Inglath Cooper's Blog, page 7
February 5, 2015
Like Michael Jordan, Take the Shot
The hurdle is in the first step. Gathering up the courage to make a change, take a stance, tackle a goal.
I wonder if most of the difficulty comes from not believing in ourselves. Doubting our ability to follow through. Why try?
But deciding to try is exactly what we need to do.
Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. . .I’ve failed over and over again and that is why I succeed.”
Think of that. 9000 shots. People were watching, from the stands, on TV, for every one of those 9000 shots that he missed. Those had to be painful moments.
But if he hadn’t taken those shots, he would never have made the successful ones.
I think of this quote often. Any time I’m afraid of what people might say if I end up being wrong or don’t reach my goal, whether it involves writing or working out.
For me, writing has required my willingness to make 9000 shots. I’ve been writing all of my adult life, and the landscape of publishing has changed dramatically during this time. I’ve had peaks and valleys, highs and lows. And I’ve had to reevaluate along the way, decide if I wanted to embrace the change or stay in a place where I felt stuck.
Ultimately, we need to act on the things we care about and want in our lives. I remind myself regularly to take the shot. Some I’ll make. Some I won’t. Tenacity is what will keep me going for the next one.
Is there something you’re debating acting on in your life? Starting an exercise routine? Adding juicing to your nutrition plan? Mending fences with a loved one? Leaving a job you don’t love anymore?
Take the shot.
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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January 14, 2015
3 Reasons to Consider Juicing
I will be the first to admit that juicing is not effortless. But is there anything worthwhile in our lives that is?
Here are three reasons why I choose to juice, choose to set aside a piece of time during the day where I won’t find arguments to skip it.
It is sobering to know that more people are getting cancer now than ever before. This is not a disease any of us want. But we all have friends and loved ones who have suffered from it, and even died from it. If you start to do any amount of reading on the power of nutritrients to help our bodies fight off things like rogue cancer cells, it’s not hard to see how choosing powerful nutrition ever day of our lives has to work in our favor.
I hate to be sick. I had the unfortunate opportunity to spend forty-five minutes in an MRI machine this past fall because of a suspected spot on my liver. It was an absolutely wretched experience. Thankfully, everything was okay, but I hope I never have to do that again.
Juicing makes me feel so much better. I really can’t even explain how different I feel since I’ve been juicing 2-3 times per day. I have so much more energy. My taste for sugar has changed dramatically. Things that used to taste normal to me now taste sickeningly sweet. The result is I eat far less sugar than I used to.
If any of these reasons resonate with you, and you’ve never tried juicing, watch Joe Cross’s Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. This was the first milestone of my journey and the story that made me want to making juicing a part of my life.
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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January 12, 2015
Excerpt from Blue Wide Sky – A Second Chance Romance
Do you love second chance stories? I have always had a soft spot for them. LaVyrle Spencer’s Bittersweet was one of my favorites, and I’ve read it so many times, I feel like the characters are people I’ve really known. It is still one of the best romance novels I’ve ever read.
A second chance is something Gabby and Sam never expect to get in Blue Wide Sky, my next release. They fell in love as teenagers, but were separated when Sam’s father took a job in South Africa. Although they had plans to wait it out and eventually be together, life had other paths for them to take. Read an excerpt from the opening of the book when Sam arrives back at Smith Mountain Lake, the place where he spent summers as a boy and where Gabby still lives.
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You know how there are some things in life that you eventually allow yourself to admit you’re never going to do again? Things that you clung to when you were young with the arrogance that underscored life through your twenties, anyway. Until you hit thirty and that little ping of awareness started up. Uh-oh. This really might not go exactly like I thought it was going to. No u-turns in sight. Just straight ahead highway like the North Dakota stretch from Gackle to Beaver Creek where you can see so far in the distance, it looks like you’ll just fall off the edge of the earth if you ever do get there.
At some point along the way, that’s what I eventually came to accept about Smith Mountain Lake and my memories of it. That this place and everything I had loved about it as a boy were part of my past, a time long gone, so far behind me that it wasn’t possible to ever travel back.
Or at least that’s what I would have told myself just a few days ago.
And yet here I am now, behind the wheel of a rented Ford Explorer, headed out of Roanoke down 581 South to 220 and the winding curves that will take me back to the heart of my childhood summers.
The H&C coffee pot and the Dr. Pepper 10-2-4 signs are still here among the downtown high rises, both erected sometime in the 40’s. The factoid comes to my brain with my father’s voice still attached, and I remember how he’d point them out those first summers when we’d drive in from D.C., headed for the lake in our packed-to-the-gills station wagon.
New on the city landscape, though, is the train-shaped museum that is a more recent part of Roanoke’s contemporary identity. I had read about it in the New York Times online and remember the pang just seeing the city name in print lifted up inside me.
To the left of 581, Mill Mountain looms in the distance, its famous star now modestly dim in the daylight. At night, it glows red, white and blue on top of its post, earning Roanoke it’s nickname as the star city of the south.
A Starbucks, Lowes, and a BMW dealership have grown up alongside 220 heading out of Roanoke. It looks vastly different from the last time I was here, and I am suddenly anxious to leave the city limits where the countryside starts to appear in short, more familiar stretches.
But it isn’t until I’ve hit route 40 headed east outside of Rocky Mount that I start to see green pastures, black and white Holstein cows grazing slope after slope. Barbed wire alternates with white board fencing, the houses ranging in style from brick ranches to two-story farmhouse structures.
I’ve hit late afternoon traffic, and a big yellow school bus has cars lined up out of sight behind me. The transplanted Londoner in me itches to blow the horn and wave for the driver to pull over and let us all pass. I suppress the urge, realizing I don’t want to be that guy. Not here where everyone seems content to wait. Where I used to be someone content to wait.
The thought of London brings with it a ping of guilt.
I should give Evan and Analise a call. Let them know where I am.
But I don’t have the energy to get over that wall just now. It’s possible the kids haven’t even missed me yet. Evan’s on the fast track of a young career, and Analise is nearing the end of her junior year in boarding school. They are both busy and occupied with their own lives.
For now, I’m grateful for this. At some point, I will have to talk with them, but I can use the time here to figure out how I’m going to do that.
And as for Megan, I don’t really owe her an explanation of any kind. Sad, but true, after twenty-three years of marriage. The life we built together wasn’t initially mine by choice, but I did commit to it, and if what we had never felt like a love of a lifetime kind of love, I grew to care deeply for her. I was faithful to her. Odd as it sounds, in some strange way, I am glad that I wasn’t the one who caused our marriage to end, and that I don’t have that particular guilt to live with. . .
You can pre-order Blue Wide Sky here.
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January 11, 2015
Dog Friends
A friend is, as it were, a second self. – Cicero
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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January 10, 2015
Juicing – You Being Good to You
In a busy life, make your juice at a time of day when you aren’t feeling overwhelmed with other tasks. View it as one of the most important things you can do for yourself, and set aside the little chunk of time it deserves. I like to break the process into steps, cleaning up as I go, so that I’m not left with a lot to clean up at the end. I make six or seven bottles at a time, so that I’m making juice every other day instead of every day. Buy some pretty juice bottles and store in fridge for up to 72 hours. #juice #juicing #organic #vegetarian #healthy #plantbased #cleaneating
Why I Started Juicing: Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
My favorite juicer: Breville 800JEXL
My favorite juice bottles: Aquasana Juice Bottles
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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January 9, 2015
The Good Lie – A Great Story
Have you seen The Good Lie?
I missed it at the theatre and recently watched it at home with my whole family – husband and teenage daughters. I actually love to rent movies online. And The Good Lie is that rare movie you can watch with your children and not find yourself holding your breath about the wide range of material that seems to fall under the PG-13 rating.
Reese Witherspoon stars in this wonderful story, but I have to say it’s the actors who play the characters of Mamere, Jeremiah and Paul who steal the show.
Wikipedia’s plot line: Carrie Davis, a brash American woman, helps four young Sudanese refugees (known as Lost Boys of Sudan) after they win a lottery for relocation to the United States.
Here’s the synopsis from the movie’s website:
Mamere and Theo are sons of the Chief in their village in Southern Sudan. When an attack by the Northern militia destroys their home and kills their parents, eldest son Theo is forced to assume the role of Chief and lead a group of young survivors, including his sister Abital, away from harm. But the hostile, treacherous terrain has other dangers in store for them.
As the tattered group makes the difficult trek to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, they meet other fleeing children, forging a bond with Jeremiah, who, at 13, is already a man of faith, and Paul, whose skills become essential to their survival.
Thirteen years later, the now young adults are given the opportunity to leave the camp and resettle in America. Upon arriving in Kansas, they are met by Carrie Davis (Witherspoon), an employment agency counselor who has been enlisted to help find them jobs—no easy task, when things like straws, light switches and telephones are brand new to them.
Although Carrie has successfully kept herself from any emotional entanglements, these refugees, who desperately require help navigating the 20th century and rebuilding their shattered lives, need just that. So Carrie embarks on her own unchartered territory, enlisting the help of her boss, Jack (Corey Stoll).
Together, against the backdrop of their shared losses, the Lost Boys and these unlikely strangers find humor in the clash of cultures, and heartbreak as well as hope in the challenges of life in America.
I think maybe I avoided this one one when it was first released because I was afraid the subject matter might be painful. I was right. It is painful, but I would have missed out on an incredible story if I had taken a pass on this movie.
The characters snare you with their desire to not only live but thrive. They care for each other the way the best of human beings do.
As a writer, I love the reference to the good lie in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Mamere learns about it in the English class he takes once he gets to America and finds an incredible use for it in his own life.
If you need a good movie to rent that will leave a permanent imprint on your heart, reward yourself with a two hour present and experience The Good Lie.
Rent it here.
Buy it here.
Watch the trailer here.
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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December 15, 2014
Every New Beginning. . .
“Someone once said every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. The trick then has to be letting go of the safe, the known, and reaching out for we can’t yet see.” Nashville – The Series – Book One FREE.
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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December 14, 2014
Three Days in Nashville! Book Review.
Thank you to Janet Anne for her wonderful review of Nashville on Amazon. Honestly, as a writer, I couldn’t ask for anything more. amzn.to/133lTni
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Torn Between Two Brothers. . .
Torn between two brothers. . .
. . .Grier tried not to stare, but curiosity got the better of her, and she squinted at the man’s face. With a start, she recognized him as Darryl Lee’s older brother, the resemblance impossible to miss.
Bobby Jack Randall. The name came instantly to her, even though she’d barely met him once when she and Darryl Lee came back to his house to watch TV, high school code for making out. Bobby Jack had been home from college for the weekend, and she remembered now the way he’d looked at her with what she’d later realized – too late, actually – was pity and even later on discovered the reason for.
If Darryl Lee looked like Bradley Cooper, Bobby Jack could pass for a slightly more serious, slightly taller version. He had darker hair and startling green eyes. Amazingly enough, he was even better looking than Darryl Lee.
“You’re a rat’s ass, you know it, son?” Bobby Jack said, glancing Grier’s way with clear disapproval, his voice carrying through Darryl Lee’s rolled-down window.
“Hey, man, I wish, but it’s not what you’re thinkin’,” Darryl Lee said.
“Right. I thought you and Dreama were trying to work things out.”
Darryl Lee glanced back at Grier, and she decided his two minutes were up.
“Come on, Sebbie.” She picked up her dog’s leash, opened the door and slid out, waiting for Sebbie to jump down beside her.
He did, jerking the leash from her hand and shooting across the parking lot toward Bobby Jack’s truck, the hound inside now barking at Sebbie in a very large hound dog bark.
Grier ran after him, her feet again screaming in the hateful heels. “Sebbie!”
“Looks like he’s got a little crush on Florence,” Darryl Lee drawled, smiling at her.
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A small town contemporary romance about unexpected love and second chances. . .
“How refreshing to find real-life characters who become your friends. I was impressed with the quality of the writing and the development of the settings and the story in this excellent book. Each time I returned to read a chapter, I was eager to find out what happened next.” – Amazon.com Reviewer Jayzoo33
“What an emotional roller coaster. Loved this beautiful novel. I felt every heart ache, heart warming, humorous moment of this book. This a must read!” – Amazon.com Reviewer JennyJ
“I loved, loved, loved this story and devoured it in one day. I want to be an Inglath Cooper-like author when I grow up! The story was sweet, real, romantic, whimsical, and beautiful. Her writing is artistic and captivating and you simply get lost in the story. The dialogue is so well done that you can feel the emotion kindling between the characters. And Bobby Jack…the perfect book dreamboat.” – Amazon.com Reviewer Ready2Read
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Never tried one of my books? If you like stories that take you away for a bit, feature characters looking to live fulfilled lives with love and dogs and relationships that matter, I’d love to give you a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs! Please just click here.
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December 9, 2014
Keep on Reaching
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