Linda's Hodgepodge

I wasn't sure what to talk about today; I came up with about fifty different ideas but they drifted off about as soon as they came, so I'll just gloss over some of the ones I remember!

NEW PET -

So after our tadpole/frog debacle, we got Lydia a new pet: a beta fish, which is supposed to survive a nuclear blast...or near to it! The kiddo calls it "tadpole," which kind of dooms the poor thing in my eyes, but whatever. We'll see how well this critter survives. Tomorrow, Tadpole will have lasted a week in the Kage house!

THE RECENTLY DEPARTED -

There have been a couple deaths in my stratosphere lately, people I kinda of/not really know. My friend who is the very person who set me up with my husband lost her brother early this week. He was only thirty-four, married and a father of three.  I guess he was mowing his yard and lay down in his hammock after he finished. His mom found him passed away like that some time later. Cause of death is unknown. Hubby and I went to the visitation on Wednesday night, and I felt awful for every member of his family; each of them seemed to deal with the tragedy with a different coping method.

Then I learned my beloved writing mentor at Champagne Books passed away. I only met author Nan D. Arnold through email but she was so very kind to me with a quirky, infectious humor. She told me last February she had cancer and her current book would probably be her last. A year and five months later, she had published two more stories until she "booked a flight on sweet chariot airlines" as she called in on her website in July.  I'll miss her supportive emails, and hope her family is doing okay.

BOOK TOURS -

During all this, I still worked on setting up my blog tour for my Color of Grace book. I was bitten by an insane bug and feverishly kept contacting blogger after blogger.  And you can't email just anyone, you know.  I had to go into their site, check out how professional they make their reviews, see if they even like my genre, read their about-me page and their review policy page.  It takes time, time I shouldn't be wasting because I already had enough tour stops set up, but I became obsessed.  After contacting seventy-five people, I finally told myself I had to STOP!.  Stop the madness.

Out of those seventy-five, thirty responded, saying they'd love to be in my tour!  Five bloggers responded to regretfully decline.  And ALL the rest, I never heard from--I don't know why, maybe I had bad breath!! Then on top of that, three people volunteered.  That gives me thirty-three stops which will take place for twelve days at the beginning of October.  Sounds pretty darn good to me, so yeah, I'm definitely stopping the madness now!

Good news, though! One of the bloggers I sent a request this week said she'd review my book.  Less than twenty-four hours later, she'd already posted on Goodreads how much she liked it but couldn't talk about it until October!  So, that totally did my heart good!!

WIPS -

And since I've been working on about, oh ten or so stories, at the moment, my muse decided to throw another story idea into the mix, so I wrote about 1500 words on a totally new story this week. I can pound out a lot of words on any given day when I really get into writing, but the next day, I don't know, I get bored with that story, and I just have to work on another unfinished manuscript. Doesn't seem to matter how much I write a week, nothing's getting finished because I'm working on too many stories at once, so it doesn't feel like I'm accomplishing much. Of course, a couple years down the road, I'll finally reach the end of all eleven of my WIPS and have eleven books at once to revise.  UGH!

READING -

This is my last topic change, I swear!

I haven't gotten a lot of reading done lately. My to-be-read pile had grown dangerously big, and I kind of miss slipping into someone else's fiction land for a while.  Here's hoping, this weekend, I can get a little reading in!  Do you feel like you have withdraws if you don't read a new book for a while?

Have a great weekend!