“Now I’ll be able to use my English accent and people will understand me.”

To be fair, my daughter does have a unique ability to mimic accents and voices. This isn’t always a good thing as we’ve had a few awkward moments when she was younger and people may have thought she was making fun of them.  Her favorite accent is a Northern English one. I believe she learnt it at an early age while watching a kids show on t.v.- but it never ceases to amaze me how spot on she is with it.

And, indeed, she will get to try it out in person this summer. True to my New Year’s Resolution, we started off 2014 by making the reservation for our trip to England this summer. I have a million ideas for our itinerary battling for attention in my head right now. But since the purpose of the trip is to do research for my next book, this sets the priority. Fortunately for both me and my daughter, the trip is based around a mother and daughter’s visits to competing tourist locations of Jane Austen and Harry Potter.

There are so many possible sites for each of these that even that will be difficult to cull. The filming of Harry Potter and the many Jane Austen stories has covered many English locales. But the point of the story will be the mother’s conflict between literary pride and commercial prejudice. Expect some romance thrown in there (for my character, not me:>) and it is a story I am really eager to write. It also is a great way to prioritize which of these many locations we visit.

I read somewhere that having a goal is a great way to focus a trip. At the same time the author wrote that while the goal might help create the itinerary, the real journey takes place in the experiences, planned or unplanned, along the way. So, while we will be excited to visit friends in England, and eager to finally go to some places my daughter has on her bucket list (like Highclere Castle, Stonehenge and The British museum for the Rosetta Stone,) the purpose of our trip is to experience our mother/daughter time, and allow it to inform the manuscript. We may even blog about it from each of our POVs... a record, so to speak, of this personal and emotional journey for each of us.

In the meantime, I’ll try to share our itinerary with you as it grows, and I’ll look forward to your suggestions. I like to hope it will be a Journey Inspired by Love and enjoyed by many.

Happy New Year! Here’s to your own Journeys Inspired by Love in 2014.
Deanne

Have you visited any must-see Harry Potter or Jane Austen sites? Do you have any big journeys (literal or metaphorical) planned for 2014? I love to hear from my blog readers! And to prove it I'll give a copy of any one of Daniel Davidson's Travel Free Guides to one lucky commenter during the month of January. Leave your comment and then check back at the end of the month to see if you won. Good Luck and Happy Journey.

P.S. In case you haven't found him yet, Daniel Davidson is a travel writer with great advice on saving money while traveling. Check him out at his website: http://www.freetravelideas.com/

“Argh! I don’t remember which site it was on.”

The growling and grumbling was emanating from my office where my daughter was stuck in that black hole of searching for a particular game she had played on one of the sites she is allowed to visit. I am sure we could all commiserate with her. After all, I’m back to looking for the Christmas presents I hid just weeks ago in a place I was sure to remember them this year. Not!

And, since the internet is far bigger than my home, imagine all of the places I would have to search to find that one website I saw months or years ago. I know, I know… there is the favorites tab. I promise, I do use it. But, unless you have an accountant mentality, or your own personal assistant to help set it up, the organizing underneath favorites can end up looking like, well, my closets.

This picture, above, is taken of my office. I shudder to list the items that this closet stores for me; scrapbooking tools (rarely used), files, boxes of books, all of the school photos of my daughter, left-over fabric from projects- the list could go on for the entire length of this blog post.

So, it should be obvious you would not want to see my favorites tab. There are three different tabs for writing. One of them is broken into two more tabs for setting locations. The same is true for Italy, school, food, travel (also in Italy and in writing). My own circular logic catches me, so that I can’t decide if a recipe for lasagna would be in family, food, travel, Italy or writing. Ultimately it is found in Christmas (I must have been tracking recipes to make over the holiday that year).

Recently I too have found myself searching all connections, all favorites tabs, all top sites, and even my own blog, for a site I found about a year ago. I can’t quite remember how I originally came across it- though I think it might have been one of my Linkedin connections. But in any case now I can’t recreate that path no matter what I do.

My last shot is to ask all of you. Do you know of a site that supports crowd-sourced publishing? I am not looking for one that offers fund, but rather one where the resources can come together and agree to create the project. So, for example, I would list my book idea and then solicit an editor, marketer, cover designer, who would agree to work on the book for a percent of the royalty.

So far, in my searches, I have found sites that crowdfund book projects (like Indiegogo or Pubslush), or sites that aggregate these resources (like Writer.ly). But I have not yet found one that pulls together the actual resources. I know it exists… I found it once, many months ago. I probably even bookmarked it.

But, since I am at a loss, I’m offering a special bounty for finding this site. Leave a comment with your suggestions and a link and if you are the first to get me to the correct site I will give you an e-copy of either of my books (BETTING JESSICA or UNTANGLING THE KNOT) or a PDF of my as yet unpublished third book, MOLTO MAYHEM – PLUS I will donate $10 to your favorite (non-political) charity.

Good luck, and happy searching.
Deanne

Note: October is now over and I have selected the winner of the drawing for my book, UNTANGLING THE KNOT. Thanks for all of the comments. The winner is… Judith Ashley.  Write to me to claim your prize!