• Sunday Snippet: The Begin Again Edition, Plus a Snippet!

    Good Sunday morning, mes amies. It’s kinda cloudy here at the lake and the forecast is calling for rain and cool temperatures, which is okay. We need the rain and it’s supposed to be sunny and pleasant the rest of the week. So boat rides after work, but no swimming–the lake has cooled off considerably. We’re having guests this week, which is always a joy, but we also have work to do. Husband plans to scrub the back of the cottage, we need to reset the last of the border bricks in the back as well, and we’ll start scraping the deck in prep for priming and painting sometime before…

  • 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 Wow, What a Week Edition

    And it was indeed, mes amies, quite a week! Author Nan has had a pretty cool time this past week. Right off, the story for Joey and Kara–book 2 in the Walkers of River Edge series is underway and so far, I’m liking it. Right now, the best part is researching garden shops and nurseries and plants. Wow. So much to learn to write these two characters. It’s a shame I don’t retain too much of what I learn in this research, isn’t it? Next, the Authors Over 50 podcast I did with Julia Daily ,back in April, dropped on Thursday and I sound halfway intelligent, which is always a…

  • Sunday Snippet: The I’m Really Tired and I Got Nothin’ Edition

    I’m not going to whine, even though I feel like I could. Isn’t it funny, though, how you can’t seem to catch up on sleep? Why, do you suppose? I mean, it makes sense to me that if you miss some sleeping time, then sleeping more later should fix it. But things don’t seem to work out like that. Right now, I feel like I could sleep for a week, but I can’t do that, so here I am. On the upside, I’m at the lake, I’ve gotten to swim several times this week with friend Moe and Grandboy and Son, and we had time with our kids up here.…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Travelogue #1 Edition

    We made it to California! Writer buddy and fellow Tule author, Carol Light and I are almost to our Tule Author Retreat. Carol flew from her home state to mine, where I joined her on a very crowded Southwest flight to Dallas. After a couple of hours hanging out in Dallas, we caught our flight to Burbank. Both flights were full, but honestly, no delays and everything went so smoothly. Tired, but happy, we got a Lyft to our hotel and settled in. Since we didn’t have a car and the hotel is in rather an industrial part of Burbank, we opted for supper at the hotel restaurant and were…

  • Sunday Snippet: The How Does It Happen Edition

    It’s July. How did that happen? I’ve been married for 50 years! How did that happen? Grandboy is 11. How did that happen? I’ve got 14 published novels and another two on the way in 2023, plus I’m contracted to write four more books for Tule. Whew–how did that happen? I’ll be 70 in two months, how the hell did that happen? Can you tell I’m a little overwhelmed with… well, life stuff and work stuff at the moment? I am, yet I go on ahead and do what needs doing because don’t we all? Right now, it’s all about the writing… People ask me all the time, “How do…

  • Sunday Snippet: The Whine, Then Find the Sunshine Edition

    It’s been a tough week. My shoulder hurts, really aches, from spending so much time in front of my computer, working on editing gigs and writing Jack and Maddie’s story. Son is dealing with a lot of stuff that I wish so much I could take off his plate, but I can’t. I can only listen. (Even when they’re in their forties, your mom instincts kick in.) We’re doing work on the lake cottage, making choices about where we want to spend refurbishing dollars this year, except that those dollars now have to be shared with medicine expenses because I hit the damn doughnut hole with my heart meds this…

  • Sunday Snippet: The No Thanks to Aging Edition

    Been thinking about aging, particularly after the neighborhood yard sale we had this weekend. So many of the folks participating were our age or older and as anxious as us to purge some of the stuff they’d had in their homes forever and a day. Ironically, a lot of the people wandering the ‘hood buying the stuff the rest of us were getting rid of were… wait for it… people our age. Go figure, right? A few years ago, when Husband and I moved from our home of 37 years to our new place here in the ‘hood, we did a major purge. Like truly big. A wonderful group of…

  • Sunday Snippet: Another I Got Nothin’ Edition

    Seriously…I got nothin’. Right off, I’m late with this–usually I have it up at 6:30; it’s now 7:15. I lingered in bed this morning because it is a dang chilly morning here at the lake, we worked hard yesterday, and the kids came for supper and Euchre and we stayed up late-ish. We did have a great time after supper. Son went around the table for a couple of hours and had each of us pick a song we wanted to hear. He cued every one up on his Apple music app and played them through our Bluetooth speaker, so we listened to a mad variety of music from 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…