Archive | May 2018

Morning Routine

I hate this template. Need to find something else. So the next Click, Grow, Love photo challenge was to show a morning routine. I was trying to figure out how to show it in a way that was fun. Taking the puppies out, taking pictures of the new flowers before it gets too sunny and hot, (caught a dragonfly and was chasing him around the yard getting more shots, poor dragonfly), writing on my blog, and working on the book, oh, and having my tea. And sometimes I do a composition, like with the dandelion I did yesterday morning. The free original one is here to play around with. https://kibblywibbly.deviantart.com/art/Dandelion-1-free-to-use-stock-520616012

That’s my morning routine.

I didn’t look at the challenge for today yet. She’s in Australia and gives us the challenge at 9 pm the night before. I’m always working on the book, so don’t have time to watch it at that point.

Have a great one It’s going to be HOT here! It was at 5 this morning already.

Terry

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”
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Shadow and Light

May30

Light was the challenge for Click, Grow, Love this time and I apologize for my collage. The template didn’t quite work out for me. My fault, of course. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong.

I often see a stream of light in the darkness and for me, that’s fun, to see the shadows and sunlight, not just a strictly cloudy day for pictures that do turn out great, but the dappled sunlight and deep shadows can add drama.

The next challenge?

Your Challenge: Capture Your Fave Morning Routine

Ugh. My morning routine is taking the dogs out to go to the bathroom, feeding them, taking them out to go to the bathroom, getting my tea, blogging, then writing. Well, this morning I also was watering my plants and adding a little peroxide to the water fountain to get rid of algae, and food for the birds. Oh, and taking pictures. Yep. First thing. The full moon was still visible, so grabbed some shots of that. I don’t have a pretty breakfast, or kids to take pictures of today, or anything this beautiful. This is the photographer’s vision of morning activities. If I made breakfast, it could be of exploding microwave eggs, or boring oatmeal…

I usually skip it and just have lunch early. I didn’t read the exercise until this morning, and we’ve already done all our first morning activities. I could use yesterday’s photos. I took baby for a walk first thing, which I always do, then we checked out the tomatoes and I took a picture, and I took her to splash in the wading pool, all early morning to avoid the sun. It was already extremely hot and muggy first thing.

One nice thing about the challenges, is you can do them any day, so maybe I’ll do this tomorrow, make some exploding eggs, show what one author’s life is really like! I probably need to put that in a story.

L-R Morvern Shaw, Kate Theres, Lou Glendon (From Louise Glendon, Click, Grow, Love)

On writing, I am still working on the book, and I was thinking of how I need to make this more personal, as far as the bad guys go. I’ve been watching an Australian series where two women are caught up in a bad cops’ drama, and both women have committed crimes themselves, only the one’s was justified. But by watching the show, it reminds me to: make my characters have deeper characterizations–the one woman steals lipstick, even when that can get them caught and they’re on the run from the good cops and the bad cops. She habitually cleans things when they’re on the run, etc.

And the bad guys are bad, but they also have some admirable traits. For instance, the one really rotten cop will kill anyone for money and power, but he doesn’t want to lose his wife and kids, even though the wife is very happy to stab him in the back to keep her father from going to prison. It’s all very twisted, lots of conflict, and you wonder how the women are going to get out of the next bad situation. I like watching something like this to remind me of what I need to do with the current book.

I keep thinking the bad guys in my story need to show up earlier, somehow, and I began to think about the mention of how the hero had been shot 3 times on an earlier PI job. But nothing more about it. He has a bulletproof Humvee because of it. There’s a comment about when he’s grazed by a bullet it’s no big deal. Not unless he has 3 or more bullet holes. So what happened? Who was the attempted murderer? Did he survive? Yes!!! That’s it! The tie-in I need for the one bad guy. He was the shooter. I didn’t glean this from the show, but it’s been something I’ve been thinking of–just how to show the bad guys earlier. We have two shown early on. And I kept forgetting about the hero having been shot 3 times. That’s why I need to re-read the whole book, jot down loose ends and tie them up.

Okay, I’m off to work on the story. I think I’m going to have to do my morning routine photography challenge tomorrow. See if I can explode some eggs. NOT.

Have a great one!!! And hope your eggs do lots better than mine, if you microwave them!

Terry

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Perfectly Purple

May29

hanging flower baskets purple petunia 1000 013

Baby’s on her way, so I’m trying to get this done this morning before she gets here. I was working until late last night on the book. Added 2,000 more, still working toward the end.

This was the 1st day challenge for Click, Love, Grow: Pick your favorite color and make a collage of it. I LOVE purple, don’t have much in the line of purple in the house, but I love to see purple flowers in the garden, make purple bears, light, dark, and a mixture, and dress baby in it when I can. The purple mountains are on my favorite mug that I brought home from Scotland–feature the black faced sheep, and the Scottish thistle tea cup my mother gave me years ago. The little purple cup was from my son and daughter’s great-great grandmother. When I picked it out of the inheritance their grandmother had received, my MIL said she’d checked and it didn’t have any value.

She’s wrong. It’s the prettiest purple tea cup I’ve ever loved to own.

And Dreaming of the Wolf was my only purple cover. Love it. I had wanted to have a field of purple wildflowers in Colorado, since Jake Silver was a photographer and captured them in his photos. But my publisher said the real photographer wanted too much, so they turned the whole cover purple. Love it!

Okay, off to take care of baby! Have a beautifully purple day!

Today’s photo challenge is light.

Terry

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Time Traveling to the Past…

May28

viking wolf in old building time travel 1000

Time Travel Ghostly Romance

I love time travels. I guess it’s like a fish out of water. In my wolf stories, they live LONG lives, so that means some of them have cool historical pasts. I love history, so it’s a way for me to add some of that into the story. For instance, in one of my Highland wolf stories, I show the scene in the past where the wolf pack is dealing with pirates in the Highlands. One of them sees a woman trying to escape brigands who he again later rescues in contemporary times. Her family were pirates of old.

But in A Ghost of a Chance at Love, she actually time travels to old town Salado, only it has a different name in the old west. It’s a town in Texas that I used to visit with my mother, and I always wondered if you went back in time, how would you explain who you were? And how would you return to your own world? It’s also a ghost story…and she’s caught up in a real mess, both in her own world, and in the past–all because of her job and a ghost relation who doesn’t want to leave what she remembers of her world.

I was playing around with a Viking from Neostock, featuring a blending of worlds–a cave that becomes part of an abandoned building as he travels between times. Wouldn’t that be a shock for him and everyone else who encounters him? How would he deal with it? Would he find his way back?

Okay, so I have to immerse myself in the real world–fighting crime between wolves in SEAL Wolf Surrender….

Have a great day, whether you slip into the past or move forward to explore new worlds!

Terry

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Taking a Closer Look–Macro in the Garden

May27

macro lavender swirl trailing lantana 1000 049

Macro red snapdragon, pink coneflower, lavender lantana, orange marigold, milkweed for the Monarch butterflies, radiation lantana

And a closer look at the book! I finished minimum word count, and now I have to finish the book! Not that I haven’t been working toward that all along. I can’t wait to figure out the final scenes. I’m going back in and fleshing out all the rest of the book first, finding more loose ends. I swear the fae are inserting new loose ends for me. I’m going to have to get my notebook out and begin to take notes on what needs to be tied up.

Okay, I’m just working on a couple of photos of the kids in their spider family costumes and then off to write!!!

Hope you have a spider-less day, unless it’s hero time!

Terry

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Memorial Day is a Day to Honor Those Who Died…

May26

…in all the wars while serving in the American Armed Forces. Memorial Day started as Decorations Day in 1868 to honor Civil War soldiers who had died. That’s what Memorial Day is all about. Not just a 3-day weekend holiday off from work, government agencies and banks are closed, and we don’t get mail, and lots of folks are having barbecues.

But it’s nice to take a moment to remember what the day stands for. Thanks to those men and women who served during the time of war and sacrificed their lives.

And I’m off to work! Need 2,000 words on SEAL Wolf Surrender, just for minimum word count, and my publisher is changing the title from the other book: Her Jaguar Protector to You Had Me at Jaguar. I thought that was cute.

Have a great weekend, whether it’s a 3-day holiday, or just the same old thing. I’m off to write.

Terry

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Macro Shots in the Garden

May25

Coneflower, yellow esperanza, coleus, lavender lantana, pink zinnia

I haven’t played with macro shots in a while, so thought it would be fun to give it a try!

I’m only 3,000 away from word count goal on SEAL Wolf Surrender. Annoyed with myself that I couldn’t just at least write the last 3,000, just for the minimum goal, but the story isn’t coming to me. Baby is here soon, so then the story REALLY won’t be coming to me. lol

I need to make the bad guys’ presence known early on. One is from the very beginning, so that’s good. I’ve been watching Cold Case Files, interested in seeing procedures on criminal cases, because I write romantic suspense, and the guys they’re after are criminals.

My villains are often shifters, so they take care of their own. Sending a shifter to jail when the world doesn’t know about them, won’t work. It’s fun creating a fantasy world within the real world (cougar shifters, wolf shifters, jaguar shifters, bear shifters, snow leopard shifters), though sometimes it’s just easier creating a whole fantasy world, where the characters visit the real world (as in my fae series).

All right, off to play with baby! Have a wonderful TGIF!

Terry

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Is Your Life out of Control?

May24

When baby was here, she slammed her foot on my laptop and changed my email to tiny print. Ugh. So I think I had to reset the size and then shut down. Hopefully, that corrected it.

Then today, I have had computer issues, internet issues all morning. I needed to move my big picture files from my hard drive, so trying to do that and everything is moving at SLOWER than a snail’s pace. Used CC cleaner to remove some junk, and it cleaned out all my passwords, so trying to remember them. lol

And sometimes I hit the wrong button on my camera and it brackets my pictures, which is a pain in the patootie. I think I’m taking a picture using the whole frame, but I’m not, and I cut part of the picture off that I don’t want to cut off. So then I have to figure out which button I hit and un–button it.

So that’s my story! But I did get 3,000+ words written yesterday on SEAL Wolf Surrender, and that’s the good news! I just can’t wait to finish it! Five-thousand words to go!

OMG, it’s clear out mostly, and raining. I guess that’s what they mean when they say a small percentage of rain. My neighbors across the street aren’t getting any.

Anyway, I decided to try something new. The penta flowers are big time hummingbird and butterfly attractors (yes, it is not a word, but I’m an author, so I make them up as I go), but I’ve run out of room, and another couple of flowering plants I had that the hummingbirds and butterflies love didn’t make it through the ice and snow we had. I decided to try hanging baskets of lantana and petunas right next to the patio. If they attract the hummers and butterflies, I might get some really good shots. Or not.

And I totally confused the squirrel. I changed the order of the squirrel pictures, but WordPress wouldn’t honor the change. *sigh* So the first picture was of the squirrel in the hanging petunia basket, wondering where the seed was. The birds had the same issue. lol

But it is fun. I hope they do well. I’ve never tried them before but my mother always had beautiful baskets of hanging flowers. If nothing else, I’m going to have fun taking flower pictures for as long as they survive. And I can plant the lantana in the ground as it will come back in the spring.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Which reminds me of my writing. The only way the book is going to finish itself is if I lend a hand.

Oh, and I have two panda bear orders!

http://www.longandshortreviews.com/book-reviews/alls-fair-in-love-and-wolf-by-terry-spear/

All’s Fair in Love and Wolf by Terry Spear
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Genre: Action/Adventure, Contemporary, Paranormal, Suspense/Mystery
Length: Full Length (352 pgs)
Heat Level: Spicy
Rating: 4.5 stars
Reviewed by Xeranthemum

The Silver Town wolf pack has your back

Wolf shifter Sarandon Silver’s in trouble with the law, and bounty hunter she-wolf Jenna St. James is determined to bring him in for trial.

Lucky for Sarandon, the entire Silver Town pack is ready to fight for his innocence. But until the case is solved, Jenna’s sticking to Sarandon like glue…

“Ms. Spear has a winner! The first chapter set things up kind of slow but isn’t that how a roller coaster starts? Once you reach the top, it’s a downhill ride filled with speed, chills, thrills and WhooHoos! That’s the fun of All’s Fair in Love and Wolf. Once this novel gets going it’s a great read and is nearly impossible to put down once the chase is on.

The attraction between Jenna and Sarandon started within a most unusual circumstance and I think that’s what hooked me.”

Loved the review!

Okay, it is still raining, love it! And I’m off to write!! Have a lovely day!

Terry

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More Storms…Getting to the End

May23

More storms, the garlic is growing leaps and bounds. Had another order for a Patriotic Patrick Bear. And the burgundy daylilies and apricot roses are blooming to profusion. When I first started growing them, they were small, beautiful, but not as showy as they all are now. It’s fun seeing them grow from baby plants to showy adults. I look at the mass of coneflowers out front and instead of 3 or 4, now I have about 10 blooms at once. Now, they’re noticeable.

Just like the book I’m working on. It’s nearly done! And I’m feeling great about it!

I managed to get some word count yesterday even though baby was here. She hadn’t slept well at home for the last couple of days and fought me to take naps. I took her for a walk and she fell asleep in the stroller. Score one for Grandma! Then I finally managed to get her to sleep for 3 hours in the afternoon. She would have slept longer if she hadn’t already drained her bottle. But I can’t get her to sleep anywhere but my lap (except for on a rare occasion in the stroller), and so I was able to work on the story on my laptop, situated next to me–makes it awkward, but I was glad to be able to get something done. I also finished the bear last night.

I think I have only 8,000 words left on SEAL Wolf Surrender. Maybe less.

It’s amazing to me when I start out with so little and end up with a book. Of course, it will be longer than that. That’s just the minimum word count and I always aim for that because I tend to write way too long otherwise. I also edit as I go along because things change in the story and I need to update. It’s also the way I keep from making the story toooo big. If I write to the end, then begin to edit, I have to flesh out scenes and the story grows and grows and grows. And, when I do finally finish the story, when I go back through to reread and edit, it’s not as much of a job because I’ve edited several times already. It also helps me to see where I’ve started threads and can expand on them, if I’m stuck moving forward. I know the “rule” is to write and write and write and don’t edit your book to death, but I can’t do it like that. My books were running 130-140K when I was doing that. lol

I’m not a plotter. I can’t plan out the story from beginning to end no matter how much I love the idea. It just doesn’t work for me. But I do begin to tie up loose ends near the end of the story. Wait, why was this guy introduced? Can I make him more important, or eliminate him? Wait, what happened to that situation? If I mentioned it, it has to be crucial to the story, make it so, or take it out. So right now, I’ve got to figure out the fantastic end. The end that makes readers feel satisfied and can’t wait for the next book!

I’m still trying to figure it out. Sometimes, if I try too hard, it won’t come. I just need to keep moving forward and then, at some point, the light bulb flickers on, and that’s it. Just the perfect ending!

Off to write! Have a great day. I think the storms have subsided for the time being, but they’ve been nice while they lasted!

Terry

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Need a Do-Over Day?

May22

Games are great to play because if you make a terrible play, you can just restore an earlier game. Yesterday was one of those days that I felt I had fallen out of bed on the wrong side. Everything that could go wrong, did. And then, last night, same thing.

But you know what? I persisted. Didn’t help, but I kept going and didn’t give up.

heart of the wolf audio, billionaire wolf christmas 1000 007

Garlic growing in the fridge planted in the planter, bunny ears flower, pouring rain with another wild thunderstorm, Heart of the Wolf in audiobook! and Billionaire Wolf for Christmas–coming October.

This morning, I hadn’t set the alarm because I ALWAYS get up early. I wrote that my characters woke late. Well guess what? I woke later. 5:45 and I’m like, ack!!!!! I usually get up an hour earlier on baby day. So I was rushing around to get everything done that I usually do before she ends up here. And I made it!!! I soooo hope today isn’t another day that I feel I need a do-over!

Have a great one. Baby is here!

Terry

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Terry Spear's Shifters

"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy IS reality."

Archive | May 2018

Morning Routine

Shadow and Light

Your Challenge: Capture Your Fave Morning Routine

Perfectly Purple

Time Traveling to the Past…

Taking a Closer Look–Macro in the Garden

Macro red snapdragon, pink coneflower, lavender lantana, orange marigold, milkweed for the Monarch butterflies, radiation lantana

Memorial Day is a Day to Honor Those Who Died…

Macro Shots in the Garden

Coneflower, yellow esperanza, coleus, lavender lantana, pink zinnia

Is Your Life out of Control?

More Storms…Getting to the End

Need a Do-Over Day?

Garlic growing in the fridge planted in the planter, bunny ears flower, pouring rain with another wild thunderstorm, Heart of the Wolf in audiobook! and Billionaire Wolf for Christmas–coming October.