Long Time No Me!

May 26, 2019 | Leave A Comment

Well, hello, stranger!

And by stranger, I don’t mean you, dear readers! I mean this blog, that has been woefully neglected by moi for a while, and I have no one to blame but myself.

I often have good intentions to maintain this blog more regularly, but life seems to get in the way. And my last post certainly attests to that – it was before Christmas! Argh!

In my defense, two days after I’d posted that, on my birthday, just about an hour after I finished a book and turned it into my editor and was all psyched for a stretch of relaxation and enjoying having the kids home for Christmas, we learned that sadly my father had passed away unexpectedly. He’d spent his winters in Hawaii and thus far from family, and no one had heard from him in about a week. It was so very sad for us all but we were all very grateful that he died in his happy place, a place he hadn’t expected to be able to return to after having fallen gravely ill last summer with Lyme disease of all things.

My father’s passing meant much word needed to be done ASAP — my brothers and I had to close up his life, settle all affairs, clear out his house in Pittsburgh and his condo in Hawaii — both of which were overflowing to the brim with junk (uh, we filled three 6-ton dumpsters to the brim in Pittsburgh alone!). Dad was a hoarder and boy, did we have to purge and purge massively. Between the time spent emptying out his belongings and then organizing two memorial services, and the myriad emails and texts going back and forth amongst family during this time, all of a sudden my other have-to’s took a backseat for a while. And to be honest, having lost both of my parents suddenly and unexpectedly in the past couple of years, it kind of threw me back on my heels for a while as I processed this all. Which meant my productivity just evaporated, and I had to postpone a book that I had due to my editor repeatedly, only finally just this week turning it in months late. In the midst of this all, my middle daughter was getting married, so it was a lovely chance to redirect from sadness to great joy — we kind of ran the gamut of emotions in a very condensed time frame.

Without a book releasing for a while, I decided to bundle the first three books in two of my series — The Royal Romeos and Falling for Mr. Wrong for the first time to make available to readers at a great price—I’ll post info below if you’d like to check them out. If you’ve not read any of them, this is a great time to give them a try for a real bargain! And don’t forget books 1-3 of the It’s Reigning Men series are also available in a bundle! And I’ll post below a picture from the wedding and the breathtaking view from my dad’s condo in Hawaii, where I’d never been until we had to go there to clear it out—you can see why it was indeed his happy place.

For those of you anxiously awaiting my next book, thanks for your patience as I let life get in the way a bit. Bird Dog, book 4 in the Confessions of a Chick Magnet series, is with my ever-so-patient editor and will finally be released July 16^th!

I’m writing this, by the way, Memorial Day weekend, kind of lamenting that we’re not somewhere fun, like a beach or a pool, relaxing with friends and family, but also enjoying the chance to do absolutely (well, mostly!) nothing for a day or two without feeling terribly guilty. It’s the first chance I’ve had to start working my way through the many things that got waylaid over the past several months, so it’s nice to feel like I’m making progress, interspersed with watching episodes of my latest guilty reality TV pleasure, 90-Day Fiance (it hardly gets better than watching 90-Day Fiance Pillow Talk!).

quite a view from my dad’s condo in Oahu — of which I am now a temporary 1/4 owner of! Sadly we can’t afford to keep it–anyone interested?!