Tag: Gratitude

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Day 53 of Gratitude – An Unexpected Book Review

  By Foreseen, Gratitude Blog

When Foreseen first came out, I used to check Goodreads for the latest reader reviews constantly – as in more than once a day. That was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself. My first literary baby had stepped into the world and I was eager to gauge the reaction. What I learned from that is that it takes a long time for reviews to come in, especially if you are unknown.

Now, I only check a couple times a month to see the new ratings and get a feel for the demographics of who reads my books. This morning was one of those days. Choices, my more recent release, has a couple more Goodreads ratings (most people rate rather than rate and review) and is running at 4.33 out of  5. I’m satisfied with that. But I was surprise to see that Foreseen had a new text review that was posted yesterday. Not only was it a 5 star review, but it is one of the more precise and well-worded reviews I have seen. It says:

Imagine a world where people could see cellular makeup and move things with sheer mind power. Now put that setting into a modern world United States, where only a select few had these skills. What if you were one of these “adept” people? This pretty much sums up the storyline of FORSEEN, by Terri-Lynn Smiles. And intriguing science-fiction novel about a young woman who discovers her strange abilities and is placed in Rothson Institute for young Adepts. Throughout the story she must deal with love, her new life, and an internal battle of morals.

I loved this book. My personal copy is a pre-release edition, given to me by a friend at Christmas. As soon as I read it for the first time, it’s been at the top of my list of favorite books. The plot twists and change of point of view are extremely captivating to the reader. It becomes impossible to put the book down until the last page is turned, and then you’re hungry for more. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves reading about an extraordinary, nerdy girl who fights for the right to be normal.

“Grateful” doesn’t begin to describe my feelings for such a review. Thrilled, awed, thankful, happy, humbled, and a whole lot of other things – like the fact I better get back to writing!

 

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Day 52 of Gratitude – Change

  By Gratitude Blog

Years ago, I was part of a group of up-and-coming civic leaders who were given an assessment known as the Change Style Indicator. For ease of description, the scale on which each person is scored runs from around -66 to +66. Those who score below -13 are “conservers,” people who like tradition and accept change only in incremental doses. There were close to a dozen attorneys in the group and they all scored around -40. Except me. My score was +52. Above +13 is called an “originator.”  These are people who thrive on challenging the existing structure and exploring new possibilities. The higher a person is on the scale, the less likely they are to accept any idea or process simply because “that’s how it’s been done in the past.”

For the past two years, my life has been one of constant change. My roles vis-a-vis my family have changed. I’ve changed careers. My friendships have changed. Very little, other than my husband, has remained constant. And you know what? It has been great! Sure there have been ups and downs, but they’ve given me the opportunity to rethink everything, to not accept what has gone before simply because it’s a known. Sometimes it’s been hard but, looking back, those are mostly the times I was trying either to make the changes feel safe to the conservers around me or was allowing them to persuade me that change is bad. I understand where they are coming from but it’s different for me. Change is invigorating. It makes me feel alive. So keep it coming – I love it!

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Day 51 of Gratitude – Doing What Makes Sense

  By Gratitude Blog

There was a time when the business world made sense, back when you needed chickens and I had some, and I needed a coat of paint on my fence. Then we just exchanged – chickens for painting the fence. Business isn’t like that anymore. It’s too big and there’s too much money and the tax ramifications are too complicated for it to be that simple. But still, that’s how my brain works. What makes sense? Let’s do that.

Writing fiction as a career may not be sensible, but to me, it makes sense. Everything I write is more real to me than when I put together complicated business deals. And the marketing – in this day and age when the longstanding traditions of book marketing have flown out the window, doing what makes sense … well, it just makes sense.

But what makes sense in a world where I am bombarded with book marketing services charging me anywhere from $3 to $5,000 for a few day run? I will admit making some mistakes at first. I tried a couple of the “popular” services even though I suspected that the bulk of their “subscribers” were other authors who had purchased their services  and not the readers I wanted to reach. But I finally realized it comes down to basic business – the exchange of a chicken for a painted fence. Now I look for those services whose interests are aligned or at least complimentary to mine – those that screen the quality of the books/authors they accept, those that track and show the results of their services, and those who charge based on the success (sales) of using their service.

I completed a bunch of tax forms yesterday which has left me thinking today about how little sense they made to me – taxing some money differently than others  based on the legal fictional name the money was given. That experience has left me very grateful that I live my life in a different world – one where I get to do what makes sense, pretty much all the time.

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Day 50 of Gratitude – OMG! Grass!

  By Gratitude Blog

It’s been a long winter. We got our heating bill the other day and it kindly listed the average monthly temperatures, perhaps as a proactive explanation for the size of the bill. Last January the average temperature was 37 degrees. This year it was 15. Brr.

Because of that, the snow that’s dropped from the successive snow storms has not melted. It just kept piling up.  But today, the third day of above freezing temperatures, I spied a patch of grass sticking through the melting snow. Just a small one – most of the yard is still covered by inches if not feet. Still, there it was: a nice reminder that no matter how bad the winter has been, spring will be here – eventually.

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Day 49 of Gratitude – Retraced Footsteps

  By Gratitude Blog

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Morgan, my dog, loves the snow – or did until it got covered by a layer of ice a week or so ago. Now the hard surface disturbs her when it breaks and her foot falls through the snow below. So she has come up with a solution – retracing her footsteps. Each time she goes outside, she places her feet PRECISELY where she stepped before and doesn’t have to deal with breaking the crusty ice. This is what it looks like after a week and a half:

That made me smile this morning.

Perhaps she’s smarter than I thought.

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Day 48 of Gratitude – A Thinking Day!

  By Gratitude Blog

Today, I didn’t write. In fact, these are the first words I’ve had a chance to type all day. Despite that, it was a good day. I had a meeting this morning – not the boring kind, but rather one where I had to analyze information and make informed decisions. This afternoon I worked on accounting and taxes for my writing. I can’t say that was fun, but it was intellectually challenging.

I’m exhausted and I certainly wouldn’t want to do that all the time. But mentally working that hard on something other than fiction felt good. And for that, I am grateful.

 

 

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Day 47 of Gratitude – The Existence of Kryptonite

  By Gratitude Blog

While I would never have said it this directly, I’ve always thought of myself as invincible. Not as in dodging bullets or stopping speeding trains, but I thought there was nothing in normal life that could harm me. I believed there were no obstacles to my personal well-being I couldn’t overcome by sheer force of will. I was wrong.

For the past six months, I have struggled in my relationship with a friend. Our interactions left me feeling bad about myself. But he wasn’t trying to do this and so I thought I simply needed to control my reaction and asked that he alter how he spoke to me. Neither worked, of course. Kryptonite cannot stop being kryptonite any more than Superman can stop being vulnerable to it. And that is the realization for which I am grateful today.

Kryptonite exists and I cannot will myself to survive it. Sometimes the only solution is to walk away. And so, my friend and I no longer speak. I wish it were different, but it isn’t and I have to accept that. Having been away from my Kryptonite for a few weeks now, the joy is returning to my writing – and laughter will soon follow. Sometimes the only way to win the battle is not to fight it, and I am grateful for having learned this lesson before it destroyed me.

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Day 46 of Gratitude – No Email!

  By Gratitude Blog

I have a difficult relationship with my email. When I was practicing law, I would check my inbox every morning with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Messages sent overnight would be there, waiting to change my plans for the day. They might be upbeat messages from friends or clients about their lives. It could be a decision from a court or agency that needed to be appealed from or celebrated. It could be a new client with an urgent matter I needed to address. Something was always there.

For quite awhile after I left the practice of law, the emails continued. Clients would contact me for suggestions of a new attorney. Other lawyers would email with questions about clients or a case I had handled. A few friends would just check in to see how I was doing and fill me in on their lives. Without realizing it, I began to look forward to those emails. It was a link from my rather solitary writing life to the world I’d left behind.

Overtime, of course, the email slowed as clients became established with their new legal counsel and my knowledge of their matters became too stale to be helpful. Even the social emails from the people I used to see or talk to all the time became sparse. My eager morning ritual of reading my email became riddled with the depressing thought that I was irrelevant. Sure, I get the occasional email from a reviewer or fan of my books, but not many readers do that. As a result, day after day goes by without receiving any email other than from bots. This was hard.

This morning, I checked my email to find nothing but the notifications from my Google calendar and another automatically generated email on the rank of Foreseen on a non-retail site. But today, instead of feeling disconnected and depressed, I found it freeing. I get this day to myself! No one is dragging my attention away to celebrate with them or to give them advice on how to address their latest obstacle. I can do what I planned to do today.  My life is no longer subject to the moment-by-moment whims of others as conveyed through email.

This is a wonderful feeling.

 

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Day 45 of Gratitude – A Big Mac

  By Uncategorized

I don’t eat fast food and I hadn’t been to McDonald’s in years, maybe even a decade, until last night.

Last night, I got together with some friends to celebrate my birthday which I missed last month because I was sick. Just before I left to drive one of my friends home, someone mentioned McDonald’s and my fate was sealed. Neither of us had anywhere close to enough to eat that day and the Big Macs were calling. We went to the drive-thru, then sat in the parking lot and ravenously ate before resuming our trip to her house.

There’s nothing about a Big Mac that resembles a hamburger. You can’t taste whether there is any meat on it at all. And white bread, a fatty sauce, strong onions, tasteless cheese – this isn’t something I’d eat.  And yet, at nine o’clock at night, having eaten almost nothing since breakfast, it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

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Day of Gratitude 44 – My Minecraft Partner

  By Uncategorized

Don’t say it – I know a woman of my advanced years is not supposed to play Minecraft. But I like exploring and building and searching for resources. When he was last home, my son played with me. I had a blast showing him around and he built some very neat stuff that I did not know how to create. But then he left and I was back to playing on my own. I’d tell him what I was doing but it wasn’t the same. Plus, a creeper blew up a corner of my house and, while I could repair the structure, I couldn’t fix the automatic trash incinerator Andrew had built.

Well, Andrew just built himself a mega computer and this morning, installed my Minecraft files on it. Even after I go home, we will both be able to enter my Minecraft world and work together. I’m very happy to have my Minecraft partner back. Thanks, Andrew!