Book Blitz of If You Were Mine by A.S. Kelly. (#contests- Win A $25 Amazon gift card.)

If You Were Mine
A.S. Kelly
Publication date: October 14th 2026
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, LGBTQ+, Romance

Levi Anderson has never felt more alone. Since saying goodbye to his husband, he has drifted between long shifts at the hospital and quiet, empty hours in his apartment, surrounded by boxes he can’t bring himself to unpack. He refuses to face the pain — or imagine a life without him.

Shay Miller has never been more furious. In one devastating moment, he lost the man he loved, his job, and the home they shared. He’s barely holding himself together. He’s tried to start over, but deep down, he knows he can’t move on until he lets go of the past — and stops hurting himself.

When fate brings Levi and Shay together, they immediately see how different they are and can’t imagine ever being drawn to one another. Levi is still learning how to live again, while Shay is learning how to forgive.

Yet, with this stranger who’s appeared out of nowhere, Levi slowly begins to open up and trust again. And with this man, terrified of letting himself go, Shay starts to long for someone he can protect and love.

For the first time, the future feels possible for both of them. But Levi doesn’t know Shay has lied about who he is — or that he’s hiding a secret capable of destroying everything, leaving Levi to hate the man he loves for the rest of his life.

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EXCERPT:

After about half an hour, I’m standing outside the cafeteria, peering through the window to make sure he’s really inside, waiting for me. But when I see him, sitting at one of the tables, intent on reading the newspaper, the urge to turn around and run away almost gets the better of the strange, inexplicable desire to sit at that table with him.
He lifts his head from the newspaper and scans the room. Then his eyes land on me, watching him from the other side of the glass, as if he suddenly realises someone is there.
I wave at him like an idiot, take a deep breath, walk to the cafeteria door, pluck up courage, and push it open. I cross the space between us with his eyes still on me, and join him at the table. He folds the newspaper and sets it aside the moment my hand touches the back of the chair in front of him.
“You didn’t get anything.”
“I was waiting for you.”
I grip the back of the chair without thinking.
“Do you want to…?” He points to the same chair.
I’d like to, yes. To sit here with you. To talk, maybe even smile at you, to understand who you are and why you keep appearing in my life when I least expect anything to happen. And I wish I didn’t feel guilty towards those who are no longer here, just for thinking and wanting all these things.
“Everything okay?” he asks, after realising I’ve been standing in front of him, just staring.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“And do you maybe want to find out?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He nods slowly, as if turning my words over in his mind.
“All I know is that I want to sit down.”
He sketches a half smile.
“With you.” I don’t know if I’m still breathing as I say it. “I want to sit here with you.”

Author Bio:

A. S. Kelly was born in Italy and now lives in Dublin, Ireland, with her husband, two children, two cats, and many plants.

She worked as a literary translator for several years before she began writing full-time. Today, her books are available in English, Italian, and Spanish.

A. S. Kelly writes emotional, heartfelt romantic fiction. Her most popular series are The O'Connor Brothers and From Connemara with Love.

She enjoys yoga, running, and swimming. She also loves gardening, photography, and reading mystery and crime novels.

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If You Were Mine Blitz

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Teaser of Not Done Yet by Brian Nelson

 

The Magical Run of the College Team That Lost Its School

Nonfiction; Sports, Baseball

Date Published: 11-17-2026

Publisher: Mission Point Press

In the spring of 2024, Birmingham-Southern College’s baseball team learned that their 170-year-old school would close before their season ended. Rather than surrender to disappointment, Head Coach Jan Weisberg and his players rallied around the program’s culture of playing for the person beside them. Amid uncertainty, grief, and growing national attention, the young team mounted a remarkable final run built on resilience, brotherhood, leadership, and purpose. More than a baseball story, Not Done Yet explores how people respond when the future they expected disappears—and what it means to finish with integrity when everything around you is ending.

Excerpt

The rise and ultimate fall of Birmingham-Southern College, a small liberal arts school on a hilltop in Birmingham, has a history that mirrors the fortunes and struggles of the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1859, Alabama Southern University opened its doors in Greensboro but nearly closed them two years later when most of its all-male student body left to fight in the Civil War. By 1866, the student body had dwindled to twenty-eight. The school quickly rebounded, however, and in 1889, the graduating class numbered 289 students, including the first woman graduate.

In 1898, another Methodist school, Birmingham College, was established less than a hundred miles away. The new college was perched on a hill near the western edge of the rapidly growing city of Birmingham. After the Civil War, the two cities were a study in contrasts. While Greensboro was still largely dependent on cotton, Birmingham had made the smart move to steel, and its booming economy led to its nickname: “The Magic City.” By 1918, it was clear that two Methodist colleges this close together would be unsustainable. The answer: merge the two and call the new school Birmingham-Southern College.

The merger solved an immediate problem, and BSC thrived—for a while—but faced a devastating enrollment drop during World War I. The college hung on during the Great Depression but lost most of its male students and faculty during World War II. Two decades later, the Civil Rights Era brought new challenges. BSC became an early supporter of the movement, enrolling its first Black students in 1965, and continued to embrace diversity as a core part of its mission.

 

About the Author

 

 Brian Nelson is a lifelong baseball fan, former player, and dedicated coach whose love for the game spans generations. A pitcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1980s, he later coached his three sons and their teammates through Little League, high school, and college. Drawing inspiration from a deeply literary family—especially his grandfather and mother—Nelson brings an analyst's brain, a storyteller’s heart, and impressive baseball knowledge to his writing. After a multi-decade career in finance, he has returned to his earliest passion to tell this story. This is his first book.

Contact Link

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Preorder Links

https://mybook.to/NotDoneYetMagicalRun

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Mission Point Press

Interview of G. Mascarenhas author of She Forgot She Was Free

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She Forgot She Was Free is a powerful invitation to remember who you were before fear, expectations, and survival convinced you to forget.

She Forgot She Was Free is an invitation to remember the woman you were before fear, expectations, achievement, disappointment, and survival convinced you to forget.

In this deeply personal and transformational book, two-time best-selling author and founder of The BECOME Method™, Giselle Mascarenhas, shares the lessons, questions, and revelations that led her back to her truest self. Rather than offering quick fixes or another self-help checklist, she invites readers into a journey of honest reflection, identity, healing, and intentional growth. Through compelling stories and practical insights, readers are challenged to release limiting beliefs, reconnect with their authentic voice, and rediscover the freedom that has been within them all along.

Rooted in the principles of The BECOME Method™, She Forgot She Was Free equips readers with a powerful way to move beyond simply surviving and begin living with clarity, courage, and purpose. Whether you’re navigating a season of transition, rebuilding after loss, or simply sensing there is more waiting for you, this book will remind you that the life you long for doesn’t begin by becoming someone new, it begins by remembering who you have always been.

Because the person you are searching for has never been lost.

She has simply been waiting for you to remember her.

╰┈➤Book Details

● Title: She Forgot She Was Free
● Author: Giselle Mascarenhas
● Genre: Self Help
● Sub-genre: Inner Child Self Help/Transformational Self Help/Motivational Self Help
● Language:English
● Pages: 132
● Paperback ISBN: ‎ 979-8234125965
● ASIN: B0H6M1PSHT
● Publisher: Mija Media House
● Publication Date: June 23, 2026
● Price: Hardcover $37.99, Paperback $25.81, Kindle $9.99
● Amazon: https://a.co/d/04aiKYWO
● Purchase Signed Copy: https://signedcopy.netlify.app/

INTERVIEW: 

 

Can you tell us a little about yourself? Are you a full time author?

I am an author, but I wouldn’t call myself a full-time author. I’m a builder.

For most of my life, I have built businesses, developed people, created communities, and taken ideas that existed in someone’s imagination and helped turn them into something real.

Today, I am the founder of The BECOME Method™, and my work is centered around helping women remember who they were before the world told them who they needed to be.

I am also a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and someone who is still very much in her own process of becoming.

She Forgot She Was Free is my first book, but writing it helped me understand that storytelling has always been part of what I do. I just didn’t always use a book to do it.

I don’t think of myself as someone who has arrived and is now teaching everyone else how to get there. I am living this work right alongside the women I serve.

I think that’s important.

BECOME isn’t something I created from a textbook.

I lived it first.

You have been building businesses and leading organizations for years. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that?

Building is probably one of the most natural things I do.

I can see something before it exists.

Throughout my career, I have helped build businesses, brands, communities, programs, movements, and leaders. Most recently, I served as COO of a women’s empowerment organization where I helped develop chapters across the United States and Canada and was preparing for expansion into South America.

And I loved that work.

But there was an unexpected lesson waiting for me inside all of that success.

I had become incredibly good at helping other people build their dreams.

I wasn’t nearly as good at betting on my own.

That realization changed the direction of my life.

I began to see how often I had placed myself behind powerful people, powerful brands, and powerful movements. I could recognize greatness in someone else immediately, develop it, create strategy around it, and help bring it into the world.

But somewhere along the way, I had made myself smaller.

Eventually, God began asking me to take all of that ability I had spent years pouring into everyone else and finally use it to build what He had placed inside me.

That is the season I am in now.

And it has become some of the most meaningful work of my life.

Can you tell us about your latest book,

She Forgot She Was Free: Returning to the Girl You Were Before the World Got Loud?

She Forgot She Was Free is a memoir-style journey back to the girl you were before the world got loud.

It begins with little Gi, the little girl I was before I learned to perform for love, approval, belonging, achievement, or acceptance, and follows the moments in my life when I slowly forgot that I was already whole.

Some of those moments were enormous.

Others would look almost insignificant to someone else.

That’s actually one of the reasons I wrote the book.

We can make lifelong decisions from something that happened in a matter of minutes.

Someone embarrasses you at eight years old and suddenly you decide it isn’t safe to dance.

Someone you love disappoints you and you decide people can’t be trusted.

You experience rejection and decide you need to achieve in order to be valuable.

Then thirty or forty years later, you are still making decisions from a belief you don’t even remember creating.

The book explores my own versions of those moments, not because I believe my story is extraordinary, but because I believe women will recognize pieces of their own stories inside mine.

Ultimately, this book isn’t about becoming a better woman.

It’s about remembering that the woman underneath all those layers was already there.

Can you pick out a passage in your book to share with us?

There are so many passages that mean something to me, but this one holds the heart of the book:

“You do not find yourself.
You return to her.”

And that is really what I want a woman to understand.

We spend so much time searching for ourselves as though we disappeared somewhere.

I don’t believe you disappeared.

I believe life happened.

You adapted. You survived. You achieved. You became responsible. You learned what received approval and what didn’t. You picked up identities that helped you belong.

And underneath all of it, you are still there.

Is this your only book?

For now!

She Forgot She Was Free is my first book, and becoming an author wasn’t something I had mapped out for myself.

In fact, God spent about a year nudging me to write it before I finally listened.

So I’ve learned not to tell God what I’m not going to do next!

What I do know is that the book opened something in me. It showed me the power of using our stories, not to remain inside what happened to us, but to understand what it cultivated within us and then use it to serve someone else.

Whether the next expression of that is another book, an anthology, or something I haven’t imagined yet, I am open.

How can people benefit from reading?

She Forgot She Was Free: Returning to the Girl You Were Before the World Got Loud?

I hope they stop trying to fix themselves.

That’s the benefit I want more than anything.

I want a woman to read this book and begin recognizing where today’s decisions may actually be coming from yesterday’s wounds.

Where did you learn to become smaller?

Where did you learn that love had to be earned?

Where did you stop trusting yourself?

Where did someone else’s opinion become your truth?

Where did survival become an identity?

And then I want her to look at all of it with love instead of shame.

Because my message isn’t, “Look at everything that’s wrong with you.”

It’s the opposite.

Look at everything you survived. Look at everything you learned. Look at the woman who is still standing underneath all of it.

You are not almost whole.

You are not working toward wholeness.

You are WHOLE right now.

The work is remembering.

Thank you so much for this interview, Giselle. What’s next for you?

BECOME.

The book helped me understand that what I thought was a personal journey was actually the foundation of my life’s work.

Today I am building BECOME as an ecosystem of experiences designed to help women move from remembering into living.

That includes The BECOME Method™, Dream Labs, BECOME THE CAMP, anthology experiences, methodology development, and other spaces where women can uncover what is theirs and begin building from that truth.

But I’m also trying to stay very present with what God is showing me next.

For most of my life, I thought being powerful meant knowing exactly where I was going.

This season is teaching me something different.

Sometimes power is saying:

“God, show me what is mine.”

And being willing to move when He does. 

 Excerpt:

“Beat It”

If you grew up in the 80s, you understand what Michael Jackson meant.

Not as a celebrity. Not as a pop star. As a feeling.

My bedroom walls were covered in him. Floor to ceiling. Every page I could tear from every magazine that had his face on it, I put it up. I would climb on my dresser drawers and stand on chairs just to reach higher, just to fit one more. My brother John knew this. And because brothers are built to find the exact thing that will undo you, ripping one of those pictures was his most effective weapon. That was the deal, unspoken but understood, touch my Michael Jackson pictures and I stop raiding your Little Debbies and cereal. We had a whole economy built around it.

But Michael Jackson wasn’t just decoration on my walls.

He was proof that you could be fully, completely, unapologetically yourself, and the whole world would not just accept it, they would lose their minds over it.

Third grade. The school talent show.

I signed up to dance to Beat It. I borrowed a dress. Black tights that were slightly too small. I was not nervous. Not even a little. I was a great dancer and I loved Michael Jackson and the combination of those two facts felt like more than enough reason to get on a stage in front of the entire school.

When the music started, I stopped thinking.

I just danced.

I hit every move. I got lost in it, the way you only get lost in something when you are doing exactly what you were made to do. No performance. No awareness of being watched. Just a little girl and the music and the complete and total freedom of a body that knew what it was doing.

When it was over, the cafeteria stood up.

The whole cafeteria.

Elementary kids on their feet, cheering, for me, for little Gi who had just danced her whole heart out in slightly-too-small tights without a single moment of self-consciousness.

I remember that feeling. I want you to feel it with me for just a second before I tell you what happened next.

That feeling, of being fully yourself, fully alive, and being met with that kind of love, that is vitality. That is exactly what this book is about. Not the applause. The aliveness that came before it.

I signed up again the following year.

I was going to dance again. At this point I was certain, certain, that I was either going to be a ballroom dancer or a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. It was not even a question in my mind. It was just a matter of which one.

Then I got called to the principal’s office.

Mrs. Champion sat across from me and told me that before I could perform in the talent show, I would need to audition privately for her. Because last year, she said, and I still remember her tone more clearly than her words, my dance moves had been vulgar. And I would not be allowed to perform if I did anything like that again.

I was in third grade.

I did not fully understand the word she used. But I understood her face. I understood the disgust in it. The way she looked at me like my aliveness, my joy, my freedom, the very thing that had made every child in that cafeteria rise to their feet, was something to be ashamed of. Something that needed to be contained. Auditioned. Approved before it was allowed to exist.

I went back to my homeroom teacher and told her I had decided not to perform.

She asked why.

“I just don’t want to anymore,” I said.

And I sat down.

I did not have the language for what had just happened to me. I did not know that a grown woman had just looked at a little girl on fire and made her feel like her flame was a problem. I did not know that the thing I did most naturally, the thing that made people come alive, had just been handed back to me with a note that said too much.

What I knew was the feeling in my body.

The same body that had been lost in the music, free and uncalculating, was now sending a different signal.

A warning.

A familiar click.

When the light shines too bright on you, move it.

Point it somewhere else before someone decides your brightness is the problem. Before they call it vulgar. Before your heart gets shattered by someone else’s discomfort with your aliveness.

I had already learned the light switch.

Mrs. Champion just gave me the first real reason to use it.

– Excerpted from She Forgot She Was Free by Giselle Mascarenhas, Mija Media House, 2026. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author

Giselle Mascarenhas is the founder of BECOME™, creator of the BECOME Methodology™, and author of She Forgot She Was Free. An entrepreneur, speaker, and transformational guide, she has dedicated her life’s work to helping people reconnect with who they were created to be so they can live with greater purpose, freedom, and intentionality.

After years of building businesses, leading organizations, and walking through seasons of personal growth, Giselle recognized that lasting transformation does not begin with external success, it begins with remembering one’s authentic identity. That realization became the foundation of the BECOME Method™, a proprietary methodology designed to guide individuals through a transformational process of self-awareness, healing, alignment, courageous action, and embodied growth. Unlike a framework that offers guidelines for achieving a specific outcome, The BECOME Method™ is a comprehensive method of personal advancement that can be applied across every area of life, leadership, and purpose.

Her debut book, She Forgot She Was Free, is both a deeply personal memoir and an invitation for readers to embark on their own journey of remembrance. Through honest storytelling, reflection, and faith, the book explores the universal experience of losing ourselves beneath expectations, fear, pain, and performance, and the courageous journey of rediscovering the freedom, identity, and purpose that have always existed within us. Rather than simply telling her story, Giselle invites readers to see themselves in its pages and begin writing the next chapter of their own lives.

The book became the catalyst for the broader BECOME movement, an expanding ecosystem of transformational experiences designed to help people move beyond inspiration into intentional action. Through immersive workshops, retreats, leadership development, educational programs, community experiences, publishing initiatives, and speaking engagements, Giselle equips individuals with practical tools to create meaningful and lasting transformation. Every experience is grounded in the belief that personal growth is not about becoming someone different but remembering and embodying the person God uniquely created each of us to be.

Known for her ability to blend heartfelt storytelling with practical application, Giselle creates spaces where people feel seen, challenged, and empowered to take meaningful action. Her presentations combine vulnerability, strategic thinking, and actionable guidance, allowing audiences to leave not only inspired but equipped with a clear path forward. Her work resonates with entrepreneurs, leaders, professionals, educators, faith-based communities, and individuals seeking deeper purpose and authentic fulfillment.

Beyond her work as an author and speaker, Giselle is passionate about developing leaders who create ripple effects within their families, businesses, organizations, and communities. She believes transformation is contagious, that when one person remembers who they are and chooses to live courageously, they give others permission to do the same. This philosophy continues to shape every initiative within the BECOME movement.

Through future books, collaborative publishing projects, leadership academies, retreats, and global speaking engagements, Giselle’s mission is to help millions of people reconnect with their God-given identity and become the fullest expression of who they were created to be. She envisions BECOME as a worldwide movement that empowers individuals to live intentionally, lead authentically, and create lasting impact for generations to come.

Giselle lives in Texas with her family and continues to write, teach, speak, and expand the global reach of the BECOME movement. Whether on stage, in the pages of a book, or through transformational experiences, her message remains the same: the person you are searching for has never been lost, you have simply forgotten who you are. Remember. Rise. BECOME.

Visit her website at www.thebecomemethod.com.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤Twitter: https://x.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Instagram: https://instagram.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21957760.Giselle_Mascarenhas

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