Jan Scarbrough's Blog, page 17

Meet the Montana McKenna’s

Meet Brody, Callie, Mercer and Parker—the four siblings in the clan of James McKenna, a Montana rancher. Growing up on the ranch was a great life, until Callie and Parker’s mother passed away, leaving James a widower. It wasn’t long, though, before he remarried, bringing stepmother Liz into their lives and her son Brody. The stepfamily was complete when James and Liz added a new McKenna to the family with the birth of Mercer.

Brothers and sisters are prone to conflict, and this yours, mine, and ours “Brady Bunch” family is no exception. Brody and Callie left the ranch, hoping to put the conflict behind them. Only one thing that will bring them home—their father’s dying wish.

Coming throughout 2014, beginning in May, with my Brody, these four books about each sibling put you on the McKenna ranch in Montana. Watch for Maddie James’ Callie to follow, as the siblings begin THE LONG ROAD HOME.

Enter to win a paperback book of Timeless at Goodreads

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Timeless
by Jan Scarbrough

Giveaway ends May 30, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

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The Ladies of Legend are back!

Janet Eaves’ new ebook Crossroads is the first of four novellas coming out this summer, one written by each of the Legend authors. We’re calling these stories Return to Legend.

It’s also return for the four authors, who haven’t written new Legend stories in a while. And it’s a return for readers who may have read Legend for the first time years ago, or maybe just discovered the series when Love in a Small Town was a bestseller on Amazon.

In each book, the main character inherits something important from Ms. Addie Bynum, a woman whose good deeds continue after her death. My book Heart to Heart follows in June.

Crossroads: Return to Legend

 There is no way anyone could have ever convinced Sharon Clark she’d one day return to Legend, Tennessee.

With her mother playing the leading role of town slut when she was growing up, with the townspeople either pitying her or looking down their noses at her all her young life, with the child she’d carried and hidden from the town’s prying eyes and expected condemnation all those years ago, going back now is just not an option…

 But desperation has a way of changing everything….

 Happy reading, and Welcome back to Legend, Tennessee, where romance lives next door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When my office is a mess, I feel out of control

Okay, I know I don’t have control over my life. No one does, really, but we humans like to think we do.

Lori Deschene writing in her blog 50 Things You Can Control Right Now comments that “According to Columbia Business School’s Professor Gita Johar, who studies consumer behavior, the greatest motivation for visiting a psychic is to feel a sense of control.”

LOL! I’m guilty of doing that. I still don’t pretend to have a handle on the future, but visits with my medium friend Dale have given me a sense that things will eventually work out for the best.

Back in the day when things weren’t going the best, I went to group therapy every week for eighteen months. It changed the way I look at life, and I’ve credited it for “saving my life” in many respects. Being the perfectionist only child that I am, I took notes about the things I was learning, and later I typed them up.

Here’s one note: I don’t have to give control of my life over to another. Maybe that’s why I stood up for myself. I’m talking divorce now. And maybe it’s why I took horseback riding lessons because I didn’t want to live my life through my daughter.

The family therapist at “group” taught us “if you believe external things will make you happy, then you must be in control of them.” That could be the subject of another whole blog. But I will use it to segue to the topic of the title of this one. My office is a mess. It’s cluttered, piled high with stuff. I have a new computer desk, and I need to set it up properly. Why?

BECAUSE I FEEL MY LIFE IS OUT OF CONTROL!

Granted, once I straighten up my office, it won’t stay that way. But I’ll feel better about it and myself. I will feel in control again. I won’t have given my life over to junk and disorder!

That’s why I’m taking PTO (vacation) on Friday. I want to whip this office into shape. I want a sense of control.

Oh, before I go, I’ll leave you with another truth.

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him. – Groucho Marx

 

 

 

It Took Me 30 Years before I Wrote About It

As a romance writer, I write a form of fantasy, but I also include a lot of truth in my books. More often than not, it’s my truth—things I’ve learned over my life. When my friend recently described her daughter’s divorce, I flashed back to my experiences.

My Bluegrass Reunion Series is set in Kentucky with heroines who are usually single moms. I was a single mom too so felt comfortable writing heroines in similar situations. However, most were single moms for reasons other than divorce. It wasn’t until thirty years after the fact that I could create a divorced heroine.

In Kentucky Rain, Kate deals with very hurtful experiences—“exchanging” her child with the child’s father once a week, dealing with the knowledge of another woman, facing her own inadequacies, and handling life as a single parent.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It happened with me. It happens with Kate in the book. As hard as my divorce was, I’m better for going through the experience and surviving. It just took me a long time before I could write about it.

Spring cleaning – I started it!

I blogged a few weeks ago about not having time to start spring cleaning. Well, I’ve started—a couple drawers at a time. My biggest accomplishment was going through the walk-in closet in the basement and tossing out old clothes.

Okay, I can’t fit into the clothes any more. Or they were so old and depressing. However, as I folded and put them into the cardboard box, I thought about the times I wore this shirt or that pair of slacks. I was younger and thinner back then. But I’m not saying life was better. Just different. I’ve moved forward. Accomplished more things. Acquired more grandchildren.

So I gathered one trash bag full of shirts and dresses and a box full of pants, jeans, and slacks – all one or two sizes too small. I carted them to church this week to make a donation to the poor. When I delivered them, I told the receptionist getting rid of so many things made me a little sad. She laughed at me.

It’s liberating, she said, to clean out and toss out. She told me her husband always said that you regret giving something away until you walk out the door and leave it behind. I thanked her for helping me with my donation and turned on my heel, heading to the car.

Guess what? I didn’t feel so bad about getting rid of stuff. Just like she said I felt liberated.

 

Cowboy Up!

I wrote a blog about this expression several years ago and decided to revisit the concept today.

To “cowboy up” means that when things are tough you get back up, dust yourself off, and keep trying.

Rick Pitino in his 1997 book Success is a Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business and Life addresses this very same concept. He said the following:

It’s persistence that makes you great. It’s persistence that allows you to reach your dreams. It’s persistence that enables you to perform at your fullest potential.
Sometimes of course, we fail to accomplish our goals. But we have to remember that failure is a part of life and failure is only fertilizer for future success.
The only time failure is truly bad is if you use it as an excuse to quit.

(Rick Pitino, for those of you who don’t know, is the Hall of Fame basketball coach for the University of Louisville Cardinals.)

Think back in your life to times when you wanted to quit trying. Did you? If you didn’t, were you able to eventually succeed? I think back to the long eight years before I sold my first book. If I had quit trying, I wouldn’t have accomplished one of the big goals of my life.

Here’s a final takeaway. This quote comes from John Wayne. Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.

How about it? When you fall off that horse, do you climb right back on its back?

 

Is there something about your life you regret?

I regret not being able to sing. I can’t carry a tune, and even though I sing in the church pew on Sunday, I have to be careful not to do it loudly.

You see, I come from a musical family. On my father’s side. Not my mother’s. She could not carry a tune and would not try to sing in church. But my dad’s family was all musical. His grandfather was a song leader in the 1800’s. My grandfather started the first community band in Lenoir City, Tennessee. He was a self-taught musician and gave music lessons during the depression after he lost his job at the railroad yard.

All my aunts and uncles were musical. My uncle played in a Navy band during World War II, my aunt played the organ at my wedding, and when all six Scarbrough children got together during holidays, their voices would raise in song. My father was a music major at Western Kentucky University, and the band director at Oak Ridge High School, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, from 1946 to 1960. Even today I hear from former students of his on Facebook who fondly call him “Prof.”

Oh, l learned to play the clarinet and enjoyed marching in the band in high school. My children played in their high school band and sang in the church choir. With my father’s help, I passed the love of music on to them. But as much as I love it, as much as I would like to burst out in song, most people are really glad when I don’t.

What about you? Is there anything you regret? Something that you’d love to be able to do, but can’t?

 

Peter’s Principle Alive and Well Today

The Peter Principle is named after Laurence J. Peter, who co-authored the 1969 humorous book The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong with Raymond Hull.

The book describes the pitfalls of bureaucratic organization, suggesting that people will tend to be promoted until they reach their “position of incompetence.”

Definition of ‘Peter Principle’

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Corollaries:

In time, ever post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Investopedia.com describes the principle this way:

“An observation that in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence. The Peter Principle is based on the notion that employees will get promoted as long as they are competent, but at some point will fail to get promoted beyond a certain job because it has become too challenging for them. Employees rise to their level of incompetence and stay there. Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties.”

A 2009 Business Week article observed:

“Now 40, The Peter Principle resonates even more today, when a lust for accomplishment has led an unprecedented level of incompetence.”

“When people do their jobs well, Dr. Peter argued, society can’t leave well enough alone. We ask for more and more until we ask too much. Then these individuals—promoted to positions in which they are doomed to fail—start using a bag of tricks to mask their incompetence. They distract us from their crummy work with giant desks, replace action with incomprehensible acronyms, blame others for failure, cheat to create the illusion of progress.”

I won’t rise to my level of incompetence and try to describe examples of the Peter Principle at work in my life. However, I ask you to stop and think about it in yours. Look at your job. How many co-workers are in positions where they are over their heads? Look at government. Good grief! Our bloated bureaucracy on the local, state, and federal levels is enough to make my point.

And look at your personal life. Are you in a position where you are competent and comfortable? Or are you driven to climb that ladder of success, whatever that means to you?

 

It’s time to spring clean again!

There’s just too much cluttering going on! I expressed my belief in spring cleaning on my March 7, 2013, blog. Everything I said then is relevant today.

But today I don’t have time to spring clean, even though I feel like on of those hoarders on TV. I’m rushing to meet a deadline for Heart to Heart. Edits for Brody will be back any time. I need to start my next Bluegrass Reunion book.

And then there’s real life: the day job, riding lessons, grandchildren, NCAA basketball! What’s a person to do?

Let’s face it. I need to retire so I can devote myself to de-cluttering. What would I do if I retired? Easy! Write, exercise, meditate, take care of grandchildren, and clean every drawer and every closet in the house!