Once a year my parents ship my two youngest sisters to Dallas for a week-ish to babysit my children for me.

Wait no! I mean spend quality time with me! Heh heh heh…sorry Mom and Daddy…slip of the tongue…they come every year for a week-ish to spend quality time with me…

This year I decided would be the year of New Things. We would go to New Coffee Shops! New Book Stores! New….ok well that was all I had. Every year my little book nerds come and we coffee shop and we book store, sometimes even multiple times in one day. And usually to the same spots.

But not this year.

Rather than make the familiar trip to my beloved Half Price Books down the street, we instead drove a little further on a warm and sunny Sunday evening to Recycled Books in old downtown Denton.  We let our hair down. We listened to country music. We avoided…

From time to time, I venture out from behind the Pine Curtain.

This weekend I will be making a mini-book signing tour around the Humble, Texas, area.

Many, profuse thanks to Andi Klemm (who is fabulous) for putting everything together. She is amazing.

Where and When:

Friday, 7/26, at 6 pm – Good Books in the Woods

I’ll be giving a brief presentation about quilting and anthologies, but mainly just visiting and meeting new people 🙂 (my favorite!).

Also – very cool – during my visit there, the bookstore will be hosting a Twitter contest for original artwork created by Aoristos – Mother and Child. You can find out more about the Twitter Party here.

Saturday, 7/27 1:00 PM – Half Price Books, Humble, TX. I love it here. If I lived closer, this would be MY bookstore. Signing copies of Rich Fabric and giving away a…

So when I’m not writing, cooking meals for my family, gardening, cleaning, volunteering, etc., I try to keep up with what’s going on in my community. Currently, some of the city leaders want to spend about 700 million dollars to put another bridge across the river that divides our city. Now, the city is not divided right down the middle; just a little edge of it. We don’t really need another bridge. All studies show that fewer people are actually commuting by car; that more and more people want to live closer to where they work, etc.

Additionally, the place the city council has now pinpointed for the bridge is a poor location for many reasons. I decided to focus my 3 minute testimony before the council very specifically on one of the many reasons. After all, how much can you really say in three minutes? My reason was Community…

I’ve lost Faulkner and gained a Lifetime movie…

Ugh. I don’t know what has happened to me, but I’m not pleased.

Has my muse changed shape? If so, no offense, but I’d like to go back to the one I had before.

Lately (like for the past year) when I set down to write, one of two things happens:

1) I get so far in the story, and then I decide it isn’t worth pursuing – I lose interest in it.

OR

2) The inner voice in my head that narrates the stories (sounds crazy, I know. Don’t judge!) sounds like some sappy, weird combination of a Hallmark Channel special and a Lifetime movie. Now, to add to the weirdness – I don’t watch either one of those. I don’t read books that have a “lifetime/hallmark” feel to them. Nothing wrong with…

Complementing my interviews, today’s Author Spotlight, the two hundred and forty-fourth, is of historical novelist and crime author John Foxjohn. If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/author-spotlights.

John Foxjohn grew up in rural Nacogdoches County, deep in the heart of East Texas and the pine forests. In fact, John often says, he was raised so far out in the country they had to pump sunshine to them. As he grew up, he developed an intense love for reading—a love that would never leave.

Books opened a new world and adventures for John that he imagined being a part of. He wanted to see that world, be a soldier, a cop and a detective, a coach, and yes, he even wanted to write books. When he was twelve, John decided then that he would write a book about Crazy…

It seems like everyone I know in the writing, editing, blogging, crafting, creating sphere goes into overdrive during the spring and summer months (except for me!).

Here are some of the people that I am connected with and what they are doing right now. Maybe it will provide you with some inspiration. It just makes me want to take a nap for them — I know they must be tired!

Let’s start with this busy lady – Tamara – and her blog Traveling with T. Goodness – she is off and running – a book club, book reviews, travel updates, book tours. Let’s just say she is rather bookish these days 🙂

Next up is a woman who I know cannot possibly sleep. She just cannot do it. Andi Kay Klemm and her blog Anakalian Whims – in addition to…

As my daughter and I sit in my favorite local coffee shop-I, enjoying the bright sunshine, the iced latte, the acoustic gloriousness; she, sucking furiously on her pacifier, rocking in her car seat, lulled by what are at this point in her four-week existence already familiar sounds and smells-I read and rethink and edit and begin a new document and cut and paste.

Scrap it all and start over. It feels good to write again.

For the past year I have been busy. Busy being fat, busy being nauseous, busy making a gorgeous little girl and keeping up with my son who spent the bulk of my pregnancy taking advantage of the fact that mommy did not have the strength or the speed to keep him from his favorite death-defying activities. I ignored any and all election coverage watched everything Nathan Fillion has been in ever and read books from my growing library that were by turn too easy or too…

So the last post was about the wonderful time I had at the women’s retreat. I neglected to mention that even though it was my first time there, I was asked to lead one of the interest sections. The one on journaling.

I confess. When I was first asked, several things crossed my mind; the first of which was, “Lead journaling? But don’t you just open a notebook and write whatever is in your head?” Being the kind of person I am, I began to wonder if, after all these years and piles of notebooks/journals, I didn’t really know what journaling was. (This can happen after you’ve had a supervisor at work doubt your expertise when you’ve been an expert in your field for over twenty years…but I digress). Anyway, so I looked it up on the internet.

I found a remarkable website that not only assured me I WASN’T…