Good Morning everyone!  I hope you had a wonderful holiday season with your friends and family.  I am sorry that I have not posted, but I have come to an important realization in my life during this holiday season and felt I should share it with you all.

2017 was a very rough year for me as I suffered with severe mood swings and memory issues related to menopause and I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it through the year with my sanity intact.  I am very thankful that we were finally able to find a medication that has helped to calm everything down and I feel like my mind is finally clear again!

Focusing on What’s Important in Life

As with all trials that we push through, I was able to come out of the other side with a very important realization – that I was spending a lot of time focusing on things that were not truly important to me.  Now, I want to preface this by saying that I enjoy writing a weekly blog and connecting with my audience through blog posts and social media.  But what I found was that I was spending so much time focusing on getting these things done that I haven’t worked on what I truly love in almost a year – writing.

I haven’t written a single line since the beginning of 2017 and I even skipped NaNoWriMo because “I didn’t have time to worry about that”.  My main love is to write children’s books, and I have robbed myself of that over this past year by focusing on being a “businesswoman” – and it has to stop!

I had already planned out a full year of blog posts to write for you as well as a full year’s worth of email newsletters, but it was the act of actually creating them that I still needed to do – and I’ll be honest, it’s not quick and easy.  It takes me about 2 hours of research for each post or newsletter and another hour or more to write it, put the perfect images in, and format them.  As much as I enjoy writing blog posts, I miss being able to do actual writing so much!

So I have decided to take a break from blogging weekly for a while and get back to writing children’s books.  I have 2 Young Adult series that I haven’t started, the 3rd book in the Laurel Hill series, my scary short story book I started, a non-fiction work I am close to finishing, and 20 new picture books that need to be written so as you can see, I will DEFINITELY stay busy this year!

Once I am back into a true writing schedule, I will try to write some blog posts and schedule them to share with you – I’m hoping to have at least one a month.  But I have to focus on getting back to doing what I love, which is telling stories that engage a child’s imagination.

I want to thank you all for your love and support, and I’ll definitely keep you updated as I start on this journey of changing my focus back onto what’s important.  Have a wonderful and blessed 2018!