I love this wildlife reserve. The last couple of years I’ve gone to Omaha, it’s snowed, even in October, and they close it the first time they get snow. Ugh.
This is the alpha male at the Omaha wildlife reserve.
So today will be a busy day. If we can manage, we’ll be making vegetable bugs, my granddaughter and me, and we’ll be creating a paper dragon. Now, depending on how they turn out, there may not be pictures. lol
My daughter was telling me about a 3 year old who could read 1 00 pages. My granddaughter every once in a while tells me a word she recognizes, but she doesn’t want to read really. I do ask her to tell me repetitive words in a book to try and get it to sink in until she’s learned them whether she wants to or not. And it’s fun for us.
I need to get this done as she’ll be here momentarily.
I managed to get to ch 7 on proofing on White Wolf Moon yesterday. Need to get some more chapters done today. And I did get 1,000 words done on Billionaire. Tomorrow is zoo day and I hope I can get some good pictures. It’s supposed to be overcast, maybe rainy, so we shall see. Then we’ll have her birthday party also. She’s really not 4 until the end of the month, but just in case my daughter has the baby early, we’re trying to get some other things done first.
I’m hoping to get White Wolf Moon done by Friday so I can work on taxes on the weekend.
I also saw the cutest Easter idea for a sweet treat–a Peep driving a Twinkie. I couldn’t find Peeps yet, so we’ll do it later.
I worked all day on Billionaire. Woohoo! Okay, so I should have been working on proofing White Wolf Moon, but I did the rest of the edits and then I was working on Billionaire, having a ball with it. I love it when that happens. So I’m up to 7,000 words on it. Only 73,000 words to go. And I proofed ch on White Wolf Moon.
At least I’m getting somewhere with it, so I wasn’t goofing off or anything. And I was playing with a couple of pictures too.
So it was a great day! Today, I hope to get somewhere on proofing white wolf. lol
Even if the billionaire book is calling to me. Working on edits first on it!
Have a great day! It’s time to begin to work on proofing after I do the edits!
I took the photo of the bison at the wildlife reserve in Omaha, Nebraska. They have these humongous doors that automatically open and you drive into the reserve. It reminds me of Jurassic Park and their huge doors. They have deer and bison, elk, turkeys, roaming free on the land. And they have the white bison, and they had a calf too. I used Daily Texture for the background and foreground, and the additional clouds and moon are from Oscraps.
I worked all day on White Wolf Moon edits and have more to do this morning. Then after that, I’ve got to start reading it through to make sure I caught anything we all missed, then turn it in. In the meantime, I started working on Billionaire wolf, and I have 3,000+ words on that also. So a beginning. But I have to start somewhere! Once I’m done editing and proofing White Wolf, I can concentrate more on Billionaire. I wanted to write more yesterday, but I needed to get White Wolf done.
I need to go to the grocery store, but they’re not going to require masks in a couple of days and we have five different strains of the more easily shared COVID-19 in the Houston area. Yes, I’m wearing a mask, so hopefully, that will help. But I noticed already, last Friday, a woman picking up her toddler at the daycare, no mask, even though it was required. And at the grocery store a week before that, a woman wearing no mask. I was reading about a 27-year-old who died of COVID. So it’s not only the elderly who get sick and die of it.
In any event, I’m disappointed in the way things are being handled here. If we would wait a couple of more months while everyone gets vaccinated who wants to, we would be in a lot better shape. But more people will die needlessly.
Okay, back to the book and writing where pandemics are just the stuff of legends and myths and old history.
Hope you all are staying healthy and safe and have a super, lovely day!
So we went to a park to do the maternity shoot and found another pregnant woman having one done, one with a new baby, a couple for engagement photos, and what looked like a 1 year old’s birthday party. It was fun seeing all the things going on, everyone separated with masses of greenery. They brought a bubble maker and that was fun, though it ended up making so many bubbles they all became bubbleheads. lol But I’ll share the pictures with them of those too.
I had this nightmare that Keira would end up in a lake and her daddy would have to fish her out, and then at the park it was mainly green grass and pine trees, but then we saw the water–a pond and water fountain, and naturally, we had to take pictures there too. So then the dream came back to me.
In truth, I had watched the movie Barbarossa the night before and the emperor had fallen into the water and the men were trying to rescue him. He came up on his own, but 14 years later, that’s how he died. So I think that, combined with the notion of a preschooler and water, caused me to have the dream.
We happily went home and had pizza after the shoot, and daddy didn’t have to rescue anyone.
Before we went, I finally managed to finish the proofing of Jingle Bell Wolf and sent it off.
Next, I have to do the edits on White Wolf Moon, and proof Saving the White Cougar.
It’s fun having the books mostly done, but even more fun having them finished so I can write the new ones. And I’m eager to get back to work on them! And play around with some art too. I’ve been so busy working, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for much else.
Hope you all have a lovely day!!! I’m off to work!
I was working on synopses for three different books and went through all the changes on Jingle Bell Wolf, now proofing it. My daughter wanted a pregnancy shoot today, so I’ll be doing that and then be back to working on proofing. I need to have this done by Monday, so that’s all I can do all the rest of the weekend. By Friday night, I had only started on chapter 5–proofing. I already made all the changes or rejected the ones that didn’t need to be changed.
Doing edits and I came across this: Wouldn’t light reddish fur be pink? When would light reddish fur ever be pink????? lol
And truly, reddish fur is orangish, but you don’t call a red wolf an orange wolf. Or the orangish fur on a gray wolf orange either. It would be reddish. And taking if further, would you call someone with light red hair having pink hair? I don’t think so. Not unless it truly is pink. And that is a whole other story. I remember seeing a lady with pink hair when I was a kid, way back before people started dying their hair all kinds of fluorescent colors. This was soft pink and then her poodle was a matching pink. But like I said, that’s a whole other story.
I was watching the War of the World, a cool series and a movie about Barbarossa while combing out the dogs. I’ve been so busy on audiobooks and proofing, I haven’t been working on them. So they were a job. They don’t shed, which means they mat up.
Dying pine tree. I will have to have it cut down.
With all the freezing weather we’d had, it looks like a lot of palm trees and sago palms bit the dust. And oleanders too. My parents had them years ago, but a freeze killed them too. Luckily we didn’t have any of either, so I’m hoping that everything in my yard made it. I’ve been trying to teach my granddaughter what deciduous and evergreen means. She keeps pointing out deciduous trees and telling me they’re dead. I keep telling her they’ll leaf out. We have live oaks that shed some leaves while they grow new ones, but some of those have barely any leaves. They usually have most of them year round, so hope people didn’t lose them too. And my pine tree is well on it’s way to being dead. It’s supposed to be evergreen. When it looks this brown, now a good sign. They’ve said to leave everything until mid month before cutting back to see if this stuff will come back. I don’t think so on the pine tree.
All right back to proofing! Then picture taking. I took the family pictures when she was pregnant the first time–back then, just my daughter and SIL before baby came. I didn’t have time to do anything but have them stand against their brick house. She had the baby the next day. We wanted to take pictures when they had azaleas blooming, and other flowers too, and green everywhere, which it was before the hard freeze. I wanted to wait a week or so, but my daughter’s worried she’ll have the baby first. lol That wouldn’t do! Especially during a photo shoot. So we’re doing this earlier than the last time.
So yesterday, I finished the audio book uploads to Voices. Now I have 30 up there. Yay! I was looking at my statements for January, and I have some titles that paid themselves off, and some that may never be in the black. I’m hoping with library sales, some will begin to show some more sales and whittle away at the cost of narration. I’m talking about getting maybe 59 to 67 cents a month. Not anything more than that for some of the titles. Not a huge income. For some of the titles, maybe $7 a month. In my kids’ lifetime they may see the ones in the red paid off! Or the grandkids’ time! It’s not so much the narrator, I have the same great narrator for several stories. It’s more the genre. So maybe they’ll get more reads at the library.
When I was a kid, and later of course, I LOVED to read. I would be swept away in the world of books. I wrote stories too, told stories orally with my girlfriend, and just loved to go to garage sales, the only way I could get a book to keep for my own. I remember my mom asking me if I would read a series of books I wanted more than once, and I said, “Yes!” and I did. I hated going to the dentist, but the only highlight was they had Highlights for kids and it didn’t matter that millions of kids had abused it, or circled all the hidden objects, I devoured all the stories until I had to visit the dreaded dentist.
I asked my mom if she would get them for me, and finally she did for a couple of years. I just loved them. Once a month I would get a new magazine and I would read it from beginning to end in a sitting. It wasn’t until I was a teen that we started going to a library. But before that, I ate up all the books at the school library I could get my hands on. I remember being told I could only check out so many books at a time at the school library. I could get more at the regular library, but my mom didn’t want me to have that many at home because I probably couldn’t read all of them. But I could. And more.
We didn’t have advanced classes in anything, but we had to read all our school material and then once we were done, and did all the testing for it, we could spend time in the library for that English class period. I would whip through the books, do all my tests, and spend the rest of the semester in the library. That was the life.
So when I got a coupon in the mail to sign up for a Highlight’s magazine for my granddaughter–they have them for 3-6 year olds too–I did. And when that magazine comes in at the first of the month, we sit down and devour that whole magazine in one sitting. They have cool craft ideas, and one of them was to make a peanut butter, birdseed pine cone for the birds. So I had all the ingredients, pine cones all over the yard, peanut butter, and a bag of birdseed I feed the birds with–and squirrels and dogs, since they’re always eating it if I’m not after them about it.
What a mess. But it was fun, then it was fun seeing all the goldfinches and chickadees and cardinals and even the blue jays come down to eat off them. And of course the squirrels, who immediately had to have something to drink. And my dogs were in on the act, which goes without saying.
a lady in a medieval gown sitting on a stone and reading a book
They also have a craft where you create a dragon, I think, from tissue paper and such. I’ll have to look at it, but we’ll do that. And one for food. Bug food made of tomatoes and black olives and cucumbers. I don’t have the cucumbers, or cream cheese or anything, but maybe I can come up with something. I do have the antennas–chives, growing in the house, so we could come up with our very own version. I stuck antennas in her mashed potatoes and that was a start and got a laugh!
She told me she wanted her tomato. And I was like, yes! Finally, she wants a tomato. So I brought her an orange tomato, I only have the small orange ones and she frowns at me. “No, I want the white one.” Now I’m puzzled. Then I realized what she was saying! Potatoes! I was cooking them and they weren’t done. “Potatoes!” I said. “Yes, potatoes!” Like that’s what she had said all along.
Okay, it’s back to the real world of adult stuff for me. I guess I’ll work on the deadline book edits for Monday, then Saving the White Cougar final proofing after that, since the actual book isn’t coming out until several months from now. I’m still wracking my brain for a billionaire story. I see him running along the beach. I see her rescuing him. But I need more than that. lol
Woohoo! Made some inroads into the audiobooks, between that and reading books to little one. Well, some inroads. I discovered that 2 of the books, the narrators had 30 seconds over their retail sample on the 5 minute limit, so that means I couldn’t publish them with Voices. So annoying. I had done all the work on them, redone the covers, because they require 3000×3000 and then uploaded all the audio files and get an error message on the very last file–the retail sample. I had these narrated in 2014, so doubt I could have the narrators redo them. That means I have finished 5 of the 17 so far. So making some progress. Now I’m checking the retail sample length FIRST to make sure they’re not too long before I go through all that other work. Oh, my son-in-law picked up his daughter and showed me how to fix them. He makes his own music and soundtracks, so that was cool! Finished 8 of them, 9 to go!
My granddaughter and I went out to check on one of my old forest pine trees in the front yard to confirm what I thought I saw last night. It’s dying. I hate that when that happens. I lost one of my other pine trees in back. I’m sure it had to do with them doing so much digging to put electric lines and water pipes in when they built the homes here. They tried to leave a few of the old growth forest trees in the development to make it appear not like totally stripped land, which was nice. The good news is I’ve been letting saplings grow up around the old trees, just in case this happened. So I’m hoping they will eventually grow up and take the place of all the old pines that are growing there. The good news also is they grow fast. Not sure about the ones in the front yard, but the one in the backyard grew 3 feet last summer. In any event, I’ll need someone with insurance to take that tree down. With the high winds we get here, it could be a hazard to our health. They’re about 50 feet tall.
So when we went for our walk, my granddaughter wanted to run, and she was running along at a good click but then she leans over, like she’s one of those professional runners who has run thirty miles, and she says, “Carry me, Grandma, I’m too tired.” She’s 37 lbs. I don’t think so. I told her I had a backpack of mail I was carrying too.
I finally convinced her to walk again while I talked about our shadows and then she began stepping on mine and was laughing hysterically while I was trying to protect my shadow. That got her mind off of how tired she was. And then at the end, she made me run with her.
Then we get home and she takes off her shoes and scolds me for putting her socks on wrong. She has to have them just right. She told me the other day how she had put one of them on wrong herself. She’s so funny. But at least I get her shoes on the right feet. Her mom put them on the wrong feet when she picked her up, and I put them on the correct feet. So then Keira tells me her mom put them on the right feet. Thankfully, my daughter told her grandma was right. I do know my left from my right when it comes to shoes. Not sure about her socks.
Other good news, we don’t have to do our taxes until June. I’ll still get mine done before the baby comes, hopefully, but I want to finish these audiobooks and get them out with Voices, and also finish proofing the print version of Saving the White Cougar. But then….more edits came. These are for Jingle Bell Wolf. No! 🙂 *sigh*
So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend. I have little one here again tomorrow, so can’t get a whole lot done.
Hope you all have a fun day! I’m off to get busy with mine.
When we had our snowstorm, I managed some pictures of the birds, that are totally not used to snow and ice! Poor little things. Luckily, the fountain I have works perfectly, motor and all, after I forgot to turn it off and it turned into a frozen waterfall. We just don’t have a week of hard freeze normally like that and I just didn’t think of it. A squirrel kept trying to get water from it, confused as to what the ice was.
Sparrow
I read where we could have more severe hurricanes and Africa could get dryer. I’m not surprised.
If I were a scientist who could perform a miracle, I would turn the deserts into lush green forests. I’ve always wanted to. I wish I had the power to do it. Not for fame or glory, but just so more of the earth could be inhabitable and everyone could have enough fresh water and clean air to breathe.
I looked at the news, I shouldn’t have. One of the news stories I saw was about a tractor trailer that hit an SUV killing 13 of the 25 people traveling in it. Now, I’m sorry for that. It’s a horrible tragedy for everyone involved, the loss of loved ones, the people who made this happen. But how in the world do you get 25 people squished into an SUV? Forget that only about 8 people could have been seat-belted in. That’s more than three times what they can safely carry.
Anyway, the news is all horrible. We have both of the new fast spreading virus strains in Houston. We have a large international airport here. It’s a mess.
But on good news with the writing arena–the only thing I have real control over–I finished proofing Primal Desire and made the changes and uploaded the print version, so it should be coming out in a few days. And next I’ll be working on Saving the White Cougar print proof! And then it’s time to get back to writing new stories.
I was working on 1 of 17 audiobooks I need to send over to Voices, and I was writing on Warrior Elf also yesterday. I love it when I finally have some ideas for a story I’m working on. I’ll reread a story from the beginning several times, wondering where to go with it next. And then suddenly, the light bulb turns on. Now if only it would do that for Billionaire! I mean, that I could just come up with an idea to even start it!
And a little excerpt from Saving the White Cougar.
“She’d already moved behind rocks to jump down the cliffs on the backside, but her darned tail was whipping about in a response to the mixture of frustration and anger she was feeling.
She wanted to bite the men, but not turn them, and that probably wouldn’t fare well. They would be turned and then be rogue cougars, and she would have to terminate them. Which she didn’t want to do. Then there would be a hunt for the killer cougar, and any puma would be on the hunters’ hit list.
The men had already made it over or through the barbed wire fence and were running around to the other side of the cliffs before she reached the bottom. One of the men fired a shot at her, the bullet hitting the cliff and splintering the rocks. Her heart skittered as she dodged through the rocks to the base, trying to find cover.” –Saving the White Cougar, Terry Spear
Okay, I’m off to get something else done, maybe get Taming the Wild Cougar’s audiobook done before my granddaughter gets here. We have a busy day ahead of us!
Sparrow in the Snow–this was during our snowstorm.
So will our weather be: In Like A Lion, Out Like a Lamb?
We can always have crazy weather, but it’s been hot–80+ and then cold 40, and blustery rain and wind. So it seems like it is roaring like a lion, but then the calm will come? I sure hope so!
Woohoo! Done with proofing White Wolf Moon. Sending it to beta readers this morning. Then I’ll be working on proofing Primal Desire for print next. Four books to proof, 2 left now. If I work at it, and work at it, and work at it, it will get done.
But this weekend I need to get to work on the dreaded taxes.
Hopefully I’ll have the last 2 books proofed before the weekend and I can get back to having fun writing. Still trying to come up with an idea for my Billionaire story. I have to look up the other billionaire’s name. He was a friend of Rafe’s and I only had him in the first story. Well, he was mentioned in the 3rd, but we didn’t see him. And I have to look up the heroine’s name.
I was watching one of the million versions of King Arthur and Merlin last night, only with the Celtic names and it was interesting. It was about a druid who was using dark magic to try and take over the world. And Arthur had to find Merlin and get him to help him to vanquish the Underworld god. It was a little anticlimactic, but I was thinking in my Warrior Elf story, I might have a druid or two. Good or bad, or maybe both. So sometimes watching a movie can give me an idea!
In the meantime, I need to keep proofing, and I still need to get the audiobooks ready to sell on Voices and I need to do my taxes and I need to come up with an idea for Billionaire and…
One step at a time. Send off White Wolf Moon to beta readers. And get to work on Primal Desire. lol That’s today. Because I never know what stumbling blocks will come my way. So first things first.
Have a super lovely day! I’m off to get started on mine!
I finished proofing Dreaming of the Wolf and the novella in the 10th anniversary release. I love proofing books, hoping I catch anything the editors didn’t, glad they caught stuff at the end that none of us had. It’s my final say in any of this. I’m thrilled to finish it, but it’s been fun to read this story again. I don’t have time to reread all my books over again, after initially reading them so many times–changing this and that–until my eyes cross. But when they’re at the proofing stage, it’s great because I’m reading it for enjoyment too. But this book had been written ten years ago, and so it’s enjoyable revisiting the earlier books too.
In Dreaming of the Wolf, Alicia Greiston witnesses, or shoots a couple of bad guys in self-defense. She’s a bounty hunter after a couple of men who murdered her mother and she’s trying to learn who her father was. She’s been wanted for questioning all over the state of Colorado. Trying to keep the wolf issues out of the equation is tantamount. Yet, she’d bitten one guy too, and left evidence behind. Wolves shed. And if someone does DNA on saliva, they can determine if it’s a dog or a wolf. They had done that in the case of a farmer’s sheep that were being killed by a “wolf,” only to learn from DNA that the culprits had been dogs.
I read tons of mysteries while growing up, and I love writing them. Throw a newly turned wolf into the setup, a romance, and it’s a perfection situation for disaster.
So I turned it in and now I’m working on edits on White Wolf Moon. I’m up to chapter 10, but I have 18 more chapters to go!
I took a lot of pictures of families in masks for the baby shower and sent those to my daughter. But I’d like do to some more fun photo art. Just have had my nose to the grindstone on the books.I’m down to proofing 3 books now. And then once all three of those are done, I’m back to the world of writing. Billionaire Wolf is next on the schedule of deadline books and the USF Christmas Wolf story and You Had Me at Cougar.
“Then she crept through the woods with great elf stealth. She’d seen the golden eyes of wolves peering at her through the darkness, a darkness she could see in just as well as them. She heard an owl hooting high above in a pine tree, warning there was a new danger on the prowl. Her, of course. Not a danger to the owls in the woods, but to the elves who would keep a princess locked in a tower.”–Warrior Elf
I’m working on Warrior Elf also, when I get stuck on the other books. 🙂
Okay, enough chit-chat, got to get back to proofing. Have a lovely day!
