A Time For Everything

Image courtesy IMGBIN.

Hey there! Hope you're well. As you can probably tell--blog post title anyone? lol--it's time for my quarterly check-in.

The third quarter was a bit rough for several weeks as the anniversary of Mom's death in August hit me a little harder than I expected--which is to say I didn't expect it to hit me hard at all. Add to that the triple digit temperatures we'd been dealing with for weeks and weeks (and weeks) on end as well as "the turn" I mentioned in my last post.

So all that to say that I probably didn't do very well with my goals since the whole year hasn't really gone the way I anticipated. So, without further ado, let's dive in.

1) Send a postcard to my Grandma in Denmark monthly: I've been keeping up with this. August was Grandma's birthday and she got her usual flower delivery along with a letter.

2) Finish & publish Finders Keepers: not done; not gonna get done although I do want to finish it some day. Whether that actually comes to pass is hard to say. Just want to be realistic...

3) Exercise minimum 3X per week: I fell of that wagon. Grief and heat took its toll. I need to get back to doing my Hinge Health exercises if nothing else.

4) Read 52 books, including 6 non-fiction: I've read 49 books this year so far, ten ahead of schedule according to Goodreads. Six non-fiction books done and dusted. I've read seven so far, with one more waiting in my Kindle. One book tends to lead to the next, so I imagine another one or two will appear before the year is over.

5) Keep up my writers group duties on a weekly basis: I'm caught up as of this post but I wasn't very diligent about keeping up weekly. Mostly monthly, but summer is slow... And maybe I need to take a lesson from my history and reassess my plans going forward.

6) Add one non-hockey pattern per quarter to Etsy shop: Didn't happen. My plan became to have my own store and leave minimal patterns on Etsy, but due to a factor beyond my control, that project is currently stalled.

7) Self care: working on it. Sorta. I think. I think I need to do better.

8) Complete a home improvement project or two: Didn't happen; isn't gonna happen.

9) Read / listen to / watch my writers education items: Didn't happen; isn't gonna happen.

10) Continue to cook /eat healthy / adhere to a food plan: let's just say...I could be doing much better.

11) Stay on track with / up my game with the housekeeping: fell off the wagon here, but trying--albeit not very hard--to hop back on.

12) Keep blogging: I addressed that a couple of weeks ago. :0)

13) Write articles for my writers group newsletter: fell off the wagon here too and with everything else going on in my brain, I just haven't had a whole lot of inspiration. I have an article in progress, but it definitely needs some adjustments.

14) Finally study the Personality Strengths in depth: you know it's been three years and I'm pretty sure this isn't going to happen this year...

15) Get through the Bible in one year: totally on track here. And I've already decided that next year I want to go through the Bible in chronological order.

16) Keep up with / solidify my Goodreads habit: did pretty good until a month or two ago and other than tracking my book reading challenge, I couldn't care less about it any longer. So...we're done with that.

I've given myself grades in the past, but that's not where I'm at right now. Life has reached a crossroads and some of these goals no longer serve me. And that's fine. That's life, right? As the fourth quarter progresses and I assess where I am and where I want to go, I imagine that many of next year's goals are going to have a different look and feel to them.

I hope you're all well dear followers.

See you in a couple of weeks.

I like the weekdays just fine, to be honest. I get stuff done. As the regular readers know, I like routine. There's a day for everything and a task for every day. Oh, man--that's an awful bastardization of the maxim. :0) But it's true.

On the other hand, I do enjoy my weekends, and who doesn't love a long weekend? One extra day to sleep in or to just get other, random stuff done. I personally think there should be a long weekend every month. Who says no?

Now this long weekend, this Saturday, my besties are coming over for a day of writing, brainstorming, and general visiting. I haven't seen them in person since April, and sometimes we all miss just being together. During that first stretch of COVID lock downs, we met every week via Zoom to connect and uplift one another.

We've been a group since the early 2010s; and what a motley group we are in a variety of ways. But these women have loved me and supported me and offered their friendship and experience and knowledge over the years. Each one of them is a treasured gift from God.

The picture above doesn't include our dear friend Michelle who passed in February. She was part of our original group, but due to her medical issues wasn't able to travel much as the years marched on.

I'm so thankful for each one of them.

To be the published author I play on TV?

Me at GRL October 2018.

There's an author event at a local library in April that I've been invited to and that I actually signed up to participate in. It's a full Saturday during regular library hours.

I've done previous iterations of the event--evening, the romance genre only--and my biggest takeaway is that you have to have physical books to sell. The people who attend seem to want to walk away with something in their hands.

Of course, is anyone going to want to walk away with an MM romance? That's the first question.

Am I ready to really be an ally and represent the genre? Will there be people there who enjoy the genre as much as I do? But what book do I choose to showcase my work and the genre? That's the second question.

I finally picked two books and I worked for more than a week to format the MS Word documents appropriately to upload to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing so that I could order physical copies of the two titles.The covers ended up being more of a challenge, but I finally beat them into submission as well.

I gotta say it was as challenging and, more importantly, as tedious as I remember. Part of me was like "Eehhh, maybe I don't want to do this thing."

But five months out from all the heavy thoughts I was having about quitting writing...well, I don't feel like that's a path I'm quite ready to go down. I want to keep writing for a little while longer. I definitely want to finish my hockey series, but after that, I'm not sure what I want to write.

It's not that I don't have a list of ideas--I do--but they're not eliciting any spark of excitement in me at the moment, so I'll just have to wait and see what my mindset is when I have to make that decision.

Another thing I've determined that needs to happen is a revamp of all six books of the first series. In addition to new covers, I need to transition them to the more traditional third person, past tense point of view. Right now, they're second person, present or something like that.

That project might also be a good way to dip my feet back into the writer mindset and habits.

Between the time I drafted this and today, the day of posting, I got the physical copies--LOOK!

The covers need a bit of tweaking, but the insides look great.

Hope you're well. Have a great weekend.

Slowly.

I'm not diving straight into the deep-end. Maybe I am. I don't know...I don't think so really.

After that, I have ideas for at least two additional Linzer trilogies...

Not sure I'll ever get to those, sadly... But I digress...

I love Nate and Wesley, the heroes of hockey book five, called Finders Keepers (cover above), and I do want to tell their story. Nate is a goalie and he finds Wesley and in the end, opts to keep him.

I had two documents--one a revision of the other one with, I thought, a lot of duplicate text.

My first exercise was to read each doc side by side, paragraph by paragraph, and compare. To decide which text, where it's different, I wanted to keep and then to copy/paste into the correct document. 

That process went okay for the first 30-33 pages...then I reached a three-page section that was different and I liked both scenes. So the question became...could I keep both and in what order?

That meant note-carding the scenes. Which I did.

Turns out, not so much duplicate text after all.

As I moved farther through each document after that three-page section, I realized the two documents weren't as similar as I thought. One adhered more to the original plot thoughts than the other, and I was happy to find that that was so. I've often had the thought that I'd veered to far from my original concept.

A resolution to a major plot problem that I'd been struggling with also finally presented itself. When the time comes, I'll be able to rewrite with minimal impact to the dominoes that fall because of that one sticky wicket. I haven't tackled revisions, because I'm still working on the note-carding process, but I know some of what to do now and that's definitely a relief.

I'm working on it a little every day as my brain and my body build up the stamina once again for this kind of work and effort. I had put my writing endeavors in the freezer for safe-keeping when I left for Oregon in mid-March. The thaw and preparation is slow, but that's okay.

Real life has a few things going on that need my attention, I'm still pondering life going forward a bit, and I'm still working in my post-parent-loss grace period.

And fall is lovely; I'm trying spend a lot of time outside enjoying it.

Here's to a lovely weekend for one and all.

I usually only have two to four things to share for Miscellaneous Monday, but today you get a laundry list!

CALL OR TEXT FOR ASSISTANCE

The number to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is 988.

I heard this on the radio while driving to Omaha and thought it a vital piece of information to pass along.

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It seems humanity is doomed to repeat too many of its past mistakes.

You may have heard that there is a spate of book banning going on once again. From what few articles I've read--which isn't many, to be honest--most of the books are LGBTQ-themed. A library in Michigan was defunded after librarians refused to remove certain books, although they did move some books to behind the counter. Librarians in the small Michigan town have been harrassed and accused of trying to "indoctrinate" the town's children.

Long story short, Nora Roberts, donated $50K to the GoFundMe campaign that was started on the library's behalf. She might have donated more, but that was the max allowed!

For the full story, click here...

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Did you know that not only was September once the seventh month of the year, but until 46 BC, it only had twenty-nine days...?

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Remember all that time spent yanking sticker burrs from my yard?? Yeah, for all the good it did. Those are some pervasive little buggers. We had two drenching rains about a month or so ago and everything greened right back up and there were little explosions all over my yard of these things.

click on the image and

LOOK AT THEM ALL!

YIKES! 

Because we have animals who spend time in the yard, I didn't want to buy harsh chemicals that would be toxic for any of them. DD suggested vinegar and a quick Google-search verified this as a valid option. To test its power, I took about 1/2 cup of vinegar and poured it on a handful of those sticker burr plants one evening. The next evening when I checked them, they were browning up/drying out quite nicely. I yanked them out and poured the rest of my gallon jug of vinegar into a sprayer and went to town on several other large swaths of these things.

Lo and behold...

Eradicating these things is going to be an ongoing process. I'm up for the task now, but how long will this enthusiasm last, I wonder... 

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And one last tidbit... I've taken on the job of providing the writing incentive theme & goodies for next years' writers retreat at Lake Conroe.

One dear friend has provided this bit of extra fun for us since the beginning and has asked (finally) that someone else do the honors.

I volunteered immediately because I love this kind of thing. I came up with an idea within minutes and ran it by DD. She liked and now I have ten months to plan the fun and gather the goodies.

And no, I'm not sharing on the off-chance one of them reads this. I don't think they do, but they don't get to know until they arrive at the lake, so it's not fair of me to spill the beans here.

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And that's all I got for you today. Have a great week. See you on Thursday...

P.S. ~ I think I figured out the blog via email thing...I hope it's working out for you. (Let me know if there are issues.) It's working out much better for me.

My darling DD caught sight of these in Dollar Tree the other day and brought them home to me. They definitely brightened my day as well as my week, which didn't start off great. It's ending on a better note, thanks goodness, but I'm glad it's the weekend. (They're salt & pepper shakers, if you couldn't tell.)

I heard back from the online publisher to whom I submitted "the cookie book" I mentioned a few weeks ago. It wasn't a request for the full, so that really bummed me out. I'd had my own doubts about the opening chapter, which was all that I was allowed to submit for the query, but I wanted to get it off my plate and didn't listen to my gut. So while I'm not surprised or devastated at this point, it did sting a little on Monday.

The editor did invite me to revise and re-submit, giving me until the end of next week to get it back to her for possible inclusion in this year's anthology. So guess what I'll be working on this weekend and into next week? There's not a whole lot of work to do so I should be able to get the alterations done and a new query sent...

Anyway, hope you're well and have a great weekend.

I tried to get something up on Monday, but the inspiration, the words just weren't there.

And now it's Wednesday. I don't feel like I should let two official blog days pass without a post, so have a general life update...

I submitted the cookie book to an online publisher this past Sunday. My receipt email arrived Monday. I should hear back within 60 days if it was accepted or not. *fingers crossed* If it's not, then I'll get a cover made and publish it myself next Christmas. No harm, no foul.

I've got three writing projects on my plate at the moment--finishing the epic historical, percolating hockey book 5, and character development for a future series...

I think I'm just about ready to dive into writing hockey book 5--yeah that's only book five, not six like I thought. My list of hockey books included the box set of the first three. So I thought I was on book 6 for a minute there, but then realized that no, I've only got four individual titles out. Book 5 is for this year, book 6 will come next. I've fixed the list, moving the box set to separate list/section to avoid future confusion. :0)

Aaaand....

Hockey is back!

After a false start (half the team ended up in COVID protocols and games were postponed), we--I should say: the STARS hit the ground running with four straight wins. Then they lost two. And got back into the winning column again last night.

Be Loud. Wear Green. Go Stars!

Whelp--

We made it through January, but 2021 goes marching on.

I made a good start on my goals. I cooked meals. I mopped the kitchen and hallway. I sent a letter to my grandma. I worked on character worksheets. I completed and submitted a book. I worked out.

Now that we've turned the calendar page... 

I'll keep cooking and mopping and writing letters and writing books and  watching/attending hockey games.

The temperatures will keep warming and the days will keep getting longer and I'll keep making progress.

Hope you're well. Catch you on Friday!

This weekend will be focused on revisions and getting my book, To Linzer & to Cherish, as close to ready for submission as possible.

I'll also work on my goals list, since, as you can see I don't have those...but I've been thinking about them and working on the list and the action plans. Next week for sure.

Have a great weekend.

Now that Thanksgiving is barely but officially behind us, it's time to think about and start planning for Christmas.

DD has already requested something non-traditional for Christmas dinner. Actually she claims that Christmas dinner has no requirements like Thanksgiving dinner does and has requested spaghetti. Spaghetti is not something I eat often anymore, so I don't think we're going that route, but chips and queso and deviled eggs are already on the short list of nibbles.

Sadly, Sonshine will not be flying home anytime soon, but the Brown Eyed Girl and her soulmate are planning a visit home.

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So far, so good... I reached my word count goal of 1400+ words yesterday and today. Just Saturday and Sunday to go. I do think I'll end up exceeding the projected final word count. Not that it's a bad thing, more words just means completing this WIP might take a little longer, and I'm trying to get to some other projects sooner rather than later.

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I hope you and yours had a lovely Thanksgiving. See you Monday.

Four day weekend coming and isn't that delightful!?!?

Due to the black cloud that is COVID still hanging over society's heads, Thanksgiving will be limited to our household only. I've bought most of the dinner fixin's. I just need to buy another bag of potatoes, because Thanksgiving is NOT complete without mashed potatoes no matter what else you serve. Otherwise:

Ham. ✅

Corn. ✅

Hawaiian King Rolls. ✅

Gravy. ✅

Canned Pumpkin. ✅

Cream Cheese Frosting. ✅

DH also wants turkey, so hopefully there will be a small package of pre-cooked turkey and I want to make cupcakes for the office, so I'll be hunting down another can of pumpkin and container of frosting. I also love stuffing, so I might hunt up a box of cornbread stuffing...

DD is looking forward to a full week off school. She has the 2 / 3 year olds, so they're a handful.

I wish we had a whole week, but I'm definitely thankful for the four days I do get.

I was thinking this morning that I have time to percolate more of the new WIP--I'm writing a short Christmas story to submit to an online publisher for release next holiday season. The deadline is March 1.

Four days of writing for at least four hours at approximately 350 words an hour...that's 5600 words, which is about half the word count I'm shooting for and would be a heck of an accomplishment.

That doesn't include any of the words I write in the meantime and...

I'm getting super excited about the prospect & possibilities right now. 💖

In order to prime the pump a little I'm going to have to work on my Romancing the Beats, well, beats...and get a road map put together.

Oh--I commissioned a book cover for one of two historicals I've had in my back pocket. I think I mentioned them a while back. I got the cover back for the one and I'm so pleased. I wanted to have it to keep me focused and inspired to finish the book, and this cover is gonna do just that.

Have a great rest of your week!

The dental work, that is.

Sorry, no pictures are forthcoming. Last Thursday I had three teeth pulled, the right side canine and the two just to the left of it, and then a bone graft put in. It'll be left to heal for 8 to 12 weeks, at which time I'll have posts put in, and then at some point after that a permanent bridge will be attached. Oh joy. But I'll have permanent teeth and a new and improved smile.

Once I get past the necessity of soft foods--most of which seem to involve carbs unless I eat a lot of eggs--I'll get back on track with my diet plan.

I started my yoga practice again last night and it felt good. I've been missing it.

Now that hockey is over and the dental work has begun, life can get back to a measure of normalcy. I have a book due in a month, so time to get crackin'.

Hope you had a great weekend...