I haven’t done a personal blog for a while and I thought I’d give an update as to what I’ve been working on. Lately, I have been playing with cover designs for my new novel Dimensional Shift. The rough draft is below. I like it, but my twenty-year-old son doesn’t, so it continues to be a work in progress. In this story, travel writer Aria Chandler ventures into Romania’s Hoia Baciu Forest and is swept through a portal to another dimension. She is out of place in this new world and is used by the king as a bartering chip to deal with his warring island neighbors. While under the influence of the powerful hallucinogenic, Ayahuasca, Aria must use her skills of persuasion against a tyrannical king.
Last month, I did an Ad contest through Amazon and learned quite a bit about advertising on their site. Unfortunately, the Amazon Advertising site would not update my new credit card and I couldn’t participate in the challenge with others, but regardless I learned a great deal. I guess my nine-year-old computer has become obsolete as I need to update my Operating System to get Amazon’s Ad site to work for me, but even if I update it, the new OS system that my computer can take will be obsolete this fall, sooo I went on my daughter’s computer and updated my credit card information on Amazon Advertising. I’m now up and running with three ads in play. This was the easiest way to accomplish what I needed without purchasing a new computer yet. I continue to work on the Amazon search function, which has difficulty finding me and my books. Unfortunately, Amazon is not helpful in solving this problem.
On a personal front, our fourteen-year-old dog passed away last week. He was my shadow and I miss him tremendously. I have three other dogs and I love them all, but none of them follow me around like Chipper. He’s been in our family since my kids were little and we are all adjusting to his loss.
Last month, my husband saved a baby deer that was stuck up to its neck in mud. He took it to a nature center where the newly born fawn is doing well. We were told that she loves raspberries. Then last week, an injured red-tailed hawk showed up in our yard and was hanging out on our woodpile. I love hawks and was thrilled it was in our yard for three days, but it’s difficult letting the dogs outside when a hawk is hanging about. We realized the poor thing had a broken wing. We cut up some raw chicken and the hawk devoured it, so the next day we decided we needed to catch it and take it to the nature center where they specialize in helping raptors. We created a hawk box and my husband captured the hawk and took it to the center. We found out days later that the surgeon brought in to repair the hawk’s wing said that it was too calcified to fix and they had to put the hawk down, which was disappointing and sad. Unfortunately, this situation didn’t go how we imagined or we wouldn’t have taken the hawk there.
On the writing front, I’ve been working on rewriting my new book Dimensional Shift as the heroine needs further backstory and I need to tweak some of the otherworldly aspects. I put my Griffin Series away for a while, but once I finish with Dimensional Shift, I will work on getting that series released. I’ve also started a new story with the working title In an Instant. It’s a time-travel story about a young woman who searches for her mother in the time stream. Her mother went back in time to stop a fifth column group from activating the Voice of God technology on the people, which led to global destruction. I’m also editing my Regency novel The Courtesan’s Daughter.
I was on Google yesterday and realized lahilden.com is fragmented when using their search engine. I apologize to anyone who is viewing my webpage that way. I’m working with Google to get it fixed, but I was told it could take weeks. This is the correct landing page: https://lahilden.com
Aside from work, I was busy planning my twin’s graduation party. I spent hours taking pictures of old photos and downloading everything into my computer to make a video montage of them. It took me nearly just as long to find the right music to go with the photos. Unfortunately, my kids didn’t have a graduation ceremony, so I’m glad they could have a small party with family.
