Gift of New Beginnings

Welcome to my new blog! 

As a fiction writer, I love creating intricate, inspiring stories. It took me four years to write and publish my first novel, "Whispering Pines". It took much longer than I would have liked, mainly because of my steep learning curve. I had no idea how to go from a roughly edited manuscript to a published book. Eventually, I found wonderful people and resources to help me figure it out. My book, the first in my "Celia's Gifts" series, was self-published in September 2017. I am hard at work on the second book and am confident I will be able to get this book to "published" in a matter of months vs. years.

As I worked on launching "Whispering Pines", I found I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with readers through emails and Facebook posts. I decided I wanted to build a forum I could use to continue to connect with others. A blog will be a fun way to do just that. Please bear with me as I learn the ins and outs of publishing blog content on a regular basis. This, too, is a new process for me. I will learn as I go. An important lesson learned over the past year is to just start. Don't wait until you have it all figured out because, until you jump in and start "doing" something, it is almost impossible to figure it all out and you run the risk of remaining stuck at the starting line.

Once I decided I wanted to blog, the next step was to decide what I wanted to blog about. I didn't have to go far for the answer. In my book "Whispering Pines", each chapter name begins with "Gift of ..." My whole series is based off of a "gift" theme. Who doesn't like gifts? Material gifts are great, but when I speak of gifts, I also mean the gifts we can glean from life's lessons, both big and small, both positive and negative.

Please consider joining me on this new journey into blogging that will run parallel to my book writing. My goal is to write a blog post each week for a year, using the chapter names from my first novel as the writing prompt. I am excited to see where we can go with this.