I'm not dead yet!

I promise I will get back to blogging soon. I got a little derailed by the holidays, Joey's accident with a farm animal (I'll get to that eventually) and Lucy's recent weight issues, or lack thereof. Kind of chaotic in this house.

OUAT: The Heart is a Loney Hunter

Warning: Here there be spoilers!

Once Upon A Time is tied for my new favorite show with Revenge, both ABC offerings. They are smart, different, and the twists and mysteries keep me hanging. I love them, especially since some of my older favorites (like Grey's Anatomy, CSI, and Private Practice) have gotten a little stale. I was eagerly awaiting OUAT after seeing very early articles about it, and tuned in anxiously for the first episode...well, the next day anyway, thanks to DVR I never watch anything live anymore. I was hooked from episode one. So far they've been great about keeping the mysteries and twists coming, but last's night's episode really didn't shock me.

According to all the TV blogs, last night's episode was supposed to contain a "big character reveal" and a "shocking" death. There WAS a reveal, and there WAS a death, but I wouldn't consider either a shock.

Prologue - Excerpt from The Road Not Taken

Be careful what you wish for.  How many times have we heard that expression? Does anyone really ever pay attention to it? I know I didn’t. How would wishing ever actually do anything worth worrying about? If wishes were horses, we all would ride…right? I was depressed and totally dissatisfied with my life.  I kept wondering about the road not taken. Kept regretting all the choices I made, or didn’t make. What if I had found a way to finish college? What if I had not married John so young?  I could never be satisfied with my life because I felt a huge hole in it.  I was plagued by thoughts of “I could have been so much more.”

My husband and I had issues, but he was a great father who loved his children. My children. The one bright spot in my life, they were my world. I adored my three beautiful, wonderful children. Even when they exasperated the hell out of me (which was often), I couldn’t imagine my life without them…until they were gone. Until my entire life, everything I knew, was gone forever.

                I still don’t know what happened, but this is my story.

Why I Love Sabrina Jeffries

Okay folks, I get very enthusiastic about things sometimes and I want to share them with the world; hence, I will be starting a “Why I Love…” series about these things. I have my favorite authors in pretty much any genre: Classics – Jane Austen, Fantasy – George RR Martin, Mystery – Agatha Christie, Supernatural – tie between Christine Feehan and Sherrilyn Kenyon, Historical Fiction – Alison Weir, and of course J.K. Rowling, who is in a genre all her own. I could go into great detail, and often do, about why I love these particular authors and I think it’s only right that I start this blog with a post about the author that inspired me (in part) to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November, Sabrina Jeffries.

Sabrina Jeffries is a romance novelist. That would be an easy way to categorize her, but it’s a little narrow. Romance has gotten a bad rap, especially lately with articles about how women have unrealistic ideas about love due to romance novels. I’d like to think that’s not really true. I know they are my guilty pleasure and I don’t think some superhot bad boy is going to swoop in and save me from my life of drudgery and become the world’s most devoted husband. But I sure like to read about it. Romance novels are for escapists. We all need those moments of imagining a different world. I’ve liked many romance novelists over the years, but Sabrina has become my favorite over the past few years.

So why do I love her? Two reasons. A) Her writing and B) The way she interacts with her fans. Let’s start with A. The first book I read by her was The Pirate Lord.  It was great fun, a pirate captain and his crew courting a ship full of women…a good adventure. I read the rest of The Lord Trilogy and moved on to the School for Heiresses series, which intrigued me as I started to notice a pattern with the book heroines…they were intelligent! Many romance novels focus on the men, and while Sabrina’s men are very well written, it’s the women that shine. They are smart and they don’t take crap from their “heroes.” What really sealed the deal for me was her Hellions of Halstead Hall series. It’s a series about five siblings who are essentially blackmailed into getting married in the next year by their grandmother, who wants them to settle down and stop living so scandalously. What seems like a completely insane concept actually works out so naturally that you actually believe these five men and women could really have met their spouses in the various ways described. And the best part is that there is an overarching mystery going on as a subplot: what really happened to their parents? They died under scandalous and somewhat mysterious circumstances many years prior and the mystery starts to unravel as the books progress. It’s something that most romance novels don’t have. Even series usually just share some characters in common, but there’s no continuing storyline to bind them. I eagerly await her new releases because I want to know what happens next. I have my theories about what happened, and then they all get shredded in the next book and then I have to reformulate my theories. I LOVE IT!

Perhaps just as much as I love her unusual romance novel style, I love her interaction with her fans. Sabrina is easily accessible; she tweets, blogs, posts on Facebook, sends email newsletters, and even actual physical mail – which often includes treats like bookmarks! I have emailed her or commented on her Facebook and have always gotten a personal response. Her readers come to know her family, including her autistic son, Nick, her husband, and her parents. We hear about her travels, her deadlines, her encounters with fans. We giggle over her reoccurring comic strip about the Jane Austen and William Shakespeare dolls that live on her desk and have very definite opinions on things. In short, she feels like an old friend and it just makes her work all that much more entertaining.

Sabrina just released the penultimate book in the Hellions series, To Wed a Wild Lord. I can’t wait to get a copy of it so I can see if some of my suspicions are correct! Although I must admit that I am probably most looking forward to Celia and Pinter’s story coming out in January, A Lady Never Surrenders. Pinter has been a character throughout the series that I have to really enjoy, and I look forward to seeing him spar with the feisty Celia. Alas, budget doesn’t really support my book habit, so I have to wait, but I am patient! Sort of. Often the library feeds my book habit, but I own all the other Hellions books and I’m not going to break the mold with this one. I like to re-read them! Not to mention the waiting list for her books takes months! I feel the same way about the Song of Ice and Fire books. I refuse to get them on my e-reader because as epic as they are, it just seems wrong somehow not to have them physically in my hand when I’m reading. 

So, if you stuck with my post this long and you like living vicariously through some really great romantic stories, I hope you decide to give Sabrina Jeffries a try. One day when I *hopefully* get something published, I’ll keep in mind her example when it comes to connecting with readers.

Happy Birthday to Mommy

In honor of my mother's birthday today and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a celebration of the Blessed Mother of us all...I thought I would post some thoughts I have had about my Mom.

Lucy's Birth

My mother was the one that spent most of that week with me. Patrick had to work and deal with boys, so he couldn’t be at the hospital much. He got Joey on and off the bus to school and took Daniel to work with him most days. I knew what he was doing, and I appreciated that I didn’t need to worry about the boys being taken care of, but part of me was still lonely and resentful.  So Mom stayed with me, watching stupid TV shows, playing endless games of rummy, just talking to me, drying my hair for me after helping my ungainly body into and out of the shower. Sometimes I just slept or read while she worked on the pink flower quilt she was making for Lucy. She had made quilts for all my babies, something for them to keep and pass on to their own children. It was an instinct I appreciated, but didn’t truly understand until my grandparents and great-grandparents started passing away. There was this need to leave something behind, a tangible reminder that you had been there and had loved. I was, understandably, a bit of an emotional disaster that week, but my mother made it easier to handle. For all the times she got on my nerves, I always felt better when she was around and I always wanted her around when I needed help or comfort. For all the agony we had been through when I was a young adult, we had gotten to a point where we understood each other and what being a mother meant.

Joey's Birth

She was the first to hold him other than me and his father, just as she was the first to hold Daniel and Lucy. It seemed fitting somehow that the person who had given me life was the first to welcome the little lives that came from me. I felt closer to her in that moment than I ever had. Finally, I understood her better. All the times she had said “you’ll understand when you are a parent” made sense. 

Painting - In the before time...

After the writing marathon that was NaNoWriMo, I decided to take a little break from my book during the holidays to recharge my batteries. I didn't want to sink back into idleness though, so I decided to work on a painting to keep my creative juices flowing. Okay, so it's a paint-by-numbers but still...

This is as far as I've gotten. I'll let you know how it looks when it's done.

"A day in the life" - Excerpt from The Road Not Taken

A Day in the Life…

@ 12 am – Finally shut my brain off and relax enough to fall asleep

1:53 am – Mary crying. I stumble to the door of her room and listen for a minute to see if she will go back to sleep on her own. No luck. I go in, give her the binky that she threw out onto the floor and sit next to the crib while she goes back to sleep. She lies there quiet, but awake, watching me.

2:25 am – Not exactly sure when she actually fell back to sleep as at some point I drifted off while sitting there on the floor, but I wake up and go back to bed.

4:15 am – Mary crying again. I make it downstairs without tripping over my own feet to make her a bottle. I go into the kids’ room to find Drew sitting awake in the middle of the floor and Mary crying while staring at him. Guess I know why she’s awake. He wants to sleep on the floor in Tommy’s sleeping bag. I tell him to go back to bed. He starts screaming for the sleeping bag. His screaming causes Mary’s to get even louder. I tell him that the sleeping bag is put away in Tommy’s closet and I can’t get it right now. He climbs back into his bed and screams while I deal with Mary, who is by now shrieking at the top of her lungs. She and her bed are both soaked from a leaky diaper. I pull her out and change her…note that both children have been screaming for several minutes now, but husband Sean is still in bed. I finally get Drew quiet and tucked back into bed and Mary clean, but I can’t put her back in her bed as I can’t change the sheets one-handed and she will go ballistic again if I set her down. Give up and take her back to bed with me.

4:30 am – Mary drinks her bottle and proceeds to demonstrate how wide awake she is by trying to crawl around the bed. Sean just rolls over and ignores the whole situation. I get up and try to rock her back to sleep.

5:00 am – Still awake

5:30 am – Lay her down with Sean so I can go pee…takes all of 1 minute, in which time she bangs her head on the wall and starts screaming bloody murder. Idiot Husband realizes he’s about to get his ass handed to him and ever so generously offers to get up with her so I can “get some sleep.”

5:55 am – He brings her back. “She’s tired now.” Hands her off to me and goes to get ready for work. So much for that sleep he thought I should get.

6:25 am – Mary finally falls asleep.

6:30 am – Sean leaves for work. Keep in mind that his office is only about 30-40 minutes away, particularly this early in the morning before rush hour. You will understand this later.

6:40 am – Tommy’s alarm goes off.

6:45 am – Tommy didn’t get up, so I try to ease out of the bed without waking Mary and drag him out of bed.

7:19 am – Get Tommy out the door to catch the bus and decide to try to go back to sleep.

8:02 am – Drew comes stomping into my room, saying “WAKE UP!”…which of course Mary immediately does, grinning at her partner in crime. Time to get them up, bathed, dressed and fed, change dirty sheets in Mary’s crib and let them destroy the living room and watch too much TV because I’m basically a zombie.