Here I am again!

It's been a big week. There is more to writing than writing. My friend Darlene and I went to a book signing at the South Lebanon Quilt Show on Friday. Oh my God was it hot and humid. It was a wonderful show with the life quilting works of                  .  We were privileged to  meet her when she came into the show. She is delightful and 80 years old. A very beautiful woman.
     We sold some books and met some wonderful people.  We met Peggy Logue who was also selling her book called Skin in The Game which is about the year her nineteen year old soon spent in Iraq as a US Marine.  I am particularly interested in this becasue my son and I are collaborating on a book about the year he spent in Kuwait and Iraq.

     I am also very excited to have received a review of Glory from the Midwest Book Review.  I am including it here so you can see what a complete stranger had to say about the book. I am very excited that they liked it. You can find it at http://www.midwestbookreview.com/ if you don't want to read it here.

Glory Pruitt has just spent two months holed up after her husband died
of a heart attack. In another woman's bed. That is the first of several
shocks she is about to receive. The roughly 2.5 million in assets from
their business have disappeared, and her husband has been sending
flowers to a number of women in town. Camden, Ohio is a town full of
pedigrees, and its insulation begets snobbery that Glory doesn't really
understand. But the shadows are full of menace, and it is up to Glory to
put it all together:

I I .
"My front door was unlocked when I arrived home. I couldn't remember
ifl'd locked it before I left for Studs Unlimited or not. It seemed like I'd
left days ago and anything was possible. I pushed it open and stepped
inside.
'Anybody here?' I called out.
My voice echoed in the stillness. For a moment I stood quietly, listening
for an answer. The silence in the house was heavy, artificial. The
drawers of my desk were open and papers were strewn across its top. I
knew I hadn't left it that way. I fingered through the papers and saw the
mail was still there where I'd left it and felt a shiver crawl up my back. I
didn't know if it was seeing the envelope from my mother's lawyer or
something else. I wondered if Kate might have stopped by to have
another look at the desk."

Forrester's talent is that she sets up scenes guaranteed to make the reader
want to scream out at Glory to be careful. Glory's character is someone
who has been sheltered her entire life and suddenly has to function on
her own in the midst of an evil presence determined to bring her down.
Forrester carefully paces the story so that Glory has to either adjust or
literally die, which makes for a hair-raising spine tingler of a mystery,
and one that the reader simply can't put down. GLORY is a winner.

Shelley Glodowski
Senior Reviewer

     Isn't that nice? Don't you just love it? I do.

     We have a book signing in  Port Clinton, Ohio on June 23 and a signing at the Logan Antigue Mall on June 26 from 1-3.  Quuilters are busy here in Columbus this week at the NQA show. I am not going to make it down. My family is taking first priority at the moment. My husband is very ill.

Two weeks in a Row

I'm very proud. I got a picture put up all by myself.  This is my grandaughter and her dog, Gus at our farm. I made the dress and hat. I love this child in a way even I cannot believe.

The point of this blog is to tell you about my writing experiences but I haven't had any this week so I will talk about something else. My husband has a stage 4 gastric cancer. The entire family has been dealing witih this almost two years now and we are getting to a harder part. It takes all our energy some days. I think Bill (my husband) is depressed. He doesn't feel good, that is for sure. He has lost his appetite and had two embolisms in his lung last week. so now he is on blood thinners and the dosage is not yet adjusted. This morning he had a bloody nose. It did stop but his INR is too high and needs to come down.

He is not the best patient in the world and I am not the best caregiver. We have fun around here. I had him eat advacado which he does not like this morning. That will help with his vitamin K intake. I told him to think of it as  medicine. I have to call the Zangmeister Center and find out what they think we should do.  A lot of  my time is spent in this sort of activity, so no writing gets done. Bear with me.

I am going to a book signing on Friday in South Lebanon, Ohio. This will be interesting to me as it is my first experience as a vender at a quilt show. Hopefully we will sell some books. I still have a lot of them in the garage. I will let you know how it goes next week.

I am still thinking about the civil war book I want to write next. My main characters are named Ivy and Esther. They are ten and fourteen. Esther is ill, gravely ill, as a matter of fact. Her father is a doctor and he suffers over not being able to help her. The year is 1862 and the Civil War is raging down south and threatens to spill over into Ohio where Esther and Ivy live. See, it sounds interesting, don't you think? I have to schedule some time to work on it. I want to begin to find out what's really going on. That is the  main reason I write. It is the only way I can find out what the story is.

Check back next week and see how things are going. I'm relly pleased I got a picture up all by myself.