A New Year – A New Word(s) of Intention

I’m not much for New Year’s Resolutions. The surest way for me not to attain a resolution is to set it in stone. I don’t know, the rebel in me just balks. So for the past couple of years, I have chosen a Word of Intention for the year. 2016 was Gratitude. Each day, I strove (strived? stroved? egad) to feel grateful for some aspect of my life, no matter how small. My mood is affected by not only the ups and downs of daily life, the losses that naturally increase as we and our loved ones age, but also by the weather. And in my part of the world, in the winters we get our fair share of white-shrouded skies, in the spring comes the gray clouds and sometimes torrential rains (our region suffered severe flooding in 2017), and the summers, while usually nice, lately we are experiencing drought and forest fires up the whazoo, which makes for more clouds–with smoke–obscuring the skies. Something about a blue sky just lifts my spirits. The weight of clouds weighs me down. So my annual Word of Intention helps me get through those rainy or fire-smoky days,

For 2017, I chose Positivity as my Word of Intention. In retrospect, this was a fantastic choice. My dear doggie left this world in November, and I spent most of last year as her caregiver. Reminding myself to find the positive in a day–no matter how small–helped me focus on the positivity animals, and especially dogs, radiate. Once Allie died, I got very ill with a host of viruses that seemed to swoop in and take advantage of my total lack of defenses. Only wrapping myself in the feeling of positivity Allie gave me helped me through some of those days.

So along came the time to choose my word for 2018. I chose Joy, as an extension of Gratitude and Positivity. Here we are less than 10 days into the new year, though, and Joy alone isn’t quite working. As I gazed at the white sky while on a solo walk without my beloved pooch, I wondered why. And I decided Joy wasn’t…verby enough. It’s a fine plan to try and embrace a spark of joy in daily life as we proceed through the year, but I needed something more active to spur me along. Joy is my goal, but being Proactive every day, in my writing and in my life, I believe will help set me on the path to Joy.

And you know what? It’s working. The days I can’t find joy, I remind myself to just be proactive, to take a step toward a writing or personal goal. And once I’m in the midst of doing that, well, there comes my joy.

Some days, joy is elusive. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s hard to find joy when someone passes away or another sort of tragedy befalls a loved one. But by being proactive, I am confident that step by step, I will find my way back to joy every time.

What about you? Do you set Resolutions? Or do you have a Word of Intention for the year? The season? This month? That’s sort of the approach I’m taking with 2018. If February requires a word other than Proactive to pave the path to Joy, so be it. Don’t fence me in! My year is wide open.

Heat Up Your New Year!

My buddy, my pal, my lifelong friend, Kate St. James, has a new release! The second edition of A LITTLE WILD, a super-steamy sinsational romance previously published by the now-defunct Samhain Publishing, has been updated and revised for indie re-issue just in time for the new year. The book is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so if you have KU, you can read A LITTLE WILD for free.

Check it out!

She wants a little. She’s gonna get a lot.

Tess Sheridan works her tail off hoping to make partner at a prestigious law firm. The hitch? She hasn’t sizzled the sheets with a hot hunk of a man in over a year. Bedroom romps can lead to love, and she can’t afford the distraction. Infusing sensual oomph into her life must come later. Much later.

Then Tess’s best friend dares her to put her fantasies to the test with a gorgeous stranger. Can Tess pamper her inner wild woman and keep her heart in check without risking her career goals?

Bad boy Zach Halliday realizes it’s time to stand on his own outside the family fortune. When it comes to his personal life, though, he’s all about taking pleasure to the max. Like making the most of a steamy encounter with the beautiful strawberry blonde he met in a bar. Oh, yeah.

Discovering she’s the lawyer for his new business has Zach reconsidering…everything. Tess is such a fascinating combination of buttoned-down legal eagle and softhearted woman that he’s swept away. Can he convince her there’s more between their sheets than a little wild action?

Amazon

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Amazon UK

Amazon Australia

International? Search your store for “A Little Wild by Kate St. James.”

Golden Heart Finalists – Where Are We Now?

Back in 2007, WHERE SHE BELONGS finaled in the prestigious Romance Writers of America Golden Heart contest. Yep, it’s mentioned on some of my covers. Most every year, the group of finalists creates an online sisterhood. My year, 2007, we called ourselves the Bond Girls in honor of ’07 and created a wonderful community as well as a group blog that took a lot of time and effort. It was beautiful, well-run and well-organized (I say as one of several volunteers behind the scenes), but unfortunately only a few months into the blog’s inception the Internet was hit with a mega-gremlin, and the Bond Girls blog suffered an untimely death.

Another Golden Heart “class,” the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood, survives to this day with a healthy group blog that appears here to stay. Today, I and other members of the Bond Girls as well as the Wild Cards (the GH finalists from ’05) are featured on the Ruby Slippered blog. Hop on over to catch up on my own goings-on, as well as several others, including B.C. writer Susan Lyons.