Friday, July 20, 2012

A Bit of a Catch-up

(Kitty) Wow, has it really been seven months since we wrote on here?! I guess we've gotten used to posting on Facebook for our updates. But we do have a few friends who still check out this blog, so we'll continue to try to post updates here.

Since December, life has been in continual upheaval. Actually, it's been in upheaval since October, but you heard about part of it - how John's job ended and we moved back to the States quickly and rather unexpectedly. Since our last post, we enjoyed a lovely Christmas with Doug's family, sweated through a few months of unemployment, and then moved to Carlsbad, California, when John got a job at a company that makes Xbox games. (The picture in our header is the famous Flower Fields in Carlsbad. They are gorgeous in the spring!)

About the time we were moving, my mom got sick in Michigan. When it looked like her health was not going to improve, two people offered to buy me a plane ticket so I could go home. Those three weeks were some of the best days of my life. I had a lot of fun times laughing with my mom and, the week before she died, spent one of the best weeks ever with my three siblings as well as nephews and great nephews.

As I was still trying to get my proverbial feet under me after we returned home, John's company decided to close his branch office. Before we could quite recover from the shock, after a long walk talking with God and each other about our options, John got a call and was offered another job. Only three hours after he lost the first one! Must be some kind of record. So I went off on my writer's retreat and John started working for Sony Computer Entertainment doing more work for games.

The great part is that he liked that job even more than the last one. Unfortunately, we got hit with another surprise when they told him at the beginning of week four that the project he was working on was coming to an end. He's been off work for a week now, and it's been a trust-building experience. If we say we trust God to provide for all of our needs, then we need to put our money (literally) where our mouth is. We're sure God has another job lined up for John, we just don't know when it will start.

Hard as that is, the good side - yes, every part of the roller-coaster of the last year has had good and hard sides - the good side is that John has been able to help me with our company's work this week. Daydreamer Entertainment is the company we created to publish my books. As of today, we have our logo finalized - yay! And John is working on the interior book design so I can get Little Miss Lovesick in print soon. (I'm hoping for a late-August release. Oh! And I have a short story in an anthology that will be out in August. More details soon!)

So we're plugging away, trying to figure out how to prioritize our To Do lists when we live in a state of flux. I'm trying to post to my Kitty Bucholtz, Writer blog once or twice a week. I posted a couple of fun lists this week - Things I Won't Miss When I Die and Things I Will Miss When I Die - because of something I read about Nora Ephron. And I'm off to my annual Romance Writers of America national conference next week. Since it's in Anaheim, John can just drive me up and drop me off. Nice.

What are we doing next? Only God knows! LOL! But we'll try to let you know here as soon as we can. We hope you're all well and healthy and happy. God bless you lots!