Good morning! How are you? It has finally cooled off here. We recently returned from a week visiting my husband’s family in South Carolina, which was wonderful! His parents just moved to a new house with a swimming pool, so we enjoyed that every day with our nieces. And of course, we got to see the total eclipse! Unfortunately, the pictures I managed to get with my phone were less than impressive, so the best one I have is this one, taken by my sister-in-law at her house. The eclipse wasn’t total yet, but it was getting close! Luminous: […]
Random/Life
10 posts
How is your summer going? Is it summer where you are? I live in northern Virginia just outside of Washington, DC, and it is sweltering this week. My plants are happy, though! Here are some that are either blooming or just finishing up. If you’d like to see more, I post pictures on Instagram.   Thank you for your prayers! While I’m working on A Long-Forgotten Song 4, I’m also hard at work on other writing projects! I finally released the boxed set of Erdemen Honor, which includes ebooks of The King’s Sword, A Cold Wind, and Honor’s Heir. The cover image below is linked to […]
This post was sent as an email to my subscribers yesterday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can subscribe right now! You get a free short story for signing up. What do you think of my new email header? I think I like it. Cara (the owl) is so very dignified. ~~~ A fellow indie author, Brandon Barr, faced leukemia last year. A little over a week ago, he found out the leukemia had returned, and he’s already had his first round of chemo. I can only imagine how difficult this time is. I don’t know Brandon well, but I know […]
I’ve started on a number of new projects, but I need to focus after my long period of post-surgery recuperation. Why yes, I’m almost functional again! Thanks for asking. I’m getting better! I don’t want to go on the cart! I’d originally posted this on G+, but I figured my blog is a better place to do this. Plus a lot of you aren’t active on G+ so maybe you’ll vote this way. What should I work on next? I have an abundance of ideas at the moment. All of these are started but only the first has anything approaching […]
Bear with me. This is a post about me being dense and finally realizing what to do about it. It’s also a post about money and about stress and about “finding balance” (whatever that means) and about blessing others. And letting myself be blessed. And not feeling like I have to constantly prove something to the world. Confession: I am always stressed. I have a wonderful life. I am a stay-at-home mom to two brilliant, adorable, sweet, well-behaved children. I have a husband who is the love of my life, selfless and brilliant and a total hottie. I have wonderful friends […]
A sweet friend on Google+ recently wrote this blog post: Why I’m Scared to be a Mom and an Entrepreneur. If you are a working mom, or a self-employed mom, or a creative mom, or probably any mom at all, parts of that will resonate with you. I wrote my first two books (The King’s Sword and A Cold Wind) before CutiePants was born, but I published them after she was born. I didn’t think of myself as an “AUTHOR” yet, with capital letters and everything. I was just someone who wrote a book or two. That’s actually still how […]
I got up the courage to join the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. Yeah, how silly is that? I’ve been thinking about it for a while because it seems like a great group of people. But another commitment? Seriously? I didn’t want to flake out, so I just didn’t join for oh… months. An embarrassingly large number of months. But here I am, and here’s my first post. I had a major bout of doubt and frustration a few weeks ago. I spent real money, as in triple digits, on a number of advertising and publicity efforts. Nothing really panned out. […]
While I was at Awesome Con DC, I didn’t have the chance/inclination to do a lot of walking around. My back is feeling a bit better now that my parents are here waiting for Baby Brightley to arrive and helping with all the day to day stuff. But at the con, I was hurting, I was tired, and I felt like I needed to be at the table at every moment. It probably was unnecessary, but I tend to feel extra-responsible about things like that. So I didn’t get a chance to see any of the media guests or celebrities. […]
No, this isn’t going to be a blog post about all the wonderful things I would do with a billion dollars… travel the world, devote tons of money to various worthwhile charities (some personal favorites are Gospel for Asia and WorldVision, but there are others I would support too), pay off our mortgage (buy a new house) and grad school loans, and all the other standard things most people would do. This is a “what would I do differently in my writing life if money wasn’t an issue” blog post. All those things I listed above are great, but this […]
First, if you found my site through some strange combination of search terms… welcome! No matter how you got here, I’m glad to have you as a reader for as long as you stay. I haven’t paid much attention to my website stats as I’ve been working on this blogging thing. The stats tend to make me feel like the effort I put into the blog isn’t really worth it, that no one is reading after all. But sometimes I check out the stats, especially how people are finding my site, and there are some pretty funny search terms that […]