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