I've done some soul searching lately. Should I keep writing books? Am I really good enough to be an author? It's been on my mind. A lot. This battle in my heart. A heaviness in my soul these past several weeks. Since I was eight years old, I've wanted to be an author, but now I'm just not sure I have what it takes to really cut the mustard at it. It all started when I read my Goodreads reviews on my first book. I confess I don't know much about Goodreads, and didn't even know I had reviews there until recently. Honestly, I've been afraid to read my reviews. I kind of watch them on Amazon with one eye closed. I don't like to see reviews, though as a reader, I find them helpful and … [Read more...]

  If it floods... you will have a story... hopefully a fierce, unforgettable story to share for the rest of your life. You will tell this story till you are old and gray, and then you will tell it even more because older people love stories. Oma and Opa nearly lost their lives after a Pineapple Express storm blew out a levee near their Yuba City homes on Christmas Eve night 1955. I've heard my parents' flood stories a thousand times, and I never tire of them. Opa was lucky not to drown as the flood waters rushed through the darkness toward his house. His family barely made it out of the flood plain alive. Stuck in a line of cars headed for high ground, Oma's family … [Read more...]

I always choose a word for the new year. I pray about this word for several weeks before settling on it. Words make up stories. And stories make up the fabric of our lives. Last year my word was "Hope." So many things I hoped for in 2016, healing. Peace. A bountiful harvest. A run of hard years had hit us. Honestly, I was dreading another tough year and needed hope so badly. On New Year's Day 2016, I sat in our living room with tears streaming down my face. On top of all the hardships, Scott was making me give up my writing dream. At least the way I'd imagined my writing dream would happen. "You don't need a literary agent, and you don't need to be a Christian writer," Scott said as I sat … [Read more...]

As you can see our family is growing! We added puppies this year. Just one puppy really because the other four pups went to their new homes a few weeks ago. Getting a decent Christmas picture is always a challenge. Every year I tell myself the picture isn't THAT important. I will not freak out over taking this picture and every year something arises that annihilates my good intentions and I end up freaking out. I won't get into the details of what went wrong this year, but let's just say I did my best not to freak out. In the end, we got our picture, though I made Scott photo shop Christian's face, because in every family shot we took this year, Christian made a funny face. So we took his … [Read more...]