Family-wise things have been a bit hectic, but I’ll share more about that in my Saturday Afternoon Tea and Chat post.
Blog-wise I’ve been busy writing reviews of books and shows.
Writing-wise I have finished Cassie, which will release in August and have started brainstorming for the third Gladwynn book. I’ll announce a title for it at a later date.
Let’s get right to our most clicked post of the week:
I always love Debbie’s decorations and how she pays attention to detail and focuses on that detail for us in case we miss it while looking at the photos. These setups must take a very long time and her patience to create them always impresses me.
I really loved this sentence: Then we look up, not into the eyes of our friends and family, but into the precious Word of God and realize that spring is here, not because it’s actually spring, but it begins to feel like spring because we’ve allowed ourselves to be comforted by the Word of God and His Spirit.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family-friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago.
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
There have been some lovely reviews of Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing over the last week and a half.
I’m going to share a couple today and also remind you that you can enter to win a copy of the paperback of the book and a $50 Amazon gift card HERE.
This one from Devoted to Hope was so nice:
Step into the nostalgic embrace of Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing, a delightful haven for lovers of vintage charm and heartwarming mysteries. With its retro flair and cozy atmosphere, this book invites readers to immerse themselves in a world where classic style, old-fashioned values, and the timeless allure of small-town life reign supreme!
As you journey through the pages, you’ll be swept away by Lisa R. Howeler’s storytelling, which effortlessly transports you to a bygone era filled with quaint cottages, a bustling town, and the comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee. With every twist and turn of the plot, you’ll find yourself captivated by Gladwynn’s spirited determination and unwavering resolve as she unravels the mysteries lurking beneath the surface of her beloved community.
The intriguing storyline and the rich tapestry of characters who populate this enchanting world will steal your heart. From Gladwynn’s endearing quirks to her grandmother Lucinda’s timeless wisdom, each character is infused with a warmth and authenticity that feels like a welcoming hug. As you follow their journey, you’ll find yourself becoming deeply invested in their lives, eagerly anticipating each new revelation and heartfelt moment.
Read the rest of the review and find other amazing reviews of Christian or clean fiction books HERE.
There have been so many nice mentions or reviews of the book since last week and I truly do appreciate those who took the time out of their days to read the book and then share about it or leave reviews on their blogs, Amazon and Goodreads. It really does mean so much! The tour ends March 25.
What: Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot – a chance for bloggers to link up their posts that are related to fashion, DIY, food, and anything else that is family-friendly.
When: The link goes live Thursday nights at 9:30 PM EST/United States time.
Why: To connect with other bloggers and bring more traffic to your own blog.
My 9-year-old daughter wanted me to read my book—Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing to her a couple of months ago and then again this weekend. Since it is a very clean book, even with the mystery element, I started to read it to her. I didn’t think she’d be interested but she asked me to keep reading so I did.
This week she asked if she could use my old Kindle and she downloaded my book and began to read it on her own. I thought she’d get bored fairly fast but 20 minutes in she ran to me from where she’d been sitting on the couch in the dining room and declared, “I just got to Lucinda and I love her. She is my favorite character.” She then quoted something Lucinda had said and, in the most adult way, said “She is heeelarious.”
I can’t lie – the whole situation made me weepy. I imagined other people reading my book and enjoying it and always thought that would be so amazing but I never thought about how amazing it would be to have my own family like what I write.
Some might say that it is normal to have family and friends say they like what you have written, but I have not had one friend from high school, college, or in my adult years read my books or say one thing about them to me over the last five years I have been writing.
I have not been able to gush with them over my characters like I hoped I would be able to.
My mom and my husband have both read my books so I can gush a little with them, luckily.
My daughter is only 9 and I really didn’t think about her reading my books or even caring about them, but I am grateful that my books are clean so she can read them and not be shown things she shouldn’t be shown or exposed to at her age.
My dad is not a reader but he has now read both of my Gladwynn Grant books. He literally took the time to read a couple of my chapters of my books each night and that means the world to me. If you could see me right now you would see me with tears in my eyes, knowing that my non-reader dad took the time out of his day to read my books and even left me a review on my Facebook. Dad has not always been a supporter, exactly, of me writing fiction so I was shocked when Mom said he was reading my book.
Dad felt like I needed to have traveled more and experienced more to be able to write fiction and he may be right in some ways, but his comments were somewhat discouraging to me when I started writing fiction for fun in 2018.
Here is the review my dad left me:
I am not much of a reader at all and very seldom read fiction and I watch very few movies.
Like who wants to read about something that is not . Lol Evidently a lot of people.
Anyway I got into the first Gladwyn mystery and found it intriguing and starting this one I find it more so.
Sometimes I think wow, I never knew that lol ; you see Gladwynn Grant,a mixture of intelligent, ditsy curious, and almost cunning, was my mother’s name.
Okay off to store a few more clues and along the way of the town theater find out what happened to Samantha.
Well, anyhow, I just thought I’d share all that today because it was on my mind as I started to write this post today.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family-friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago.
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
What: Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot – a chance for bloggers to link up their posts that are related to fashion, DIY, food, and anything else that is family-friendly.
When: The link goes live Thursday nights at 9:30 PM EST/United States time.
Why: To connect with other bloggers and bring more traffic to your own blog.
I hope all of you who celebrate Valentine’s Day had a lovely day. For all of you who consider it just another day, I hope you are having a good week!
Our kids made dinner for us yesterday at home and then we watched a Fred Astaire movie, which I didn’t enjoy as much as his others because the ending was quite weird. He tricked a woman into marrying him like he could just treat her like something he owned and not a real person. It was so odd.
We watched an episode of Psych as a family after the movie.
Our weather dropped down into below-freezing or just above-freezing temperatures this week so today I am sitting in front of a fire that took a bit for me to make but that is keeping us nice and cozy in our living room while I snack on frozen blueberries as a treat and get ready to watch Lark Rise From Candleford. Have you ever seen the show? It is based on a classic book.
This week we had a three-way tie and they were all from Lynne at Thrifting Wonderland! Lynne always has such interesting posts! Did you see these three this week?
I hope you had a great week and have a great week ahead.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family-friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago.
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
Oh my goodness, everyone! The weather is so awful and cold right now where I live and if you are in the United States, probably where you live too.
Much of the country is in an arctic freeze right now with temperatures anywhere from negative 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-25C) to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-3C). Where I live, we are used to cold winters but not this cold!
The horribly cold temps started on Sunday and are still going on. On Tuesday about five inches of snow fell and my daughter (who I call Little Miss on here) loves playing in the snow but with temps at 18 and windchill at like 7, she gave up pretty fast.
Even our animals, who will go outside in almost any weather, only stepped out at five minutes at a time and then returned inside to warm up by our woodstove, which has been going full bore since last week when we had snow. I have barely seen my parents in two weeks, even though they live eight minutes from my house because the extreme cold makes my muscles hurt and my chest tighten up.
On Sunday we tried to head to my parents but high winds were knocking the dead Ash trees down around us, the temps were dropping and freezing water run off from the day before, so we opted to stay home.
How has the weather been where you are?
If it is nice and sunny then please enjoy but don’t brag too much! *wink* Kidding! Brag all you want. I won’t blame you a bit!
I really enjoyed this reminder from Grace Filled Moments as well. I am going to be referring to this later when I need to be reminded to find those small moments to lift my sports and get through.
I loved all the winter tips provided in this blog post. Some of them I am going to try myself as we deal with this arctic cold snap.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family-friendly. You can link up posts from last week or from years ago even.
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving last week. We are back in session this week for our Weekend Traffic Jam. We are still looking for an extra host so let Marsha know if you are interested.
This is a post where you can link up any post about any topic as long as it is family-friendly. You can even dig into your archives to share.
The most clicked post for the week before last was:
I enjoyed this post because I am a homeschooling mom myself and I know how hard it can be to get started. Parents need all the advice they can get.
This post from Is This Mutton was perfectly true. There really aren’t any good “belly laugh” shows out there anymore and while she didn’t think it had all to do with political correctness (maybe some), I think that is the biggest reason no one can laugh anymore. They’re always afraid of who they will offend. Of course, everyone is also offended anymore. Like everyone.
I remembered a lot of the shows she remembers (Father Ted, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Keeping Up Appearances – all shows I have watched over the years and enjoyed).
That is my intro post for today. I hope you’ll share a link with everyone at the link up below.
Today I want to open the floor, so to speak, to all my bloggy friends.
I want to know a few things:
Why do you blog?
How did you get started blogging?
What has been the benefit of blogging in your life?
What have been the best parts of your blogging experience?
Have there been any bad parts of blogging?
You can answer these questions here or write a separate post and then come back and let me know.
I started thinking about these questions as they pertain to my life in the last few weeks because I had become very wrapped up in social media while trying to promote my books and I started to hate it. I hated it because I missed blogging. I missed sharing with my “followers” here. I don’t like the term followers because many of you have become my friends – friends I don’t see or talk to in person most of the time (with a couple of exceptions) but friends, nonetheless.
Many of the people I have met while blogging have prayed for me, checked on me, encouraged me, and sometimes even gently corrected me.
There have been recent seasons in my life that I don’t think I would have survived without my blog friends.
I truly am feeling choked up as I write this.
What a blessing it has been to connect with bloggers in my “real life” (not that blogging isn’t real life). I never imagined I would be able to call my readers my friends – such as Facebook friends but also real friends.
So to answer my own questions:
I started blogging because I enjoy writing and my brother was blogging so I started to keep one too. My first blog was called the same as this one, Boondock Ramblings, and it was what was called a “mommy blog” because I blogged mainly about my son.
I blogged back then to connect with other moms and share stories (both funny and stressful) and simply to have a creative outlet. Today I still blog for the creative outlet and to connect with others.
The benefit of blogging is that it has allowed me to connect with other people who have encouraged me and supported me and laughed and cried with me.
It has also been something I can do other than sit and worry about my problems or concerns.
Connection with the other bloggers has also encouraged me in my walk with Christ, or as a reader, or mom, or just a person.
Is there a downside to blogging? Sometimes. There have been times I’ve felt pressured to write something, even when I’m busy, but that’s more my problem than blogging’s problem and I luckily haven’t had that feeling in a while. There can sometimes be rude people who leave rude comments but that has very, very rarely happened to me.
There are times when bloggers can get into the comparison game and compare their lives to the lives of other bloggers. That’s a negative but something I have not done very often, luckily.
I’ve already mentioned the best part of blogging above but I will reiterate again that the best parts of blogging are meeting people, getting to know them, and forming friendships with people who have stumbled onto my blog for whatever reason.
For whatever reason you stopped on my blog – I thank you. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we have become friends. I’m thankful that God brought you here at just the right time in my – and your – life.
Can I interest you in a slice of cake? A cookie? A cup of tea?
Honestly, I don’t have the cake or cookies so you will just have to have the tea, but I do have some fresh raspberries if you’d like some of those.
Let’s kick our Saturday afternoon chat off with a weird question:
Did you hear of the man who stabbed his colleague at a science lab in Antarctica in 2018 because the colleague kept telling him the end of the books he was reading?
Do you think you’d ever go that far?
I hope I wouldn’t but I would guess that there was a lot more to that man’s stress than simply being told the end of books. The man who was stabbed lived, by the way.
Anyhow, I somehow made it through this week without stabbing anyone despite all the running around and mental gymnastics my brain kept doing.
This summer has been very busy for us in some ways, but usually we’ve only had one thing to do a day. That one thing has often been in the middle or end of the day so it has thrown some things off but that’s okay. We’ve adjusted.
I am looking forward to autumn and winter this year simply for the fact that I will have an excuse to say I can’t attend something.
“Oh, so sorry but we’re supposed to get bad weather and … yeah. I’d love to, but you know. The roads could be dangerous.”
I have that excuse practiced pretty well but, alas, I can’t use that one in the summer. Unless we get flash flooding, and I’d prefer that didn’t happen.
So, Monday I volunteered to pull weeds in my dad’s garden. I forgot how uncomfortable a person’s muscles can get after pulling weeds so the next morning I was hurting quite a bit.
I couldn’t mope around too long, though, because Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing came out on Tuesday and I worked on marketing for that most of the morning. In the afternoon Little Miss and I went swimming at my parents’. She talked me into a couple of swimming competitions which were easier for her because she was in an inflated inner tube and I was using my actual muscles to swim. Using muscles I don’t use enough other times of the year two days in a row left me in a lot of pain later that night and into Wednesday.
Working those muscles, in other words, was both good and bad for me. I had a hard time walking and sleeping this week but I was glad I got out and did things and I was proud of myself for whining less than I normally do when I am in pain.
On Wednesday I drove Little Miss about 15 minutes away to a park for the county library’s Summer Reading program. That’s one thing I don’t think I have ever mentioned on here – our county is so small population wise, we only have one library. It isn’t our town library – it’s the county library and it’s where everyone in the county goes for books and activities, etc. Since it is the county library, they try to hold events in places other than the most populated town in the county, which is my town.
The children at Wednesday’s event painted rocks, played on the playground, and participated in a rock relay race where they had to race to place rocks in the shapes that they belonged to on a large piece of cardboard.
Little Miss had fun but was ready to go home fairly quickly because there were new episodes of Bluey on Disney Plus. These episodes have been withheld for some reason for the last year or so and they were much anticipated in our house. I was glad we didn’t have anywhere else to go the rest of that day.
On Thursday, The Husband took the day off so we could one, take his car 45 minutes north to be worked on and two, go out to dinner for our anniversary.
Our view while we drove. My lunch.
After we dropped the car off, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant we enjoy near us. The Husband took Little Miss to gymnastics that evening and I stayed home and watched an episode of Miss Scarlet and the Duke while turning the air conditioning up full blast to make the house feel like fall. I made myself a cup of peppermint tea with honey and sipped that while I watched the show and designed journals. I know I should live in the present and not wish for it to be another season, but I do have to say, yet again, how much I miss the cooler months where I can snuggle under a blanket with a good book.
Yesterday a friend came to visit for a couple of hours, and then it was back up to pick up The Husband’s car and then he went grocery shopping, something he does because he is very nice, but also because I think he just doesn’t want to deal with whatever weird calamity befalls me if I go.
If you are new here, you may not know that almost every time I go grocery shopping something weird happens to me and I have some kind of emotional breakdown because I am a bit of a mental case at times (that’s the understatement of the year).
One time I locked the keys in the car and we didn’t have a spare. The last time I lost the key fob to the van and thought we didn’t have another one so I burst into tears. It wouldn’t be so bad except we have to drive 20 minutes away from home to get our groceries and I hate when I have to inconvenience someone to dig me out of whatever trouble I have gotten myself into.
I’m a bit high maintenance, which makes it a surprise to me at times that The Husband hasn’t run away screaming and that we’ve actually made it to 21 years.
He’s really very sweet to do the grocery shopping. It helps so much, especially because, even though I hate admitting it, my chronic health issues often leave me feeling drained and achy for a day after I do something like grocery shopping or anything that leaves me on my feet for quite a while.
He does a lot for our family and we’d be lost without him.
Today I really want to stay home and do absolutely nothing other than catch up on blog posts by other bloggers, write some more in the second Gladwynn Grant Mysteries book, or read a book, but it is supposed to get up to 87 and it would be a good day for Little Miss and I to go swimming. We will see how well I get around. Tomorrow, however, I am drawing the line and staying home all day so I can do some housework and catch up on blog posts, etc., because next week promises to be another long week with a church program at a local church, Summer Reading, and probably visits to the pool again.
The pull off along the scenic bypass we travel down to go home.
How about you? How was your week last week? What have you been sipping while you work, travel, or read this week?
I started it as a fun endeavor to help take my mind off some lost friendships and my loneliness. I was lonely before those lost friendships because they really weren’t good friendships at all, but I didn’t realize how bad they were until they were gone.
A few times during this fiction writing journey, I got wrapped up and sad about not making money from my books. Silly, I know, since they are really stories I wrote for my blog readers more than they are books.
As the journey has continued, I have slipped in and out of those feelings, but have had more moments of simple gratitude – not for making money from selling my books because I’ve barely made any of that, but for the friendships and connections I’ve made through writing, either with the books or the blog.
The connections I’ve made through my blog and my books have meant so much more than money.
Those connections have literally been a lifesaver. I’m not exaggerating when I say that.
The encouraging messages, the offers of prayers, and even beautiful songs sent to me privately have sustained me through some very dark days, most recently, but also over the last three years.
Just a couple of weeks ago a follower/reader and now friend sent me this video that was such an important reminder to me. It literally left me in refreshing, needed tears.
The people I have met online came to me in a time when I had lost “real life” (as the saying goes) friendships and felt so lonely and alone.
I used to take the online connections for granted. These were only people I knew online, not really “knew-knew”. But behind that computer they are real people, like me, some of them also lonely or in dark places, and we are making connections, in many cases, on a heart level, not just a superficial virtual level.
I can’t imagine what I would do without all of your wonderful people who read my blog and my books and send me encouraging messages and are just there when I really need someone to be there.
You are appreciated much more than you could ever imagine.
