 At the end of June our dear Dali ran out of her allotted nine lives. Her kidneys finally failed, so our vet helped us send her over the Rainbow Bridge. Her transition was done with a great deal of love and care. and we are truly grateful to the staff at Animals Are Family here in Porto. Dali was a feisty feline, full of opinions, very set in her ways. She was 6 years old when we adopted her from the animal shelter and was always an only cat. Her original name was Dolly, which was rather old-fashioned, so I renamed her after Ilona Andrews' white tiger in her Kate Daniels series. Ironically, as our Dali's eye problems advanced she become more and more like the Daniels' Dali who had issues with her sight as well. She was present in our household from 2012 onward so she leaned on my hand and keyboard during the course of many books. She made the journey to Portugal with us and handled it better than we did. Now our Dali is romping on the other side of that bridge, turning her nose up at various food offerings, and can see well once more. One day we'll meet up with her and I suspect her first complaint will be that no one is feeding her food she likes. I also suspect whatever angel was assigned to take care of her will shove her at whoever crossed that bridge first, and then scurry away. Dali was always one of a kind. Rest well dear. We miss you. And yes, that food is different than what they fed you this morning. Just give it a try, will you, dear? You might like it.... or not. (sighs)
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 March, April and May were spent mostly indoors, ordering our food online for delivery while hunkering down to avoid the virus. I typed out a lot of words because social media was driving me nuts, so that's actually good news.
Lest you're interested on how it went down over here, check out the post linked below from our blog on Our Life in Portugal. I'll be posting more often from now on, especially with news regarding the latest Demon Trappers book. Stay well, folks! Portugal vs. COVID-19  Since a particularly nasty new virus has decided to wreck havoc not only on the world's health, but its economy, I've moved my books around to help you guys out. First thing -- there has been no change to the Demon Trappers books which are still available on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, B&N and GooglePlay like normal. I'm a bit limited on what I can do with those. However...
 I am happy to announce that I'm back to writing on a more regular basis now. Part of the delay was due to hand surgery in October. Or in this case hands surgery since I had work done on both paws. I'm four months in now and the ability to type for longer lengths of time has returned and the numbness in the affected fingers is nearly gone. Huzzah! And now onto book news!
 To be human is to deal with stress and my international move to Portugal certainly red-lined that meter in so many ways. Today's post on Janice Hardy's Fiction University explains how all that changed my approach to writing, how I'm coping with that abrupt change, and why it's all very positive. Enjoy!
 The winter is always a slower time for me. It's like I'm part bear and like to hibernate, though I don't actually sleep any more hours than in the summer. I suspect many of you are exactly the same. I find I like nothing more than curling up with a good book, a cup of tea and a purring cat. Everything else seems like too much bother.
 If you check out the blog post archives listed to the right of this post you will note a HUUUUGE gap between December 2016 to August 2018. A lot of that silence is because of THE MOVE in September 2017, which required ten months' worth of prep time to accomplish. I've mentioned THE MOVE on Facebook and elsewhere but never really addressed it on my blog. So here goes!
I put those words in caps because any move is likely to wear you down. All the logistics, the hassles, the unforeseen near-disasters are totally mind blowing and exhausting. Add in selling, tossing or donating 99% of your earthly possessions and moving across the Atlanta Ocean to a foreign country -- that's Olympic level hell right there. And we did it to ourselves with no one else to blame. LOL  First of all -- HAPPY NEW YEAR! Wherein I learned that I didn't need to go out onto the streets of Porto to see the massive fireworks display downtown, but could see it just fine from our apartment. Yeah, color me surprised.
 I've been a bit quiet because after my trip to the United States I was home for a couple weeks and then off to London. This, too, was a business trip, but like the one in the US, much fun as well. Because I was hanging around with . . . Ripperologists.
As promised here is the entire self-publishing presentation I gave today at Moonlight & Magnolias. I figured it'd just be easier to give you the whole works.
self_publishing_mm_2018.pdf |
Jana OliverJana is an international & multi-award winning author in several genres including young adult, paranormal romance and urban fantasy. Archives
February 2020
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