Gremlins
Equipment is supposed to work perfectly, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what kind of equipment—computers, kitchen appliances, our bodies, or in the case of my most recent skirmish with disaster, automobiles. One evening last week I attended a meeting that ended after dark. It wasn’t late, but the sun was definitely gone. I started home […]
Forty Years Ago Today I Began My Legal Career
Forty years ago today, September 4, 1979, I started working for Hallmark Cards. It was the day after Labor Day, summer was over, and it was time to get to work. My husband and I had spent the summer studying for the bar exam, taking the three-day test at the end of July. Then we […]
My Hope Secured: Cover Reveal
It seems appropriate that on this Labor Day I am updating you on my most recent labor of love. I am pleased to show you a near-final version of the front cover of my soon to be published novel, My Hope Secured: Love and Loss on the Oregon Frontier. I might revise this cover slightly, […]
Where Did 1850s Oregon Farmers Get Their Water?
As I am finishing my current novel, it dawned on me that I have not focused on how the settlers in Oregon obtained their water. I’ve just assumed they had plenty, mostly from creeks or springs near their cabins. This is probably a reasonable assumption, but I decided I should do a little research into […]
Random Photo: Summer Visit in Virginia
Now that we know where most of our boxes are after our recent move, I decided to open a box of photographs and post about a random photo. My selection wasn’t entirely random. Summer is drawing to an end, and I told myself I would use the first snapshot I found of summer. What surfaced […]
MY HOPE SECURED: An Update on My Work in Progress
Because of our move, July was a lost cause on editing my current work in progress. But I am pleased to report that as August began, I got back into the swing of things. I’m into the polishing phase on the novel, which will be titled My Hope Secured. I’ve discovered a good way to […]
The U.S. Postal Service Gift That Keeps on Giving
I posted a couple of weeks ago about the error the U.S. Postal Service made in recording the zip code of our new home. In that post, I described the finger-pointing between the Zip Code A branch and the Zip Code B branch personnel. In a second post, I described how we received mail one […]
Lost and Found
A few days ago, a friend said to me, “You look thin. Have you lost weight?” “I have no idea,” I responded. “I can’t find my scale.” The bathroom scale is one of the things my husband and I have lost in the move. I remember packing it. I think I shoved it in a […]
The Hazards of Living Off the Grid
My husband and I have now been in our new home a little more than two weeks. Most of the problems during the move have stemmed from people’s reliance on computer systems. Automation can be a boon to efficiency or a bane to our sanity. When we rely on computers to organize our lives, we […]
Fifteen Nuggets from Cherry Adair at the Woodneath Romance GenreCom Master Writers Program
On August 1 and 2, I took a break from the hassles of moving to attend the Master Writing Class with Cherry Adair offered by the Woodneath Branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library as part of their Romance Genre Conference. Author Cherry Adair taught a two-day program that covered how to plot a novel, with […]