Never Ending...

It seems that the quest to finish Adventures of Bear B & Stone is a never ending one. Every time I think that I am almost finished, ready to write the last chapter, it dawns on me that there is something missing in the middle chapters.

I have edited and rewritten chapters 2-5 numerous times now, constantly adding fresh new content that contributes meat to the story. Chapter 6 took a dive. After editing and rewriting the preceding chapters I realized that between chapter 5 and chapter 6 I seemed to be missing something. So most of chapter 6 became the new chapter 7, chapter 7 became 8... So, this left me with only a couple of chapters to begin chapter 6. Now, I need to figure out what happened in the story between 5 & 7.

Previously, it was written that days went on in this fashion for some time and summer rolled around. That was a cheap escape that I apparently wrote for myself. I don't want to leave that trap door hanging wide open for my readers to fall through. They deserve better. I have my ideas on what can happen during 6. I have some thoughts on where it should go leading up to the newly appointed 7. Now if only I could tie it all together in a satisfactory manner. Satisfactory being the first step in achieving GREAT, which is of course my ultimate goal.

Needless to say, Adventures of Bear B & Stone probably won't be ready in time for Christmas as I had previously hoped. I will continue to keep you posted on the progress of the chapters. The end is in sight. Unfortunately, the middle has a giant hole in it.

It's much harder than I thought putting together a chapter book for tweens. My novel flowed more easily than this one seems to be.

OT Homemade Crayons for Halloween

Today, our 6 year old daughter and I sat down and made Halloween Crayons for her classmates trick or treat bags. They are so fun and easy to make, so I thought I'd pass it along. You can do these any time of year. Just grab yourself a pan with fun shapes (Wilton makes some fun cookie pans that work great, but we've done it with just a regular mini muffin pan too).

To make them, just save all those broken, useless pieces of crayon throughout the year. Take the little pieces and fill the tin cups just until full but not to overflowing. Preheat oven to 250*F. Set pan in oven. Bake for 10-20 minutes, just until all crayons are melted. Set pan on cooling rack. Cool completely. When crayons are fully hardened, press around the edges until you feel them pop free. Turn pan upside down on cooling rack. You now have fun crayons that will change colors as the kids draw/color with them. 

They make great party favors or fun gifts to give. This year we are including them in the treat bags for our daughter's class. We completed the bags with bookmarks, stickers, pretzels and candy. She had a lot of fun and is really proud of the fact that she "did all the work". 

Holiday Specials

Have you started your Christmas shopping yet? We haven't. We have always been last minute Christmas shoppers. Every year I say that is going to change, but it never does. Perhaps it is because I have a November baby. Maybe it is just that there are so many holidays and birthdays piled up in the months before Christmas. Maybe I'm just lazy. LOL.

Well, if you are doing your holiday shopping (now or closer to Christmas) we have an irresistible offer for you. First, we have extended our $1.00 off offer on CreateSpace. Purchase any of our books straight from CreateSpace and use coupon code VDBK4S4B at the checkout. This will take $1.00 off of each book you purchase. This will continue until the new year.

For those of you that prefer to keep your collections in the more portable form of ebooks, we have a special for you too. All of our books are only $1.00 in eformat. Currently available at Smashwords and Amazon Kindle. For those that prefer to shop at B&N I will keep watching for their updates, but they inform me that they are extremely backlogged and cannot even project a time when their systems will update. Monster Beneath my Bed for Nook is still caught in that backlog somewhere. But I do have good news. Smashwords offers a format for ALL ereaders. This includes Nook, Kindle, iPad, and many many more.

Here are all the links you will need to take advantage of these wonderful offers:

Monster Beneath my Bed on CreateSpace
I Love the Changing Seasons on CreateSpace
We've Seen Santa on CreateSpace

Monster Beneath my Bed on Smashwords
I Love the Changing Seasons on Smashwords
We've Seen Santa on Smashwords

Monster Beneath my Bed on Amazon
I Love the Changing Seasons on Amazon
We've Seen Santa on Amazon

We love hearing from our readers. If you have read any of our titles, please leave us a review at Goodreads or Amazon or Barnes & Noble. This helps us to spread the word about our titles.

Review & Giveaway I Love the Changing Seasons

Check out the newest review of I Love the Changing Seasons over on Lollipops and Books.

Thanks to Krista and her CandyLand Crew for another great review!

Head on over and read what her and her Crew had to say about I Love the Changing Seasons and enter for your chance to win a copy for yourself!

Congratulations!!

Congratulations to Debbie Ritenour. She is the winner of the Lollipops and Books Monster Beneath my Bed giveaway! We hope you and your family enjoy your winnings.

We are offering $1.00 off for each of our books that you purchase directly from CreateSpace. i.e. if you purchase 5 copies of Monster Beneath my Bed you will receive $5.00 off, if you order I Love the Changing Seasons and We've Seen Santa you will receive $2.00 off, etc...

• Monster Beneath my Bed
• I Love the Changing Seasons
• We've Seen Santa

Simpy enter discount code VDBK4S4B at the checkout. 

We are so close to 100 fans on our Facebook Fan Page. Remember that when we reach 100 fans we will be celebrating with a giveaway. You can help us reach 100 fans by spreading the word to your friends and family. You could be the lucky winner.

OT Halloween Costume

So, our daughter (6) decided she wanted to be a cheerleader for Halloween this year. It's really not surprising since she did cheer at one of the high school football games with the high school cheerleaders and then walked in the Homecoming parade with them the following weekend.

Now I don't mean to offend here, so I apologize ahead of time if I do. Over the years we have found that girl costumes are far too (how can I be politically correct here?) grown up for a young girl. This is even the costumes geared towards toddlers and elementary school students. This left me wondering how I was going to allow her to have the costume she wants without dressing her in a way I find totally inappropriate.

As you may have seen in a previous post, I recently got my sewing machine back out and sewed some makeshift bedding for our Monster Beneath my Bed bed that we have in our front yard for Halloween. I took the leftover felt from the bedding and created a costume for our daughter for her costume.

I am not quite finished. I need to make a trip to Joann for some elastic. Then I will put a waistband on the skirt. It will be in the paler of the two purples. In the meantime, here are some pics of what I have done thus far.

I am really proud of myself. I didn't know I could do it. I haven't used a sewing machine, other than the night I sewed the bedding for our Monster bed, since I was a young girl in Girl Scouts, and I have never done clothing before. I guess it is a lot like riding a bike. Once you know how, you never forget.

I will post some pics of the finished product when I finish. Perhaps I will even get my little cheerleader to model it for me. :)

Bear B. & Stone Adventuring Again

Finally, the walls have come down....

Well, maybe it was never really walls. Maybe it wasn't even block. Perhaps it was just a simple matter of going insane staring at a computer screen.

Call me old fashioned. I just prefer the old, trusty paper and pen method. I get so overwhelmed and frustrated staring at a screen and wondering what the next words should be. Typing a sentence straight from my brain seems like I am missing something.

So, I printed out the chapters I have completed. I purchased a stack of legal pads. Who would've known they'd be so cheap by the bundle at Staples. Yay for unexpected finds. I wasn't even planning on going down that aisle, but there was a pull I just couldn't resist.

I admit that when my computer is on, I don't seem to find myself working. Instead, I wander over to that black hole we call Facebook. I check everyone's news and comments and anything else they got the inkling to share since I checked it five minutes ago. I then turn around and check on my apps, which quickly run out of energy. Then I wander to my emails. And, well, you get the point.

So, I promised some time ago that I would get a chapter book out there. My young readers have been begging for one. They enjoy the picture books, but they know they are too old for them. They are hoping (READ: counting on) my chapter books will entertain them as much as the picture books have. And, thus, I too am hopeful that I can please them.

In the meantime, we are also preparing for our upcoming event. Just in time for Halloween, we will be reading at our local library. We were initially doing just a small group of toddlers to preschool aged children. Recently, we learned that the librarian decided to invite all the local preschools to join us! We don't have a number count yet, but I have a feeling it will be more than the handful of kids we read to when we were there last Christmastime.

So, that is what is going on over here. Hope everyone is having a good time preparing for Halloween. Remember to read lots of spooky stories this month!

Spring Cleaning...

Yes, we know that it is fall, but we really needed to clear out and go through everything that had ended up stockpiled in the "office". See, our office is really a second living room. The set up of our house has two long (and unfortunately rather narrow) living rooms then a very large kitchen/dining room. The front living room (where you enter through the front door) is what we dubbed our office. It is also where our daughter does her art, plays with play dough, and keeps various toys that she doesn't take to her room. The kids computer (they get the desktop) is in there, and then the shoes and coats, mittens and hats are there as well.

As you can imagine, we are all guilty of dropping things off in the office on our way in the door. These things can pile up so quickly if they are left to be "dealt with later". Well, Spring or not, later has arrived in our household. We pulled everything (including furniture) out of that room. We scrubbed the walls and shampooed the carpets. Then, we cleaned the windows. This was all yesterday. Today, we put everything back. Not where it had been, but where we think it will work better. We are hoping this will help both work and household run more smoothly.

Of course, now that we have done one room, it is only right that we do the rest of the house. Tomorrow there are appointments and meetings, so I am not sure what we will get done. I am hopeful that wihtin the next couple of weeks we will have at least the entire downstairs finished.

So, when I find the time I am working Adventures of Bear B. & Stone, and promoting Monster Beneath my Bed. But, our main point of focus is getting our house clean from top to bottom, or more accurately bottom to top as we started on the main floor.

Please bear with me as I will not be posting as often as I should and there probably won't be much information on the upcoming books. Don't forget, Monster Beneath my Bed is a great family Halloween read, and there is still time to order your copy to arrive before Halloween.

Loving this fall weather and cleaning out the house for a comfortable winter.
~Tiffany

Review and giveaway plus what's next

Thank you to Krista and her Candyland Crew over at Lollipops & Books for our first review for Monster Beneath my Bed. Head on over there and check it out. She is also hosting a giveaway, so be sure to enter while you are there.

As for what comes next, Adventures of Bear B. & Stone is coming along fairly well. The story that once started out as a mystery type story has fast become a story about bullying and overcoming adversity. A story that I think speaks to the heart of the matter. I believe that there are only a few chapters to go. Of course once the chapters are finished, there will still be editing and rewriting galore.

Clark has not yet begun to work on the illustrations yet. These will be ink drawings. There will only be one per chapter as this is not a picture book. Mostly, we just need to settle in and get to working on it. Now that the kids are in school, and Monster has been released, it really shouldn't be too terribly hard to get these last chapters finished. (In theory anyways).

So, that is about all that we have going on. I am tossing around some ideas for some more books. Dragons and aliens seem to be at the top of my list. These will be illustrated children's books, but geared to the age group between our picture books and chapter books. At least that is a thought I am working on. Who knows, they could end up becoming picture books or chapter books. As of now, I just know that I want to work with dragons and aliens in the future.

Next month is NaNoWriMo, so my alter ego will be coming out to work on her next novel. Perhaps I should be thinking on what I want to do there too. Maybe dragons and aliens will play a role. LOL.

Good luck to everyone who enters this newest giveaway. Remember, if you read  Monster Beneath my Bed or any of our other books, please post a review at Amazon, Barnes&Noble and/or Goodreads. Thanks.

A little unconventional...

You've heard of billboards on the side of the road, right? People pay thousands of dollars to display their message the the motorist driving down the highway. But, you are going 70 mph (or faster), and you sometimes miss the message. Or, you are caught in rush hour traffic and you begin to notice that of the last 20 billboards you passed half were the exact same ad shoved in your face over and over again.

Well, the other day Clark and I were discussing new ways to drum up interest in the newest book, Monster Beneath my Bed. First, I printed up a poster sized rendition of the front cover. This we attached to our front door. Then we started hanging some of our Halloween decorations to draw attention. Then, Clark came up with a great idea. Why not bring the story to life in our front yard. After all, it is the month of Halloween.

So, over the course of the last few days he designed and we collected the materials we needed. He then began to build a rather large scale bed for the front yard. I got out the trusty old sewing machine, and I began to sew the bedding. We spent all day yesterday building, painting and decorating.

Now, we have a finished product to be proud of. We think it is pretty neat and it sits right in our front yard for everyone who drives by or walks by to see. The bonus is that we live 2 blocks from the elementary school. The kids seemed to really enjoy seeing our bed with eyes under it as they walked by this afternoon after school.

So here are the pictures:

Purchase Monster Beneath my Bed (Your Links in One Place)

While the giveaways have all ended, I thought it might be helpful to create a post of all the places you can still get a copy of Monster Beneath my Bed before Halloween. Monsters always make for great Halloween stories!

• WeveSeenSanta.com (we will autograph even personalized autographs & we offer gift wrap)
• CreateSpace
• Amazon (also available for Kindle)
• Barnes & Noble (coming soon for Nook)
• Smashwords (for any and all e-readers)

Also, check with your e-reader provider such as Apple & Sony & Blio. While I do not have these links readily available I do know that they carry our books.

We've Seen Santa and I Love the Changing Seasons are also available through these same channels. 

Happy Reading Everyone! Hope you enjoy your Halloween plannings, hauntings, and tricks & treats. 

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Vicki Sotomayor Leroy, Becky Leichty, & Ann Tagg! They were the winners of our Goodreads Giveaway! Your books will be headed your way shortly!