Monday News

Today, I have a neat contest to share with you, but first this picture of Hermione. She is so camera shy, that I don’t often get a good picture of her. She was looking out my office window with such a contemplative expression, and I’m so glad she didn’t move as I slowly picked up my phone, opened the camera, and took a few shots.

I’ve teamed up with 30+ fantastic authors to give away a huge collection of Literary, Historical & Women’s Fiction novels to 2 lucky winners!

And the Grand Prize winner gets a BRAND NEW eReader? 😁 

You can win Evelyn Evolving: A Story of Real Life, plus books from authors like Susan Slater and Nicole Evelina. All you have to do is follow the authors on Bookbub to be entered in the random drawing to win. The contest starts today and runs through March 2.

The top two winners can receive either a signed paperback of my book, if they live in the U.S., or an e-book.

Enter the giveaway by clicking here 👉 https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/february-2022/literary-historic-and-womens-fiction/

Here’s just a little bit about my book, for those who are not familiar with it.

Evelyn Evolving is the story of my mother’s life, fictionalized in places because some things were never known for sure – like the circumstances of why her father disappeared when she was about 3 years old.

I’ve always wanted to write my mother’s story. Partly because it is so complicated, and I realized when I reached adulthood that how she grew up influenced how she attempted to mother two girls of her own. It wasn’t always pleasant. It was challenging. But she did the best she could.

My mother had a difficult childhood, raised in an orphanage with unspeakable abuses heaped on her, while always wondering why her mother abandoned her. What was wrong with her that her mother didn’t love her enough to keep her? What had she done to deserve the neglect, the abuse? A question often asked by children in those kinds of situations.

Life continued to batter my mother throughout her adulthood with a failed marriage, post-partum depression, and financial problems. During it all, she often wavered, but never went down for the count.

I don’t want to give the whole story away here, so I’ll only say that despite her flaws and failings, I always saw my mother as a very strong women. She had to be strong to endure, and I wrote this book to celebrate her strength. For some reason I never could do that in all the years I’ve been writing. I have notebooks filled with starts and stops in the effort, and it wasn’t until after she died, that I was finally able to write the story from start to finish.

Maybe it had to be that way. I don’t know. I’m just so happy that it did, and so many people are meeting this woman who was my mother.

The book was the #1 new release at Amazon the day it was published, and I was blown away, but also so thrilled. Now and then, it continues to rise to the top ten best-seller list in several categories, and I’m so thankful to all the readers who’ve purchased the book and kept it high in the rankings.

Perhaps my mother is smiling, too.

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In closing, I just want to mention a three-part series I’ve been listening to from the TED Radio Hour on an NPR podcast, Work, Play, Rest.  “In this series, TED speakers share evolving notions of what it means to pay bills, feel joy in play, and rest our minds and bodies.”

 I’ve listened to the first episodes and am halfway through the last one. Not that the episodes are hours long. Each one is just under an hour, featuring different speakers, so there are perfect places to pause and listen to more later. I hope you check the series out. Let me know if you do and what you think of it. So far my biggest take-away from the series is the importance of finding joy in what we do.

That’s all folks. I do hope you have a wonderful, fun-filled, relaxing, productive week ahead. Yes, all those things can co-exist. Find your joy.