Buzzing about a New Winner

Last week's Mystery Picture

And so we see the rest of the picture. Most of you guessed it right off the bat. Well, you guessed the bee anyway. A few of you didn't see the daisy but nearly all of you recognized that bee. Sometimes the mystery picture is hard and sometimes not. And the fun part is that different people see different things. It's good to work our imaginations a little. Well, it's especially good to keep mine working.  :) 

Bees

I liked seeing this bee on the daisy because that means they are some out there. Bees are vital to our food supply chain since they pollinate many of our plants' blossoms. But bees are having a hard time in areas, including ours. Several beekeepers have completely run out of honey locally. My husband likes his honey. He thinks it helps his allergies. I'm not a honey eater. Didn't like it even when I was a kid and my sweet tooth was at high alert. I guess it didn't taste enough like chocolate. However, I would beg Tums from my aunt at times to feed my sugar addiction. I never went for that chocolate appearing Ex-Lax though. LOL. 

But back to bees. We are not beekeepers here on the farm. My mother's father was. I should have worked that into the Rosey Corner books. Mom said she sometimes watched her dad gather the honey and that he didn't get stung. Or not that she could remember anyway.  

I can only remember getting stung by a honey bee once when I was a kid. But they were everywhere on the hollyhocks that grew all around our yard. We sometimes caught them in quart jars just for fun. Didn't take a lot to entertain us, I guess. We always let them go after they buzzed at us in the jars. 

I do wish I saw more of them buzzing the wild flowers now.Our world is an amazingly complex system of intertwining  creatures. "Then the Lord saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good." (Genesis 1:31)

On to the Winner!!!

Danie is the Wednesday blog winner. I'll get her choice of one of my books out to her as soon as I hear which one she wants. Sharon was my previous winner on last Sunday's blog and she sent me a message that I just looked for and didn't locate. I read it while I was away visiting my daughter this weekend, but unfortunately I don't remember, for sure, which book she wanted. I think it was Love Comes Home. But sometimes my thinker gets a little mixed up. Does that ever happen to any of you? I'll search again, Sharon, or contact you again.

Newsletter and Website Contest

I appreciate all of you playing my guessing games. You make blogging more fun. Now, if you haven't already entered, you can hop over to my website to see details about my Celebrate The Innocent Contest. Deadline to enter is midnight EST July 3rd. Shaker prizes! 

As always, thanks for reading!

Some Winners - A Few Stories - Fun for All

And the winners are... This is when the announcers always pause to heighten suspense. No suspense for my winners. I've already contacted them all by e-mail and they've all already responded with the books they want. Such fun that so many different titles were picked. It's sort of a smorgasbord of my books. Who knows? If I'd picked more winners (you all would have been fine with that, I'm sure), I might have given away one of all my recent titles. 

As always, I feel like the winner when I have one of these contests. That's because I get to hear from so many of you and also get to read the stories some of you shared. I didn't get very many homecoming stories, but the ones I did get were great. I've already shared some of them here and I'm sharing a couple more tonight. Here's one from Denise about reunion time homecomings. 

"As a little kid, I always enjoyed the family reunions. Little kids can play with each other, and their differences don't matter--it's not until we age that some people let the differences separate them, rather than embracing each other. My mom was raised Plain in Lancaster, PA, but she didn't stay Plain. As I aged, I realized I was the 'outsider' in the family. I was the one who dressed differently, had a television, didn't wear my hair up in a covering, etc... than my cousins. To the outside world, they were 'different,' but to them, I was the oddball.

And, then, the Appalachian side always seemed to look at me sideways--I'm a Yankee, after all! And that was back when Southern Living magazine was only available to Southern states, and Delaware counted as a Southern state--but I was still a Yankee!"

Thanks for sharing your reunion story, Denise. You got to experience several different worlds and I'm sure it made you stronger and more tolerant of others' differences as you grew up.

Last of all here's a story that proves even four-legged friends can have good homecomings. Alicia shares this sweet story. 

"Special family homecoming that comes to mind is when I was able to bring our little dachshund home from the animal emergency care. He stayed at 2 different places for a night at each, and we were so sad and worried. What a blessing when we were able to bring him back to his family. He is a rescue and had been mistreated prior to joining our family, so we were extra worried that he would feel abandoned." 

And now for the winners. Are you hearing the drumroll? The first place winner of my Love Comes Home Celebration giveaway is Chris from FL who picked the heart necklace and my new Rosey Corner book, Love Comes Home. Debbie from GA, the 2nd prize winner then gets the Forget-Me-Not Willow Tree figurine and she picked Love Comes Home too. Mary from Australia can't say she "never wins" anymore. She picked my first Heart of Hollyhill book, Scent of Lilacs to go with the Praying the Names of God Journal. 

The 5 winners of the blog contest here are as follows. LL of CA chose Small Town Girl. Karen C of OH wants Christmas at Harmony Hill. Melanie of TX is heading to Rosey Corner for the first time so she picked Angel Sister. Nancy L of SC wants to visit  Harmony Hill and read The Outsider, and Nancy W of IN wants The Believer. A fun mixture of my titles. I'm planning more giveaways here in the months to come. I've got a stack of autographed books from other authors and I'm ready to send some of them your way. So come back to see what you might win next. 

I do appreciate all of you who commented here and to those who shared stories or enjoyed the stories others shared. Some of you commented and had your name in the hat several times. Maybe I'll look back through the entries and see who entered the most and give an extra prize. Think I should? 

As always thanks for reading! 

 

Opening Day for Words Spoken True

Today is release day for Words Spoken True. It's out there in the world of readers now. The cover is getting great remarks and now to see if what's between the front and back covers will make you readers happy. I feel like a mother bird watching her baby bird fly off into the great beyond. Well, I really doubt a mother bird worries too much about the baby birds after they fly away. She's too busy repairing the nest for the next eggs. So maybe I should be like the mother bird - not  think about the book flying out there to readers, but start building the new book. Actually I am doing that. Building one word on top of another and feeding my characters with new ideas and situations to see if they won't develop wings that will carry them out to readers someday too. 

But a release day is too rare not to celebrate a little. Some writers get more books out to market in a year than I do, but I'm thinking they are probably happy about every one. I'll have two this year. Two is good. Two is great! One is good. And there have been plenty of times in my writing career that one would have been great. It is fun to see your book for sale. It's fun to see the reviews start showing up. It's fun to get e-mails from readers who like your book. I had a note passed on to me from a Barnes & Noble community relations manager. She wrote " I read this book in two days - if I did not have to get up and be a functioning employee I would have read through the night. ... Draws you into the story as if you were living, breathing and speaking with Adriane and Beck at moments."   I mean, who wouldn't like getting a letter like that?

Every writer I know likes to hear that "I couldn't put it down" line. That's what keeps a writer digging the stubborn words out of her head to tell a new story.  At least it makes us feel good after we've spilled the words out. I have to admit I'd probably be writing some kind of story whether I had any readers sending me encouraging words or not. That doesn't mean encouraging words aren't a boost and a blessing. They are for this writer.


Now it's time to announce the winner of my blog drawing. I really appreciate all of you who left comments here in January. I have such fun reading your notes and love it when you share stories with me. I gathered a lot of comments about the quilt, so I know the love of quilting is still going strong out there. 

Okay, okay. I'll tell you the winners. I decided to pick two. Drum roll please. Virginia C. and Nancy D., you are my winners. I'll send you an e-mail for your mailing address. Thanks so much to all of you. We'll do this blog giveaway again soon.


And I've got that other giveaway going on my website now if you want to throw your name in the hat for that. I think I'm going to need a big hat. I sent out my newsletter today and the entries are rolling in. Also, I'll be doing some guest blogs and interviews in the next few weeks. Some of those will offer a copy of Words Spoken True to one lucky person who comments. So you've still got plenty of chances to win. The first ones are this weekend. You can also get a peek at the scene where Blake and Adriane meet on Chapter-a-Week. Check out the links on my website Event Page.

Thanks for reading. And tell all those groundhogs to stay underground and not come out and see their shadows tomorrow. Of course, it's already feeling like spring here, but I have a feeling winter will be returning.