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Showing posts from 2011

We wish you a Happy New Year!

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As we get ready to say good-bye to 2011 and welcome the new year, I'm grateful for the many new experiences and life lessons learned this year. Most of all, I'm grateful to welcome 2012 with these three gorgeous people in my life. Hubby and I could not be more proud of the young men and woman they are growing up to be. They are the reason we smile (and pull our hair out every day) and the motivating factor to be better people every day. We wish you all a avery happy and prosperous new year!

Are you an active listener?

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Active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. - Wikipedia Image by highersights via Flickr If you've ever wanted to learn how to communicate effectively, sit among a group of teenagers . If your words can get through all of the noise around them (literally not just metaphorically as they're usually listening to music while texting and updating their Facebook page) then you may just be an effective communicator. I'm surrounded by teens at least once a week, if not more, as my kids are notorious for bringing their friends over, using my house as a hang-out place or just a place they can come and be "themselves". Hubby and I are very open-minded and encouraging of our kids to look at all of the sides of a situation before accepting anything they hear or see as "fact" and their friends tend to enjoy that about being in our company. Doesn't hurt we have HD TV , hi

The Aging Process

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This weekend I realized I'm crossing another milestone in my life. I'm approaching the middle-aged years and while these may seem scary years for some, I welcome this new stage in my life as I have every other stage I've come across. As a child, I couldn't wait to grow up and every year, I'm more excited about the coming experiences. I even get excited when new white hair sprout on my head. I don't dye my hair and don't plan to. I look forward to the day I have the crown of white hair my grandmother had. I'm not eager to be a grandmother and my children are well-aware of this fact but I don't fear aging. I truly welcome it. Christmas 2009 The thing about aging is... others age just as fast. This weekend, for the first time, I noticed how much my parents have truly aged. They're 61 and both look fantastic and have always looked young, not just to me but to others too. When people would look at pictures of my father , they couldn't beli

Gals, Sun & Surf

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So what are you guys doing this weekend? Any big plans for Memorial Day? I get to spend some time with my gals connecting, relaxing and enjoying each other's company as we also celebrate our birthdays together. Four of us celebrate birthdays in May-June so we're getting together and spending the night being ourselves! We get to leave the labels behind for one night and just be gals. I think women forget to do that from time to time: to just be women! That's a topic for another day though. On Monday, with the kids being off from school, we're heading to the beach and I'm actually looking forward to it. Those of you who know me well are likely gasping, shaking your heads and looking to see when I was replaced by the borg as I'm not fond of the outdoors. But... there's just something about being able to sit by the sea and enjoy the magnificence of that great power. The great eye candy doesn't hurt either! So how are you spending your holiday weekend?

Happy Belated Mother's Day

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Hernandez Family at Mr. Sisters outdoor patio Being a Mom has not been easy but it has certainly been the most rewarding experience of my life. I have three kids who remind me every day the importance of tolerance, patience and acceptance. Yesterday was both relaxing yet event-filled. We started the day out at my favorite restaurant/nightclub Mr. Sisters for their Mother's Day Brunch and enjoyed a great meal and fantastic atmosphere with our teens. They laughed with us, requested songs from the piano man to play and had a fantastic time with their parents... in a public medium! I know! Be still my heart! :) Later that afternoon, we went to see Thor with my parents and completely geeked out talking about the upcoming Captain America and The Avengers movies. I love having geeky kids! When we got home, they played Mortal Kombat with their dad while I got to play with my Sims 3 game. I've missed lazy Sundays like these so it was great to just be laid back and carefree

Favorite First Lines

Here are some of my favorite first lines in books I've loved. In the deserted men's restroom at the back of Middleton Community College, Sam Keller knelt on the tile, braced his hands against Keith Jameson's thighs, and broke his mother's heart. - Special Delivery , Heidi Cullinan I'll write you every day. - Beyond Eden , Kele Moon I, Amanda Wilkinson, hereby give the instructors of San Francisco Sex University permission to fuck me in the ass. - Sex University: Physical Education , Louisa Bacio Jason Carrillo walked around the block a third time, working up his courage to go into the brownstone. - Rainbow Boys, Alex Sanchez The bomb detonated while Grier was still two blocks away. - State of Mind , Libby Drew From the second he set foot in my classroom, I knew he was trouble. - Allegro Vivace , Cat Grant You're going to want to split those bitches up. - Belle Starr , Belinda McBride You have to understand, Max, this has nothing to do with you."

Writing to market?

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Photo courtesy of Beauty in Everything I think all of us, at one point or another, can remember a book we could not put down. That story whose characters beckoned you to keep reading and whose plot was so intriguing you could NOT look away. You lose yourself in the story and when it's over feel a little sad about putting the book down and walking away from it. While reading queries and submissions by my clients over the past few weeks, I've realized that the stories I want to sell are the ones I feel saddened by walking away from after reading them. The stories whose message resonates with me and makes me physically ache for more. I've found that these stories are usually the ones the authors did not intend to write in the first place but the stories their characters wanted to tell. They're not always written for a specific market or genre (often times they straddle genres and break all kinds of "rules" in the genres they want to sell them in) but they

The Love of Books

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Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez Have you ever saved a book for your children to read at the right age? I've done that with books like the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson series thinking they would enjoy these books as much as I did. When my daughter fell in love with the Twilight books, I feared for my sanity. I'm not a fan of the books but I thank the author for helping my daughter discover her love of reading. Soon after reading those, she went on a reading binge and thankfully chose better books. While she didn't get into the Harry Potter series like I'd hoped, she fell in love with the Elizabeth Chandler books instead. She would spend hours talking to me about the characters and even wrote several book reports on them. Seeing her excited about a book was fantastic! She even started writing stories featuring angels, vampires and demons with her friends. After reading Alex Sanchez 's Rainbow Boys in 2009, I knew I would be saving this trilogy for my youngest son.

The Way of the Publishing Dodo

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Reclaimed By Nature There are those who say the printed word will go the way of the Dodo; that books will end up like vinyl albums, cassettes and VHS tapes. I think ebooks will continue to evolve in the digital sphere but we will keep printed books as our perpetual back-up system. Perhaps that's just my sci-fi/urban fantasy-loving mind fictionalizing the future of an industry I love but I truly see an immediate future where both digital assets and printed resources are available for all. Will this mean a decrease in the production of printed material? Yes, but not their complete eradication . At least, not in this decade. I suppose this picture is what most people see when they hear about the evolution of the publishing industry. I've never been a supporter of that mentality though. Digital is where I believe we are headed, but print is far from annihilation. For every supporter of the digital evolution I come across, I find one fervent advocate for traditional pr

The Cult of ePub

If you've ever owned a Mac you've been part of the Cult of Mac. This group of Mac-savvy owners are always ready to help others learn about everything Mac and while there can be a few fanatics in the group (stop staring at me, I know, I'm a Mac geek) many are just quiet supporters of the system touted for ease-of-use and virus-free software. But it appears that whenever two or three Mac fanatics are gathered in Apple solidarity, new converts are created. While helping my sister choose and purchase her iPad this weekend, I was reminded several times that I should be working at the store I consider my personal Mecca both by my family and the staff working at the store! More than once, I heard things like "You should work here!" and "Why aren't you working for Apple again?" while showing things to my sister at the Apple store. But the truth is when you love doing something, it doesn't feel like work and it is reflected in your attitude and everything

Be Mindful of What You Say but Careful of What You Write

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Be mindful of what you say but careful of what you write. My parents used to tell me this as a child all of the time. It was likely due to the rather disturbing stories I'd write as a child of inanimate objects flying around the house and as I got older the "forbidden" love stories I'd scribble about on the dozens of notebooks in my bedroom. As a teen, I didn't understand why my parents were so controlling of my words and often rebelled against them in my writing. As I grew older, I realized why the pen is truly mightier than the sword and it's something I'm often surprised to find many people online forget. You can scream at the wind and howl at the rain but the moment those words are on paper (or screen) they are immortalized and the world's perception of you is forever changed by them. People believe what they hear but they SWEAR by what they read! Celebrities live with this fact of life as their words are often twisted in tabloid TV, e-zines and

Ready to be Done with Family Emergencies

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We went to visit my aunt last week in Tampa and found that she's not been able to swallow anything for several months. Doctor ordered endoscopy and found a mass in her esophagus. They did a biopsy and found the mass to be cancerous but also found that the tumor had spread down her esophagus into her stomach. The prognosis is not good without surgery and aggressive radiation and chemotherapy. She's 70 and while she was strong in her earlier years, she's grown frail in the past few months. She's my Mom's eldest sister (Mom's the second youngest of seven) and the one she's closest to since they were born on the same day, ten years apart. Her lease is up next week and her daughter is moving them out of their apartment and needs help. So we're heading back down to Tampa this Saturday to help pack up their things. This comes at the heels of my uncle being diagnosed with Alzheimer's last summer and learning a few weeks ago that he no longer recognizes a

It's a new year already?

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2010 flew by in a gust of work, work and more work. 2011 proves to be just as busy... always a good thing! :D My clients have been doing fantastic this year and in the next few days we'll start working on goals for the next 18 months. I'm really looking forward to 2011! Many of my clients were debut authors in 2010 and have had great success with their debut novels including Kele Moon and Diana Copland . This week is going to be fun to get back into the swing of things after the holiday break. Have several contracts to finalize and queries to open up to... not to mention a slew of status calls and emails to my clients. Things at home have been going well too. We ended the year on a high note with the entire family at home for Christmas. Though, my brother-in-law ended up in the hospital with a bout of pancreatitis. He will remain there for a week but is in good spirits and should be released back to active duty once his enzymes return to normal. His base was hit by a to