Hello Y'all! It's fall!  October flew by!  Here is an update that I want to share with you.  

So my deadline for final edits by me is October 30th.  But, I have been working really hard every night and most of my Saturday evenings on finishing it up.  I hit the send button last night at 6:45, sitting in the porch rocker where the book began over a year and a half ago.  Whew!  

Here is the fun moment I want to share with you - because you cannot make this stuff up no matter how hard you try.  I play around with mentioning several things that would have been important to each one of our lovely ladies in this hometown southern novel.  

One of those mentions happens to be The Partridge Family.  One character in the novel had a crush on David Cassidy and loved the show. Not long after pressing send on the email, "I think I love You" by The Partridge Family played on my sirius xm radio.  WOW.  I mean really? How often do you hear that song? 

In this novel, the pages of their lives is a read with earth shaking trauma and an equal dose of recovery - and then tragedy and then recovery.  Through the roller coaster ride of life, these four ladies take you from the sleepy town of Greenway, NC to the sand on the beach of Emerald Isle.  Then back home to an event that changes the trajectory of their lives.  By the time fall arrives, and they are closing in on December, life looks completely different for all of them.  The future holds a few surprises they never anticipated. 

I hope you will follow along in the journey with me as I prepare the final touches to publish this labor of love.  Truly, it has been like carrying a baby for months - nourishing the story with as many bits of thrilling life changing moments as possible.  Their lives are not that different from any other ordinary life, but the way they face the storms together is a lesson we all can learn from. 

If you like to recognize the change in chance opportunities and if you like to read novels that are not filled with vulgarity - then you will love their story. While some characters may throw out a word here or there - it's PG 13.  You have seen worse on tv and probably said worse yourself a time or two.  If you are laughing right now, then I am laughing with you too.  But really, I have two adorable granddaughters that may grow up and read what Grandma wrote.  Maybe, maybe not, but just to be sure it's a pretty clean read.  So you can read it along with your young daughters too.  As a matter of fact, I think these four ladies could teach them a thing or two about life. 

As I wrote the first few chapters back in the spring of 2020, it was for lack of anything better, self entertainment. We were going through a shut down and I think all of us experienced an unhealthy emotional shut down. For me, I penned the pages of lives that were living and it helped me cope.  As I really began to write their story, I couldn't stop dreaming about what their lives would hold for them.  Before I knew it I had reached almost 100,000 words and 46 chapters.  

Now I sit on the porch and wonder what the editor is going to send back to me.  Scary right?  She reviewed some of my writing before we agreed to work together and she thought it was "really good", but she is an editor. Y'all know what they do, it's like sending your essay in 8th grade to the teacher's desk to be graded, and praying you remembered all the grammar rules and punctuation correctly and that your content was worthy of the paper you wrote it on and the time invested.

Before I go, let me say thank you if you are still reading this post.  Stick with me on the journey, I hope you will find as much joy in the life of these ladies as I did in creating their story.  Now, on to the next step, working with the publisher on a cover page. 

Thanks for reading!