This I know for sure...

I love bread. I like to make it almost as much as I like to eat it. I love the way it smells when it's baking. And eating it hot out of the oven with butter melting over it - heaven. 

I'm always on the look out for a new bread recipe and have collected a number of them for different types of bread. The folder I keep them in is getting thicker and thicker so I've decided to try and make a different bread recipe each weekend unless I have something going on that weekend. This will allow me to weed out the ones we don't like or aren't worth the time and effort to make them.

I'm going to start next weekend. This weekend I'm making Chocolate Babka. It's a family favorite and I've been getting hints that they'd like to have it again even though we just had it around the Christmas holiday.

Here's what it looks like. It's loaded with chocolate, mini chocolate chips, and walnuts. It tastes amazing when you toast it.

What's Up Wednesday

This week...

My Current WIP (Work in Progress): Due to a lot of appointments last week, I didn't get much accomplished. This week I'm going to work on refining my blurb for Honor Bound. It really needs work. 

Quote of the Week: "Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned." ~ Peter Marshall  I'm repeating the motivational quote from last week because it's a good reminder to take things step by step no matter how small those steps might be.

What I'm Reading: I finished "A Cup of Holiday Fear" by Ellie Alexander last night so I haven't started a new book yet.

Random Thoughts: We haven't had any snow to speak of lately. I'm hoping it continues that way. It'd be nice to have the remainder of the season have little to no snow going forward.

Random Photo of the Week: 

                         Mrs. Green loves to sit on my lap when I'm knitting or crocheting.
 

Book Titles

As I'm working with the person designing the cover of the first book in my contemporary romance series, I'm feeling more and more torn over the title of the book. I think I've mentioned on this blog previously that I'm not quite as enamored with it as I once was.

At first I put down the loss of enthusiasm for the title to spending so much time (too much time really) working on the editing and rewriting of the manuscript. Now that my cover designer is working on a mock up of what the cover will look like, I'm not sure I like the title at all.

The title is Honor Bound and has been the title the entire time I wrote the first draft and throughout all of the many subsequent drafts. I originally chose the title because the hero feels honor bound to protect the heroine. But now I'm not so sure about the title. It doesn't really come across to me as the title of a romance novel which is what I want the title to convey.

I've been running different titles by my critique partner and friends who read romance novels to try and find a better title, but it seems trying to find that perfect title is almost as hard as writing the book.

This I know for sure...

A friend sent me a link for a Facebook page - Repeat Crafter Me - about a temperature blanket. The concept is to crochet one row for each day of the year. The color for each row is determined by the high temperature for that day. I never heard of this before so I decided to make one this year.

This is the color guide that was given. The suggested stitch is a granny stripe stitch. I decided to use various shades of yellow starting with a pale yellow up to an orangy yellow for stripes from 54 degrees to the 89 degrees and above temperature ranges instead of the colors shown here. I'm also using a standard V stitch instead of the granny stripe stitch.







Here's what mine looks like. It's only up through January 21st. I usually wait until I can do three or four days/rows at a time instead of doing one row a day.  It's hard to tell the purple from the dark blue in the picture. The row at the top of the photo is for January 21st.

What's Up Wednesday

This week...

My Current WIP (Work in Progress): I received the comments from my beta readers. I went through them and made changes that needed to be made. This week I won't have much, if any, time to get any writing work done. I have appointments on 3 separate days and my mom has a doctor appointment on another day which pretty much kills my writing time for the week.

Quote of the Week: "Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned." ~ Peter Marshall

What I'm Reading: I'm still reading "The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People" by Dan Buettner. I also started reading "Live and Let Pie" by Ellie Alexander over the weekend. 

Random Thoughts: My cat likes to go outside and sit on the porch even on the coldest winter days. I let come out on the porch with me for a few minutes and then I make him come inside. I don't want him to be out too long.

Random Photo of the Week:

                    You can tell it's cold when you cat crawls under the quilt on your bed.