UPDATE: The winner is…BookLady!
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I want to start by thanking Delilah for being so generous with her blog and letting me play here with you today. I always have fun when I come here to visit. 

I suppose my choice of title for this blog post may seem odd, given that we’re in the middle of summer (and a hideously hot and humid one in my neck of the woods). But I just had a birthday near the end of July, and I always think of birthdays as fresh starts, much like the actual new year at the beginning of January. So even if it’s the middle of the year, you get to start over. It’s a good time to re-evaluate any goals or plans you’ve set for yourself for the year. Are you on track? Do you need to adjust or down-size an overly-ambitious aim? Do you have something new you want to try instead? Maybe it’s just something you want to accomplish before your next birthday. 

I came home from a writing conference a few days ago, so, besides all of the things I was already evaluating from my January goals for just this calendar year, I have a head full of fresh ideas and plans that will need to be worked into those existing plans. It would be unrealistic for me to try to cram everything into the next five months until the actual new year. Probably, it is unrealistic for me to even work more than one of these new ideas into this year since I am already reworking this year’s goals. So I have to look at big-picture plans and goals for the next year or so, but that’s a whole other project in itself, and I have time to figure those out. My focus right now is on the more immediate goals and plans. I’ve given myself two weeks to figure how those fit into the rest of 2019. Then I can start thinking about next year when we get into November, and maybe start working on my big-picture goals sooner, which ought to make setting next year’s goals easier. 

A lot of romance novels have characters who are forced to start fresh, who thought they had their lives mapped out and then got the rug pulled out from under them. I’m working on a project for late this year and just realized as I’m writing my post that it falls into this category. The heroine in the story is dealing with that issue, having lost a job she thought was secure, following a path she’d been on for a long time, and now she has to start over. She agrees to house-sit for friends on a Maine island while licking her wounds and trying to figure out where to go from there. 

That story opportunity was something that came at a time when I needed to figure out a new direction, and the timing couldn’t have been any better. It was nowhere on my list of plans last year, but I couldn’t say no to it since it leads down a path I intended to research and wanted to start on eventually anyway. I guess it’s ‘eventually’ now.  

Does anyone else see their birthday as the start of a shiny new year? An opportunity to start fresh? Or is there a story you love where one of the characters is forced to start all over again?

Contest

I would love to hear from you on those, so I have a signed copy of my first book Hunting Medusa to send to one person who comments by 5 pm (Eastern) on Sun, August 4 (via drawing on RandomResult.com).

About the Author

Elizabeth Andrews has been a book lover since she was old enough to read. She read her copies of Little Women and the Little House series so many times, the books fell apart. As an adult, her book habit continues. She has a room overflowing with her literary collection right now, and still more spreading into other rooms.  Almost as long as she’s been reading great stories, she’s been attempting to write her own.  Thanks to a fifth grade teacher who started the class on creative writing, Elizabeth went from writing creative sentences to short stories and eventually full-length novels. Her father saved her poor, callused fingers from permanent damage when he brought home a used typewriter for her.  

Elizabeth found her mother’s stash of romance novels as a teenager, and-though she loves horror- romance became her very favorite genre, making writing romances a natural progression. There are more than just a few manuscripts, however, tucked away in a filing cabinet that will never see the light of day.

Along with her enormous book stash, Elizabeth lives with her husband of twenty-five years, and spends plenty of time with her two young adult sons who have recently flown the coop. When she’s not at work or buried in books or writing, there is a garden outside full of herbs, flowers and vegetables that requires occasional attention.

You can find out more and keep up with news at her website: 

www.ElizabethAndrewsWrites.com