This morning, I skated my last practice of the 2023-2024 winter season as a Salisbury Stinger. At this point, I’ve been on the adult women’s ice hockey team for close to twenty years, and what a couple of decades they have been! As a team, we’ve been through a lot. In early March, 2020, I hosted…
“Why”…Wednesdays
270. Why Pre-Pay
The photo above comes from an article about the importance of good communication (a skill that necessitates avoiding redundancies). My post doesn’t have anything to do with the article, but I do enjoy the humor of the image. (If you want to read the article, you can click the photo; it’s a link.) Instead, I’ve…
269. Why The Flame and the Flower
I recently read, on lots of podcasts’ recommendations, Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower. Published in 1972, the book “revolutionized the historical romance genre.” As a student, avid reader, and future author of romance, I thought it would be interesting and informative to read the book that started the “bodice-ripper” genre. I was right….
NetGalley Review of Passion Under the Microscope
title: Passion Under the Microscope author: Christine Miles publisher: Sealed with a Swoon Books publication date: March 19, 2024 pages: only on Kindle, so ?? peppers: 3 (on this scale) warnings: none summary: Tanith, a high school science teacher sprains her ankle while trying to get a photo (for her class on reproduction) of mating birds. Her…
268. Why MC
If you’re reading this post the day it goes live, Happy Valentine’s Day. The day designed to celebrate love seemed the perfect time to talk about one of the people I feel so grateful to have in my life that I think finding her was meant to be. Sometimes, connections between people are written in…
NetGalley Review of Match Me if You Can
title: Match Me if You Can author: Swati Hegde publisher: Dell publication date: 4 June 2024 pages: 304 peppers: 2 (on this scale) warnings: alcohol-induced vomit, heavy drinking summary: Jia is bored by her job writing a dumb romance advice column for a newspaper, so she funnels her passion into two things, her successful anonymous blog and…
267. Why the Messy Middle
Don’t you love great before and after photos in glossy magazines? Or the makeover montage in a light movie? I do, and I also love reading the meet cutes and happily ever afters of every romance novel I pick up. Even knowing that the path from A to Z isn’t supposed to be a straight…
266. Why Doing Not Being
If you’re thinking about becoming a doctor, you can click on the photo above to find out more about the long path to earning that title. This post isn’t about learning to become a doctor but about one of the things I’ve learned from watching my amazing older daughter decide NOT to keep following the…
265. Why Now
I fully understand the impulse to wait to do something until I can do it perfectly. I want to delay until I have figured the strongest argument and crafted it into the best imaginable wording. I’m writing today’s post partly to remind myself to resist such urges for several reasons. First, it’s important to remember…
264. Why Wear Earrings
The photo above shows a section of my screen during a Google search for “wear pink sparkly earrings.” I don’t have and don’t want pink sparkly earrings, but I thought many of you reading the title of this post might assume that’s where I was going, and I aim to please. I’ve had my ears…