Blog Post: Day One of Thea and Viv’s Big Adventure
Day One of Thea and Viv’s Big Adventure: Door/Starting Gate
Welcome to the first day of Thea and Viv’s Big Adventure! It’s an exciting blog tour, and Viv and I had a lot of fun creating it. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have!
Today I’m writing about developing a non-writing hobby. It might come as no surprise that I work a lot. I love just about every aspect of my job, and not just the storytelling. I really enjoy revisions and editing, and the networking and blogging as well. In fact the only part of my job that I don’t really enjoy is the accounting and administrative part, but that’s a necessary component of any self-employment venture.
Also, I have a strong deadline schedule, but I have not yet reached a place where I am ready to hire an assistant. And nowadays, even when I sit down to read I find myself processing the book from a professional point of view, which is not a bad thing at all but it is work related too.
So I have been in search of a hobby that has nothing to do with reading or writing, some kind of activity that I can do for fun that is a real change of pace. One of my friends, Bree from the writing team that publish under the name Moira Rogers, has tweeted a couple of pictures of one of her own hobbies, making soap. It looked like so much fun that when I went to Hobby Lobby and walked up and down their aisles, looking at the craft supplies, I decided that I wanted to try to make some soap too.
In keeping with the theme for today’s blog, which is the Door, or Starting Gate, I bought supplies and first tried making soap a few Saturdays ago. I was worried I would trash the kitchen and create a total monstrous mess of things… but I didn’t. I discovered that I enjoyed making soap, and the results look fun!
In fact, I got so encouraged from that first attempt that I went back to the store for more supplies, and I’m branching out to create different kinds of soap now. Now I’m getting ambitious. I’m thinking about trying to make homemade bath salts and sugar scrubs. I might actually try to make birthday and Christmas presents this year, which is something I’ve never done before.
Then, because my job is not just a job but more of a vocation, inevitably my thoughts turned to work again. I realized these pretty little soaps I was making might make wonderful gifts and prizes for giveaways.
Cue my fun friend Vivian Arend, who has been the driving creative force behind our 10 day blog tour. We got to discussing prizes, and while we’re having daily giveaways of our backlist at Samhain Publishing, we’ve also created some lovely bigger prizes. Two of the prizes are swag bags that will hold some of these handmade soaps, Godiva chocolate, a hand-woven back scrubber imported from Ecuador by Viv, a candle, a copy of my first book DRAGON BOUND, and a copy of Viv’s first two novellas UNDER THE NORTHERN LIGHTS. For more information on the prizes and the dates and details of the blog tour, check my blog post from yesterday.
In the meantime, you can also toodle over to Viv’s blog to see what she has to say today. For now I’m smashing a bottle of virtual champagne on the prows of both our websites as we launch the tour!
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THEA AND VIV’S BIG ADVENTURE is brought to you by Thea Harrison and Vivian Arend, New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors with a love for both travel and writing. They have joined together for the nefarious purpose of celebrating their next Samhain Publishing ebooks.
Thea’s DEVIL’S GATE releases June 5. The novella returns readers to the world of The Elder Races. Available at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Samhain Publishing
WOLF LINE, #5 in Viv’s bestselling Granite Lake Wolves, is available June 12. Available at: Amazon | Barne’s & Noble | Samhain Publishing
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Comment for your chance to win:
Information re: Grand Prize can be found at Thea or Viv’s
DAILY PRIZE: One commenter here at this blog will win their choice of one of Thea or Viv’s backlist Samhain ebooks from either the Elder Races or Granite Lake Wolves series. If you’ve got them all, you can gift this to a friend!
Winners for all the tour stops will announced HERE at my blog and at Viv’s on JUNE 13.
Question for today:
What have you started recently that you enjoy doing? What are some of your favorite hobbies?
