Category: PK Anderson Writes

So, I completed the 100 Day Dress Challenge by the Wool& Company (https://journal.wooland.com/post/2020/5/1/100-day-dress-challenge) If this sort of thing interests you, I highly recommend it. The dresses seem expensive at first glance but I can say my Mara sailed through the 100 days without even looking slightly worn and I wore it in industrial manufacturing conditions. I also washed it every two weeks in a lanolin no-rinse solution made for wool called Eucalin.

This morning when I woke up I had to put one of my other four wool dresses on and I would be embarrassed to tell you how many I have on order as I type this post. I could tell you that I am wool obsessed and plan on ditching all my other clothing to live in wool. Is there such thing as a wool dress cult?

Ironically during the 100-day challenge, I absolutely failed my personal no-spend challenge – as evidenced by the number of dresses I’ve collected in the last 100 days. It inspired me to take on Gig Work to pay for my dress habit and to pay off some debt that was starting to creep up. This inspired me to start a new podcast called Dash Away Debt. I’m on all the podcasting platforms.

So I do have a bit of writer’s block going on. I have been reworking Fractured Heart, and failing to finalize the story in a way that I want it to end. Gah! Why?

I also continue to work on Dark Days & Darker Nights with author Angel Darkraven. We hope to have that published by July this year! If not sooner. So what I’m really saying is this will be all I’m writing today in the blog because I need to get back to authoring stuff. LOL

PK Anderson

Today I have a stand off between Kitty Girl aka Shitty Kitty and my boy Cooper. He wanted to be in my home office with me while I worked on my book, and she wants to be in the office to sleep in her sweet kitty bed. As you can imagine when two furry creatures hate each other it doesn’t make for a blissful experience. So I am definitely not in my Zen Writing mode. My Author’s Domain is experiencing disquiet.

About a week ago, I was home with a headcold and working. My day had been filled with online calls, and I was just called on to present the safety statistics for a certain area where I work. I started talking just as Cooper came into the office, spotted kitty on the couch and lunged for her. I told everyone on the call I had to stop a dog and cat fight, and ripped my headset off to grab kitty away from Cooper. He had his jaws completely around her belly, but wasn’t hurting her. I grabbed her got her out of the office and back into her family room spare bedroom dog free space.

When I got back on the call, everyone was laughing and I started presenting again. Once I was done, I said does anyone have any questions? Guess what their questions were! Did I have the fight on video!

Now that Christmas is past, I can’t help but marvel about how nice technology is for trying to replace those family customs we used to enjoy in person.

Christmas Day, I asked my mother and sister to join me for a video call. I proposed using Facetime since we all have apple phones or tablets. If that didn’t work, I suggested Zoom as the back up. For my real job, I’m on video calls all day long, so I didn’t anticipate much of problem. How wrong I was.

The call was supposed to take place at 7pm giving me an hour to talk to my family and then a half hour to get ready to go for christmas appetizers at my step-daughter’s boyfriend’s family house. Facetime only worked for one of them, so after about fifteen minutes I suggested trying zoom. I hadn’t even installed it, so I had to quickly download it, ad then attempted to contact both parties again. Epic fail.

So about 25 minutes in of trying to get us all on one call, I sent a message saying I gave up. My sister decided to use her work computer and invite all of us to a teams meeting. Which worked perfectly for me, because I use Teams both personally and professionally. For my mother, she had to download the app, set up a login and then get on the call and then couldn’t figure out how to turn on the video camera or her speaker so she could hear us.

40 minutes total into this project we finally had success. A quickly chat with my family to pass on the holiday wishes and catch up.

After going through all this, I can’t imagine what parents are doing for their children to have access to their school curriculum. I’ve read stories about kids who have to go sit in parking lots of fast food restaurants so they have access to their school programs. I believe technology will be the thing that keeps lower income people down and the divide of access will keep getting worse. How do you do interviews for jobs if you don’t have internet or a smartphone or laptop?

There is also a new trend emerging with employers who are asking their workers to provide their own cell phone and laptop to be able to perform their work. Imagine being asked to provide this when you can’t afford it to start a job.

This year I’ve sunk too much money into my fledgling publishing business to do this, but I’ve decided once I have some spare cash, I’m going to buy one of those tracfone deals that provides phone and data for one year (limited use – but if you use free wifi whenever possible it stretches its use).

You can pick one up for about $60 from HSN (this is not meant to be a plug for HSN – it just happens to be the only place I’ve seen these deals for less than $100). I plan on buying one or two to pass on to kids in my community that are struggling with access. I imagine foster children or children in households that are struggling to pay bills would also benefit. I know these particular phones are a decent deal and a decent phone because I purchased one for $50 to be my own business phone to keep costs down.

If you can spare the money consider doing something similar like buying a low cost tablet or cell phone to help someone in need. Or by providing access on your wifi for those that can use it. Access equals the ability to thrive.

I am excited to announce that I am co-authoring a cozy mystery book series with fellow author Angel Darkraven, who is the latest author to join the Columbia Gorge Publishing LLC group. I am excited to take this step back from romance books and work on this series, which is based in a fictional oregon coastal town called Deep Woods Valley.

The heroine, Amelia Goodfellow, is a girl after my own heart. She ekes out a living being the town’s resident psychic. And resident weirdo.

One day she wakes to discover that in addition to her psychic abilities, she now can see and speak to the spirits haunting the town. She determines that it is her duty to protect the town’s residents from the angry spirits that are hanging around trying harm the town.

“I love fall because I love the whole cuddling aspect of it, and a sweater dress has that vibe of I’m going to hunker down and be warm, but it’s also very feminine.” – Jessica Chastain

I think that I’ve gone back into the 50’s and have become a stay at home housewife. Or at least for the last four days it has seemed like that. I am burning up vacation time before the end of the year so I don’t lose it. Its been cold and rainy here in the pacific northwest. To me its soup weather. So today I made my split pea, sausage and lentil soup in the crock pot. The smell of it cooking all day was divine and comforting all at the same time.

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My bad photography shows you before and after with the soup. I am very pleased because I was able to put away three servings in the freezer and have enough to send some with Mr Anderson for dinner and to have for lunch tomorrow. Meal prepping is the best.

So I think I’m hunkering down in the house, going to work and coming home without putting myself at risk for catching Covid-19. Instead I’m making social media posts, writing, cooking and drinking my new favorite cocktail a Dark and Stormy. Ginger anything? Yes please!

So I am just about ready to wrap up Vision of Aspen Ridge the story of Gabe and Eden. Yes Gabe is a bilionaire, but he has to work like everyone else in this book and I love that. Nothing is handed to him on a silver platter.

Eden is a down on her luck heroine that is fierce and strong. I like my females heroines to be self reliant. As a child I was raised to believe my husband would take care of everything for me. Oil change? He should take care of it. Mowing the lawn? He should take care of it. But life isn’t that way. So women of the world step up and be strong. We can do anything we want.

“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”
—Erica Jong

I’ve decided that writing and publishing is a necessity but also have figured out that it can very easily break my soul. The journey to self publishing can be a painful one. Building my own publishing business while also working full time is also painful. But the though keeps coming to my mind, what doesn’t break me, makes me stronger.

I have had a rocky thanksgiving so far. This is the anniversary of my brother’s death, so I never am fond of Thanksgiving. It drums up bad memories every year. I prefer not to be with friends and family because I have a black cloud following me about.

So I had big plans to do final edits on my book 3 in the Aspen Ridge Holiday Hearts series. And wow! Did I mess it up. First, Mr Anderson and I decided to refinance our house for a better interest rate. As there are no comps similiar to our house in the area we live, we have the pleasure of paying for a house assessment, and the mortgage asked us to have no clutter or messes anywhere. So we have frantically been packing up stuff, donating and making many loads to the dump.

Then I didn’t pay attention to my deadline to have my book Romantic Heart published with Amazon by December 1st. So of course, I missed it. Its all on me. But then I did a stupid thing by unpublishing the book that was available for pre-order. Which of course stopped all those orders and removed the book from being searchable.

Then to add insult to injury, I was uploading my manuscript and it kept coming up with errors. Because I didn’t pay attention to the notice that I needed to update my software. Gah! I am completely responsible for all this, but it amazes me how quickly things go bad.

My conversation with Cooper the dog this morning was all about this was a learning process and rome wasn’t built in a day. But geesh! I hate when I do stupid stuff! But I own it. I can only do better next time.

So on exciting news, I hold in my hand, the first two books in paperback form! I can’t wait to get book three – when all the issues are resolved – so I can send a copy of all of them to the Library of Congress. Last year at this time I couldn’t even fathom being a published author. This year, I have three books published and two in the works, all while working full time.

Coming from a small town, I understand how much duty and honor mean. Mr Anderson is a Navy Veteran, and served during Desert Storm. I remember Desert Storm vividly because I would stay up late at night watching the news on Public Television (we only got two channels on antenna) and I remember being scared for our future as a country. If I was that scared, I can’t imagine what it was like for anyone in battle For that, I thank them.

The only other time I remember as vividly is 9/11. At that time I was working in Downtown Portland and they put a TV in our conference room so we could wander in and out to capture the latest information. I felt so lost. Our world as we knew it changed so much.

Yesterday, I loaded up my second book, Beautiful Heart: Aspen Ridge Holiday Hearts (Book 2). It felt so good, but I was almost late in loading it. I had less than 23 hours to get it into Amazon before the Go Live Date of 11/15/20, I hope if you are reading this blog you will check it out. I will say, I loved how easy it was to write the store of Carrie Ann and Erik. Their relationship was amazing.

I am completing final edits on Romantic Heart: Aspen Ridge Holiday Hearts (Book 3). And while doing this, I realized I’m going to have to write a couple more books in this series. I love the idea of love at first sight.

Growing up in my small town, there was a couple there that were quite old. As I grew up I learned that the couple had met when she was a nurse for the Army and he was on leave for a week. They met and married and were till together after all those years. It started my obsession with finding out how people met. Which is why I started the Podcast: The Stories Women Tell.