Keep Going

So who made resolutions to lose weight or exercise more? We’re almost 2 weeks into January. Still sticking with it?

Motivation can sometimes be hard to find, to keep up. What do we do when our gas tanks are on low? We go in for fill-up. We can do the same thing with our motivation.

How do we recharge our motivation? There are several ways that help me.

One is being accountable. If I tell someone I’m going to do something, like go to Sculpt & Burn class, I feel that I need a really good reason to not follow through. “Didn’t feel like it” isn’t one. While not particularly motivation, it does help keep me on track.

Two is rewarding myself. I mentioned a while back about a reward plan. If I stay on track and hit my goals, I’ll gift myself with a new CD or book. If I’ve hit a particularly big goal, there are weekend jaunts all over Europe. Spa treatments are good. Yeah, I don’t have any trouble coming up with rewards and that helps me stay the course.

Three is a strong support system. It’s awesome when you can turn to someone when you’re feeling low and they remind you how far you’ve come and that they’re proud of you. I don’t know about you, but that really makes me want to keep going.

Today is my first day back to the gym after vacation. I’ve got a little ground to make up, but I’m confident that I’ll do it. Then I’ll kick it up a notch. I think I mentioned a running club? That should be starting soon. We’ll be training for a half marathon in Prague for the spring. In addition to that, I’ll be adding weight training to my regimen come February.

I’ve got big plans. I’ve got a support system in place. I’ve got goals. I’ve got motivation. I’m ready for the new year and all the changes it’s going to bring.

How about you?

Here We Go Again!

It’s a new year. Yeah, I know I’m a week or so late informing of you this. Lucky for me, you’re all smart cookies.

What’s kept me away this past week, you ask? Travel and the ramification of such.

As you know, I was in Texas over the holidays. We left on Sunday to come back to Germany. Side note: any of you that travel, noise-cancelling headphones are worth their weight in gold and then some.

Unfortunately for me, I don’t sleep well on the plane. So from start to finish, I was up for about 24 hours by the time we reached our apartment. Of course, it snowed while we were gone. So we dropped off our luggage, picked up the puppy from the neighbors’ (I missed her soooo much) and shoveled the driveway so hubby could get the car out the following morning.

Then two days of laundry, two days of errands and grocery shopping and not to mention a week’s worth of jet lag. Yes, it really does take my body that long to get back into the swing of things after crossing that many time zones coming east.

Anyway, for good or ill, I’m back.

Wednesday, we’ll have another Weightloss Wednesday. Yes, I’m still continuing my quest for a healthier and more active lifestyle.

Friday will probably be a Fangirl Friday. I’ll either have a guest or I’ll tell you about this great new-to-me series I’ve started reading.

I’ve got lots of plans for the new year and I hope you stick around.

What do you have scheduled so far? What are your great plans?

Happy New Year

Here we are, folks. The last day of the year.

I have to admit, I had a pretty good year. My first two novellas came out this year with The Wild Rose Press. I’ve made some great new friends between this blog, Facebook and Twitter. I got to go RWA National Convention, I made PRO, I finished up my associate degree I’ve been working on forever, and I’m back to writing full-time. Those are just the highlights. I can’t complain.

I’m expecting next year to be even better. I’ve got a full load planned for writing, I’ve got great friends and critique partners to help keep me on track, I’ll be starting my bachelor degree, and I’ll be pursuing an agent this year. I’m excited to get started.

I'll be spending the evening with wonderful friends, playing games and having fun. Tomorrow is family day and Sunday I'll be winging my way back to Germany to brave the snow.

How has 2010 treated you? What are your highlights? What have you got planned for 2011?

Have fun celebrating, but stay safe.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

I arrived in Texas, safe and sound. Maybe a little bit frazzled, but that's another story.

Since I've been tied up with family the last two days, no blog post today.

I'd like to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a season full of love. Be good to each other.

Holidays: The End of your Healthy Lifestyle?

I’m winging my way across the ocean today (plane and weather gods willing) while you read this. Hopefully on Friday, I will be writing from sunny Texas.

Weightloss Wednesday, right before Christmas. What shall we talk about?

Should we discuss all the cakes, cookies and pies everywhere we turn? How about fat-laden mashed potatoes, all the bread you can eat, and the alcohol that flows freely at holiday parties?

What’s a poor girl trying to make healthy choices to do?

Give it all up until after the first of the year? We could do that. But that’s 2 weeks and if you’re anything like me, you’ll take license to eat whatever you want and to damn the rest. When it’s time to start back up again, you’ve gained back that 20 pounds you lost before Christmas.

Deprive yourself? You watch everyone around you shoving all those calories down their throats without abandon. You start feeling left out. Then is desperation, or possibly even spite, you indulge. And indulge and indulge and indulge.

Neither of these options sound all that appealing, do they? With a plan in place, you can weather the holidays, indulging in the traditions that make up your family holiday and keeping on a healthy track. After all, balance is what it’s all about, right?

If you have a holiday gathering, eat a little less during the day beforehand and get in your exercise. You’ll feel more in control and by conserving some calories and burning more with the exercise, the food you eat at the party won’t make a dent in your plan.

If you’re hanging with the family, incorporate some healthy snacks along with the baked goodies. If you eat a bunch of low-cal veggies, you don’t have as much room to hold the high-cal foods. You may even find that you don’t crave them as much as you thought you would.

There’s always lots of alcohol at holiday parties, right? You can still indulge. In moderation. Alternate glasses of wine with sparkling water. Or do like the Germans do and mix half wine and half sparkling wine. That’s a popular drink over here and it cuts your alcohol intake in half.

One important thing to remember is that the holidays are separate events. If you stick to your healthy lifestyle most days and indulge at those special parties or family gatherings only, you’ll still be on track in January.

What are some of the ways you balance your healthy lifestyle with the holidays?

Delivering Christmas Cheer in Germany

Thank you to Lillian Grant for stopping by on Friday and sharing such an interesting story with us. Thank you, dear readers, for stopping by and saying hi.

The winner of a copy of Lillian’s new release, Happy Birthday Nancy Tobin, is:

FiremanPat

Congrats, FiremanPat. I couldn’t find your email address so could you please email me at riley@riley-quinn.com. I’ll get your copy out to ASAP.

So what did your weekend hold for you? This time of year seems to find people so busy.

We started delivering Christmas gifts to the neighbors. I say start because we learned another difference between Americans and Germans last year.

When we lived in Texas, we were in a fairly new neighborhood and as a result, we met our neighbors as each family moved in. Being near a military base, most of them were friendly and we did cookouts and parties together.

At Christmas, I always baked goodies and put together a gift bag for the neighbors. We’d go to each door, ring the bell, wish them a Merry Christmas and give them a gift. They’d say thank you, Merry Christmas back and we’d go on our way to the next house.

So last year, I put together gift bags and one night after hubby got home from work, we thought we’d run gift bags around and then eat dinner. We only had 4 houses to visit. No problem, right?

At House 1, the neighbors were gone. So we left their bag inside the doorway for them.

House 2 is where our master plan began to unravel. Instead of a quick stop, we were invited in. Wine was brought out. Then another bottle of wine. 2 bottles of wine, several schnapps, and 2 hours later, we left.

At House 3, again we were invited in. This time it was beer. 2 beers each, 2 schnapps each and 1 hour later, we left.

Keep in mind, this is 2 bottles of wine, 2 beers, lots of schnapps (which is powerful stuff here in Germany. Think tequila) all on empty stomachs. I was drunk and we still had one more house to go.

We popped into our own place and ate a quick snack of sausage, cheese and crackers in which I proceeded to slice my finger open while cutting the sausage. Then on to House 4, which happens to be our upstairs neighbors and we KNEW that would be a long visit. It was.

Moral of the story: We needed more than a quick visit to deliver our goodies. Friday night, we were invited upstairs. We took their gift. Today, we visited House 1 & 2 and tomorrow we’ll hit House 3.

In addition to all this impromptu neighbor visiting, we had hubby’s work Christmas party and then a co-worker’s Advent party this weekend. Lots of fun, lots of socializing.

We’ll also get a lot of the same over the next 2 weeks. We’re heading to Texas to visit hubby’s family and see all our friends for the holidays. We fly out of Frankfurt on Wednesday (good travel thoughts please as there have been a lot of cancellations lately) and straight into Dallas. We’ll be there until after the first of the year.

So what about your weekend? What kept you busy?

Welcome Lillian Grant

What English?

As an Aussie seeking publication in a US dominated e-publishing world some things you assume are a given clearly are not.

When I wrote Happy Birthday, Nancy Tobin, I wrote it in English. At least I thought I did. Turns out, nothing is quite that simple.

Story complete, critiqued, polished, rewritten, re-critiqued, whisked into outer space by aliens, prodded, probed, formatted and good to go, I sent a sample on its merry way to my publisher of choice. Happy with the final copy, I sat back and waited, and waited, and waited, until at last I got a nibble. Could I send the whole manuscript? Mai oui, of course. Then, would I rewrite the sex scenes to make them hotter? Well, in for a penny in for a pound. Finally, an offer to publish my baby, in English.

BUT, hmm, whose English? The contract said I had to use US spelling. So, who cares? What are a few lost U’s and the occasional S morphing into a Z between friends? If it got my book into the public domain and made women weep with unrequited lust for my hero, I could sacrifice the odd letter here and there.

Contract signed, I waited for my first round edits. They arrived and I opened the file. What eternal hell was this? My editor had interpreted, use US spelling, for make it a US novel…NOOOOOO!! Thankfully, she is an angel and when I emailed my horror at having my gorgeous Aussie hunk, that would have the ladies panting with pent up frustration, changed to a down home American boy, she spoke to ‘management.’

Oh, what sweet joy it was when the answer came back, lose the Aussie spelling, keep the Aussie slang. However, this came with a caveat. Keep the Aussie slang that made sense. So began a period of tense editing where words like ‘lounge’ were tossed aside to be replaced with ‘living room.’ Would American readers understand the word ‘git’ if read in context. I even got complemented on how clever I was to know when it was appropriate for my hero to use the word ‘bugger’ in a sentence. After much deliberation, the process was complete. My hero and heroine are still Aussie’s living in Australia and most of my slang survived. I was thankful I hadn’t used some of our more colourful expressions, such as ‘cooked chook,’ because nothing could have saved them, and it seems the names of more intimate body parts are universal.

I recently read pages and pages of comments on another blog about changing stories for the US market. Which begs the question, as a reader, do you want books set in other countries to be adapted to become stories set in the country you live in?

NB: No U’s or S’s were harmed during the writing or publication of this article.

Blurb:
Suddenly single on the eve of her fortieth birthday, Nancy Tobin’s not sure turning middle-aged is worth celebrating. She's stuck in a dead-end job as the boss’s bitch with only her morose Labrador for a companion. What does she have to party about? Maybe if she ignores the whole birthday thing, it will just go away.

Hot, twenty-six-year-old Jake Turner has other ideas. When he bumps into Nancy at the library, he sees a woman in need of a wake-up call. Determined to unleash the beauty hidden beneath the sad façade, he schemes to relight her spark. He wants to give her a birthday to remember but he ends up being the one who can't forget: a visit to his apartment becomes a weekend in his bed where he discovers an offbeat, unpredictable, sexually adventurous woman he never wants to let go.

With Jake, Nancy can do anything, her life can be whatever she chooses. But this new and exciting relationship teeters on the edge of destruction when her soon-to-be ex-husband reveals the reason for Jake’s initial interest in her. Can Nancy trust Jake when he finally tells her he loves her?

Excerpt:
Nancy sat alone at the table near the student café. Despite her best intentions not to, she searched the male population for Jake. He must have been teasing. Why would a cute young guy be interested in her? She stared at the nubile female bodies as they walked past, their belly buttons proudly displaying all manner of trinkets and tattoos and yelling to the world, I’m young, supple, and the best shag you could ever have. She looked down at herself and saw the roll of flab above her waistband. Her body appeared to yell, I’m old and saggy and too fucking tired to care if I ever shag again. Why would he even give her a second thought? Perhaps it was a dare or a joke.

“Excuse me; is this seat taken?”

The voice dragged Nancy back to reality, and she looked up, surprised to see a familiar face. Her cheeks burned, and she struggled to speak.

“No, please, feel free.”

Jake slid into the seat next to her. “So, Nancy, we meet again. Are you stalking me by any chance?”

Nancy was quick to shake her head. While she had been hoping to see him again, she had no intention of revealing that to anyone. She could barely believe it herself. Was she so desperate for love she would latch on to the first male who showed a glimmer of interest? No matter why she attracted him, with her track record, she should avoid good-looking young men like the plague. “No, absolutely not. Are you sure you’re not stalking me? I was here first.”

His deep, sexy chuckle resonated through her. “Touché. You guessed it. Someone is paying me to follow you.”

“Well, they’re wasting their money, I can assure you. There is nothing to see here.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Did you miss me?”

Nancy tore her eyes away from his and tried to sound nonchalant. “I haven't given you a moment’s thought since you left the library.”

He put his hand over hers, and she felt the blood rush to her cheeks again. When he leaned closer, she closed her eyes. The smell of his musky cologne and the feel of his breath on her face as he whispered in her ear made her stomach lurch and her heart rate lift.

“Liar, but it’s okay. I’ve been thinking about you too.”

Nancy opened her eyes and snapped her head around to glare at him. No one in their right mind would think about her. She refused to be the butt of anyone’s joke. Her hand hovered in midair as she fought the urge to slap his face. Jake leaned back and put his arm up. Deciding he wasn’t worth it, Nancy dropped her hand and snatched her empty Coke bottle off the table instead.

She clenched her teeth. “Fuck off, you git; you’re not funny,” she spat out.

Without another word, she got up and stomped back to the library, tears of frustration stinging her eyes. Stupid, stupid woman!

Thank you, Lillian, for joining us today.

If you’d like to read more about Jake and Nancy, one lucky commenter will win a free copy of Happy Birthday, Nancy Tobin.

If you can’t wait, you can buy it here.

And to keep up with Lillian, you can visit her site.