2017 Revisions

I know...it's been another long absence, but a huge change took place in my life. We moved from Central Texas to East Texas in the early fall of 2015. In the first year, we rented a house and hubby got settled into a new job. It was a challenge to learn a whole new area, where the closest city is about twenty minutes away containing a mall and popular stores I like to browse. The town we lived in had a population of over 4500 and it was a huge change from where I moved from, being over 85,000 people. Then in the second year,2016, we bought a house in the fall and moved again, into a very rural area of less than 1500 people. My home is about an acre, is on a dead end street, where I have woods behind me and on the north end of the house. Very peaceful here, but sometimes I miss interaction with different people. It has been an adjustment to this country life, where I see many squirrels, rabbits, birds and the occasional raccoons. While hubby worked, I had lots of time to get our household in order. I also had time to think about my writing, which was thoroughly lapsing. I had started a new project, "The Groundsman" in 2015, but found I didn't like the direction the story had taken, so I let it lie in the dust of my mind. I do have the beginning of the story in google docs, so at least part of the story is written. I will tackle it again to get the story going again, but first I had to complete the Cross Passage series. This was a must to put off my bucket list. I read out loud the 2nd book, Falling for Her Heart, and found many things in it which didn't read well or not make sense. So this spring I pulled it off Amazon and went through the manuscript to revise it. I also went through the manuscript for book three, Hearts Restless Winds, which is not published yet and the final manuscript for the fourth book (untitled). All needed a thorough edit. This was quite an undertaking. Sometimes you have to read things several times to make something work and I felt my eyeballs tire. However, I recently re-uploaded the new installment of book two on Createspace and it is available on Amazon. I did look to ensure they had the 2017 revision in place and they do, which is really reassuring. I will have to ensure the correct version available on Kindle too. It takes time to develop oneself to write. We all start off with grammar mistakes and bad wording, or too many uses of words like "that", "all", or cliche phrases. What diligence it takes to weed such things out. The fact I recognize it now shows growth. Still I do amble a lot and the plot may take a while to get to it's destination. I do write in a soap operatic fashion, where the characters are thrown into challenges unforeseen. When it reaches the end of the story, it feels satisfactory. I did find myself crying sometimes,being too involved in my characters, which are a part of me. My hope is other readers will reach the same conclusion of it being a good story. It remains to be seen.