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Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving today had a wonderful day filled with food and happiness. If today isn’t your Thanksgiving, then I hope you had an excellent Thursday. :)

I’m thankful for so many things this year: family, friends, health, prosperity, and so much more. I’m thankful for all of you who have read TQG or are waiting for PR to come out. I’m thankful that I get to do a job I love. I’m thankful that I have an awesome agent who always has my back. Really, I am very blessed, both personally and professionally.

I’m also fortunate to have a dear best friend who invites us to spend Thanksgiving with her and her family every year. We spent the day cooking and drinking mimosas, which, let’s be honest, is a fabulous way to spend a day. It was a small group this year, just five of us. But because we do Thanksgiving right, we had three pies—pecan, pumpkin, and apple.

I made my grandmother’s pecan pie and it turned out delicious if not beautiful (the story of my pie making).

Pecan pie

We also had enough food that everyone took home leftovers for Thanksgiving 2 tomorrow. The menu consisted of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato casserole, bread, fruit salad, ambrosia salad, amaretto green beans, and cranberry salad.

Thanksgiving food

Pretty much the entirety of my favorite Thanksgiving foods were represented here. I did miss my mom’s baked beans, but I think I’m the only person in the group who likes beans. And we already had enough food to feed an army.

Now we’re going to hunker down and hide from the Black Friday crowds. :)

How was your day?

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A Camping Weekend

Today dawned cold and dreary, which makes me even happier that we spent the weekend at Enchanted Rock with sunny, 85°F weather. We almost didn’t go because the rain forecast was more than 50%, but my optimistic husband talked me into it, and I’m so glad he did. It sprinkled on us a few times, but mostly the weather was lovely.

Also, because it’s in the boonies, we didn’t have cell service, which meant a weekend away from being constantly connected. It was awesome. I am tethered to my phone as much as the next person, and there were a few times I would’ve liked to post a photo to social media, but overall, it was nice to disconnect.

Plus, look at this amazing campsite we snagged.

Campsite

Continue reading “A Camping Weekend”

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RWA2018 Signing Recap

I had such a fun time at my first RWA conference! It took me a week to recover from the people overload, but I don’t regret a second of it. :)

I’m thrilled to report that my first ever signing was a success! I signed close to 150 copies of Polaris Rising in an hour. It was crazy awesome!

Thank you to everyone who came by and took the time to pick up a copy. Especially when I was in the same room as Beverly Jenkins, Tessa Dare, Sarah MacLean, and so many more incredible, amazing authors. Before the signing, it was all I could do not to run around fangirling like crazy.

It was my first time seeing PR in print, and I have to say, I was blown away. It looks INCREDIBLE in person, y’all. Look at this table. Look. At. It. ?

Signing table

Who could resist? I couldn’t, and I might have made a very unprofessional squeeing sound when I saw it. In fact, if you want to see a face of pure joy, look no further. Continue reading “RWA2018 Signing Recap”

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Words Learned From Reading

We went on a mini vacation for a couple days last week and while on a tour, I learned the word gaol was pronounced jail.

Mind. Blown.

Gaol is a word that pops up every so often in historical romances, and while I knew exactly what it meant, in my mind it was pronounced something like it looks (think ga-oll).

This got me thinking of other words I know from reading, but I’ve never used in conversation. Licentious comes to mind. Or imagine if you’ve only ever read colonel. Good luck pronouncing that one from the spelling. Or chic. I pronounced that one wrong for a while as a kid. Chaise (as in the furniture) still trips me up occasionally, because in my mind it should be chase.

I know there must be more, so I’ll turn the question over to you all. Do you have any words you learned from reading only to later find you were mentally pronouncing them wrong?

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I’m Alive! With Photo Proof and Everything!

I’m alive, I’ve just been super busy trying to crank out as many words as possible on book two. I’m behind schedule, but I’ve had three good writing days in a row, so I’m taking a short break.

Polaris Rising continues to move through the publishing steps. Most recently, I received feedback from the proofreader that I needed to address. So now it’s been looked at by me, agent, editor, copyeditor, and proofreader. I think we might be done at this point, but I thought that after copyeditor, too, so it’ll be a surprise one way or the other. :)

Because we’re inching ever closer to release, Voyager needed an author photo of me for their catalog. If you’ve seen my social media photo, you’ll notice it’s a snapshot of me that I ran through a Prisma filter. Not exactly professional enough to use in a book catalog. Continue reading “I’m Alive! With Photo Proof and Everything!”