I’m finally back up with the internet in my new house.  It was hit and miss for a while since I had to find a place with wifi access to do anything.  Now that I am settled in, things should start coming back into place.

I’m behind in emails, though, so if I haven’t emailed you yet, please bear with me.  I’m not ignoring anyone.  I’m still feeling overwhelmed.

About the Enchanted Galaxy Series

Book 3 in the Enchanted Galaxy Series

I have been working on book 3 in the Enchanted Galaxy Series.  I am almost finished with it.  One more book, and I’ll finish up the series.  Anyway, as I am going through this third book, there’s no doubt the series is too heavily drenched in fantasy to be considered a romance.  I will say it’s a romantic fantasy, but it’s not a fantasy romance.

I tried to figure out a way to make the books more romance, but I finally came to the conclusion that a story is often written the way it’s supposed to be the first time because there is a certain mindset that goes into the creation of every book.  The characters are built for that storyline.  To change the storyline requires characters also change, and in changing characters, the story falls apart.

In other ramblings…

It’s been one of those days where few things seem to be going right.  And probably the most difficult thing is taking kids to a store during the summer and realizing you can’t adequately study up on fax machines while they’re bored.  When four kids are close in age (9, 10, 11, and 12) and one is deaf so he has no idea how loud he’s being, I guess it’s a recipe for disaster.

This is why I shop at Amazon as much as I do.  People don’t like it when kids are in the store, and as much as do my best to keep them quiet and lined up in an orderly fashion, I just had to realize (today) that it’s not going to happen.  Amazon not only allows you to shop for just about everything, but it also allows for 2 days.  I’m a Prime member for this reason.

I don’t know how women handled it before online shopping.  Did they drop their kids off at the grandparents before they went to the mercantile?  It’s hard to focus when kids are talking and buzzing around you.  My kids will literally walk in circles around my cart as I’m going down the aisle, and yes, it can be enough to make me dizzy as I’m trying to remember why I even came to the store to begin with.

But I guess mercantile were small, so kids weren’t circling their mothers like mine do with me.  But then I think, there’d be the buggy ride to town (if they were more in the country), and knowing my kids, they’d try hanging off the side of the buggy for the fun of it because the ride is “boring”.  Remember, they didn’t have radios or dvd players in cars, and they didn’t have iPads or Kindles to play games on.  And more than that, how on earth did a parent keep a child quiet in church?  Church was a big thing back in the late 1800s.  It’s where people socialized and caught up with friends.  So during the sermon, how did they keep the children sitting nicely in the hard pews?  (Back then, they didn’t have cushions.)  And then I wonder for kids living in town, how did they stop the kid from running after a ball or some other item into the street where horses and wagons were going back and forth?

I tend to idealize the past, as if everything was perfect.  But then I think, “If I spoke to a mother of four children–all a year apart in age–would she tell me it would be so easy to raise children in an age where we have internet, devices to play on, TV, comfortable beds to sleep on each night.  That mother would think it must be easy to be a mom.”

And this is why the saying, “The grass is always greener,” fits so well in so many situations; kids, of course, just being one of them.