Five Minutes Peace

I had wonderful delusions of keeping up to date on this blog at least once a week. In reality....
Still doing promotions for The Bookstore Lady. I'll be doing a blog tour once I find some more wonderful writers who will host me and plan to have some special guests of my own. I'll let you all know where & when!

Have Four Possessions with Beta readers before I send it off to my agent in September and have some paperwork to clean up for Dawn as well.

Book Two of the Wild Blue Mysteries, tentatively titled The Mystery Lady, is written and undergoing edits.

Aside from that it's been a very busy summer between work and training to grade for my Green belt in karate in September. I'm also juggling writing time between spending time with my oldest son before he goes off to University. There will be big changes in store this fall! On the plus side, I'll have more writing time once the kids go back to school.

Read a wonderful book the other day. Anne Van has written a great book called Tokyo Dare you can order on Amazon. Anne is a fellow writer who shares not only the same agent (Dawn Dowdle at Blue Ridge Literary) but the same publisher (Books We Love) as I do! Feel free to check her out! Great book and I really hope she has a sequel!

Have a great weekend!

 

The E-Book Process

When Books We Love offered to publish my novel The Bookstore Lady, I didn't expect it to be available until later this summer. Wrong!

We designed the cover last week, did the edits Thursday/Friday and added my dedications then Saturday morning, the novel went up on the internet. The Bookstore Lady is now live at Smashwords and All Romance e-Books. It will be live at Amazon, B&N and Kobo and will filter over to Sony and the iBookstore from there! http://networkedblogs.com/N783T

WOW!

Now I am scrambling to get links everywhere I can on Facebook, my blog, my website, my writing group site, everywhere! Then I can take a breath.

So what's next? Into the editing cave I go! Edits for Four Possessions, my second book which I'll place into my agent's hands this fall.
After that, I'll work on The Mystery Lady, book #2 in the Wild Blue Mysteries series. Looking forward to reuniting with Danny Walker and Leo Blue, my favourite detectives!

I am so grateful for all that has happened in the past two weeks--good and bad!
While the good gives motivation, the bad offers perspective and introspection.

Stay tuned!




 

A Lazy July Sunday

Now that all my paperwork is done for The Bookstore Lady and I need a day to shift gears to edit Four Possessions, I wanted to do something a little different. Yesterday, the kids and I celebrated our town's 150th birthday by wandering through the festivities downtown. Parading dragons, acrobats, artists, dancers and singers abounded. So did the heat! Today, with the rain, we wanted to do something a little bit different.

Having obtained my Reiki III not so long ago, I've been itching to teach some of what I've learned. My kids, likewise, have been asking me to teach them. With the rain coming down in buckets this morning and hubby away, my kids became very willing students. We only did a half lesson, giving them time to absorb the things we discussed, but wow the things that came out of that session were amazing!

First off, who knew three teenaged boys could sit still so long without a computer or a video game?

Secondly, meditation means different things to different people. It blew my mind what each boy thought of what they went through. Sensations of heat/cold/peace/comfort and gifts received during the guided meditation.

Thirdly, how energy pulses through each of us in different ways. One son's hands were hot, another son's hands were warm and the third son had one hot hand and one cold hand.

The one thing that struck me the most about all of it was the rain outside. It was raining when I took my Reiki I a few years ago. It was kind of an affirmation for me. A cleanse of sorts. Today, the rain poured while we did attunements then died off as we ended the session and chatted.

Afterward, I felt like I'd achieved a wonderful sense of peace and energy. Energy that has guided me today to recreate both my blog and my website! I hope you, my wonderful readers, like what I've done!
Please don't hesitate to leave a comment.

Love and Peace,
Diane
 

Contracts signed, scanned and delivered!

Just a brief update to say I have signed and sent out two contracts this week!
1) to my agent allowing her to represent Four Possessions.
2) to the publisher Books We Love to agree they can publish The Bookstore Lady.
Time to celebrate then set my focus on editing!
Woohoo!

A pause while I catch my breath!

What a wild week at my house!

First off, the older kids finished school Monday. My oldest is now officially a high school graduate AND enrolled in University AND got his first real job for the summer and has to get up at 4:30am every day! My middle son is taking advantage of having the house to himself to squeeze in video games, friends hanging out and walking with me. My youngest finishes school today and HAD to go because he and a buddy are going out for lunch. Hard to believe how mature they can all be in the real world. Certainly a different story at home!

As for me, I got a great email from my agent on Wednesday to say that she wanted to represent Four Possessions and work on getting it published. Woohoo! Great way to start the day, which led to a good karate class that I sweated like crazy in. It was when I came home for lunch afterward that I nearly fell off my chair...

My wonderful agent Dawn phoned me to say we had an offer to publish The Bookstore Lady!! I won't give out details just yet until all the paperwork is signed etc. Needless to say, its hard to eat a stir-fry when you're dancing around the kitchen. Things get messy!

We're holding onto the offer until today because The Bookstore Lady is also with three other publishers. Dawn sent them each a notice to say we have an offer and if they want it to speak up before the weekend. Today is the deadline. We'll know by tomorrow at the latest what my options are and I may be able to submit more books to them in the future!

Wow! Very glad for a long weekend this weekend! Need to sit back and catch my breath for a few minutes.
Of course then I have to update my blog when I get more news, update my website, update facebook, send out twitters...

Silver Linings

Things have been a little hectic in my life over the past couple of months. I've been sidelined by some crazy allergies to things I never thought I was allergic to, I've gone on a doctor supervised elimination diet to try to weed them all out. The list seems to grow daily as I add things back into my diet. Things like green tea, honey and dairy products and that's just the first of many I'm sure. Yikes. Certainly a life changer.

Another life changer was my oldest son turning 18 this year. Wow. I'm so excited for him. Such a realm of possibilities are opening up for him! University. A job. Travel. My biggest wish for him is to live the life he loves. To find joy in every day life.

Joy can elude us so easily, can slip from our fingers and be replaced by darkness, frustration and despair. I have tried to raise all my kids to find a silver lining. To look for the positives even in the negatives. A Pollyanna view? Perhaps, but good is always there lurking.

My writing career has stalled for the past couple of months as I deal with my health issues and "real life" took over. Too busy to write, to edit, to think. Too distracted by all the big things to bother with sitting and focusing.

Then came a rainy Monday.

Stuck at home with cranky weather, no vehicle and a bad mood, I sat and I wrote. As I wrote, emails came in from my agent. More rejections, but with it came more possibilities and the request for a sample of my latest manuscript. The one I was working on right that minute. A silver lining.

Now I face the excitement of a new deadline and karate classes with a possible grading.

Better get cracking!

Exactly one month since my last post. At least I'm consistent!
Very busy gearing up for a big karate event at work so I've let a few things slip like checking emails and updating my blog.

On the writing scene, I'm still waiting for the last of the first seven publishers to give either thumbs up or thumbs down on The Bookstore Lady. What's a writer to do while they wait? Karate, of course. Kidding!

A draft of my latest manuscript Four Possessions is now finished and off to one reader. I will seek others next week. Just when I think I'd take a week off and focus on other things, I decided to help my oldest son job hunt. While he went and handed out resumes, I ended up writing. Book 2 in what has suddenly become a series. I had a title picked out but then this character came along and has changed everything. Now I'm a bit adrift and he's taken over and the body's been found...

So much for my hiatus. It's funny how characters have a way of taking over and changing what you thought would be an easy, peasy little murder mystery. Nope. Cue one hunk with a sword and all bets are off!