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Happy New Year 2020
Ten years is ten years. It’s the start of a new decade — because I said so. A decade is merely a group of 10 years, right? So, having not been around at that long-ago Year One, I am free to divide the time I spend on this earth any way I want! And I’ve decided that the new decade begins now. So here I am, ready to create a new me. I have tools: *a diet program *a subscription to the YMCA *books on Time Management (Atomic Habits by James Clear, Indistractable by Nir Eyal and Younger Next Year (for women) by Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry Lodge, MD).…
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Coming Up for Air
Seems like it’s been a while since I posted! Family duties caught and kept my attention during the summer — lots of milestones like the offspring’s high school graduation, followed by the final summer of childhood and the first tentative flight from the family nest to college. But now I’m settling into my own life again, and soon will report on new developments. In the meantime, enjoy the beautiful autumn skies, wherever you may be.
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Motivation
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. — H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956) Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels So in my quest to defeat procrastination and find new motivation for moving toward my goals, I am reading Sam Horn’s Someday Is Not A Day In The Week; 10 Hacks to make the rest of your life the best of your life. I’ve already found a great tip: Have a pretend SEE to give you a sense of urgency. An SEE, he explains, is a “significant emotional event.” It’s something dramatic that forces us to reevaluate…
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In Praise of Participation Trophies
I love participation trophies. Don’t scoff. Knowing that people care, knowing that they see you – even if you’re not a star performer – well, that means a lot. Learning something new is hard. When you first start to master any skill, you fumble and make mistakes. It’s an awkward process, and it takes encouragement to keep going. I’ve noticed that when we learn, we gravitate towards the skills that are easiest for us. Reading came easily to me, so I read a lot. All that practice made it even easier, and now I’m an avid reader for life. When I practiced Taekwondo, I noticed that some kids seemed…
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Out of the Box
When we are young, we believe that the future contains unlimited choices for us — who do you want to be when you grow up? You can be anything! Go for it. But as we enter the third chapter of our lives, many of us find that our field of choices have narrowed. We chose a career, a life path, and then after a couple of decades, we feel as if we’re stuck with it. Obligations and responsibilities have piled up, and eventually it seems impossible to change our direction. Now, instead of choices and control, our lives can seem to be made up of consequences. All those years spent…
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The Re-Invented Self
I’m writing this blog because I’m hoping to help myself as well as others. Together, I hope we can: Figure out who we want to be when we grow up. I’ve never thought my identity was set in stone. I always thought reinventing myself was fun, not frightening. As long as I can choose who I’m going to become, it’s all good, right? I am whoever I say I am. Right?? Well….just the other day, we took my son to his college orientation program. Everything was great until one of the student leaders thought I was my son’s grandmother, not his mother! That was a blow. I’d talked myself into believing…
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Cake and Grit
So I’ve been on a low calorie diet for 2 months now, and I’m happy to say I’ve lost 15 pounds. I tried to take an updated photo, but the difference doesn’t really show. Maybe it’s just that I’ve still got a long way to go. And it hasn’t been easy, let me tell you. The moment I declared my intention to lose weight, my calendar began bursting with Memorial Day cookouts, graduation parties, and other occasions where people felt free to ask “Is that all you’re having?” Yes, those carrot sticks are all I’m having. No, I wouldn’t like a piece of cake. In the meantime, I’ve been reading…
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First Steps to Financial Independence
I come from a long tribe of grasshoppers. Do you know what I mean? I’m talking about the parable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. In the story, the grasshopper made music all summer and laughed at the industrious ant, who worked hard to store up grain for the winter. But when winter arrived, the grasshopper was in trouble while the ant was safe and well-fed. Here’s a full version of the fable. My family lived like grasshoppers. When we had money, we spent it. We borrowed or scraped together enough cash to enjoy ourselves today, because who knew what tomorrow would bring? It wasn’t as if we spent our…
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Exercising when you’re creaky and disorganized
Becoming an organized grownup is one of my big life goals, so I’ve gotten books from the library, subscribed to a number of podcasts, and signed up with Credit Karma. What does that have to do with exercise? Because it has to do with energy. Younger people have more energy, as financial advice author David Bach (author of The Latte Factor) stated in a podcast interview with Paula Pant on her Afford Anything show. I agree with this. I think we all have more energy in our 30s than in our 40s, more energy in our 40s than our 50s, and so on. And that dictates the level of activity…
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Less of Me
Time to tackle the issue of losing weight when you're over 60 years old. Hope to show you less of me in the future!
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Making Time
How can a person write every day when their time is limited? By making time through careful scheduling and time management.
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Healthy Writer – The Original Post
This is me. I’m still astonished to find that I’m now 60 years old. How did that happen? Along with the mystery of how I got this old, I’ve got other conundrums to contemplate, like: How come I gained all this weight? When did my health take a nose-dive? And, last but not least, what can I do about it? The answers to the first two questions are pretty simple: 1) I’m a writer, and spend most of my day sitting in front of my laptop surfing the Net doing Important Writing Tasks, and 2) I stopped exercising regularly and eating healthy. That third question’s the kicker: What can I…
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Party All November Long!
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Happy Launch Day to HER WILD IRISH ROGUE!
On October 16, 2018, my newest Regency romance, HER WILD IRISH ROGUE, became available for sale! It’s an exciting milestone in the creation of any book. HER WILD IRISH ROGUE is part of the “A Legend To Love” series, 11 books written by a wonderful group of historical romance writers. We all got together to write Regency romance novels in which the main character (or characters) are based on legendary heroes and heroines. In these books, you’ll meet Tristan and Isolde, Odysseus and Penelope, Pygmalion and Galatea, Mulan, Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Dracula, and Beowulf, in addition to my legendary couple, Cuchulainn and Emer. All of these legends have been…
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Victorians Enjoying Indian Food
One of the most entertaining Victorian cookbooks I’ve read so far is called “Culinary Jottings: A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles, Based Upon Modern English, and Continental Principles, with Thirty Menus for Little Dinners Worked Out in Detail, and an Essay on Our Kitchens in India.” This fun book was first published in 1878 and written by Col. Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert under the pen-name Wyvern. You can find the book online here: https://archive.org/stream/culinaryjottings00kenn#page/306/mode/2up The Colonel arrived in India in 1859, when the ‘old ways’ of the British East India Company still held sway. In the days of the Company, the Anglo-Indians, or British-born people who…
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Book Review: The Art of the English Murder
What is it that makes a murder mystery so satisfying to read about? In her book The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley tracks the history of English literature devoted to murder, mayhem and true crime. I’ve already commented on the book, but now I want to do a complete review (And, since W.S. Gilbert often finds his way into my thoughts, there is a reference to one of his works below). Beginning with Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” and “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” this entertaining book traces the development of popular taste in sensational murders from the 18th-century broadsheets printed…
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Read All About It: Victorian Crime News
Just wanted to share some interesting bits from what I’m reading now: The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley. It’s a very entertaining account of nineteenth-century attitudes towards crime and violence, and the enduring fascination that lawlessness holds for human beings. She traces the relationship between crime and entertainment, from word of mouth gossip to broadsheets (printed accounts of a murderer’s crimes and confessions). Literacy was spreading among the people of Britain, but this didn’t prevent those who couldn’t read from enjoying a vicarious thrill. Often their friends would read the broadsheets aloud, and some street sellers of crime news had interesting ways of enticing their customers. Worsley…
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Cover Reveal: A Romantic Tale of Christmas in Venice
Hello, all! My dear friend Caroline Warfield has a treat in store for you — her delightful novella of unexpected love blossoming during a winter in Venice. Take a look at the beautiful cover of Caroline Warfield’s 2017 Christmas Novella and don’t miss this opportunity to pre-order the book. Love is the best medicine and the sweetest things in life are worth the wait, especially at Christmastime in Venice for a stranded English Lady and a dedicated doctor. About the Book Lady Charlotte Tyree clings to one dream—to see the splendor of Rome before settling for life as the spinster sister of an earl. But now her feckless brother…
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I’m Back!
For a while, I wasn’t able to access this blog — I don’t know why, but nothing worked. Anyway, now I’m able to get back to posting things. Hooray! I will start by adding a new post tomorrow. See you all then!
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Art and Money: The Peacock Room
For a man who described his artworks as Harmonies or Symphonies, in his personal life the famous artist James MacNeill Whistler created plenty of discord. One of his greatest quarrels happened with his former friend and artistic patron, F.R. Leyland. Called the “Liverpool Medici,” Leyland was a self-made man who rose from office-boy to wealthy ship-owner. He was an accomplished amateur pianist and an art lover with a discriminating eye for both Old Masters and contemporary artists, including Botticelli, Rosetti, Burne-Jones, and Albert Moore. In order to fulfill his ambitions of living like the culturally enlightened merchant prince he believed himself to be, Leyland bought an elegant house in Kensington,…
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Victorian Crochet for Christmas
