Happy 2019!

Cue the streamers, confetti, horns, and paper hats!

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. Ours was fabulous and thoroughly enjoyable. Now I'm ready to rock and roll again.

Thanks to everyone who participated in my informal survey of what you'd like to see more of at the Tiki Hut. You gave me a lot to choose from.

The most prevalent answer I received said y'all want to know more about where I live. I'm taking that to mean Texas and the San Antonio area rather than my address and photos of my house with all the flyaway dog hair and accumulated writer mess. So I'll be writing more about the Lone Star State and Military City USA.

The second things you wanted most to read were more about me, my writing, what I read, what books inspire me, things like that.

So I'm going start two new features here. They may not appear every month. Or they may be the only thing(s) here some months. Mostly I think you'll see one or the other along with whatever else, if anything, I'm blogging about.

The first new feature will be "My World" and  the other will be "Book Nook." Sometimes these may overlap. I am a writer, ya know 😉

Since it's my first blog of the new year, there's no time like the present to begin.

Book Nook

My bookshelves. Plus two more in a different location. They all need dusting... ssshhhh. This is an old pic from when we first moved in. Not all my books are there. I can't take a new shot because there's now a long table in front of them blocking the view. But there are more books and less space.

I read all kinds of books. Currently I'm reading The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. Have you read it? I'm actually writing this blog on New Year's Eve - the exciting life of a writer! - and I'm about a third of the way through. So by now, I'm probably somewhere around the middle to two-thirds point.

So far, this is the best book I've read in a long time. It was an impulse buy for me - on sale and I liked the blurb. About a quarter of the way in, I looked it up and saw that many places listed it as a Book of the Year in 2017. I understand why.

How did I miss it, LOL.

The opening sentence is: "The first person I met in England was a hallucination." The book just gets better from there. I'm enthralled.

What are you reading now?

My World

I grew up in Texas, but I've also lived in New York City, Miami, Virginia Beach, Nashville, Cape May, NJ, and Ruidoso, NM. My attitude is certainly Texas-based, but having lived a good many years on the East Coast, I still feel very much at home there no matter where I go.

I've traveled a little, and those experiences also go into shaping who I am. Sometimes, I think I'm unique; other times, I wonder who I am. But I so love my life that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about those things.

What about you? Have you grown where you are planted, or have your roots spread all over the place?

Moving on...

I wish you a happy, healthy, and productive January. I'll be back here on Monday, February 4 with some Gracie news.