Joanne

Christmas Rose is available in paperback! So much has been going on these last few weeks it took us longer than usual to get the cover designed and the book uploaded. And by “so much” I mean two birthdays, Christmas, New Years, an anniversary, more overtime for Josh, getting the kids started back in school again, grocery shopping trips we turn into long and fun days out by going far afield, and all the other stuff that goes into day-to-day survival for a large family. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll have seen some of what we’ve been up to. For those who haveRead More →

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. This isn’t the first time I’ve started to post in the last couple of months, but my other attempts never made it past the draft stage. Life has been turned on end around here lately. Each day is a constant battle to monitor and control Buddy’s blood glucose. We had him all evened out and everything was going great, but then he caught a cold and that really messed everything up. He’s over his cold now, but his numbers are still all over the place. Four days ago (has it really only been four days?!!)Read More →

Ever made a mistake? Just a simple miscalculation. You look at the calendar hanging on the wall, knowing you have six days, seven hours, and however many minutes until such-and-such happens. Then when that time is up you find out that your calculation was off by a day and you missed whatever it was you were looking forward to doing. It’s disappointing isn’t it? Or frustrating because that thing you were waiting for was something really important and now you’ve blown it because the numbers didn’t add up right. That happened to me. Last night, in fact. A week ago I sat down and calculatedRead More →

Yes, I know, I’ve been neglecting the blog. There is so much to do and so little time to do it, seeing as I decided to basically rewrite the entire book. No, I didn’t have to. I could have used the old manuscript, but one thing led to another which led to another and here we are, just a couple of weeks shy of release day, and 99.5% of the book is new so far. And I couldn’t be happier (and take it from me, the new version is 99.5% more interesting than the old). I went into this unexpected rewrite thinking I’d only changeRead More →

I’m making progress on Yours, Mine, & Forever. We’re up to chapter 12 and I’d be writing now, except I have two electric trains running around the track in my writing room so I’m doing other writing-related things instead. Like blogging. Someone suggested I include a recipe to, I guess, sort of go along with the book. I was supposed to do that in another post and didn’t because I tend to rattle on too long to add too many things all at once, so I’m devoting an entire post to it because I’m pretty sure I’ll find something to talk about. I usually do.Read More →

So, yeah, I had another post planned that was supposed to go up the day after the last one. Didn’t happen. Life got in the way. Then I was busy working on the next chapters of Yours, Mine, & Forever. Which kept me rather busy. Not that I found that particular problem troubling at all. I enjoy writing and enjoy seeing what my characters get up to. In this case, there was a problem, one character went all ninja on another character, and now I’m working on the aftermath of the problem and trying to figure out what lesson my characters are going to haveRead More →

I’m a bit late with this post, I know, but today was a busy day. I’m working on the next part of the story, changing things, realigning the story to match Dreaming of More, and rewriting parts I don’t like. That was the case today. I was working over the instigation of the conflict in Yours, Mine and it just struck me as wrong. I tried doing it, my beta reader—who’s been amazing during this scramble to get Yours, Mine done—didn’t walk away with the right feeling, so I headed back to the drawing board to ratchet up the conflict some more, but when IRead More →

If yesterday’s post is true—I know it is because I wrote it myself and even went so far as to reread all the original emails from the days surrounding the spark of the idea so I got them all as accurate as possible—Dreaming of More started out as a dream. A very detailed dream. Not the typical type of dream where Random Person 1 comes up to a writer and says, “Oh, hey, I had a great dream. You should totally turn it into a story.” Writer 1 gets all excited, grabs a new notebook and pen, and settles down to scribble ferociously as Random 1 tellsRead More →

To continue with the behind the scenes details about the making of Dreaming of More, today we’ll look at where the story came from. In late October of 2018, I was knee-deep and rising in a series that, sadly, is unlikely to ever see the light of day. I won’t go into that too much here, because I want to talk about Dreaming of More, but suffice it to say, to publish that series I’d pretty much have to rewrite the entire thing. All six books and counting. The idea alone is enough to make me want to run for the hills. I think IRead More →

If you aren’t already aware, Dreaming of More releases on the 25th. That’s only two days away. Someone suggested that I take these next few days to introduce you to my book and tell you a little of the backstory. So this is me, telling you about the book. We’ll start with the cover, because that’s the first thing you see when you look at the book, or come to my website. It all started several months ago. I’d finished writing the book and had begun the self edits. Progress was slow, and while I was wasn’t working on that I had plenty of timeRead More →