I did all my chores this morning, but then got distracted from my main quest, writing, editing! AppSumo had a sale on Depositphotos and I use them for covers and for video trailers. But then I was looking at videos of wolves and cougars, which meant wasting about an hour this morning! I could tell myself they’re good for research, to see their behavior and remind myself of it. I take a lot of still shots of wolves when I’m at a wolf reserve. I really need to take some videos myself to add to trailers!
In one, a male cougar who wants to mate a female was licking her fur, giving her a good washing and massage at the same time to put her in the mood. I’ve never seen that before and had never read that before, so guess what’s going in my next cougar book? Ah-ha! Not so much a waste of time then!
But I am getting late on working this morning, so I’m going to take a quick walk, plant some more flower seeds, and get to writing and editing! It is hot already!
Usually, I’m not big on yellow, but I have yellow lantana, coreopsis, two different varieties, don’t recall what these flowers are, and one other yellow flower in the bed. And then purple salvia. I’ll have zinnia in there that are coming up and sunflowers. It’s really pretty.
We had a lovely Mother’s Day, and I always enjoying hugging on the grandkids. Really lovely time. And of course I took pictures. Need to download them.
Everyone was tired. Them with the new baby, and me because I didn’t sleep well either. No baby as an excuse.
Then I returned home to work on the book again. I had worked on it all morning before I went over to have lunch with them.
Honeybee on a yellow flower.
I had moved one scene earlier in the book and that changed everything, and then too, I had been writing some scenes I thought should be in the story, and just tacked them on the end until I could find where they should be. So it’s been a month since I did that, and I get to the end on edits and I’m like why are these scenes out of order? lol
It’s wonderful when you can write a story from beginning to end, perfectly linear. But my mind doesn’t work that way sometimes. So this afternoon, I spent the rest of the day trying to sort out what I could use of the scenes at the end of the book and put them where they belonged and discard the rest. Obviously, I did not finish the book this weekend. But I’m getting closer.
Hope everyone had a lovely weekend. Mine was too short!
It’s a glorious Mother’s Day today, nice and warm and I’m ready to plant more flower seeds and take a walk and work on the book and then have lunch with the kids! We’re ordering in.
One negative though, I’m so disappointed in those who won’t get vaccinated when so many people need it. Wake up U.S. But I’m glad those who wanted it are able to get it. Hundreds of thousands of vaccines are being turned away by states. It’s just unreal. Like an apocalypse scenario where people become deranged who normally wouldn’t. What is the deal?
Texas is way behind on getting vaccinated, several states in the East are taking advantage of getting the shots to protect themselves and others. And the great thing about that is that they’ll be freer to ditch their masks and socialize! SAFELY.
I just wish more people would wise up. Republican and Democratic leaders all got the vaccine to protect themselves and their families. Get a clue! This has been made a political issue, but the people in charge are vaccinated! Both parties!
Off my soapbox and back to being a mother and happy mothering day it!
Unfurling hosta. I didn’t think they had survived the freeze!
Did my walk yesterday and planted some of the flower seeds I had, and dug up that huge weed that took up a 40 gallon trash bag. I wish my good plants did that well. It was about 3 1/2 feet high when I realized it wasn’t a flowering plant. I should say one of my flowering plants. It had nondescript flowers ready to seed the whole area with more of the giant weed plant. I still need to dig up the other hibiscus.
I’m at 85K+ on Billionaire, lots of edits done, lots of work to do.
I brought my granddaughter home from the daycare to let her play in the sprinkler yesterday and it worked like this. Grandma was sitting on a chair scribbling edits on printed out pages, and little one was supposed to run through the sprinklers. So she’s running around in the grass far away from the sprinklers. It’s on a timer. She has ten minutes to play in the sprinkler and then it shuts off.
“Run in the sprinkler,” I say. It’s been in the 80’s in the afternoons, so it doesn’t hurt for my plants to get a little extra water.
She makes another dash through the sprinklers, and then ends up on the chair next to me, drinking her water. I watch the sprinklers watering the plants, thinking she has been playing in the water for about a minute.
Water shuts off. She wants them back on. So I put them on for another area and she runs through them maybe twice, and she’s back to sitting next to me on the chairs. lol Oh, well. She had fun. I edited only two pages. She said she was all done.
Then while I was helping her to dress I was showing her pictures of her that I had taken and how I had to discard the blurry ones when she wouldn’t sit still. Or making weird faces when I was trying to get her to relax her facial expression. Then I took her home and cuddled with the baby for a couple of hours.
Such is the life of a writing Grandma.
I’m working on edits this morning, and then I’m taking her to the pool. It opened last weekend, but we had violent storms all Saturday and Sunday I was too busy with my book. So I said I’d take her today. What was I thinking? It’s only 65 this morning, but will be 78 by the time I take her. I like hot, but I like to get there early before it’s too crowded. But later, it will be 88 and the perfect time to swim.
We’ve been trying to teach her to swim, but she wants to play on the stairs, which ends up with lots of kids. Because of Covid, we told her she couldn’t play on the stairs when others were trying to get up and down them, or other kids were playing on them. I have no idea how she’s going to be this year, so it’s an adventure!
Have a beautiful day! I’m back to edits until it warms up a bit. Whoever thought I’d want it to be warmer in the morning???? This is great digging up dead plants weather, or planting flowers weather! Swimming? Not so much!
These flowers were super easy to make and they look really cute–unlike some crafts I do with my granddaughter. I usually don’t have any of the craft materials to do stuff like this, so I finally bought some of the mixed size pompoms to do projects with and then she’s wanted to do them every day she’s over here. It’s fun teaching them crafts when they’re simple, turn out cute, even for an amateur like me, and not too many materials.
These are the flowers my granddaughter and I made from: cupcake liners, the middle one cut down to size. They could be mini-cupcake liners, but we found a package, no price tag and I didn’t get it, but this worked even better. The others were plain white. This makes it colorful and cute and we could vary the colors. She made all the choices on the colors and helped me glue the pieces together. You were supposed to use a green paper straw, but we couldn’t find anything like that.
My granddaughter and I had a tea party, made more flowers, and planted more flower seeds. I didn’t have her for as long yesterday, so I was able to work on the story again. I printed out pages last night so I could work on it because after a while, I can’t see the mistakes from screen to screen after so many hours of working on the computer.
I’m hoping that I can get this done by NEXT week. lol. I don’t think it’s doable by this weekend.
I’m torn in the morning when it’s nice and cool out and it’s going to heat up–plant flower seeds and daylilies? Take a walk? Pull weeds? Write????? I need to keep my nose to the grindstone, but I always need to do that.
I’m going to make my tea, and I’ve already fed the dogs and taken them out several times, fed the birds, added water to the little fountain, pulled some weeds and I’m going to take a walk, and then plant some seeds. Maybe the daylilies. And I need to tackle a humongous weed that I was waiting for it to do something interesting, but I think it’s just a weed. I actually have to get the shovel to it. There’s no pulling it out. And I need to dig up one last hibiscus tree. I couldn’t pull it up by hand.
I tried to order the variety that can take harsh winters, but they didn’t live (mail order). The ones I planted this last time were tropical and they sell them all the time in the area. My neighbors die back and always return, but this last winter’s week-long ice storm did them in. But my rule is that if I plant something and it struggles to live and dies, even if I have it in a good area where everything lives, it’s not meant to be in my garden. And I buy a lot of perennial flowers so they come back every year, then I add more each year.
I’ve noticed a few 5 foot weeds that I missed seeing. Sometimes I think they’re a flowering plant and I leave them. At least they’re easy to pull out no matter how tall they get. But I have a few weed trees I need to get rid of too, and if I don’t pull those up when they’re little, there’s no pulling them out by hand. They hide among tall shrubs or like one was hiding in a youpon holly tree. The holly trees are dense, so I didn’t see the weed tree until it was un-pullable. Notice: un-pullable is a made up author word.
I took the picture of the jellyfish at the Houston Zoo. They’re so pretty, but swimming with them would be a stinging mistake.
I’m getting closer to finishing Billionaire, yay! I can’t wait so I can begin reading it through again from beginning to end to see what else I need to correct in it, but it’s fun when it’s practically all done. We’re working on coming up with a name for our Christmas wolf shifter novella anthology. I can’t wait to get started on my novella–The United Shifter Force Christmas. I’ve “started” it with different variations of the story, so I’m hoping that some of my prethinking on it will help me to charge ahead once Billionaire is ready to go.
My granddaughter and I had a nice walk to feed the turtles, naptime didn’t happen. We had a cool breeze on the walk and apparently her sunglasses were fogging up. It was very hot otherwise, so once we had fed all the happy little turtles, we headed for home. We went shopping, wearing masks and picked up supplies for the Highlight’s craft we wanted to work on. I already had cupcake liners from my daughter, but I needed to get some pompoms. I have them for my Celtic bear hats, but they’re black and I didn’t want to use them for craft projects. Plus we wanted to do colorful. They were needed for another craft project a while ago, so I figure we’ll get some use out of the huge selection. She has a ball helping me with it, and we made flowers for her momma for Mother’s Day.
So I haven’t taken her shopping anywhere since Covid happened. And it’s a shame because she’s easier to manage now that she’s getting older. The first time, I had to rush her to the grocery store to go potty. Note to self: She potties AT daycare before I take her home. But we had an issue when she saw Paw Patrol stuffed toys in a machine and wanted one. It’s one of those “games” where you pay all kinds of money to pick up a toy, I think and I wasn’t about to do that. So she had a fit and I didn’t think I’d get her out of there without a humongous meltdown.
At the store yesterday, I told her we’re just picking up the crafts we need for our project and machine screws and I had to look at plants, naturally. “I want those cheese puff balls.”
“Nope, Grandma will blow up like Bubbles the Elephant if we have those in the house.” Then we had lots of discussions about the elephant in her preschool that teaches words.
Then she saw kids’ clothes and said, “I need lots of bathing suits.”
No, she doesn’t. She has some that fit from last year, and I got her two this year. We do lots of sprinkler time when it’s hot out and not stormy, but she has plenty!
So Grandma actually ended up leaving the store with only a few crafts, no machine screws, and no plants. We went to ACE Hardware for the machine screws, but they didn’t work either. I was disappointed to see two of their staff unmasked. Everyone else, including customers, were masked.
Okay, that’s about it. Little one will be here shortly, but she’s leaving to get her regular kids’ vaccinations early, so we’ll probably take our walk, work on some more activity books, have lunch and then I’ll have the rest of the afternoon to work on Billionaire. I’m picking her up after school tomorrow, but just maybe doing a sprinkler time and then dropping her home.
I’m still making some progress on it. I’m nearly up to 84K!
Like the other picture, I took the photo of the flowers with natural bokeh coming from the esperanza in sunlight. I was thinking about that since last year, these were my Mother’s Day flowers that had come in May, and the esperenza were huge and in full bloom and beautiful. This year with the hard freeze, they are trying to come back, slowly but surely. So no flowers, just some new leaf growth at the base. Last year, we had such a mild winter, they practically bloomed the whole time. Like on the other photo art I did of the Giant Swallowtail Butterfly, I got the Sulfur Butterfly from Daily Textures. She has a collection of butterflies to purchase, but you have to cut them out yourself. They’re not an overlay.
So my friend was telling me, a little late, about doing a little May Day basket of flowers for friends, a tradition of usually putting a cone of flowers and treats hanging from their doors. I want to do that next year with my granddaughter and make it a tradition. I think it would be fun. But it is for May 1st, no Maypole.
Hump day, yay! So little one is here today and it’s cold this morning, yay!! And we’re going to plant flower seeds–zinnia, shasta daisy, coneflowers, and some other seeds I saved from last year, I think more zinnia, and some more daylilies. We’re going to nature hike it, feed the turtles and anything else we can think of before it gets too hot. But we also have to run an errand too. We have a craft to make, paper flowers for Mother’s Day.
It was a wild day yesterday, but the good news was my teeth are in excellent shape even after not going to the dentist for a year and a half because of Covid! An electric toothbrush is the key. I brush longer and can reach places I can’t with the regular one. And flossing is so important. They had a cute sign up that said, “Which teeth should I floss? The ones I want to keep.”
I’m trying to come up with a name for my business. I’m thinking of Wilde Heart Publishing. I write romance. My daughter mentioned Howling Good Books, which I love, but I write so many more books then just wolf shifters. Highland books, fae stories, romantic suspense, cougar shifters, bear shifters, vampire romance, so I want something to encompass all of them.
And that’s all she wrote! Okay, off to get ready before little one gets here for another busy day! She got here…which delayed posting this for two hours. lol
Hope you all have a great one! I’m off to have fun with mine!
I had taken the picture of the flowers and natural bokeh of bubbly light as the sun hit the esperanza flowers behind it. Then I added the lilac flowers to blend in with the giant yellow swallowtail butterfly that was perched on some lilac flowers (Daily Textures). It was really pretty with all the yellows, but I wondered how it would look as a black and white photo and I thought it was really beautiful that way as you can see more of the textures in the picture.
Well, I ended up with 3,000 words yesterday! So I’m over word count. Yay! I was so glad to be getting somewhere with the story, despite having to run errands. It’s another hectic day today for me–teeth cleaning this morning. Haven’t gone in since January of last year because of Covid. They’re starting to take patients again and I’m fully vaccinated, so I’m hoping that’s enough. Another appointment this afternoon. So I’ll have to write in short spurts as much as I can and do edits like yesterday.
I need to run in for a couple of groceries. I thought I just did that! So I’ll try to combine that with the teeth cleaning–well, afterwards.
I finally took the dogs in to be groomed yesterday. They’re long-haired havanese and though I comb them out every day (they don’t shed), their faces and paws and tummies and rumps need to be trimmed and they can do it unlike how I can. I take them once every three months or so normally. But with Covid….no.
We’re supposed to have storms again today, hoping they’ll stay away while I’ve got to run to the appointments. People can’t drive here when it rains. I swear they think it means drive faster! And we have a lot more accidents. Hmm, just looked at the weather and it appears we’re going to have thunderstorms both times I’m out and about. Plus we still have two river flash flood warnings.
I was so hoping I’d have the book done by this weekend, but not sure. I want to get started on the Christmas anthology novella and get back to You Had Me at Cougar. I wish my brain could write these at night while I’m sleeping.
Have a wonderful day! Mine is just about to get started!
I finally, finally figured out where I’m going with the Billionaire. Kind of. It helped not to have little one here every night and day for a couple of days. Anyway, I’m on the home stretch, I think. I need to run some errands this morning, ugh, and I have to pick up my granddaughter this afternoon, so that will cut into my writing time, and I’ve got a repeat of something like that tomorrow. But hopefully, I’ll get this done by the weekend. I’m 900 words shy of word count. While editing, I was adding and cutting so much that I would have had it if I hadn’t cut over a 1,000 words yesterday, but that was good. It’s all good.
I have a scene in mind to write today, and I have 3 chapters left to edit, and then I still need to finish the book, but it’s getting there!
I had a nice letter from a fan today that she couldn’t put The Wolf Wore Plaid down after she started reading it. That is the greatest compliment a writer can get. And she loved how I had Guy injure his back and write about it realistically since she has back pain. I’ve injured my back and it’s something you can’t undo. Through the years since then, if I twist and lift a certain way, I’m in pain for days. Sometimes, I can manage to only re-injure it slightly, but other times, I really throw it out of whack. So yep, I know all about it.
She wanted to know if I would have more about Guy in a future story. Yes! I love it when readers are interested in new characters and want to see more of them. I figure when I write the last MacQuarrie’s brother’s story, I’ll pair him up in a movie with Guy like before, different castle, and then I’ll have to write Guy’s story.
While I’m running around on errands today, I think I’ll pick up more daylilies. When I put them in, they were pretty, but not that showy. Now that I’ve had some of them in for a few years, they are really showy. So it’s time for more. They do block out the weeds. And that’s what I really need. Showy flowers that bloom all the time and no weeds. A perfect garden!
Okay, got to get busy with the book, feeding the dogs, etcetera!
Hope you have a beautiful day! I’ve got to quit goofing off and get mine started!
A Grosbeak came to visit. In seven years, I’ve only seen one about three times. I love their colors!
Well, we had 8″ of rain in two days. We had such bad thunderstorms, I had to put Max in the closet so he could sleep. For anyone who doesn’t know it, that’s a havanese, not a kid, grandkid, or a significant other. Just thought I’d clarify that. He finally slept fine so I could sleep!
I managed to get through another 5 chapters yesterday. It’s slow going, trying to fix timeline issues. This morning, I was trying to come up with a mystery still. I’m at nearly 76k. I need 80K for minimum word count. I need to write a bunch of more scenes, so that will easily make the word count, once I’m not just editing.
I went out early before it was even light to plant more flower seeds. They’re seeds I saved from flowers from last year–zinnia, marigold, gerbera daisy, coneflower. And I have a couple of packages of more seeds to plant. The ground is so wet, it’s the perfect time to plant them. Some seeds easily come up–I already have quite a few zinnia popping up from last year’s crop. And marigolds are too. I love it when the flowers reseed themselves and it makes literally no work for me. I had so many colors with them, I would take my granddaughter out, carrying her from flower to flower and she’d name all the colors for me. I’m not sure about the gerbera daisies. They might not come up that easily since I’ve never seen new ones from the seeds I’ve planted.
The daylilies are really getting prolific, finally, and making a really couple of showcase flowerbeds out front. I want to plant more so it’s a drift of daylilies. I love the Asiatic lilies, but one flower per season and they’re done. I love the gerbera daisies also that continue to bloom once it warms up and as long as it’s not too hot. But in the fall, they begin to bloom again. The same with the coneflowers. I need to plan better on what is in front of what though. I have some taller plants that are in front of shorter flowering plants in some places.
We’re supposed to get hot again today, unlike yesterday where we were cooler than Minnesota! And no rain, so I’m going to plant the rest of my flower seeds before it gets too hot. It’s nice out this morning.
I’m off to work on the book, hope to make some more headway! Want to finish this before more book edits come in for previous books.
