Daily Positive Thought #27

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It's good to have a day off once in a while.

Life has been crazy this month. Very very crazy, what with going out of town twice and all the a Halloween parties and stuff, and Nutcracker rehearsals. Yes, all three of my daughters are in the Nutcracker this year. That means that I have to be at the dance studio six days a week. Thank goodness for Sundays. I'm sure I wouldn't survive without them.
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Daily Positive Thought #26

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Fall is a wonderful time of year.

I love making costumes and dressing up. The weather is just right: not too hot and not too could. I love watching the dry leaves skitter across the road, smelling the scent of new-fallen rain, and seeing the fantastic sunsets light the clouds with crimson and orange.
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Daily Positive Thought #25

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Being Creative Makes you happy.

Well, it makes me happy anyway. I spent the day working on graphic design. When I get involved with graphics, I lose all track of time and enjoy every minute as it rushes past. I forgot about the whole world including eating breakfast and lunch today. I was enjoying myself so much. Of course I don't get any writing done while I'm playing with pictures. But, Hey, I feel great.
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Daily Positive Thought #24

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More snow! Snow all over. I'm glad I have a garage.
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Daily Positive thought #23

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There is snow in the mountains!

Yippee for skiing and other fun winter sports.
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Daily Positive Thought #22

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A clean home is a happy home.

That just about says it all. Easy to guess what I've been doing today.

Daily Positive Thought #21

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Push yourself. To succeed, sometimes you have to get uncomfortable.

My darling daughter suggested this one. After many years of trying, she managed to do full splits all the way to the ground yesterday. Today, she's wandering around the house saying, "OW it hurts, OW OW OW!"

I'm right with her on this one. Not doing the splits, of course. No way. But adapting to the new digital book age has made me super uncomfortable.

My new publisher, Wonder Realms Books, is gearing up for a big e-book and trade paperback release of my spy thriller Heroin Guns. I am more excited than I can possibly say. They've already published my initial short story with the Heroin Guns characters,"Chasing Pirates in Never Land." (An agent in forced retirement investigates a string of brutal murders while coming to terms with his wife's death.) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.


I'm excited, yes, but doing the final formatting on Heroin Guns for the publisher is making my head explode.

I learned to type on an old manual typewriter. Yes, the kind that actually had little metal arms that came up and hit an ink ribbon which made the letter mark on a piece of paper. You had to crank a return on those things at the end of every line. I've long since learned to let the computer wrap my sentences on its own. But up to this point, I've kept the use of the tab key to indent my paragraphs. And now I have to change over my manuscript from all the tabs to this First Line Indent thing. I have to learn about paragraph styles and a ton of other stuff. Ow, ow, ow. You younger folks are laughing. But its true.

I'm excited as can possibly be to see my stuff published like this. I've sent a letter to Santa Clause asking for an ipad for Christmas. But I do have to admit to being a bit uncomfortable. A good kind of uncomfortable. A stretching and succeeding kind of uncomfortable.

Daily Positive thought #20

I'm happy when I'm busy.

And some of you are saying, "well, I hope so since you've missed posting a positive thought for a few days now." My apologies for that.

As the mother of four children, I wish I could clone myself. That way I could take them to all their different activities all over the valley all at once. This week I really could use a clone. Tonight I think I'm supposed to be like in five places at the same time. I just look at my schedule and shake my head in bewilderment.

But with all of that going on, I have to say I'm happy. No time to think negative thoughts. Only time for action. And when I look back after being busy and see how much I've accomplished, it gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

Will you look at those four sets of fairy wings my daughters and I constructed, painted, and decorated for Halloween costumes. Those look totally awesome. I did that. :) And today, I have to help my son construct and paint a pair of gauntlets for his Lord of the Rings Witch King costume. Oh, but that's going to be the easy one. He just wants that costume for a class party. For the real Halloween he wants to be Gollum.

Doing stuff makes me happy. Creating stuff makes me really happy. This is a wonderfully fun time of year.
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Why fairy wings? I'm working on a book called The Fairy Tome, so I bought a bunch of cheep fairy wings from the dollar store and stapled them to my office walls. I've got fairy dolls, fairy statues, and fairy wall stickers everywhere in here. So of course my girls wanted to get in on some fairy action as well.

It's turning out to be a very fun book to write.

Daily Positive Thought #19

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I'm Still Alive!

What can be more positive than that thought. I'm still breathing, eating, thinking, and dreaming. I have one more day to love my family and pursue my writing. I think I take this very basic fact for granted too often. So, today I'm glad to be alive.

Daily Positive Thought #18

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Consistency has great power.

I'm sitting in our workshop room in the hotel on the beach in Lincoln City. Through a huge bank of windows I have a perfect view over-looking the sea. The waves crest and splash down on the pristine white beach. Those waves over time have worn the rocks down into smooth sand. All the time I've been sitting here, the waves have never ceased to roll in--continually, always. That kind of consistency is awe-inspiring, powerful, and beautiful. As a writer, I'd like to have the consistency in my writing as the ocean waves.

Daily Positive Thought #17

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It's great to have a furry friend to pet.

Daily Positive Thought #16

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Publishing's brightest days are yet to come.

I remember watching Star Trek and Battlestar Gallactica when I was growing up, and being so entranced by all the gadgets. It seemed so wondrous amazing that they could talk to each other with these little communicators and even better yet have video conferencing. They carried around little data pads from which they read stuff. All casual like as if it was as common as breathing. Now I watch my daughter with her real life modern day gadgets and every once in a while it gives me a little chill--like I've stepped into those TV shows. So much of what was only imaginary has become reality.

To us older people, changes in the publishing industry seem to be coming alarmingly fast. An end-of-the-world sense of fear and foreboding seems to hover over us and seep into offices and work spaces. What will we do? What is the publishing world coming to?

And yet to the children, carrying around a personal device; which they can use to talk face to face, or just using audio, or texting; which they can use to take pictures and record video; which they can use to download and read all sorts of content, including books; isn't strange or wonderous at all. The technology is as natural as breathing to them.

Those folks who say that children read less because they spend all day watching TV and playing video games, perhaps haven't watched children closely the last few years. The amount of pure text children devour on their gadgets any given day is staggering. And as books become one of those things that are instantly accessible, I believe there will be an explosive growth in the number of books published and sold. The future I dreamed about as a child has arrived. And I believe in the next few years, publishing will see a higher growth than many can now imagine.

Now I'm just waiting for the transporters. The hand-held medical scanners. And those cool instant broken bone knitting machines.

Daily Positive Thought #15

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This world is beautiful!

I'm on the road again, headed up to the Oregon coast for a writer's workshop focusing on New Technology and how authors can take advantage of it. It's a healthy drive from Salt Lake to Oregon, along some of the most scenic country in the US. I passed through desert and hills, fertile farmland and stately pine forests. The sun lit up the dazzling blue sky and kept me awake an entranced with the beauty for many long hours.

Living in the city, I find it too easy to forget that there is an endless beautiful world beyond the buildings and foul air and rush hour traffic. I'm very grateful that a couple of times a year I get out of the city for a long drive across the countryside.

Daily Positive Thought #14

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Spending time with good friends rejuvenates your spirit.

I had the great opportunity to meet with my novel critique group last weekend. We meet once a year and critique novels that we've been working on during the year. Because we're all Odyssey alumni, the quality of critiques is wonderful. This year was our fifth year doing this. I came away uplifted, excited, and ready to implement the changes everyone suggested. I am so grateful to these friends and their excellent help with my novels. Big hugs to Laurie, Jenn, Brian, and Susan. Thanks for letting me spend time with you.

Daily Positive Thought #13

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Colors are amazing.

Fall has arrived. I can look up at the mountain slopes (when it's not raining like today LOL) and see an array of dazzling reds and yellows. The leaves on the trees in my yard are just starting to change. What a wonderful time of year. The world and its colors provide so much beauty. It makes me happy.

Daily Positive Thought #12

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When you can't find an ending to your story, take a nap.

Now, that might sound like a strange DPT. Almost like giving up. But that's not what I had in mind. In writing and in life, sometimes things don't go as planned. We make up an outline for where we want to go and what we want to accomplish, and then everything comes crashing down. That's when it's very tempting to give up. I've found myself thinking, this whole book stinks. I should just chuck it out and start something new. Something better. That would be giving up.

Of course there's the old adage, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." True.

BUT!

Even the toughest, if they don't take a break, rest, recharge, won't make it to the top of the mountain. Those who are tough, know that pacing themselves is important. They don't try to sprint the whole distance of a marathon.

So today's DPT is a reminder (for those of us workaholics who have a hard time doing this naturally) to take some time for yourself to relax and regenerate. Taking a nap once in a while isn't a sin. And many has been the time when I've been completely stuck on a story and after racking my brain for hours I've let go of the conscious struggle, lain down for a nap, and woken with the answer staring me in the face. Rest can do that. In writing and in life. After a rest we can come back to the problems at hand with a new and better perspective.

Daily Positive Thought #11

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Learning is Fun!

My twelve year old son will argue with this vehemently. He says school takes away time from playing and should be avoided at all cost. I have an ongoing argument with him on the matter. I love learning new stuff. I think life would be so boring if I were stuck in the dark ages drudging through the daily grind, unable to read and learn about the world around me.

We live in amazing times. I have information about any topic only a few clicks away. I love doing research for my books. Some days I get carried away with research and forget to write at all, but hey, I learn important things like the awesome features of a Mercedes-Benz S550--Infrared Nigh View camera--how cool is that? How much a pair of AG Adriano Goldschmied "Angel" Bootcut pants cost at Bloomingdale's. And the absolutely vital information that the JFK International airport Port Authority General Aviation Terminal doesn't have a pilot lounge. I mean, really, if someday I were piloting a private jet into that airport, I'd need to know this stuff.

Or more likely, my characters fly into JFK on a private jet. And while they head off to Bloomingdale's in the Mercedes to buy clothes, the jet and its valuable contents get hijacked. Days worth of research just two write a couple of chapters. And I'm loving every minute of it. Learning is a ton of fun.

Daily Positive Thought #10

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I have hands for typing my stories, holding my children, planting a garden, and painting a picture.

What a blessing to have two hands to do all the things I have to get done every day. I must remember not to take them for granted.

I'm Excited

I'm so excited.My friend Chris York's new book is finally being released. Check out this trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-n2CqII-nQ

Daily Positive Thought #9

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If you fall down. Get back up!