Holy Smokes! It's Been Five Years?

Wow, has it been a long time since I've been here! So much has happened in the past five years that I couldn't possibly catch you up on it all. In some ways life has gone on the way you would expect - kids get taller and older, jobs come and go and waistlines shrink and expand (mostly expand in my case). The worst thing that happened was that my husband was unemployed for two years. Generally speaking, we weathered that storm well, but we don't have any retirement savings left. This has caused me to go back to work and I'll fill you in on that soon, because it's really exciting. My exciting news for today is that I wrote and published my first novel, The Shattered Door, in September, 2012. It was a great experience: fun, tough, rewarding, frustrating - I went through just about every emotion there is in the process of writing, editing and publishing my novel. I've written the second book and have to edit it, and the third book in the series is half-written. The kids are all much more self-sufficient now, so I have more time or working and writing, and I've been trying to make the most of it. More on this on soon.