Friday, June 13, 2025
Thursday, June 12, 2025
We are the Salt and Light of the Earth | Battle Ready with Fr. Dan Reehil
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
You’ll Never Gossip Again After Hearing This Saint’s Story!
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Cover reveal...
I posted about not having an update unless I had something like a cover to announce.
That didn't take long. Using a base stock image, like all my covers, Photoshop helped me to create the perfect image.
The blurb could be rewritten and I might yet tweak the cover, but for now, I am pretty happy with this. It's the closest I could get with Photoshop:
the latest happenings, including writing updates
Summer is here. It came pretty fast, but everything goes faster as you get older.
Horsing around again
Life and weather, and dangerous smoke from Canadian wildfires (last weekend was awful!)... combined to keep me from seeing my horse for longer than I would have liked. Yesterday, I finally went to see him again. He's in a pasture at the boarding facility, has fresh water and friends and gets checked on, so I don't have to worry. He's a tough boy and knows how to cope.
I trimmed his hooves, which were just starting to get long but not terrible and had no chipping or cracking yet. The big issue was a bunch of ticks under his anus (and, I suspect, the same with other pasture horses who were rubbing and rubbing to no relief). My poor guy was miserably irritated by a cluster of ticks. They are terrible this year! I doused them and the rest of him in a strong bug repellant before trimming his hooves and managed to find someone who wasn't squeamish about ticks to pull them all off. Buddy was so relieved afterwards and almost fell asleep with no more flies or ticks irritating him. He enjoyed the process of having the ticks removed too; his expressions through it were hilarious. 🤣
I didn't ride him. I knew I'd be sore after trimming hooves, and riding after that long would only compound my soreness. I started feeling it last night and still feel achy today. I gave Buddy treats, love, and a hoof trimming. He enjoyed that. No work. He's a pasture pet, but he enjoys it and is good when I do get on. Since I'm not competing, we can take it easy. I hope to get out more regularly, but then stuff happens, some of it the same stuff that interferes with my writing.
Cats and crystals
I thought only male cats had issues with bladder crystals.
Nope.
We noticed our old girl (13 years) had bloody urine. Our oldest cat (male) as a kitten did that and had to be put on a special diet for a while, then grew out of it before developing other issues that required him to be on an even more restrictive diet. Boy cats have narrow urethras and are more prone to crystal issues. But female cats can have urinary crystal problems too. I didn't expect that. They just don't have the same trouble with blocked urethras that boys do. A blocked urethra happened to the other old boy (third oldest) several years ago, and he would yowl while in the litterbox and continually lick his sheath area. That clued us in then that he also had crystal issues, but he was already in later maturity when it became an issue for him.
Now, we have three cats who have to be on special food. Only the newest is free to eat anything... so far.
The good news is that our girl, for as old as she is, has healthy kidneys and no infection. None of our kitties are diabetic. They may not like the special foods for their issues, but they're healthier and happier than the alternative. A day after switching to the special foods given to the old boys, she was already getting back to being her chipper self (*sarcastically speaking* - she has tortitude in full!). She was playing again, instead of grumping around in pain. I expect this will clear up quickly for her.
We only knew she was having issues because of a couple of times that she urinated outside the litterbox and it was bloody. It was difficult to confirm which cat it was initially because we have four, but the boys have never gone outside the litterbox. Still, we had to wait until we could observe it so we wouldn't be paying for multiple cats to unnecessarily be taken to the vet.
We caught it and only had to change her diet. She's already doing better, so yay!
Light and Shadows
That is the title I'm sticking with on Book 22 of Forgotten Worlds. The word count is around 30K now and I'm hoping to finish by the end of the month, but that only holds up if life doesn't get in the way.
I still need to figure out a cover, but I know what would work. I just have to find the right image, or multiple images and compile it. It may take some Photoshop work to get something more representative of this story.
Print Books
Since I read through Forgotten Worlds books 1-10, I fixed some things that I couldn't leave alone. (Book 6 was a mess, like the final edits didn't save or got overwritten until this update. I'm still beside myself since discovering that in the read-through this past year because the bad version was the one that had been available for a few years.)
I love reading my books, but I always see something to tweak. I started reading as a refresher and knew there would be some fixes. Updates have been uploaded for the individual ebooks. I just need to update the print files. I have the print collections for this series unavailable until the updates are ready. It hasn't been a big priority, since print doesn't usually sell for me, and I hate formatting those.
It's something I do plan to finish this summer, at least for Collections 1 and 2 of Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds. I'm still working my way through books 11-15 when I have time. Once those are done, I'll re-release Collection 3 as well.
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That's all for now. I'll post more when I have updates, like a book cover.
Thanks for reading!
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Monday, June 2, 2025
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Is The devil as Exciting as People Think?
Monday, May 26, 2025
Book 22 progress
Saturday, May 24, 2025
doing something right...
Two for two. That's a pretty amazing statement as a mom.
Two kids. Two Valedictorians. (Although one of many in each of their respective classes, anyone with a 4.0+ GPA.)
The youngest graduates tomorrow. Technically, she's already done. She's also 2/3 done with an associates degree from the local college, because of her many dual-credit courses during high school, and she has a free year coming up thanks to scholarships. She'll be completing her associates degree in the next year. After that, she'll go on to her bachelor's degree, which is a 2-3 year remaining educational journey. Kids have so many opportunities these days that my generation and those before me didn't have.
When hubby and I were dating, my youngest sister, knowing my school record (honor roll but not valedictorian, back when there was only one per class), blessed us by saying, "You two are going to have smart kids!" How very prescient of her, over twenty-four years ago.
A week ago, we held the grad party in our garage. Tomorrow, all three public high schools in town have graduation.
So, I had been pretty busy getting things together while trying to write over this past month, and the prep work also stole some of my attention from writing. Some of the stuff (buying decorations, designing the banner, designing announcements and then sending them out) had been done for a while, but the stress of the week or two before the grad party was wearing on me. I'm used to organizing events, but this was my own child, so I didn't want to forget anything, despite the simplicity of it.
After tomorrow, it's all done.
But aside from the proud mom moment, I want to say that it's not natural intelligence that is the reason for such achievements. It came down to hard work and dedication by each of my kids. I wasn't a perfect A student when I was in high school, but I wanted to be; I had to work for it, and I made sure my kids knew how to work hard and have the self-discipline to do well. You can have all the intelligence in the world, but if you don't have the discipline to do the work required, it all means nothing. Sacrifice and hard work contribute as much as intelligence and can even make up for a lack in that area.
You have to do some work that you may not like in order to succeed in life. We taught our kids that lesson when they were young, starting with assigning chores to earn privileges and rewards. That carried over throughout their young lives at home and in school and hopefully will continue into adulthood. It was the best thing we could have done for our kids. We know what we did right, the same things many parents do right for their kids.
I wish the best for all graduates...
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