What I'm Reading Now: The Redeeming

A Christian Romance set in Medieval Times

The Redeeming is the third in Tamara Leigh's Age of Faith series, and is the best, IMHO. Both H/H are strong and realize they can choose to act or react in such a way to control their future happiness.

Christian, especially, is an extremely attractive protagonist, much more so than Garr or D'Arcy from the first two books in the series. Garr is more of a strong Alpha and allowed to be so. D'Arcy seems to be a Gamma with Alpha tendencies; Christian is an Alpha who had to suppress that trait for years--he is tempered like a fine steel (whereas Garr is like iron. Don't get me wrong; iron is good.).

Gaenor her heroine grows from a reactive girl to a woman who pursues her destiny.

As with all the books in this series, the Christian element is woven into the story so as to be inseparable from it but not so "in your face" as to be proselytizing. The Redeeming is the story of people struggling with faith, just as we modern people do. In this, I praise Tamara Leigh for both her insight and her light and deft touch.

I eagerly await the next book in the series, about Abel and the healer Helene. I have already fallen in love with Everard, and I cannot imagine the situation Leigh will place him in or the woman who will be worthy of him. That is one of the great hallmarks of this series: I cannot anticipate what Leigh will have occur during her stories. (So many of the books that I read can be tracked from first event along every step in the plot and subplots. Thank you, Tamara Leigh, for actually plotting.)

The HEA is guaranteed, thank the good Lord. Too much in our world is unresolved tragedy; I read to escape that.

Here's a link:  it's not an affiliate link.

Do you need Hermione's Purse? Try this instead.

In the Harry Potter series, Hermione had this little purse with capacious capacity.  She could get a TENT in there.  A lovely tent, not the kind I go camping in, BTW.

As a writer, I used to think hauling around a huge tote bag was a necessity.  My shoulder finally convinced me that huge bags are essential.

I do have a dedicated writing area, however, and everything writing related goes into that spot.  (At tax time, I can count that writing area off on my taxes.  That's a good thing.)

The key to working a writing area is ORGANIZATION.

Writing a book is a hugely sprawling project.  You have character information, setting information, plot plans, snippets of ideas, all that has to be located in an instant.

If you're like me, you have a focus project as well as other projects that are on-going, having to be picked up once a week.  Then we have those ideas that come and have to be put somewhere.

And we have ideas that we sketched out for 30 or 40 pages, realized it wasn't quite working, and backed out of the story.

AND we also have sketches that we wrote for seminars or courses, sketches that are quite good and would build into stories.

If we only had the time to write all that.

Time's not the enemy, not if we manage to keep everything ORGANIZED.

Losing things, that's the enemy of writers.  Losing ideas.  Losing worked-out information.  Losing snippets.  Having time to explore an sketch but not being able to find it.

Here's an organization help:  poly envelopes in multiple colors.

I love this poly envelopes with the string closure. I have used a set of these for several years, and only now are they starting to give up. They hold just enough to gather up all the diversely sized elements for a project. I prefer the string/button clasp as the snap version tore up faster (even with my careful holding at the clasp to prevent just that event).

The tinted colors makes organizing "at a glance", and the see-through helps my confirmation that "yes, I picked up the correct envelope". These two aspects make these poly envelopes preferable to paper / pressboard / "red rope" versions.

Whether you prefer horizontal or vertical, these are great little organizers.

Here's a link:  it's not an affiliate link.