Hello ,

My kids and I made it home to muggy Virginia last week and have almost fully recovered from jet-lag. The nice thing is that jet-lag is easier East to West than it is West to East. I'm sure there's some scientific reasoning for that, but ....I'm a writer. Not a scientist.

Ok, not funny. Still, I can prove that I'm a writer with something that actually really excites me and seems to work with my very competitive personality (did I ever mention my husband won't play Risk with me anymore because I take my soldiers dying personally? Unfortunately, this is genetic and two of my three kids have it.... Family game night is brutal over here). Anyway, enough about my personality flaws.... I wanted to talk about how I started keeping track of the number of words I type in a month.

I started on June 10 and finished June with 29,567 words typed. Not handwritten. That's too hard to count. And would give me nightmares of fifth grade research papers and painstakingly counting all the words, hoping against hope that I had enough...

I digress. Sorry. Fifth grade was hard. For July I'm at 29,247 and I still have a couple days left! What has kept me on track even while in Europe with family? Writing with the Creative Writing Community, of course! We sprint three times a week, which really helps. Plus, I'm taking advantage of having bought my children workbooks. Yes, I'm that mean mom. If they want to play Minecraft, they gotta do math. (She says as evil laughter bubbles out of her throat.)

This summer I'm working on two separate book while redoing the cover of Stepping Across the Desert and getting Coffee Stains edited. I'm also working hard on short stories. I entered a writing contest on Shortfictionbreak.com this summer where the theme was Anniversary and the limit was 1500 words. Eek! You can read my story here.

For you, my friend, I'm bringing back some swaps. For a few newsletters we will go with historical fiction/romance to celebrate my new book cover for Stepping Across the Desert and then we'll move on to New Adult as we get closer to the launch of Coffee Stains!

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This week I have a historical romance recommendation for you. It's Tudor romance, which isn't the same century as Stepping Across the Desert, but if you like historical romance set in England, you should give it a try.

A maid with a secret and a handsome bookkeeper meet in the employ of a Duke...

A Tudor historical romance

Find in here.

Until next time,

Kat