Toddler Tip #1

This problem has happened to me twice now even though I thought I had self corrected.
It's really hard to predict how fast or slow your kid will grow.
Last spring, my daughter's feet grew like weeds. One day she was wearing a six, the next it was seven and inbetween I had bought her $55 shoes. It was so frustrating.
It was another story with the clothes. My daughter grew out of her tops in March but it was too cold to wear short-sleeves.
I could not find any long-sleeved shirts in any stores. I found a couple of strange tops in the clearance section but other than that the stores were devoid of winter clothes.
It's a good thing we had a warm spring so the need for long-sleeved shirts wasn't needed for too long.
Well, last fall I bought size 3 pants for my girl even though the size 2 pants still fit. The mistake I made was buying three pairs of jeans. My daughter has an addiction to sweat pants and has so far refused to wear the jeans -- it's been six months and I don't think she's going to change her mind.
So, I'm down to four or five pairs of sweat pants and a couple of leggings. She cut a hole in one pair of leggings, so that takes us down to one pair.
So this weekend I set out to find some more pants. My daughter has been having protest potty accidents and she went through three pairs of pants on Saturday.
So, I went to Target, etc. It's only the end of February but no one is selling long pants. Everything in the shops was spring dresses or jeans. They treat kids clothes just like adults; fashion over function.
Today I was in Wal-Mart and did find some sweat pants tucked away in some low shelf. They had no size 4 pairs, only three. It's a good thing they were only $2.50.
So, lesson here is buy everything you need before the season starts and make sure you know what your kid will or will not wear.

Vampire Diaries shocker

I just watched the episode from last week on the weekend while making chili.
That's how I watch TV these days. The kid and hubby are out of the house, I cook and catch up with whatever is on the DVR.
Holy Cow. Vampire Diaries does a good job at killing off its characters. For the first few seasons you always knew those temporary new characters were destined to die by the time they appeared in the fourth or fifth episode.
Then some stuck around and lately they've not been knocking people off.
But since Christmas it's like the show runners want to pare down the cast. Tyler's mom? Drowned.
Jeremy? drained of blood. Tyler? Banished until Klaus kills him.
I feel that Rebeka is next. Or maybe even Klaus because it seems that Silus is the new big bad. You can't have two big bads. It's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer formula. One big bad per season.
While I love Klaus, the originals story line is getting a bit tired. How many times can he threaten to kill everyone?
Catherine's return was a bit of a surprise but I knew that Silus wasn't going to get the cure and it would go to one of our favorite Scoobie gang.
Part of me thinks the show folks who be sick enough to have Rebeka get the cure and Klaus kills her.
I don't think it will go to Elena, too predictable.
All this talk about Silus bringing back the dead, that could be interesting. If he can do it, why wouldn't he bring back Jeremy? The teen who provided him with life?
In the scuffle in the caves, I lost sight of the other hunter. Where was he?

New Parent Survival Guide available at Amazon

Despite reading all about self publishing, the articles in Writer's Digest don't really do the process justice and explain the ordeal you have to go through.

First off, one article said traditional publishing can take as long as it does to incubate an infant, while epublishing takes as long as boiling an egg.
While that is a clever line, it's completely untrue. I think it took three evenings, probably six hours, to upload my book to Create Space and create the book cover. Boiling an egg is 10 minutes.
The book publishing systems, including Amazon, take 12 to 36 hours to approve the copy and cover of a book. None of this is instantaneous. At it shouldn't be.
But I must say, I am very tempted to just sell my New Parent Survival Guide on Amazon alone.
There are a lot of other publishing outfits but none as simple as Amazon has made it through Createspace.com, which Amazon owns. That process created the ability to buy a paperback and ebook version of my book. It also made making a book cover simple and professional.
So right now my book is only available at Amazon. http://amzn.to/XUI3Ag
I am in the process of uploading my book to Smashwords so that I can send it off to all the other ebook retailers but first I have to design a book cover.
This is the biggest hurdle and frankly, where I have felt the most stress in this ebook book publication business. I know a cover is uber important to the success of a book.
But there are no templates available out there. Createspace has a bunch you can use and makes creating a cover super easy.
So, I am resorting to using Gimp to manipulate the photo I have used on Amazon to make a cover. I have found a You Tube video telling me how to use Gimp to make a book cover and I'll be spending a few hours this weekend doing that.
I have to thank the woman who made the video. Otherwise, I'd have to resort to borrowing one of the photographer's laptops at work to use Photoshop.
My husband pointed out to me that if you want instructions for anything, check YouTube first because it's highly likely someone has made a video.
Just tonight my husband used a YouTube video for instructions on how to repair the clock in my car, which required him taking half of the dashboard off.

I have dived back into writing one of my young adult novels and I hope to have that finished in the next couple of months.

Thanks for listening. Read on.

New Parents Guide coming out Monday

With great relief and little fanfare, The New Parent Survival Guide is coming out Monday.
If you are expecting your first child, read this 53-page booklet to know how to survive the first year after birth. It's full of tips and advice. It's a nice handy companion to the expert books that you are probably reading.
I wrote this booklet for one main reason: I got such great advice and if I didn't write it down I was going to forget it. I have passed on some of the tips in the booklet and my friends were so grateful that I felt compelled to share with the rest of the frightened new parents waiting anxiously for the birth of their first child.
Can I say the book cover is so cute? It stars my daughter in her most lovable state - sleeping.
I do not have the photo handy as I'm writing this post remotely. I will update it tonight with the picture.

The publication of the booklet also clears the way for me to get the two young adult books I've been laboring over published. I won't state the publication goal date because I feel it's putting unnecessary pressure on me. The only deadline is the one I have in my head and I'm not going to share it right now.
Not surprising, I was delayed again --- you've heard this lament a million times -- but we all got the flu two weeks ago and are still recovering. I hardly slept for three days and am only now catching up. It's the same story for my husband and daughter.
Next year I will not miss my flu shot, even if I have to get it in August.

Glad I'm not a bank teller

The guide for new parents is almost done. I should be able to meet my self-imposed deadline and have it online by mid-February.
Life has just become so much work for me. I know I complain a lot. That's my charm.
Every night I try and squeak in an hour of writing. I don't always succeed. Right now my priority is the guide. Before it was the former Virus book. I don't have much more than three or four hours a week to write.
It makes me very frustrated that I don't have more time but I don't know where I'd get it. It's 8:30 p.m. and I've just sat down at the computer.
Now it's 8:35 p.m. and I've just returned from upstairs searching for the origins of a huge crash noise.  I was a little freaked after searching every room and finding nothing. My husband discovered a shampoo bottle fell off a shelf in the family bathroom. We must have a ghost because no one was in that room moving around.

So, I'm going to cut this short because I'm writing the guide.When I'm having a crisis of confidence I wonder if I'm wasting my time. I guess I'll know in a few months.
I hope that folks will take a chance on my stories and enjoy them.
That brings me to my assignment today. I don't talk much about work. That's another reason why I don't feel like writing because I do it every day for work.
Anyway, I covered a couple of Criminal Injuries Compensation Board hearings.
The first one was a guy who got stabbed. The second one was profound. It was a woman who had worked at a bank for 35 years. She - TWICE - was the teller on duty when the bank was robbed. The first robbery was violent with men in masks with guns.
The second one was a man with a knife.
The woman is now a mess. I almost cried during the hearing. She suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome, depression, anxiety and is really struggling to live a normal life. She hasn't been able to go back to being a teller because she's afraid of dealing with the public. Who can blame her?
I have covered several bank robberies in my career and I always wondered what happens to the tellers. Well, now I know.

Revisions bogging me down

I am making major revisions to my book. After re-reading the book several times, I couldn't get over the fact that one of the male lead characters was so unappealing I had to get rid of him.

So, I've spent some time thinking about what kind of guy I want him to be and have started the revisions. I'll be re posting a new first two chapters soon.

This is one of the things I so dislike about writing. It can be such a slog and so much work.
I do a lot of whining in this space. So I shall finish on a positive note.

With the changes I'm going to make, I think it will drastically improve the book and the romance element.

See you soon.

Survival guide coming out in February for new parents

Because I secretly have ADD (not) I am putting out a survival guide for new parents in February.
I'm doing this before I forget all the wonderful tips I learned or were passed on to me before I had my now 3 1/2 year old.
I'll be publishing it as an e-book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. I'm thinking of pricing it at $1.49. It will only be about 50-pages full of useful information.
This is not a booklet repeating all the information already out there. It's interesting that you can read a ton of books before you have your baby and yet still know nothing!!!
I mean, did you know there were sleeper swaddling sacks with Velcro arms that are super easy substitutes for doing that incredibly complicated wrap to keep your kid swaddled? Did you know that Mylicon is one of the only essential must have you need beside diapers and wipes?
If you learned anything, you'll want to check out the booklet. I also have a section on all the useless crap they sell you at big box baby stores that you don't need.
In these hard times, the only thing you have to buy brand new is a bucket car seat and that's only if you can't borrow one.
For more check out the tab and online book stores in February.