Authors, Kai Strand & LA Dragoni

For the last three days of Share the Love, we change subjects to hear from those who have taken a LEAP OF FAITH at some point in their lives. My first guest, Emily Sonderegger, shares how a nudge off the cliff started her leap of faith.  *** Taking a leap of faith is a lot harder than it sounds. In some cases, you leave behind everything you know and jump off into a whole bunch of unfamiliar. It’s nerve-wracking at best and absolutely terrifying at worst. You actually have to trust in yourself and others. If you have trust issues, well, it’s not going to be an easy road. My chance at a leap of faith came three years ago. I was in a dead-end job and hated everything about it. I wanted to quit badly. I NEEDED to quit, for my own sanity. At the same time, I was afraid to make any changes because, CHANGE!! I’m really not a huge fan of change. Luckily, in my case, the decision was made for me. I lost my job and chose to take my leap of faith right then an...

There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about my mom.   She left us twenty-one years ago on Thanksgiving after battling cancer.   I regret that she never had the chance to see how beautiful and well-adjusted her grandchildren have become or the chance to play with her great-grandchildren. She loved children and enjoyed life. Mom loved to play jokes. Especially on my husband because he took the jokes so well and retaliated back in kind. On our wedding day, she got into his packed suitcase and sewed all the flies on his shorts shut. And for Christmas one year she sent him unlabeled jams because they had a running joke where Mom would ask him if he wanted strawberry or raspberry jam and he’d always ask for the opposite one she placed on the table. Of course my husband wasn’t the only person who was targeted with her practical jokes. One Christmas when my husband and I were first married and living in a small, rundown house where I’d had more encounters with mice ...

Thank you so much, Kai, for inviting me back to your delightful blog. Hasn’t this been a wonderful month? Being a floral designer as well as a romance writer, my Valentine’s Day preparations began in mid-January and I’m only now putting the last glittery hearts away. But I’m almost sorry to see it come to an end. This month of romance isn’t only for lovers. It’s also for family and friends. It’s a time that reminds me of all the people I get to love in my life. It also brings to mind those I’ve lost but keep close to my heart. I’d like to talk about my Dad today. He’s been gone over sixteen years now, but I miss him as if we lost him only yesterday. So many good memories! But my most favorite ones are from the years before I turned ten. We lived in the ‘pink house’ then, probably one of the best places for a kid to grow up. It was a large house with a back staircase and a big backyard. And even better, it was haunted, but that’s another story! In this house, the fron...

Lost love week here on Kai’s fabulous blog. Thanks for having me on, Kai.    I chose this topic because loss was on my mind a lot in 2011. My sister lost her husband in 2011 very unexpectedly. The shock was...well, I journaled about it on my way to be with her and her family, then on my way home. I’m not sure it has entirely worn off yet. What? I’m really not going to laugh with him ever again? That can’t be true.    None of that has entered my stories yet because it is still too new and too fresh.    When we are expecting a loss, although it hurts just as much, it’s not the same as a sudden loss. Those blindsides take extra processing. It seemed so unreal at the beginning. This can’t be true. He can’t be gone. He was just here. We had no warning. And I have some distance. I can’t even begin to imagine how my sister copes.    Eventually, both he and my recorded thoughts from those days will make it into my stories. It’s a gr...

On the way to grandmother’s house, I had trouble concentrating on my driving. It was hard to accept the fact that my maternal grandmother would no longer be in my life. I parked in front of her house and as I strolled down the narrow sidewalk towards to the front porch, I pictured her sitting in her old rocker, a crochet needle in one hand and a ball of yarn on her lap. Grandma always had her hair pulled back into a bun and as a child, it always reminded me of a large, white donut. Once Grandma saw me, she stretched out her arms like an eagle and demanded a big hug and a kiss from me. I loved to spend my summer months with Lita, as I called her. Lita pampered me and always surprised me with a new dress she had sewn on her old Singer Sewing Machine. I remembered the day I went with her to buy the complicated contraption at Annie’s Cloth store on Third and Main. At the age of nine, I was full of questions. “Why do you want to buy a sewing machine, Lita?” I asked her. “I’...

Such lovely Current Love stories were shared last week. We were even treated to more in the comments. Now it is time to move to this week’s topic. LOST LOVE. When I first developed the concept for the February guest posts, I hadn’t decided to compose an introductory post for each week, so it was easy for me to include the subject of LOST LOVE, knowing I wouldn’t have to address it myself. But then I changed my mind and now I’m faced with the topic I really don’t want to address. I know that time heals and that there will be a day that I’ll jump at the chance to honor my LOST LOVE, but for now it is still too fresh and too personal. I shared it here if you are curious. Instead I’m going in a completely different direction. Because that’s what writers do. As 2011 drew to a close I was feeling generally crappy. The last half of the year I had been kind of floundering. I lost so much last year and though I was dealing pretty well emotionally, I wasn’t taking good care of my...