• Sunday Snippet: The Holiday Reprise Edition

    Mes, Amies, it’s been a long week and I didn’t get to writing my snippet this week, so you get a repeat. It’s one of my personal favorites, so I hope you enjoy… Despite struggling financially, my mom always made the holidays a treat for me and my sibs. We always had a Christmas tree, the house was always filled with the scent of cookies baking and there was always, always music. Oh, the music of it all! Mom would go to the Firestone store or to the Marathon gas station every year and pick up their annual Christmas album to play on our old console stereo. Remember when a…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Summer’s Closing…Sorta Edition

    I really can’t believe it’s Labor Day Weekend. The lake is busy, busy as it is every holiday weekend, so we went out early this morning for a boat ride to avoid the crazy. There is a sort of leaving feeling in the air here in our little lake community. Some folks will close up their cottages for the season, others (like us) hang on a bit longer. We generally start closing up closer to Halloween, but we’ll pull the boat in late September or mid-October. But fall is definitely on the way. The cottonwoods and walnut trees are turning yellow and dropping leaves. On our way up to the…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Mom Edition

    It’s Mother’s Day and although I sometimes have trouble with whole concept, which I once was convinced came about because a greeting card company needed sales. Turns out my cynicism button had been pushed because that’s not how it came about at all. A woman named Anna Jarvis spearheaded the celebration of Mother’s Day because she wanted to honor her mother who’d passed three years earlier. She ushered in the first Mother’s Day with a church celebration in West Virginia. And on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday in May as national Mother’s Day and asked Americans to give a public thank you to all their…

  • Sunday Snippet: The How Is It Possibly 2023? Edition

    Good morning! I actually know the answer to this one–days pass, time goes on, life continues whether we are prepared for it to do that or not. I’m not going to set intentions or goals or resolutions or even find a word for the year. Neither am I going to reflect back on 2022. Y’all were there. No need to rehash what turned out to be a difficult year for me. I am, however going to name the things for which I am thankful from 2022 because gratitude is key to everything else in life. If we aren’t grateful for what we  have– the ups and the downs–how can we…

  • Sunday Snippet: The “I Can’t Remember” Edition

    Had lunch with Liz yesterday and it wasn’t long enough, but we both needed to get going, so we parted ways reluctantly. On the way to the cottage, I thought of something else I wanted to talk to her about, and I nearly called her from the car, but I didn’t because we both needed to focus on driving. I still can’t remember what it was I wanted to tell her… and that seems to be a theme in our lives. “I can’t remember… ” There are so many of those moments anymore. I can’t remember why I came back to the guest room closet… so I leave, get halfway…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Grandboy Edition

    Grandboy days are always the best for Husband and me, and they’re fewer right now because he’s in school and he’s involved in things like being in plays and doing stuff with his parents and friends. Plus ,you’re never sure exactly how interested a ten-year-old boy is in being with a couple of old farts. But in his words, “I love being you guys. This house feels so comfortable.” I’m not sure there’s a higher compliment in the world than that. He was sad when we sold the “Christmas House,” thrilled when we lived with him and his parents for six months, and sad when we found our new home.…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Gone Fishin’ Edition

    Yup… I really had nothing for today. My brain is exhausted and empty from finishing up the second book in the Weaver Sisters trilogy for Tule Publishing. I’ll be sending it off to my editor tomorrow and I’ll be on pins and needles until I hear from her. I’m never sure if I’ve hit the mark or not–sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but with the help of my editor, the awesome and brilliant Sinclair Sawney, it will turn into what it should be. So, this morning, when I was lying awake in bed, wondering what I was going to write about in the Sunday Snippet, Son texted, “Anybody awake?”…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Lefty Edition

    No, I’m not talking politics, I’m talking literally from the left side. That’s how I see life because I’m a lefty. And not just left-handed, but extremely left-handed. Don’t ask me to do much of anything with my right—it simply ain’t gonna happen. It’s not always easy being a lefty in a right-handed world. I grew up during the time when old-fashioned school teachers thought that being a lefty was a bad thing. My first grade teacher thought it was just plain wrong, so she made me sit on my left hand and write with my right as I learned to form the alphabet. I did it. I was six…

  • Sunday Snippet: The I Might Need a Vacation Edition

    It’s been a crazy month so far. With the release of THE VALENTINE WAGER on February 1 came a flurry of promotion, blog appearances, giveaways, interviews, and book signings (one canceled due to weather, the other, a great success!). In the midst of all this, I’m still working on editing gigs for clients and doing revisions on the first Weaver Sisters book. My mind is a bit on overload and my brain is…well…tired. I was thinking last night how much I’d love to go to that cabin in the mountains of North Carolina where the Word Wranglers had their retreat last August. How I’d love to rent it for a…

  • Author Spotlight: Liz Flaherty Has a New Book and a Holiday Giveaway!

    Congratulations, Roseann McGrath Brooks, you are Liz’s winner! She’ll be in touch! “Some of the joys in being a septuagenarian are unexpected. Google is one—how else did you think I knew how to spell septuagenarian? Dressing however you want is another. It’s especially fun to wear what a blonde twenty-something on Facebook assures you is completely wrong for you.” – Liz Flaherty, Window Over the Desk Getting romance novels published is hard for me these days—not so much because I’m the age I am, I guess, or because I look the age I am, but because I sound the age I am. The editors I’ve worked with in past years…