Eleven Days Worth

This afternoon I fired up the old Weber kettle grill and cooked the boneless, skinless chicken breasts that I marinated in homemade teriyaki marinade for a couple days. It's so easy. I just set up the grill for indirect heat, then slap the chicken breasts on there when the coals are ready, and ignore them for 30 minutes. No tending the grill, I just leave them alone, they cook perfectly in that time, and then I bring them into the house on a big plate. I had the smallest one for supper tonight with some frozen broccoli and cut the rest of them in half to have over the next 10 days. Yum.

Another Downy Woodpecker showed up today, this time it was only one. I went out and filled all of the feeders, even put out the new, not moldy Hummingbird feeder, and the Chickadee was the first visitor calling out the news that the feeders were full again.

Today's Daily Practice was drawing Sunshine, she said. I couldn't imagine how we'd draw sunshine but it turns out that it's just various ways to draw the sun with the shine included.

Then I pulled out Drawing Cute and drew cherries and grapes. They turned out well, I think, and those things are always fun to draw.

I spent the rest of the day rereading the 2021 NaNoWriMo manuscript. The body of the book is better than the beginning. I did a little research on hiring a professional editor to help get this one ready to publish. It'll cost about twice as much as I anticipated but I'm thinking about it.

I also got the first draft of the cover I ordered last week. It's very different than I thought it'd be with a fancy, flowing font and a much busier picture as the background. The woman in the picture looks too young to be my middle-aged character and she's left-handed which bugged me more than I can say. So I emailed back my thoughts and got a response that they'll go back to the drawing board.

I got a text from Lala congratulating me on my book sales last week and she asked how many books I've sold. So I went through my orders and added up how many I've ordered and subtracted how many I have on hand and I've sold over 100 copies of all three titles combined. Suddenly I feel really good about the way this whole book marketing thing is going. At least the in-person part of it.

--Barbara