Monday Miscellany

It was 94 degrees here last week, and this week, it's hovering around the 60 degree mark. It's fabulous. The kid has so many cute pajamas and we took her shopping for new cooler-weather clothes this weekend. Another bonus of the colder weather: baking! I made two separate batches of cupcakes (I use this recipe for chocolate cupcakes, and I add about half a teaspoon of lemon extract to bring out the flavors of everything; you can also use lemon zest). Cold-weather food is also on the menu. We're having meatloaf for dinner tonight, and I think I'm making lemon-herb roast chicken for dinner tomorrow night.

If Facebook wasn't such a necessary social networking tool, I would get rid of my personal account and my author page. Every time they "improve" things, my privacy settings end up altered and I have to waste half an hour of my precious time fixing those settings. I am not one of those people with hundreds or thousands of friends. In fact, I have 42 friends--and 27 of them are my in-laws or friends of my husband. I use my personal account for keeping up with loved ones and sharing pictures of my daughter. If I believed my family and friends would check their email regularly, I would switch to a mailing list.

Late last week, I started reading Amelia James' blog. You should, too. She's clever and funny and she writes pretty sexy stuff. I enjoyed her post about balancing writing and family life. It made me think. Our kids are about the same age, it seems. I tend to write while the kid is asleep--she's napping right now, actually--but my little one likes her alone time, and several times a day, she deliberately separates herself from me to do something she likes. (Usually, she pretends to read a book or she plays with one of her larger interactive toys. Sometimes she just sits at the back door and watches the trees outside.) I use that time, too. If I'm all caught up on my housework, I write or cook or read. Things can get kind of tense if I feel like I'm on a deadline and she's being unusually needy, but for the most part, she and I work well together. It doesn't hurt that I keep my sense of humor about things ("Do you want to go to college? Then let Mom write!") and that I have no problem parking her butt in her swing, jumperoo, or in front of her favorite movie for half an hour while I get things done. I'm fortunate enough to be a stat-at-home-parent and part of the point of me staying home was to get my writing career off the ground. It's slow going, but then I knew it would be.

This week's blog posts are probably going to cover the subjects of words that are not words, what I was thinking when I wrote Cass, and why I don't think self-publishing is career suicide. Those are the posts I'm going to shoot for finishing, at least. That last one about self-publishing was inspired by an email I received from a local milspouse who claims that no publisher is going to take me seriously now that I've self-published. It was also sort of inspired by this post by Ciara Ballintyne.

I checked my Distribution Channel Manager over at Smashwords this weekend, and it looks like Cass Gets Her Kicks should be showing up at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, and Diesel in the next couple of weeks. I'll keep you updated.

However, if you've made it all the way through this post and you're interested in reading my first release right now, drop me a comment here or send me an email at ldotleonadavisatgmaildotcom and I'll send you a coupon code to download a free copy from Smashwords.