Happy Sunday everyone!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and is looking forward to the start of a new year. 2019 has been a difficult one for me personally. This Tuesday is the anniversary of my father’s death and I’ve been dreading this day for the past few weeks. I have to work that day too and in my line of work, I’m not allowed to be sad, I’m not even allowed to look sad. I have to fake smile my way through the entire nine hours and just deal with it. But I’m conflicted. I also want to be happy because the year is ending and is ending on a good note. 2020 will be a better year and I have a lot of things that I want to do. I refuse to just wallow in depression and forget about the good things that happened after the pain subsided. 

The year 2019 started out with a bad breakup with the man I love, the untimely death of my dad, learning how to deal with my mother’s Dementia, going through changes at my job and struggling to start a new novel while suffering from major depression, grief, insomnia, illness, and pressure to make this book better than the last. The book Evil Has No Color did not do well due to very little marketing on my part and with all that I had to go through, I’m sure you can understand why. But I am looking ahead and taking notes on everything I should not do for the next novel.

I made a lot of changes this year that really helped me as an Author. I didn’t want to just spend the year suffering over things that I can’t control. So, I decided to focus on the things I can control. Before my father died, he spent an entire year trying to prepare me for his death and I couldn’t understand why at the time. But after he died…I understood. I tried to handle everything the way he would’ve and considering all my obstacles, I think I did alright. You never know what you can do, until your forced to do it. That’s for damn sure. This year I had to do a lot of things that I didn’t think I could do. And it was all to help my family and myself. I won’t get into specifics of the things one must do after a parent dies. I’m sure many of you already know and you know how difficult those tasks can be, especially when you don’t have much help.

But I will tell you what I did to help myself become a better Author. The first thing I did was move my website from Wix.com to WordPress.com. A much better web host for an Author. I wanted to transfer all of my past blog posts to WordPress.com and tried to once before and failed but for some reason, I did not fail this time. It was time for a new look and a new audience, and I’ve never looked back. I also decided that it was time to get my own domain and logo to let you all know that I am serious about this and not just playing around with a hobby that will never amount to anything. I refuse to let that happen. I started writing again which was the hardest part. My head was all messed up, but I had to keep writing in order to save my sanity. I took courses in Editing and advanced writing. Even in bad times, writing is always something that I cannot do without.

There were also a few surprises this year too after my birthday. My boyfriend and I got back together, my son and I were able to move to a more convenient location, closer to mom and I am currently now more focused on getting in shape and planning to get married. The year started out badly but it’s ending with a positive outlook for the year ahead. I hope all of us have a great year. One without tragedy, one without pain, one without illness, and one without anxiety or depression. But I know that the gift of life also comes with a heavy price to pay. So even when life throws you a curve ball, you just have to know how to duck and dodge.

Until next time…Have a Happy New Year.