February, the month of love! First off, if you think love only has to do with mushy stuff involving couples, you’re wrong. Celebrating love means honoring the love between you and your friends, you and your family, you and your pets, you and the earth, and most important, the love you have yourself. Above everything, use this month of love to practice a little self love. To help you out, this month I’ll share what I do for self-care (look for it on Feb. 8). In the meantime, drop a note in the comments on ways you take care of yourself.
February is also a special month in my family. Both of my kids have February birthdays (Summer’s is tomorrow on Feb. 2, and Lucas’s is this Friday on Feb. 5), so we have a busy month of celebrating to do! Now that the kids are older, we generally hold low-key celebrations over a meal, usually at a restaurant. Unfortunately, quarantine rules have us still sticking close to home. We’ll probably grab tacos from our favorite taco truck and a fun cake from one of the local bakeries. How have you celebrated birthdays during quarantine?
My progress on For the Birds has been slow and steady, and I couldn’t be more happy with it. Because I work a full-time job, my time is limited. Usually when I’m in the middle of a book project, I write in the mornings, go to work, write on my lunch break, then write more after work. But here’s the thing. I’m tired. And I realized I’d like to use my weekday “free” time for other things. This includes starting my day with an early morning walk, breaking up my work day with another walk on my lunch break, then spending my evening with the family. That leaves ZERO time for weekday writing. But you know what? I have the weekends. So I have given myself permission to work on my book only on the weekends, happily editing for hours on end and actually getting a lot done in this small window of time. It’s funny how I’m spending less days editing, but getting way more done. I think it’s because I’ve given myself permission to just go slow. I think that’s a good thing.
I have a lot of fun stuff planned for the blog this month, almost all of it under the LOVE theme. I mean, I am writing a love story, after all. This month, we’ll get better acquainted with Sonny, the main love interest in For the Birds. We’ll also learn how For the Birds is different from other romance novels, and some sweet ways my romantic, handsome, lovable husband inspired some of the story.
It’s all coming up this month in the blog! Here’s what you get to look forward to:
- February 5: How For the Birds is different from other romances
- February 8: How I practice self-care
- February 12: Meet Sonny!
- February 15: Romantic things about Sonny, and how my husband inspired them
- February 19: The research I did on Scotland and Wisconsin as I wrote For the Birds
- February 22: My writing desk must haves
- February 26: What I read in February
Happy reading, and happy LOVE month!