January 16, 2010

Happy January!

Life has been a little chaotic around here in the office of A M Jenner. First, we’ve been editing like crazy on our next project, Clues to Food: A Letterboxer’s Cookbook. That project started mid-November, with the official submission cut-off being “the end of the year or when the book reached 250 pages, whichever comes first”. In this case, the end of the year came first. We’ve been trying some of the recipes, and we haven’t found a loser yet. Everything we’ve tried has been very scrumptious! The special air mattress on my husband’s hospital bed went flat, and he was sleeping on camp pads on the springs while we tried to jump through the paperwork hoops to get it replaced—and in the mean time, the bed itself broke and also needed to be replaced. That entire process took about a month to complete. We shared Christmas with those most dear to us, giving and receiving mostly hand-made presents. We also shared cold and flu germs with the near and dear, and our home has been filled with coughing, sniffles, and explosive blow-the-top-of-your-head-off sneezing. I’ve been working on finishing my NaNoWriMo novel, which is now around 80,000 words. My partner’s been editing our next novel, Deadly Gamble. Some filing cabinets have fortuitously and gratuitously come our way, and at the best price. In order to fit them into our cramped office/school room/craft room/storage room, we’ve had to do a lot of cleaning, organizing, throwing out, rearranging furniture, and totally taking our office apart and putting it back together again. Hopefully this project will be finished up by the end of the weekend. An update to the last post...several changes, none of them to the story, were made to Tanella's Flight, but they would not allow us to shorten the author name from Anne Marie Jenner to A M Jenner. Sigh. Those searching Amazon and other places for our books will just have to know enough about us to search under both names. School is back in session, and our youngest child is working her way through her last semester of High School. We’re looking into GED testing and grant applications so that college can be begun this fall. Two universities far out of our budgetary grasp are pursuing our home-schooler. Although not required to take them, she just received word she passed the standard tests required for graduation from High School here in Arizona. And finally, we got a chance a couple of weekends ago to get in a little letterboxing. It was nice to be out on the trails again. Happy Reading! —Anne