Of dogs and protein and deadlines

This post is brought to you by the lonely, hungry dog.

He doesn't like it when I'm on deadline because I'm less likely to kick the red ball around with him. Now if he catches me in procrastination mode, pre-deadline dementia, then he's a happy camper.

As you all know by now, I was on a crazy hard deadline that I had to meet by last Sunday.

I'm happy to say, I did it!

But let's backtrack.

Sunday evening dinner - when I was still trying to proofread because I had discovered that one computer was set to smart quotes and the other had the curly kind and I had been switching between them.  Ooops!


Then there was all the dialogue that had no quotation marks at all because I'd gotten so caught up in listening to the characters that I didn't bother with punctuation.

The problem was, each time I proofread, I'd get so caught up in their conversation that I'd forget to check for quotation marks again.

Double oops.

Sorry, doggy, no red ball play tonight.


But I did have to eat.

Hubby had football on - a real nail-biter so he wasn't interested in eating.

Normally when I'm writing, I want carbs. That's why Virginia's orange cranberry apricot scones appealed so much!

Alas, my brain craved protein so if I was going to correctly add quotation marks, I needed brain food. But I had no time to cook.

Saved by the egg!

I wanted something green too so I had the brilliant idea of doing a Florentine-type scramble.

Into the wok (which sounds really funny when making Florentine ;)  ) went some oil, garlic and chopped up tomatoes. When they had softened nicely, I sauteed the mixed greens and then added the tomatoes back in.

In a separate pan, I scrambled eggs.

Remember the hungry dog (who, by the way, had already been fed!)

He loves eggs!

(Note - he didn't get the garlic and tomatoes, though he loves the greens.)

My brain got the food it needed, and then my tastebuds got the treat they wanted.  See below.



 So, I had this novella I thought was coming out in December, but it suddenly popped up on Amazon on Tuesday evening. :)

Love by the Reins - it's about a former champion equestrian who lost her chance at gold through an accident (that may not have been an accident).

Ten years later, she has a second chance at love and a family of her own - but only if she can survive training the hero's mini-tyrant of a daughter.

I love this story of second chances. It reminds me of the horse-crazy ten year-old I was. It's dedicated to the memory of my dad who used to scour his school library to find every Black Stallion book in the series for me.

In one of the scenes, the hero brings peppermint hot chocolate to the heroine who is out in the paddock. Sunday night, after eating my eggs, I treated myself to a scoop of peppermint ice cream in my hot chocolate in their honor. YUM!

 Love by the Reins (only $0.99 on Amazon now!)