2022 in Review and Happy 2023!

 

Wishing you all a most fantabulous magical year in 2023!

2022 in Review

As much as I wanted to be more active in writing in 2022, that didn't happen. I started a few stories but did not finish them. All except one - Believe in Magic. 

This story is now part of a limited available anthology, A Special Gift. 

A Special Gift anthology has six heart-warming holiday romances that feature a gift of love, and a guaranteed happy ending.

If you enjoy reading about lovers reunited and relationships helped along by a touch of seasonal magic, this one's for you!

It's available in ebook and paperback.

Get a copy

It's so good to have a short story out there again. 

What else has been happening? 

Not much since my last post. I continue to do some work on the DarkSide DownUnder, enjoying
sharing the stories from our lovely DarkSiders. 

I also share releases for the SARA group on the Facebook page. 

I'm still doing pre-covers as HelzKat Designs - around one a week. My Facebook group gets previews and a discount. I decided to only do custom covers for those I know personally and those on my Facebook group. I do this mostly to keep creativity going as I fight my brain fog. The projects are not as long as writing a story so it gives me a sense of completion. 

Oh and I finally got covid in October. Having a number of health conditions, I was able to get anti-virals. I was in isolation for about 8 days and thankfully didn't pass it on to the rest of the family. 

Health wise, 2022 has been a struggle as my fibromyalgia is worse and so is the brain fog. It's affected my reading. I've achieved 55 books at time of writing this post (29 December - I've been trying to schedule more posts on social media). In 2021 I had read 124 books and 137 in 2020. So it's half my regular reading. Sigh. Though as others have pointed out, that's still a great number of stories read. So silver linings. 

I have been viewing podcasts of independent news. I try not to be political with my author persona but that could change. I am a person who wants the best for others and hate seeing injustices. The biggest I see is that our freedoms are being eroded slowly and our neo-liberal system is not working. Perhaps my response can be in fiction. 

We lost our beautiful dog Elektra due to a serious hip problem. The vet has never seen such an eroded hip on a dog so young (4.5 years). The other hip was on it's way of being the same. The kindest thing we could do for her was to let her go. It was so hard to say goodbye and we felt cheated that we didn't get to spend more time with her. 

As fate would have it, a few weeks later we had a new joy in our lives with Kalypso. She's spunky and loveable and just what we needed so we didn't wallow in our grief. She's not one for photos. I have to take about 10 photos to get a decent one of her because she's not fond of having her photo taken. 

Again, may you have a most fantabulous magical year in 2023!