UPDATE: The winner is…Colleen C!
*~*~*

Outside, the sun’s shining, the temperature is a nippy, slightly breezy 41 degrees. I’m ready for it to get warm enough for me to start working on the pool. It’s an icky chartreuse at the moment!

I’m a little tired after “mom duty” last night, but it’s nothing a strong cup of coffee won’t cure. Then I’m going to tackle bills, do some housecleaning, and maybe, just maybe, write a little today…

Contest

Complete the puzzle then tell me what you can’t wait for…
It’s obvious what I can’t wait for. 🙂
One commenter will win a $5 Amazon gift card!

UPDATE: The winner is…Becky Ward!
*~*~*

By Diana Cosby ©2020

Happy New Year!!!

Dreams are visions of what we can become.  But dreams are also an invitation to doubt, to wonder if you’re good enough, or if you have what it takes.   When I retired from the Navy, I decided to pursue my dream of becoming a published author.  After 100 rejections, I quit counting as I figured I knew how to achieve a rejection.  Then, after 9 ½ years, I finally sold.  The journey taught me many things, which I’d like to share with you.

-Take yourself seriously:  If YOU don’t, no one else will.

-Associate with people who inspire you, and encourage you to achieve your dreams.  Encourage and inspire others as you move toward your dream.

-Set a clear goal:  Once you know exactly what you want, break down steps to achieve it.  If you’re unsure how to start, read biographies of people who have achieved a dream similar to yours.   What steps did they take?  Are there comparable avenues you can pursue?

-Success is a compilation of small steps toward one focused goal.

-Affiliate yourself with professional organizations:  Join accredited groups to educate yourself about the industry you’ve chosen.  In addition to net-working, you will have opportunities to learn from local or on-line sources.

-Self affirmation:  Each morning reaffirm that you are good enough and clarify your goal of the day.  Then, move forward with positive, focused steps.

-Permission to fail:  Success is not a moment, but a journey.  As we grow within our craft, there will be times when we fail at a certain step.  Focus not on the failure, but on the lessons learned.  What worked, what didn’t?  Move forward and make wiser decisions with the knowledge learned.

-The way we act and talk about our goal reflects our commitment to it:  What are you telling yourself?  “I WILL do this!”  Or, are you assuring yourself that one day you’ll really try?

-Give the gift of example:  When you make the choice to follow your dream, you are doing more than commitment to self, but teaching your children an important life lesson — dare to dream, and follow through.  So, be bold.  Believe in yourself.

I hope you’ve found inspiration from my comments.  Remember, there is no right path, but the steps right for you.  Believe in yourself!

*How do you encourage others to go after their dream?

I sincerely wish everyone health, friendship and happiness for the New Year!

Contest

***ONE winner will be drawn from everyone who posts on my guest blog post about, “A New Year’s Guide To Achieving Your Goal!,” on Delilah’s blog between 3 January 2020 – 12 January 2020.  The winner will receive one of Diana’s mugs and a tote.

Diana Cosby, International Best-Selling Author
https://www.dianacosby.com/
The Oath Trilogy
MacGruder Brother Series
Forbidden Series: Forbidden Legacy/Forbidden Knight/Forbidden Vow/Forbidden Alliance/ Forbidden Realm‒14th April 2020

Christmas 2019 is over, and the New Year is finally here. 2020! A clean slate just ready for my  plans and plots. I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions anymore. I used to make them, but I found that by the end of January they were already a distant memory. Now, I just try to make general goals for the year and hope I can stick to them.

My goals this year are fairly simple. I want to keep a consistent release schedule for my books.  I have two ongoing series, my Terras Five Cyborgs and my Northern Rockies Werewolves. Although both are romance, one is a sci-fi series and the other is a paranormal. My hope is that by alternating between the two, I will be able to keep both fresh and not start to recycle the same plot with different characters in each successive story. I find my muse gets bored and stale if I just stick to one universe. (I’m sure a psychologist would love to explore that idea!)

Click on picture to pre-order!

On a personal front, I want to continue to spend as much time as I can with my grandkids while they are still willing to be seen in public with me. I have a day planned to see the latest Star Wars movie with the oldest four (ages five through thirteen) this weekend. We’ll go to the afternoon show, get pizza for dinner and then they can have a sleep over. I love going to the movies with a group of kids. They aren’t embarrassed to show their enthusiasm for their favorite characters!

As five of  my grandkids live within a fifteen minutes of my home, and one of them goes to high school a mere three blocks from me, I have an revolving door policy that means they are always welcome to drop in, be it for few minutes to grab a glass of water or to stay overnight and make popcorn and watch a movie on Netflix or Disney plus. I cherish these times, and hope they always feel welcome to drop into my home unannounced. Being a grandmother is one of the best things that ever happened to me!

I am also determined to be more active. Since my day job is a desk job, and writing is also very much a sit still kind of activity, I have to find hobbies that make me move (unfortunately reading isn’t active either!) This fall I entered Merlin the Wonder Dog in an advanced agility course, and it turns out he loves it! Santa brought him a set of weave poles for Christmas so now we can practice at home. Come spring, I’m considering letting him compete in the local agility competitions.

Lexi is much younger, really just a pup (maybe a year old?) so I am working on basics with her. So far she has mastered not looking terrified all the time, and sitting on command. I spent a lot of time getting her not to cringe and crawl when anyone looked at her so I hesitate to teach her ‘down’. Right now we are working on leash manners. As in, walking while on leash as opposed to dropping to the ground and playing dead.

So that’s it for my plans for 2020! Here’s hoping it’s a wonderful year for all of us,

Happy Reading!

Anne Kane

Good Lord, it’s 2020!

Happy New Years, everyone! I hope you had a party, friends and family, drank some bubbly! It’s nice to celebrate the passage of time. I’d love to hear how you welcomed in the new year!

I didn’t do any celebrating last night. My mother was released into our care from the hospital yesterday. We’ll have extra support from hospice, but it’s up to us to care for her, 24/7. So, last night I slept with the baby monitor next to me, with her in the next room, so I could hop up whenever she needed help.

We’re glad to have her back home. It’ll be work, but she’ll be happier in her own place, with her family around her.

Her care, her future and ours, is a bit up in the air, but I still made plans for what I want to accomplish writing-wise. This is a snapshot of my workplan for the first quarter of 2020.

Does it look like gobbledygook to you? Okay, it looks crazy busy, and it is ambitious, but I have to try to get there. While mom sleeps, I’ll write. Kind of like now.

I am blessed with family that pitches in. My brother and his wife have been RVing around the country, but they’re presently parked in our pasture, ready to pitch in with whatever we need done, for as long as we need them here. Last week, my sister flew down to keep mom company when they moved her to a larger hospital in the city. That was a huge help.

My dd lives right across the road with her big family, and yesterday, her husband tore down her bed and put it in storage before hospice workers arrived with a hospital bed and lift. Her room is set up like a hospital room now, and we’ve got all the supplies in—gloves, masks, menthol inhalers (my dd has a sensitive nose), bed pads, etc. We’ve done this before—for my grandma and my dad. We’re set. We know how to do this.

I moved into my mother’s office with the bare necessities of what I need: my laptop, planner, a watercolor notebook, and a portable set of watercolors. The baby monitor is next to my laptop monitor, so whenever she’s awake, I’m in there with her, checking on her comfort.

Probably more details than you guys want. All writers live these exciting lives, right? Gorgeous cabana boys at poolside… Well, we’re people, too, and sometimes life isn’t easy.

But I have plans. Stories to tell. I’ll find the time to write them! ~DD

2019 was not a good year for me.

After a long illness, my father passed away in March. His care, up to the time of his death, placed a pall over everyone. We knew what was coming. We took care of his needs—getting him to dialysis, cleaning the ulcers on his feet, the day to day of helping a mostly wheelchair-bound man get around… We didn’t mind any of that. We just wanted him comfortable and happy. After his death, personally, I felt drained of energy and creativity. Mourning is a malady, just like flu, and it also makes you susceptible to every bug going around. So, I barely wrote.

That’s why this list of releases for 2019 is so short. I’ve always been a prolific writer, but I couldn’t make myself sit at my computer and do the work. If you missed any of these releases—some new works and some re-worked previous releases—the links are embedded here:

1. 01/22/19 – ANIMAL, Montana Bounty Hunters series
2. 03/11/19 – ALONG CAME A SPIDER, Men in Uniform Anthology
3. 04/30/19 – STRANDED, A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology
4. 05/14/19 – GILDED CAGE, Femme Surnaturel series, reissue
5. 07/14/19 – NEW ORLEANS NIGHTS, SEALs in Paradise series
6. 07/30/19 – QUINCY DOWN UNDER, short story, reissue
7. 08/12/19 – BIG SKY WEDDING, Montana Bounty Hunters series/Brotherhood Protectors crossover
8. 08/30/19 – MAMBO’S DOOR, Femme Surnaturel series, reissue
9. 09/24/19 – QUINCY, Montana Bounty Hunters series
10. 11/05/19 – HARVEST MOON, Beaux Reve Coven series

My favorites projects to work on from the list were…

 

We lost my grandmother, who also lived with us, in 2018, after months and months of in-home 24/7 care. We lost dad in 2019. At the end of this year, my mother’s health has taken a hit. She’s spending the New Year holiday in the hospital, while we wait for the doctor’s to tell us what her future will be.

I’ll be glad to see the end of this year. I’m not very hopeful on the home front for 2020, but I do have a plan to do better on the writing front… More about that tomorrow.

I’d love to hear how you deal with sadness. Any advice would be appreciated.

Nothing in Margo Simmons’s life comes easy. She can’t claim the inheritance on a condo apartment her uncle has left to her until she is gainfully employed in a job for a year. She meets the man of her dreams but anguishes over a loving relationship because he is still emotionally tied to his deceased wife. With great difficulty, she becomes the guardian to a recently orphaned child she had been tutoring. Margo evolves from an insecure, newbie elementary teacher into a woman determined to fulfill the secret desires locked in her heart. My story speaks to anyone who has suffered a loss and had to start over.

Get your copy here!

From the Author

1. Why romance?
Everyone needs a lift from the day to day grind.

2. What’s up next?
Suspense in WWII and a psychological suspense.

3. Who inspired you to write?
Two deceased friends who were great mentors.

4. Is there romance in your personal life?
Yes, my husband who courted me while we were dating and is still romantic.

5. Do you believe in second chances?
Yes. We should all have one in love. My book talks about second chances.

UPDATE: The winner is…Debra Guyette!
*~*~*

Hello, everyone! I want to start with a giant thank you to Delilah for letting me play on her blog again. It’s always a blast!

So, it’s the end of the year, time to take stock of what we accomplished in the past twelve months and take a look at what we want to do in the next twelve. I had big plans for 2019, and I’m sure many of you did, too. Did you reach those goals you set for yourself, or did you aim a little too high?

I started looking at my 2019 list back in October and shaking my head. They seemed perfectly realistic when I put them on paper last year. Since I managed less than half of them, I have to say that wasn’t true. Oh, sure, if I wrote full-time, I don’t doubt I could have pulled them all off—they were nowhere near the amount of writing I did when my kids were little and I was home full-time. But I have a day-job now, so I should have been more realistic, clearly.

That made me take a much harder look at my goals for 2020. I had already scaled them back a little, realizing my 2019 list was too much. Then I looked at them again and chopped off some more, thinking how much more discipline I could exercise in the new year to make things happen. Then I looked at them again the other day, with a voice in my head telling me it was still too much. Sure, lots of people can pull off half a dozen book releases in a year. But I haven’t done the self-pub thing yet, so it’s going to have a learning curve for me, and I don’t want to screw it up when I get there. That lopped a couple more things off the list, in case I need more time than I’m anticipating to navigate those new waters.

I’d like to say I have a perfect goal list in front of me right now, but I think I am still going to do some fine-tuning in the next couple of days before the new year starts. The way the past few years have gone, with family things and the day-job, I’m leaning toward giving myself plenty of elbow-room for my goals, enough time to actually make them happen, and happen right, not half-assed. I’m sure it still won’t be the perfect goal list—I’m far from perfect, so why would my goals for the near year be perfect? But it will be closer, and if I exceed my expectations, well, that would be great, too, and give me a boost of confidence when I start on goals next fall for 2021, right?

How much time do you take to work out your goals for each new year? Do you obsess over them (as I feel like I’m doing this year), or do you just put them down on paper and leave it at that without too much debate? I’d love to know—I’m always looking for new ideas that might help me out, and they may be useful to someone else as well—and I have a shiny new 2020 Llewellyn’s Witch’s Calendar (wall version) to give away to one commenter.

About the Author

Elizabeth Andrews has been a book lover since she was old enough to read. She read her copies of Little Women and the Little House series so many times, the books fell apart. As an adult, her book habit continues. She has a room overflowing with her literary collection right now, and still more spreading into other rooms. Almost as long as she’s been reading great stories, she’s been attempting to write her own. Thanks to a fifth grade teacher who started the class on creative writing, Elizabeth went from writing creative sentences to short stories and eventually full-length novels. Her father saved her poor, callused fingers from permanent damage when he brought home a used typewriter for her.

Elizabeth found her mother’s stash of romance novels as a teenager, and-though she loves horror- romance became her very favorite genre, making writing romances a natural progression. There are more than just a few manuscripts, however, tucked away in a filing cabinet that will never see the light of day.
Along with her enormous book stash, Elizabeth lives with her husband of more than twenty-five years, and frequent visits from her two young adult sons, though no one else in the house reads nearly as much as she does. When she’s not at work or buried in books or writing, there is a garden outside full of herbs, flowers and vegetables that requires occasional attention.

You can find her virtually at www.ElizabethAndrewsWrites.com or on social media.