Blog (Page 2)

So, I didn’t get around to posting yesterday, but I decided that was probably a good thing because I really didn’t have enough to say about the characters in my book to fill a paragraph, let alone a full blog post. Instead, yesterday was all about family. We packed up the whole family, filled a backpack with snacks, two others with water, and headed off into the woods on the back of the farm. Josh knew of a hickory tree the loggers had cut and was interested in seeing if the treetop had any straight lengths that would work for making an axe handle. TheRead More →

You might be sitting there wondering what the title of this post has to do with writing The Serendipitous Adventures of Maddison Case (note to self: choose shorter titles in future, they’re easier to type!) and you’d be correct in doing so. After all, everywhere you go in the writing world you’ll find people telling you that, whatever you do, make sure it’s real. Do the research. Read everything you can on the subject. Make it believable. When I wrote Yours, Mine, & Forever, I never calculated how much time I spent researching adoption. I still don’t know, don’t care, and aren’t going to try toRead More →

The Serendipitous Adventures of Maddison Case is part of the Celebrate Lit April Showers promo and I thought I’d share a little of the story of how it came to be. It’s still a work in progress, but it will be finished one day. I just don’t know when yet, because I’m not setting any deadlines. Today I’ll share where the idea came from and why I started writing a book that isn’t my usual genre. It went something like this… I started writing the third book in my Taking Chances series, Christmas Rose, back in early October. I assumed that, because it hadn’t beenRead More →

Well, we’re a few days into the book tour and I think it’s going well. Am I making a bunch more sales? No. But (and I might be wrong on this, but this is my thinking) I don’t necessarily see that as the point. Exposure is what we’re going for here. Putting my name–my books–in front of as many people as we can. Some will become intrigued by the story and will (hopefully!) pick it up and read it. Others will skip over it in favor of a different book. But both groups will (again–hopefully!) recognize my name in the future and another of myRead More →

In some ways it feels like it’s taken both forever and no time at all to reach this point. You know how you felt as a kid leading up to Christmas where every day seemed to take twice as long as it should and the time just dragged and then suddenly Christmas is there and you can’t believe how quickly the time passed? It feels like that. Or maybe that’s an adult thing when you’ve got kids who moan about how time drags while you’re watching the days and years tick over fast enough to make your head spin? In case you’re curious how IRead More →

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 →