A Time For Everything

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The world lost an amazing person this week with the passing of Dolly Parton. Not gonna wax poetic because there's plenty of beautiful things being said about her. But I love her music, I love her acting, I love her philanthropic endeavors. She was a soul without match.

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And there's really no graceful segue from Dolly Parton to "I've apparently decided I don't have enough to do," so I'm not even going to try.

I've been busy as heck between writing, publishing, and my Etsy endeavors. So naturally, I've added running my writers group's annual romance contest back onto the pile.

The Carolyn Readers Choice Award and I go way back. I was its first coordinator back in the day, then handed it off and watched other people keep it going. The most recent crew has been running it for five years, which is a long time to wrangle entries, judges, scores, deadlines, emails, and all the other moving parts that go into a book contest.

They were understandably ready for a break.

And somehow, here I am again.

The good news is that I'm not just stepping back into the old system. We're taking the opportunity to overhaul a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff and make the contest easier to run—not just for me now, but for whoever gets handed the reins next.

Which means I've spent an inordinate amount of time lately buried in forms, rules, category descriptions, judging procedures, spreadsheets, old files, and approximately eight thousand tiny decisions nobody entering a book will ever know had to be made.

Because apparently this is what I do for fun.

That's about all the chaos I've got to report for now. Catch you in two weeks—and until then, stay cool, stay hydrated, and try not to add any new projects to your plate.

I'll try to take my own advice.

...my sweet Karma kitty...

Not sure if it was taken in summer, bit it looks summery!

The words are coming along well since the retreat. I'm now past 24K, almost to 25K, which is halfway to my goal of 48K to 50K. I'm enjoying the writing of this book a lot--a little more than I usually do. I'm hoping to have the first draft done by the end of October.

AND! I made it to the Dallas Zoo finally. DD and I had tickets for Dollar Days last year, but I ended up not being able to go due to a last minute work issue. I almost thought I was going to miss this year but we made it work.

Here are a few pictures of our visit. The last time I visited the Dallas Zoo was October of 2019--only, Amber and I were there to see hockey players, not animals. :0) The Dallas Stars season ticket holder event was held at the Dallas Zoo that year and we went, of course, as I was still a season ticket holder. We saw a few animals while waiting in line, but as the evening wore on, it got darker and the animals went to bed.

A few pictures from this year's visit...

And that's about it for this post. I'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Take care and stay cool!!