BEST PART OF CRUISING - SAILING AWAY FROM IT ALL

Skeptics always ask me why I love cruising so much. What makes it so special? They ask me this because I once worked on a cruise ship. I love cruise ships because I love the ocean. But what make a cruise ship so special? Well, my favorite thing about a cruise ship is the sail away. I know that you also sail into a port but that usually happens when you are fast asleep in your cabin encased in your soft high thread count luxury sheets. But sail away is a time when most of the passengers gather on the deck to watch the ship leave a port, drink frou-frou drinks and wave at those unfortunates on the dock that won't be sailing with us. This week I will tell you about my favorite place to sail away from.

My number one place to leave is Venice, and not because I want to get away but because I love Venice so much. In fact, much of the first chapter of my novel Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships is set in Venice. One of most memorable experiences was planning a pizza party on the crew deck. Earlier in the day I had bought cheap bottles of red wine in town but I didn't have to bring the pizzas because onboard an Italian head chef made sure that the pizza was thin and crispy with just a smattering of sauce and cheese that is hard to duplicate in American but can be found in any town in Italy.

The most beautiful sail away in the world - Venice, Italy

The sail away from Venice was set in the late afternoon for the greatest dramatic appeal. The whole city takes on a golden glow. It is a balmy summer day, with the movement of the ship creating a soft breeze on deck. The ship meanders past medieval houses and cathedrals painted in muted earth tone colors. The harbor is crowded with water taxis, gondolas, and boats moving produce and goods through the canals. Commerce moving as it has for thousands of years. While the ship meanders past all of this splendor all the casino staff are lounging on the crew deck, sipping local red wine and chewing on crispy hot, fresh pizza that has just been delivered from the kitchen.

And then we sail past St. Marks Square, if there is a more beautiful place on earth show it to me. Thousands of tourists are gawking at the Doge's Palace and the Basilica waiting for The Moor to strike his bell. The music from the violinist playing in the square is barely discernable from the ship. The day is perfect, the chance for days like that are why I lived on ships for many years.

I know that some of you have been to Venice, some left by plane where long lines and customs awaited you. Some of you went by train and what a great way to see the countryside. But as for me, I will always cherish those sail aways from Venice.

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