Cee gave us the Fun Foto Challenge prompt for this week:
This week our topic is Cars – new, vintage, toy, etc. (try not to use trucks of any kind). Please feel free to use archived photos for this challenge.
Cee’s Fun Foto Callenge
I think we are all familiar with the degree to which cars are often used in advertising. Okay, to be fair, they’re often used in advertising for cars, but I’m going to take advantage of this prompt to point out some cars from The Dreamer’s Alliance Series. I also want to take this opportunity to pass along a little WordPress information. I thought I’d highlight two block features that helped make this post possible.
I know, I know, many of you prefer Classic Editor and are not interested in Blocks. Still, things change, blogs change and what you want to do with your blog can change, so I think you might be interested. If not, feel free to skip around, avoiding the text and focusing on the pictures (some of which are mine and some are from public sources.
The first photo and feature lies just below the separator bar. Actually, the first feature is the separator bar. You’ve seen that bar before—there’s a least one in every one of my posts. That’s “DA_Separator,” a Reusable Block I created. Creating reusable block is a very simple process. I could explain it, but Hugh, over at Hugh’s Views and News has done a better job than I could. The point is, instead of the somewhat complicated process to create and insert that separator, I just add “DA_Separator,” and I’m done.
Below the separator is a seven photo slide show that some of you might remember. It illustrates (in compresses form) the process I followed for creating the car on the bridge on the cover of Secrets Held Against Evil my most recent novel. You might remember it because it was part of a post last August. To get it here, I simply copied the block and pasted it below—photos, captions and all.
This was the photo I decided to work with. That’s the Ames, Iowa police station 
The Ames police car has been extracted from the background 
“City of Ames” has been removed 
Now a Pittsburgh police car 
The red light bar was taken from a local police car during the parade 
The blue light bar shines 
The grill lights were added one-by-one, but you get the idea
Let’s take a look at three classic cars that were integral to Knuckleheads, the backstory of the series. Images courtesy of Classic.com Classic Automall and Car & Driver, respectively.
There are a number of cars used in The Evil You Choose, but one of the best scenes is when Zach pretends to be a pizza delivery man.
When Evil Chooses You features several vehicles but the one that represents a critical turning point in the story is the one below. I use this image from Pixabay in the trailer (all the trailers are embedded at the end of this post).
If you notice, Cee specified not to use trucks, so the image below will have to suffice. In the opening of Secrets Held Against Evil, a car and a truck do a little dance to which the fire department respond. I wanted the scene to be accurate, so I enlisted the help of a friend of mine who is a volunteer firemen and responsible for the department’s rescue operations. Tim and I met at his favorite bar and, as we ate and drank, we played with a Hot Wheels model truck and police cruiser. Tim explained and I took notes.
That’s it for the shameless self promotion, well except for the image of the books and the links below the gallery of a few cars from my archive. By the way, that is also a reusable block, and it has been since first introduced after Knuckleheads was published. With each new book, I updated the image and the links. The block was changed, AND appears in its new form everywhere it was ever used. I think that’s pretty cool
All five of my current books are now available in audio book form thanks to Amazon KDP’s Virtual Voice process. The voice is AI generated, but I can honestly say, it’s pretty darn good. The audio books are reasonably priced (all below $7 US) and, if you already own the Kindle version and want to add an audio version, you can do that for $1.99. There is a five-minute sample on the book page for each book. If you’re interested, click on any of the Dreamer’s Alliance book links below the image or on the link below for my latest book.
No Facilities 
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