Update on my life late August 2018

Hi, My Sweeties—

I’m feeling swamped. Sigh. As always. But here goes…

1. I’m working on The Best of British Scrapbooking and Cardmaking to get it ready to re-publish. It’s not up yet on Amazon, because we still have some formatting issues, but when it’s up, I’d appreciate you posting a review.

2. I had to stop everything and re-edit Tear Down and Die because someone complained to Amazon about the “quality.” What exactly did that mean? It means that I had two words missing and one phrase repeated. Yeah. That’s it. I laughed like crazy because I’ve read traditionally published books with bigger errors. In fact, I just finished reading The Ghost War by Alex Berenson where he says that Aldrich Ames didn’t have any children. He did. A son. That’s a pretty big and pretty easily checked mistake. So I went back, re-edited the entire Cara Mia book because I couldn’t help myself. Now I have to have a formatting specialist look at it because I cannot get the page numbers to show up. That’s kind of okay because I have all new covers for the Cara Mia books. They are gorgeous.

3. Today I’ll tackle corrections/edits on How to Write a Letter.

4. After that, I’ll work on Bad Memory Album, which will be a special gift for people on my newsletter.

5. Then back to the new Kiki book, which I’m behind on writing.

What have I learned this week? I hate formatting, and I want to pay a formatter to do more. It’s just a huge pain in the butt.

Also, I’ve been dogsitting for my dear friend and neighbor, Lori. Chief is an older dog, so he has special needs. We had a huge thunderstorm that caused the poor boy to shiver with fright. I decided we (Chief, Jax, and I) should camp out in the laundry room until it passed. Fortunately, Chief is Jax’s best friend. Jax even “herds” Chief. If I say, “Go get Chief,” Jax runs to his pal and directs him toward me.

On a really sad note, my son and daughter-in-law have learned that their dog, Juice, has terminal bladder cancer. I really love that big sweet lunk. Every time I think about him dying, I get all weepy…that’s making me sad and grumpy.

 

This week I started going to Orange Theory Fitness. My husband, David, had a heart attack scare a year and a half ago. After that, he became Mr. Uber Fit. I finally bit the proverbial bullet and decided I am not going to get fit on my own. Hence, Orange Theory Fitness where I’m literally working my butt off. Oy!  I have to say that the staff is really, really nice. They aren’t like the usual gym bunnies I’ve known.

When I take breaks from editing or writing, I work on my new dollhouse project. Translation: I cut or paint myself. Yes, I’ve taken to sawing my fingers and slicing a craft knife blade into my thumb. I dripped blood all over the project. I now have blood on the applicator tip of the Super Glue container. What a mess! But as long as I can type, we’re good, right?

That’s it from here,

Love you,
j