Happy November, Everyone!

If you follow me on Facebook or just about any other of my social media platforms, you may have seen a post that I began circulating around mid-week last week.  Tragedy has struck members of our chosen family, but before I talk about, I want to go back to the beginning. 

In late 2009,  Mr. Paige, then my fiance, headed off to California with full-ride scholarship for his Master's degree, and a dream that I would be joining him in the summer after our wedding.  Living apart was one of the hardest times of my life.  We coped the best we could, but it wasn't easy planning a wedding when one half of your partnership was on the opposite end of the country.  A month into his move, I received a call that I never expected. 

Glen had hurt himself on a youth group trip to Six Flags.  He assured me he was okay, but turns out, he wasn't. He struggled for weeks to get medical care and an answer for his shoulder when a guardian angel came into our life in the form of our friend, Pat.  A woman in her 70s who was a board member at my husband's church.  She showed up to Glen's apartment with a few of the church men in tow, and moved him into her house while he sought medical treatment. She drove him to class, helped him do his laundry, typed papers for him. etc. You get the idea.  Throughout the months he lived there, they became close. You see, Pat, had lost her to youngest son to drug addiction. Her husband followed soon.  After losing two important people in her life, Pat began giving back. Her home became a shelter to those who needed help. Friends in need became her family. 
 
Even after Glen was forced to move back home for medical treatment, she never let him give back her house key.  This wonderful woman even flew in for our wedding that next summer, and even came home for the weddings of friends who had come with us on our annual trip out to see her.  Her home became our home. A refuge for us all.  

In July 2018, our annual trip was something much different. The minute we arrived, Pat's beautiful smile was a little dimmer.  You see, Pat's breast cancer that she had bravely fought off the year before was back. This time in her lungs and very aggressively growing. Something that she knew weeks before we arrived, but hadn't told us.  We made it a mission to spend as much time with her as we could that week because I knew how bad it really was. 

Two weeks after we got home, she passed away.  Her death hurt us both so much. Hurt the friends who she had welcomed into her home and life as family.  But, her legacy wasn't over yet.  Her son, Darren, continued her life's work by offering her now vacant home to our friends and their family, filling it with love once more.

That is until last week when a plane tragically crashed into the master's bedroom, and destroying the house. With a friend's husband and 18 month old son inside the home. Thankfully, they escaped, but their home. Our home was gone. Watching the national news coverage brought so many memories back for me this week. The love we shared in that house now gone. Our memories there the only thing left.   You can read more about the crash here. 

Until I realized tonight that it was just a house. Not the definition of her life.  Her spirit and her love is still with us, and a part of me truly believes that she kept our friend's safe. That she protected them from harm. The house may be gone, but her love will always live on.

Now, I know that this isn't the kind of story you expected to read this month, but it's the story that was on my heart when I sat down to start writing this month's newsletter.  I hope that you found hope in it because even if you lose every physical possession you own, life and love is all that matters.  And with Thanksgiving this month, I can't help, but feel thankful for Pat being in our lives and how she impacted those around her. 
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Hug your love ones a little tighter today.

Falling for your best friend, who just happens to be an up and coming country star, is probably not the best idea. Not even being a blip on his romantic radar? Yeah, shoot me now.

Growing up in Alex McCloud’s shadow was far from easy. Then, he blew out of town, before the ink was even dry on his recording contract, with empty promises of keeping in touch that he has never once kept. Some best friend, right?Now, he sings his heart out to millions of fans, and I milk cows on my family’s struggling dairy farm. 

Well, that is until Alex strolls back into town, and he’s got more than writing his new album on his mind. I know from experience that I need to guard my heart, or I may end up being just another girl in a country song. It’s just harder than I thought, trying to get my brain and my heart on the same page.

Grab your copy now and meet 24 swoon worthy book boyfriends and decide which one is your favorite‼️
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You may be wondering about the title, and why I would want to blog about my not so perfect wedding.  Why would I want to share about one of the scariest times in my life? Sure, the pictures above look happy and blissful, but that day almost never happened.  

It's weird thinking about to 9 years ago today, and our wedding day. The flowers fragrance filling the old church my husband served as minister. Our family and friends gathered around us, surrounding us with love and support. A perfect dress. But, the only thing out of place was my soon to be husband, carefully being helped to the alter by his groomsmen. You see a our wedding was delayed a week.  My husband the Tuesday before our original wedding date began experiencing severe pain and swelling in his leg.  He thought he'd strained it at a church league softball. That it was just the remnants of one of his horrible night time leg cramps. I was at work over an hour away, unable to see his pain and to access what might be going on. It was until that night when I arrived at the home that would soon be ours together that I realized something was very wrong.  My soon to be husband, stubborn as always, assured me it was fine, but when he struggled to walk, it took my dad coming over to help me convince him to go to the emergency room.  It was there his condition went from concerning to life threatening. 

He had a blood clot in  his leg, but that wasn't the most concerning part of it. It was the at least six other smaller clots that had passed through his heart and embedded into his lungs.  The next few days were a blur.  Spending my days in the hospital with him. My nights at our hopeful home with my cat, and re-planning our wedding.  The biggest event of my life on hold until we knew whether or not Glen would make it through.  After an experimental procedure, he was released, but we weren't out of the woods yet.  As much as I wanted to postpone our wedding further, Glen insisted we would get married the next week. 

And, we did. On my 24th birthday.  Of course, things weren't perfect.  Glen was restricted in the length of time he could stand so we had to have a stool for him to sit on for the ceremony.  He had to walk with a cane when he did walk, and the only time he stood unaided was our first dance at our reception.  

That was not so perfect wedding, but I wouldn't trade it for the world because I almost didn't get to be his wife. I almost didn't get to  marry my childhood best friend.  The boy I had fallen for in the 5th grade while he read the morning weather report over the intercom, and spent years admiring after him until he finally saw me for me.  I may write happily ever afters for a living, but the best one of all is my own.  

How do you describe the indescribable? That’s pretty much how I feel about how this week has gone. I knew when I was asked to join the Love, Loyalty, and Mayhem Anthology that there was something different about this group of women.  Something special.  The potential to do great things clear from day one.  Potential that now only ten days post release has far exceeded any of our wishful dreams and near impossible realities.

I’m sure if you following on any of my social media platform you’ve seen the news, but I can’t help myself from shouting about it again.  Not only did LLM hit USA Today’s Bestseller list, #28 I might add, but it also made #10 on Wall Street Journal’s list as well. 

Writing those words now associated with my name seem surreal.  I never thought in a million years that I would be able to claim two titles. Let alone one, and for the same book.

This means so much more than I could ever explain.  After a tough year of self-doubt, stress, medical issues, and battles with my disappearing muse, I can feel myself falling back in love with writing. It’s like the veil of darkness that has been shrouding me since the end of last year is finally being lifted. And that is in part due to the response of Love, Loyalty, and Mayhem.  Seeing how the twenty of us worked perfectly and harmoniously to make this anthology happen gives me hope about the future.  We accomplished so much together that these amazing women are no longer just friends within the author community. They are a part of my extended family.  

Just like every single person who purchased, shared, reviewed, commented, etc for our book baby.  Without you, achieving these goals would have been impossible.  Without you, our charity couldn’t be benefiting for our donation.  I can’t say officially how much that will be yet as we are still waiting for numbers to come in, but it’s an amount that can bring great hope to those who face bullying on a daily basis.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. From all of our hearts for giving us this opportunity to help others. 

I know in my last few blog posts that I have touched lightly on the stress that comes with being an author. Life behind the fictional is far from easy.  Every single time you sit down to put down a few thousand words on your new work in progress (WIP) are slivers of time away from your family, your friends, your responsibilities, and more.  Being a working author like myself, it's even more difficult to find the time to write. Add in medical issues, and you have a firestorm of issues that just keep coming and coming until it feels like my brain is about to explode from the pressure. 

I know many people have been asking over the last few months where my new books are. The books that I had been teasing since early 2019. The answer? They're coming. When, I don't know.

That's the hard truth about working in a creative field. Real life tends to supersede the fictional.  Muses disappears. Words dry up.  It happens to the best of us, and for me, it's been happening for over a year. Any time I sit down to start working on Demons & Desires or Devil's Queen, every ounce of motivation and creativity dry up. Poof! Gone.  I hate it. I hate that I can't deliver on my promises. I hate that I can't get  back to my early days where I could hammer out a story in a month, and be so utterly in love with it.  Other than the two short stories that I had started long before this hit, I have nothing. A few paragraphs out of a several thousand words that I haven't just scraped. 

Something has to change.  It has to. I have too many stories floating around in my head to be told to not put them down.  I have an entire series plotted out on paper that needs to be written and published.  Finding that place again isn't going to be easy.  The first step? Two weeks away on vacation where I don't think about writing.  Our annual vacation to California is where Heaven's Rejects were born, and I have to hope that vacation will help me finish the series with one final book.

I have always been one of those people who set goals for themselves. Usually revolving around hitting a milestone or checking off every single box on my to do list for the day. But, I want to talk about other life goals today. A goal that I could have only dreamed about when I started this writing journey in May 2015. 

To hit a bestseller list.

I never thought it was even possible for me. Just hitting international bestseller was an accomplishment that I absolutely beamed about when it happened in 2017.  It was a goal, and when I achieved it, I made another one.  To hit a bestseller list by 2020.  Was it a stretch goal at the time? Of course, it was. The numbers to hit the lists seem so daunting.  I knew that if I was going to fail at self-inflicted challenge, it was more than likely going to be that one.

Until late last year.  I was giving an opportunity to join a like-minded group of authors who had the same life goal as myself. The impossible dream was inching its way closer to the reality dividing line.  Then the non-Amazon pre-order launched in February, and flurry of emotions hit me. 

The impossible was very much possible. 

We’re motivated. We’re pouring ourselves into this set. But, we can’t do it alone.
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I can’t reach this goal without every single person’s support I can garner.  iBooks and Nook are the biggest hurdles to reaching it there. Fall short of the minimum and the dream is gone.  Those two retailers are the end it all, must hit the sales marks, for this set.  Apple especially because even if we have one less sale than the minimum, the sales won’t be reported to the list compilers. That’s how critical it is to hit those numbers, and exceed them. This set hitting the list is my purpose in 2019.  I want those letters so badly that I can taste them.  Together we can jump all hurdles and achieve great things. Writing is my passion, and goals like this fuel me to take that passion and turn into it my career. This set gives me another opportunity to make that happen.

This post isn’t some shameless plea for help because honestly, it is. I can’t do this without you. If you have the ability to help, please consider pre-ordering our set. If you do, please shoot me a PM on Facebook or e-mail me avelyn@authoravelynpaige.com because I want to personally thank you for helping me get closer to my dream.

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