Saucy women packing heat
The golden hour on a lake in Maine.
Saucy women packing heat
 May in South Carolina is pretty nice, other than the constant pollen. It's warm enough to swim, my favorite thing, and warm enough to be outside.
May is also great for traveling north. It has been a long winter, but now we pack up and head to Maine. It's a great chance to see family and friends and it's the annual Maine Romance Writers' Retreat. It's a great time with my fellow writers. After traveling for a few years in the RV, road trips are exciting and bring back so many memories. Every year writers descend to Southern Maine to share stories and wisdom. I think it's the connections with the other writers that sticks with me throughout the year. Everything in the writing community has changed since COVID. We don't have as many writing conferences or meetings, everything has gone online. I'm working on projects for everyone. I'm editing my cozy mystery so that my friends in my community here in South Carolina can read it. Some of my earlier books are a bit more racy. There are more low content books coming as well. I hope you'll check them out by searching on Amazon.
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 I think everyone knows that I like to travel. We spent almost two years living in an RV traveling around the United States. It was a dream. Now that we have a homebase, I still get the itch to travel...frequently.
At the end of March, we boarded a ship in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a seven-day cruise to the southern Caribbean. We stopped at a port every day, but one. The culture, the warmth and the blue water made this trip amazing. It was my mom, my sister, my husband and me on this adventure. We played trivia (we won twice), did beach breaks and soaked up so much history. We went to St. Kitts, where I worked for the University of Medical and Health Sciences remotely during COVID. What a place to attend medical school. Coming home was tough this time. Too much reality is...too much. I'm back in the saddle again. The weather is great in South Carolina, although every day is a high pollen day. I feel bad for my friends in Maine who are still getting snow. I miss them, but not the snow in April. As far as projects, I'm still working on my cozy mystery prequel and a book on flowers of the Northeast. I also have a book for creative types and writers with lots of wisdom that will be republished with a facelift. Finally, four of my books are now available on Audible.com, through Amazon, including my first book Kidnapped. I hope you'll give them a try. Happy Spring with a small chance of pollen.  The Stumphouse Tunnel in South Carolina. Never finished, it remains a cool 54 degrees. Welcome to my website. If you haven't been here before, welcome. If you have, welcome back. I'm not sure what happened in February and the beginning of March, it's like I was sucked into a time warp. I can't even tell you what...no wait. I can tell you what happened. February was the New Jersey Romance Writers 30,000 word challenge. Seriously, I wrote and edited like crazy and basically ignored almost everything else. I reached my goal for the fifth time. And am ready to send my middle grade book out into the world. I'm querying agents this month.
I'm also traveling this month and my daughter is heading to Japan. Yikes. I realized at an event at our community center, that I'm pretty knowledgeable about cruising. I had a man tell he was going on a cruise and had some questions. Well, I had answers. It felt pretty good to be a know-it-all, and help someone out in the process. I published four activity type books in January. Wrote 30k in February and March is all about putting myself out there. I hope ya'll will find some exciting things to do that stretch you outside your comfort zone. (I had to write ya'll a few times and it still looks wrong.) I'm not southern yet. Have a great month.  The new year always brings up thought of goals and the feeling of starting new in every area of your life. This year started off with devastating events. I don't understand how someone can wake up and say, "Happy New Year! I'm going to go cause mayhem and destruction." I shake my head and try to remember that it's a new year and anything is possible. That being said, I'm working on many new book projects. Some fiction and some activity books. My daughter got engaged on Christmas. One of the books I'm working on is a wedding planner. I'm trying to think about everything she'll need to consider when she begins planning. Are you into pirates? I have a trilogy written for middle grade and those young at heart. I hope to have at least the first book out in 2025. I'm getting ready to crush the new year with goals and completed projects. If you have any interesting ideas or things you'd like to see, please email me at [email protected].  I might have started watching Hallmark movies before Thanksgiving. Hey, they wouldn't be airing them if they didn't want us to watch.
Now that Thanksgiving is officially over, I'm in full on binge mode. I don't care that they might be cookie cutter. I don't care that there is a BINGO game to play while watching these shows. I also don't care what people say when they hear I watch these movies. I love a happily ever after, which is guaranteed with these shows. As far as travel in the month of November, we didn't. We drove to our old campground that we stayed in while we were building our house. We planned to camp for two nights, but after a rainy first night and a full day of activities in the cold, we packed up and drove the thirty minutes home. We did go to Energy World and explored the use of nuclear energy in our community. It was very enlightening, and we did more research by watching documentaries when we arrived home. I'm working on an Ink Tracing book and a coloring book, you can choose your favorite way to art. It's a renaissance themed book. So, if you like a good ren faire, then this might be the book for you. It should be up by the second week of December. I'm also continuing work on a Christmas themed book, but I'm not sure if I'll make the deadline for the holiday. We shall see. My hero and I are traveling to the Smokey Mountains this weekend. It seems to be a winter wonderland, which we can enjoy for a few days. Expect to see pictures on Facebook.  Getting my ducks in a row after the storm. Well, this has been an interesting month at my house. On Friday, September 27, Hurricane Helene blew through the upstate of South Carolina. Being a minimum of 4 hours away from the coast, means that we don't have hurricanes and people here haven't had to deal with anything like that before.
The storm also continued up to the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, where our kids live. The month has been full of hurry up and wait. Wait for power to return, wait for internet access, wait to hear from the kids, get water to the kids, stock up on supplies, do laundry. Everything was made difficult because of the trees laying across wires, roads being blocked by trees and downed powerlines. In the middle of the craziness, my husband and I abandoned ship to Jacksonville, Florida, where we picked up the Carnival Elation for a 5-day cruise. We had planned this during the summer, so we had no way to know that we would be leaving our house with no power or internet. After eight days, the power returned. The internet did not. We had water the whole time, since we are on public water and we never had a boil order, thankfully. This was good for us and for our kids, who here in mid-October are just getting water back. They can only use the water to flush toilets, so they come here for showers and to wash their clothes. It's a slow process, but at least it's progress and we still have our homes and our lives. Our internet came back on last night, Oct. 15th. High speed internet is a blessing. I feel like I have no more excuses not to get work done. On a cruise note, the trip was excellent. Who doesn't love it when people make your bed and cook for you. We also won our 24-carat gold, plastic ship on a stick for trivia. It's a goal every cruise to bring home the prize. We also won a first loser medal for a different trivia game. The Bahamas was warm and welcoming. We toured forts, shopped and swam in the crystal blue waters. I'm looking forward to the next cruise already, even if it hasn't been booked, yet. Hey, what are you reading?  I love back to school time. I love the excitement that swirls around starting something new. I'm attempting to bring that energy to my writing this month. Here in the South, school starts at the beginning of August. And, since I'm not traveling this month, I only need to spend some time away from the pool and away from watching the Olympics.
Are you watching the Olympics? Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one watching, but I know my mom was watching because I was with her at camp, so she had to watch. There have been so many exciting finishes and unexpected events at this year's Olympics that an author would be hard-pressed to write something like that. Summer can be so distracting. In Maine, we waited for winter to come so we could hold up in the house and write our little hearts out, but down here in the South, it's not the same. Winter in the South is delightful. My new friends will tell you that it's freezing, but I have yet to pull out my heavy winter coat. But, let's not think about winter...go spend some time outside, bring a book and I'll spend a little time inside writing my next book.  Summer is in full swing and for me that means trips to Maine. I spent weeks with my mom at camp to help get things get up, then I flew home. I was home for a few weeks and then my husband and I drove up to Maine in the motorhome. We made a stop to visit his mom and our friends. We saw a great local Maine band, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and played cards.
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