Getting Back To It

This Friday afternoon will mark my first day back in the office at my regular job (the one that pays the bills) since Friday, March 20th. For ten weeks I've been able to work from home, something I've considered a privilege. My office is unique in that there are only six people in a lot of space. Technically, we could've stayed working there, but the boss gave us the capability and the option to work from home. I am very lucky to work where I do.

This isn't the first time I've worked from home, but the past couple of times were by choice not necessity. Once was an attempt at advertising sales, the other was an attempt to make money solely as an author. Neither worked out in the long run. Whether it be from age or the different type of work, this time I enjoyed being stuck at home a lot more. Of everyone in my family I'm the only one not suffering cabin fever. I have gone grocery shopping every week the past month (as soon as the store opens on Sunday morning only). Plus we've picked up to-go orders and such, so I haven't been stuck completely at home the entire time.

Since my life will be getting back to a semblance of normal by the weekend, I'm hoping to get back into a writing groove. I've received an order of bags with my logo on them and am considering some other promo items. I really miss going to book events and meeting readers. One of the items I'm considering is a credit card sized magnifier that can be used as a bookmark. I might do a FB or Twitter poll, but feel free to comment below on whether that's something you would pick up (for free) at a book sale or if there are other items you like to see as giveaways on authors' tables.

It's going to take a while for everything to feel "normal" again, or for us to get used to our new normal. I hope all of you have stayed healthy and safe during this pandemic, and I sincerely hope we're on the homestretch. Keep reading and take care.

Happy 2016!

Happy 2016! I hope all of my readers had a fabulous end to 2015 and so far a great New Year. I finally got back into the writing groove late in 2015. I have an idea of what caused my general funk and hopefully that will never happen again. We shall see. So far things are moving along well and I've been inspired to write on multiple fronts.

2016 will bring in three releases for me. The sequel to Born of Stone: Born of Magic, will be out in the summer. Keep your eyes peeled for the cover reveal. My third Archangel book will be out this year as well, but no dated pinned down yet. Also, They Call Me Death is currently undergoing a major make-over. My initial thought was to give it a minor make-over with a basic re-edit. However, my new editor is AMAZING and has my creative wheels spinning like crazy with his initial feedback. So, there may be some major rewrites there after all.

More news: Ellora's Cave will be putting my Love Beyond Barriers series in print this year. I'm currently trying to think up titles for the two paperbacks. Have an idea? Shoot me an email or comment below. Also, if you own the series and remember seeing a typo, PLEASE let me know. I plan to spend this coming weekend rereading them myself.

On the personal front: I decided not to bother making actual resolutions this year. I'm sick of feeling like a failure in mid-February. So instead I'm going to continue to try making smarter lifestyle choices. I actually started this a couple of months ago. There have been many hiccups so not a lot of visual progress yet, but I'm hopeful. I can say that writing again feels so good, it definitely has me in the right mindset. 

That's it for now but stay tuned for more news. I'm hoping to set up some signings around my new release dates. Want me to come to your city? Please let me know.

My Ridiculously Emotional Week

Though I'm not currently a pet owner, if someone were to ask I'd probably claim to be more of a cat person. I've owned both in the past, but my current attitude of not wanting to bother with much makes me lean toward cats when considering future pets. However, my office is in the business owner's home at the moment, so we have an office dog: his miniature dachshund named Shrek.

I didn't realize how close I've gotten to this little dog until Wednesday morning when I arrived at work to find him missing. He had somehow gotten out of the gate and was roaming the streets of Houston on a grand adventure. Meanwhile, the humans in his life were freaking the hell out. Work skidded to a halt and sat on the back-burner as we literally walked the streets, knocked on doors, and begged local businesses to post his flyer in their windows. It was a hot, sweaty, emotionally harrowing experience that I never want to repeat.

Amazingly he was returned to us safe and sound Thursday night. I'm sure he thought he was on vacation, much as his owner currently is, who has no clue Shrek was ever missing. Overall, it was a nerve-wracking few days and I'm emotionally wrung-out from the experience. But at least Shrek is now home where he belongs.

I hope your week was nice and uneventful.  

The Fine Art of Politely Saying 'NO'

Aside from my glamorous life as a multi-published author, I also have a full-time day job. I sell advertising for a local magazine Monday through Friday. So that means I make cold calls on a daily basis and get to talk to people I've never met before. Some of these people are friendly, some of them are annoyed, some of them are too busy to take my call every single time. But the one type of person who I absolutely HATE to call is the one who won't say NO. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean the one who says yes. Unfortunately, that magical three letter word is few and far between most days. But that person is markedly different from the one who absolutely won't say no the first fifty times I call them.

This anti-NO person is the one who strings me along day after day, week after week, and month after month with a maybe. This person can't make up his/her mind to save his/her life and just refuses to commit. So I keep calling and emailing in the hopes they may give me that magical three letter word noted above.

Even worse than the maybe person is the one who simply refuses to ever answer the phone and/or return a call or email. They obviously don't realize that not getting an actual NO means I WILL keep calling and emailing month after month after month. If you don't want something, just say NO. It's not hard, really. All you have to do is wait until the salesperson takes a breath and then say "No, thanks." That's it. No fuss, no muss. I know not all salespeople are the same, however, in my office NO means NO. If we're told not to call anymore then we don't. We don't want to waste our time any more than the ones who don't want to buy advertising want to hear our voices every month.

And last and most definitely least of my favorites is the rude SOB who hangs up as soon as I identify myself. I mean, come on. Is it really that hard to just say NO?! It would take literally seconds out of that person's life to say no AND THEN hang up. That's it. That's all. And I promise it doesn't even hurt.

So yeah, I had a few of these today. Can you tell?

A Child Died Today...

...he wasn't my child. I'll bet he didn't even consider himself a "child". But I considered him one of the many I interact with on a daily basis. I'm a server in the cafeteria line at a high school and today one of our students was killed. He was stabbed by another student who also stabbed three more. Now everyone wants to know WHY? Does it matter? I want to know HOW? How can this child have so little regard for human life, including his own? How can he reach his teens without learning all life is precious? How can he have not known or cared about the consequences for everyone involved? How can this keep happening in our schools, with our children?

The only thing that kept me sane through the entire ordeal was knowing none of my children were on that campus. They all attend other schools and I was the only one of us there. I was in the kitchen, in the back preparing lunch when it happened as breakfast was ending. Today will be a day I never forget no matter how hard I try. Many parents' knee-jerk reaction is to want to pull their kids from this school, but where would they go? Where is safe? Past incidents up north have proven even the smallest, quietest, most affluent communities can be attacked by a person intent on killing innocents. It sickens and infuriates me in equal measure.

So I'll hug my girls more tightly tonight. I've already reminded them to always run the other way when they see or sense a confrontation. I've warned them not to stop to take photos or videos. Their life isn't worth a damn twitter pic. There's no school the rest of the week but we'll be back to it on Monday and the memories will last my lifetime.

And Yet Another Direction

From time to time I might talk about my personal schedule. The fact is I'm a mother of four, I work part-time, and I write as often as I'm able. Back when I first started writing seriously I was working full-time. I would write only on my one hour lunch breaks, and I was able to complete a few novellas that way. Now my schedule is about to change again. I got a new job.

It's nothing glamorous but will take up a good chunk of my day. I'll be working in the morning until early afternoon Monday through Friday. I'm still keeping my part-time job too since that one is only every other weekend. So, what does this mean for my writing? Well, it doesn't mean I'm going to stop. That's for certain. However, I'm going to have to get creative on when I get to write. I'll have the weekends I don't work and I should have late afternoons and evenings. The good thing is my husband works nights. The bad thing is I still have to make dinner for the kids every night.

Overall there shouldn't be a serious decline in how much novel writing I get done. I just have to rearrange my schedule. However, it might affect my online presence a bit. Evenings are when I'm usually playing on Twitter and Facebook. Though I probably still will while writing, I'll have to keep it to a minimum to get any real writing done. We shall see. I just wanted to warn y'all that I might seem to disappear for a few days at a time. Especially when I first start next week.

The Blahs

As I'm sitting at my computer fighting the temptation to log onto Facebook, it struck me that I should probably write a blog post. Piece of cake, right? I mean, I'm an author after all. Subjects to wax poetic on should spring into my head at the drop of a hat. Um, not so much.

I'm actually in a blah kind of mood. I feel like writing but don't know what I feel like writing. It's kind of like being hungry when nothing sounds appetizing. 

In case you're wondering, the photos were taken from atop the Ferris Wheel in downtown Houston at the Landry's Aquarium. That's where we spent yesterday to celebrate my oldest's nineteenth birthday. Yeah, that probably is a part of my blah mood too. My own birthday never make me feel old, but my daughters' definitely do.

Checking In

If you keep up with me on a regular basis you may have noticed I wasn't as active online the past week as usual. It's all preteen's fault. One day as she was lying on my office floor staring up at the six bookshelves around her, she decided they needed to be reorganized. I originally had them ordered by genre. I'll admit it wasn't the most organized arrangement. Romance and horror dominate my shelves and had begun to creep onto the literature and fantasy shelves as well. There was also the not so small problem of books that fit into more than one genre. I really don't know how anyone who works in a bookstore can handle it. So together we decided to redo my entire library alphabetically by the authors' last names, regardless of genre or anything else about the book. Did I mention I own 1,078 books?

So yeah, it took nearly the entire week to accomplish. Each day we tackled one shelf. We had to empty each one before adding the right books back onto it. My Stephen King collection took the longest. I own 64 of his books. Then, to make it more interesting, I started visiting author websites to determine the order of my series collections. I now have a ridiculously long to buy list to complete the series. But I have to admit the pain was worth the end result. I own a software program from Collectorz.com to keep track of my library. I hadn't been using it to its full potential before. Now my software can tell me which shelf the book is on, whether or not I've read it, and what rating I gave it. 

So that has been my past week or so. This week I'm working on edits for my archangel book contracted through Entangled publishing. I hope to finish those quickly so I can move on to writing the sequel. 

What is your week looking like?

I'm on a Boat!

Though writing is what I do with as much of my free time as possible, I also have a regularly paying job on most weekends. I pass out a local publication at various trade shows in the Houston area. This past weekend was the Houston Boat Show. 

This was my first time at a boat show, and it was definitely a learning experience. I never knew there were so many different types, shapes, and sizes. I have my future yacht all picked out. Now we just have to see which of my daughters becomes rich and famous enough to buy it for me.

While fantasizing about my leisurely life on the water, I realized a yacht could make a great setting for a romance. Can you imagine being seduced by a hunky hero on one of these babies?

I can!

Who wouldn't want to relax and let the waves rock them to sleep in this set-up? Now I just have to find the right characters to place here and decide on the situation that gets them here. Hmmm. I love when real life can spark an idea for a new book.

Around My Town: Japanese Festival 2013

I live just north of the fourth largest city in the nation. What that means to me is plenty of opportunities to do a lot of cool stuff. Take last weekend for example. The 20th Japanese Festival occurred downtown in Hermann Park. This is a festival my family has attended nearly every year for about six or seven years. We absolutely love it! The best part? Entry is free. For a family of six, that's just what we need.

I don't remember how I first learned of the Japanese Festival. It's put on every year by The Japan-American Society of Houston. This organization is dedicated to " encourage mutual knowledge and understanding of Japan by Americans and of America by Japanese, and to encourage communication between the two countries." (from their website) 

Every year they do a fantastic job of bringing together food, dance, martial arts, art, crafts, and various entertainment from Japan. We stuff ourselves full and buy things that don't last the year. But that's okay because we know we'll just go back next year to buy more. One of my favorite aspects of the festival is the costumes worn by the attendees. If you like cosplay, anime, or anything to do with Japanese fashion (real or in the movies) then you would get an eye-full at the festival.

I was told this bookmark says "Missy".

I would have had a better picture of my food if I had remembered to take one before chowing down. Sorry. The pork and curry over rice was just too yummy to resist.

One of the most popular items (aka longest lines) at the festival are these drinks with tapioca. Umm, not for me but the teens love them.

This year my girls surprised me by trying something new. A bun filled with sweet bean paste. I wasn't adventurous enough to give it a taste. 

Fun for the whole family includes two long tents filled with children's games. This is one the youngest plays every year. Especially since I wouldn't let her try to win a goldfish again.

I take this photo every year and it never gets old. Hopefully she'll still let me when she's in her teens.

This year paper swans were added to the pond. I never got close enough for a better picture, but you get the idea.

Just Because...

I'm sitting in my office and staring out the window as I wait for the rain all the forecasters have promised. As I looked over my blog, site and other online shenanigans I realized I've done nothing but promo on my blog for a while now. I know that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, I started this blog to "talk" to people. I'm not going to lie, I want to talk about my books so you'll know what and where they are. But I also want to just talk about whatever happens to be on my mind at any given time.

In the past I tried doing specific themed posts at least a couple of times a week. Those were great but I ran out of subject matter on each one fairly quickly. Maybe I'll get back to those. I'm really hoping to do the Model Monday or Shutterbug Sunday posts again because some great eye-candy was to be had there. We'll see. For now I just wanted to say hello again without any attachments or expectations. This isn't a "buy my book!" post. Just a little hello from me to you.

So, how have you been?

Spring Has Sprung

I know technically it's been Spring for a couple of weeks already. But now that April is here and the wildflowers are blooming on the side of the highway it really feels more like Spring to me. 

What I love most about this time of year is the flowers. Here in Texas we have a plethora of natural wildflowers that bloom anywhere they can. Our highway department does an excellent job of letting them grow along the roadways. Many people pull over to take photos in the bluebonnets (our gorgeous state flower) which can often be found in dense patches. They are my personal favorite and I'm guilty of harassing my girls into a patch for photos at least once a year.

This year I'm lucky enough to work in one of the most colorful places in or near the city of Houston, the Mercer Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. All of these pretty flower photos were taken there by yours truly just a couple of days ago. I work in the Gift Shoppe (yes, that's how it's spelled) every other weekend. It's one of the most relaxing places I've ever been and I almost feel guilty when I collect my paycheck...almost.

So, even though I'm no gardener I get to enjoy this site on a regular basis.

Your Teacher Did What?!

When I was in seventh or eighth grade there was a teacher in my school everyone called "Barbie". She was tall, slender and had blonde hair. She was pretty as far as I remember, but not drop-dead gorgeous and not promiscuous in any way. Of course the boys always tried to get her attention.

When I was in high school I don't honestly remember crushing on any of my teachers. There was a Government teacher who was also a coach that creeped-out me and the other girls. He once made a friend stay for detention and she told me he removed his wedding band when she walked into the room. I was furious and wanted to cuss him out. She talked me out of it and as far as I remember nothing else ever happened.

Now I have my own children, four daughters to be exact, and I'm pretty damn protective of them. I'm also honest about sex and the possible threats around them. They know what a teacher behaving inappropriately looks like...unfortunately it keeps freaking happening.

Last week teen #2 came home with news that the Senior Coordinator had been caught with a student. Now, I've met this man, had whole conversations with him, and even joked around a bit. Nothing inappropriate at all or even borderline. However, I wasn't shocked. Unfortunately teen #1 was shocked and heartbroken. She's a Senior this year and has known this teacher since she was a Freshman. He's someone she has respected and looked up to for years. Now, that image has been shattered because he decided to have sex with one of his students.

I'm furious that my child's trust has been broken over sex, but I know it's an inevitable lesson she had to learn someday. I'm just glad she isn't a victim here. The worst part in my mind is how this will effect his family (of course, he's married with children), how it will effect his students, and how it effects the parent/teacher relationships as a whole. Those are precarious at best and now one bad decision has fucked it up even more. Yeah, I'm pretty damn angry.

In yesterday's newspaper I saw reports of two other teachers in the general Houston are with accusations. Come on now people. This is getting out of hand. So what's wrong? What's the problem and the cause of this? Why are teachers looking at their students as sexual beings? In my opinion it starts with them forgetting about the line between them and the students where they are supposed to be the ones in charge. This might not always be the case. For some it might be something darker, like a power trip to over use their authority. But for many I see it as a blurred line.

Teachers seem to be younger now than when I was in high school and I think too many of them are trying to be "cool" with the kids. They are trying to "relate" by talking on the teens' level and sharing parts of themselves. Some might think that's a good thing. I disagree. I've always told my kids I'm a mom first. I'm not their "friend", or their "buddy". I'm a mom. I'm in charge. And what I say goes. End of story. Sometimes I do listen to them as a friend would. Sometimes I share parts of myself as a buddy might. But they all know I'm always a "mom" first.

I think that's where these teachers are failing our children. Not all teachers of course, just the ones who forget that they're in a position of authority that they shouldn't take for granted. The line blurs because they're less than a decade older than the kids they teach. They share the same taste in music, movies, books, whatever. They start to see these kids on an even level instead of as their wards. In essence, they are fucking up the very basic concept of being a "teacher" rather than a pal.

So, what can/should be done about this? Hell, I don't know. I would never have the patience to teach. I commend anyone who does, but I also implore you to remember YOUR JOB. You're not there to "connect" with the students on a social level. You're there to teach them and guide them onto the next level of their education. I don't want you to be my kids' friend. I want you to be their teacher. They have enough damn friends.

We've Come a Long Way, Baby

I was talking to teen #2 a couple of days ago and she mentioned how one of her classmates said she was bi(sexual). She said this in the same tone of voice she would have mentioned someone's new Iphone or what she had for lunch that day. What surprised me the most wasn't that a teenager in high school would admit to her friends and classmates that's she's bi, or even the fact that she is bi, but that she knows that. I remember in middle school a very loud and obnoxious girl asked me if I was (don't remember the term she used but she rocked her hand side to side, palm flat facing downward), or if I liked boys. At first I had no clue what she was even talking about but then someone clarified by asking if I liked girls. Everyone around us laughed and humiliated the hell out of me. I told her of course I liked boys just none in our school.

When I was that age and even into high school it was still taboo to be anything but heterosexual, or at least to admit it out loud. There was one girl in the class below me who was admittedly a lesbian. I had no problem with her, actually hung out with her a few times, but there were many others who did and were very vocal about it. I remember thinking they were idiots but I never said anything. I treated her the same as I would treat anyone else, but never defended the bad stuff I heard because I didn't think she would care. Also, I was kind of confused. At that age (somewhere between 14 and 17) I really only knew there were certain guys I thought were cute. But for the most part they were all immature assholes. I had no idea if I liked girls or not. I just didn't think about it all.

The fact is, I wasn't really, truly secure in my heterosexuality until after my teenage years. Perhaps if I had given it real thought I would have known for certain earlier but I didn't. Sure my friends told dirty jokes and there were some talking about having sex from time to time. But we weren't really a group that focused on our sexual preferences. We wanted to have fun, listen to music, watch movies, hang out, and just generally be teenagers doing teenage things. Hell, I didn't even smoke pot. Some may think I missed out but I certainly don't.

So, what I'd like to know is are we helping or hurting our kids by being so open minded and openly discussing sexual preferences now? I have an uncle who is gay and I still remember the day I found out. I was shocked but then once my initial reaction wore off I realized it really didn't matter. I went on my merry little way and didn't think any differently of him than before. I just understood why he had that male friend that had always been around my whole life.

I want my kids to just be kids for as long as they can because frankly, adulthood sucks. I don't want them to have to worry about adult things until they are adults. To me, teenage years are full of enough concerns. Why worry about sexual preferences when you're too young to worry about having sex? I've been very honest with all of my girls. I know they're going to have sex, I'm not an idiot. But I've told them of the complications and dramatics it will entail. So I kind of wish teen #2's friend had just kept that info to herself because it really isn't anyone's business. But now that we're such an info based society I don't think there's such a thing as personal boundaries on that kind of info anymore.

Damn shame if you ask me.