I don’t like perpetual complainers. I don’t understand people who always find something to complain about. I don’t get it. Why go through life looking for the negative stuff? How depressing. How much nicer it is to see the silver lining even in the darkest places. It’s not always easy to see the positive side of things, I get that, but there is always something to be thankful for. The truth is, most of us have some challenges in our lives to deal with. But, we don’t have to harp on them. We all have good things in our lives as well. (more…)
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Have you ever noticed that people like to put things into categories? It’s just human nature I think to want to classify stuff into known categories. Everything needs to go into a box, or a file, or on a shelf. Ever look at something and wonder what the heck it is? If someone tells you it’s a new-fangled object designed to do thus and such, your brain automatically wants to file that information into a group of knowns. That’s usually when people say something like, “Oh, it’s sort of like a thingamajig?” We ask because we have an inherent need to relate the new thing to an old thing. 
That’s right folks, I could very well be a winner in not one, but two contests. A couple of months ago, I entered my book On Common Ground in the Willa Contest. What is the Willa Contest you ask? I’ve never heard of it, you say. Well, neither had I. Here’s the blurb from the Women Writing the West (WWW) website: 
You ever have one of those days when it feels like nothing is going right? You know the days I’m talking about, you get up on the wrong side of the bed or the planets don’t line up or whatever. This past weekend I had one of those days. It was more like two of those days in a row, but it just felt like I should crawl back into bed and stay there until, oh I don’t know, summer. 
The complex was highly self-sufficient; the large acreage of the purchase allowed the boys to grow their own food, raise livestock and learn farming trades. Additionally, there was a print shop, bakery and cobbler shop where the young delinquents and otherwise homeless boys could learn skills for self-preservation in the real world.
So I’ve been spending a LOT of time lately learning how to market my book. For those of you who are not writers, let me just say that when you write “the end,” you’re only about a third of the way done with that story. Next comes rounds of editing and proofreading to get it exactly right and then comes the selling part. This is the hardest, yet most important part. After all, what good is a really good book with an amazing cover if nobody knows how to get their hands on it? 
