Musings
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Sunday Snippet: A Day of Lake Life Revisited
Some days are just perfect lake days, you know? Days where you’re having so much fun, you forget to take pictures, you forget you even have a phone, so what this post lacks in pictures, I hope I can make up for in words. I got up early to write, but before I started, I made coffee and checked the outside temperature. When I opened the front door to slip out onto the deck, a doe and her two fawns were nibbling our neighbor’s hostas. The fawns still had spots, so they were pretty young. They bolted when they heard me, but they sorta hung around because we kept spotting…
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Sunday Snippet: The Power Outage Edition
So, I’m writing this on Saturday and it’s storming like crazy up here at the lake. Wind, rain, thunder, lightning–all the good stuff that make a Midwest summer storm. We’ve had branches down–cleanup is coming as soon as the rain ends and a power outage that happened right at breakfast time and lasted about three hours. We ended up having warm cantaloupe, which I cut up by flashlight, and graham crackers for breakfast because we didn’t want to open the fridge during the outage. I wasn’t able to work because my laptop battery had just started to charge when the power went out… too bad for editor Nan, who does…
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Sunday Snippet: The Rainy Edition
It’s been soooo dry here in the Midwest for the last four weeks. We’ve been watering gardens every day, and the potted plants sometimes twice a day, but we held back watering the lawn because all the experts said not to. It’s hard to watch your lovely green lawn go slowly to brown straw, but lawn people say that you can let the yard go without water for up to four weeks before you risk losing it. After four weeks, water only every two weeks to keep the roots hydrated. So we waited… and day before yesterday, Husband finally set out the sprinklers and gave the grass a good drink,…
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Sunday Snippet: The I’m Really Tired Edition
I am… it’s been a very trying week. Some of the reasons are personal and I won’t go into them here, but ending the week with the SCOTUS overthrowing Roe v. Wade was pretty much the capper on a completely shit week. That said, I’m not going to get all preachy here, I’m just too tired… Instead, how about a real snippet from the next book that is releasing in October–The Fireman’s Christmas Wish. It’s Becker Lange’s book and honestly, Beck just melts my heart. I wasn’t sure how putting this grumpy divorced firefighter with chipper, sweet nursery school teacher, Harley Cole, was going to work, but wow, these two…
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Sunday Snippet: The Snoozy and Anticipation Edition
I’m at the lake this weekend, sleeping. Seriously…it’s as if someone has drugged my beverages. All I want to do is sleep. We’re both in that mode. I think it could be both of actually relaxing for the first time in months, but we’re going to bed early-ish, waking up late-ish, and taking little catnaps throughout the day. We should be getting some things done here at the cottage–window washing, floors need to be scrubbed, and we need to trim around the edges of the yard. The boat is finally in the water, and I did vacuum it really well yesterday before we launched, but the seats need to be…
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Sunday Snippet: The Am I Irrelevant Edition
So, I’m thinking today about how much of the world I am not a part of anymore–specifically, pop culture. Liz and I talk frequently about how we are aging out of many things. She wonders if she’s aging out of romance novels–reading and writing them. I sometimes wonder if I’m aging out of being able to keep my plate as full as I do with editing gigs and writing deadlines and book promotion because stuff falls off sometimes, and more often than I like, it’s fun stuff like time with family and friends. Every now and again, I watch younger writers who go after their lives with fervor and energy…
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Sunday Snippet: The It’s a Snippet Edition
Beth R, you are the winner of a free e-book! I’ll be in touch! Good Sunday morning to y’all. The sun is supposed to be shining here at the lake after a few days of gloomy skies and rain, rain, rain. However, no sign of sun yet, it’s rather cloudy and foggy… I imagine the sun will be along at some point. I’m working quite a bit right now and trying hard to get writing done on the second book in the Weaver Sisters trilogy. I’m also pushing like mad to get promotion set up for Falling for the Doctor. To that end, here’s a quick snippet from the second…
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Sunday Snippet: The Procrastination Edition
I’ve been procrastinating…okay, no big news, right? I am a world-class procrastinator. I passed amateur status years ago and have gone into full-time professional procrastination. Nobody wastes time as well as I do. And honestly, it doesn’t even have to be time spent scrolling around the Web. I can put off doing anything that needs to be done with something as basic as folding laundry—oh, excuse me for a minute, I do have to get some stuff out of the dryer… brb… Fifteen minutes later…I’m back, clothes folded and put away, next load is in the washing machine, and while I was in there, I scrubbed the sink and the…
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Sunday Snippet: The Rethinking My Energy Edition
This week I had a long conversation/catch-up with my dear friend and former editor, Lani Diane Rich. She is an amazing writer, teacher, editor, person, who always inspires me to be better. We’d lost touch for a while and seeing her face again warmed my heart and restored my soul. Writer friends, if you haven’t gotten into Lani’s How Story Works podcasts or the book, I highly recommend both or either. You will rethink how you tell your stories, I promise. Among the many things that Lani and I talked about for almost two hours was how we spend our energy–are we truly spending energy on what we value or are…
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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…