Today's my birthday, and my first book has officially been published and is available worldwide on Amazon! It's available in paperback, hardcover, on Kindle, and for free with KU! It feels so surreal, but it's exciting! I never thought I'd finish that book. I thought I'd grow bored and just give it up. There were times when I actually almost deleted the document and called it quits. My best friend was able to keep me going, and I'm glad he did because now it's out there for the world to love and enjoy! I couldn't be prouder of myself than I am in this moment!

We have a bit of an update! It's been a wild time since I started writing my first book on March 14th of this year! We now have Puppe up for preorders on Amazon and we are formally releasing the book on September 19th which happens to be my birthday and the birthday of my Female Main Character (or FMC for short)! We are almost done with the first draft of book two in The Men of Waidmann Series, Bring Him Home, and I plan on setting up preorders for it in November, and plan to release if on Christmas Day this year. I manifested in the beginning of this year that 2025 would be my year, and it certainly is. My first year as a full-time author and I'm doing a double release! I can only hope that 2026 bears the same results! I couldn't be more proud of myself than I am right now. I'm literally making my childhood dream a reality, one word at a time!

So, as you may know by now, I started writing my debut novel on March 14th of this year. We are now entering the third month of this project, and we are just about ready for professional edits and publication. I've hit a few snags along the way, such as a rude beta reader who tried hijacking my novel and trying to get me to make it fit her wants and needs instead of letting me write for myself, and almost quitting multiple times. I let this person affect me for a while, and I even started writing a version that just wasn't me or my vision, and it made me miserable. I finally said fuck it, I'm not doing this for her, I"m doing this for me and reverted to my original. Edits are now going smoothly. I was going to push everything back to October 19th for publication because I thought I was going to have to revamp the whole book, but since I no longer have to, I will be publishing on my birthday, September 19th! I couldn't be more excited. To help with the overwhelming sadness I'm sure to feel after publishing such an important piece of work, I'll be working on book two in my series. I told myself that 2025 was going to be my year, and it honestly has been so far. It can only go up from here! I can't wait to see what 2026 holds for my writing career (I say this only because I won't publish again until 2026)! I'll be exiting this year as a published author, which is a serious dream come true! I've been dreaming of this day since I was a little girl, and now I've made my dream happen!

I can't believe that it's been four years since I retired. The time seems to have flown by. I figured you all would like a little life update from me to see where I am now in life. I started writing my debut novel on March 14th of this year, and just finished the rough draft on April 25th. I will be spending two months in the editing cave, then for the first 14 days of July will be beta reading. Afterwards, I have yet another month of editing, and then I ship it off to my professional editor, who will take care of the final edits. I plan to be writing the final draft from mid to late August into early September, and I plan on publishing the novel on September 19th, my birthday! I couldn't be prouder of myself, and I couldn't be more excited than I am right now!

I just noticed that my retirement announcement was made a little more than 3 years ago and a lot has happened since. The dream job I started didn't last very long, unfortunately. I had an author who had accused me of stealing her book, and claimed that Amazon told her I still had it in my possession despite me returning it. She was so upset over the $10 she had to pay out of pocket for a book I absolutely hated. When I returned it, I had only read 2% so it was within the return guidelines but she told everyone I read the whole thing and then returned it. Well, now that you have some context, it'll make this easier to understand. She had emailed my boss and had her friend (who only knew her side) message my boss' business page over the whole situation. I was then told to separate myself from the company but wasn't let go. A few months later, my boss was training someone with more experience in social media management than I did, and said we'd meet in a few months to talk about me coming back. That business call never happened. I'm convinced to this day that that situation played a HUGE part in that. I don't fault my ex-boss though. She only did what she had to do for the good of her company. The great news stems out of that hard blow. I was hired by an author to initially review her books. So, I took the opportunity and ran with it. I was seeing a growing number of PA (personal assistant) profiles around Facebook and decided to try my hand at that. It would give me a chance to work with actual authors and make connections. Sadly, that person who caused issues before was trying to ruin my new career path. She even succeeded in turning a friend against me, a friend that saw me prove my innocence and she believed the person anyway. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to explain to authors you PA for that there's this person that's trying to ruin you over you returning a book? It's humiliating. Most of the authors that took me on, parted with me because the situation was weighing on my mental health and I wasn't putting out as much work as I had hoped to (we have maintained friendships for the most part though). Then, the woman I was being paid to review for asked me to be her PA and I accepted REAL fast. Three years later, my PA business is expanding. I am now up to six authors that I PA for, and hope to take on even more. I am now working on my debut novel. I have become friends with a lot of authors, some that are even famous and well-known. This job has been the best thing to happen to me in these past few years. Seeing how far I've come, I can see it was worth the blood, sweat, and tears it took to get me where I am today! I can honestly say that I am NOW working my real dream job, and I wouldn't trade it for the world!