Frog Blog Christmas Reunion---Stephanie Black

Merry Christmas and Hoppy New Year! (Someone had to say it, right?)

Thank you to Julie for organizing the Frog Blog Christmas Reunion! It’s an honor to be blogging with my Frog Blog friends again. Like Rob, I’m so grateful for the friends I made on the blog, both among bloggers and readers. Thank you to everyone who supported us in our Froggie years. One of the absolute hugest blessings of being a writer is being part of this incredible community of writers and readers. During the many years when I was writing (and rewriting, ad infinitum—or nearly) my first book and dreaming of someday seeing the book published, I had no idea that one of the most awesome things about joining the writing world would be becoming part of an amazing community of incredibly nice, incredibly talented, incredibly supportive people. I love, love, love the blessing of being able to connect online with other writers and readers. Besides my yearly trip to the Storymakers Conference, I rarely see my writer friends in person, but online I’m able to maintain friendships and make new ones.

Sadly, since leaving the Frog Blog, I’ve discovered—um, not to my surprise—that I’m a very inconsistent blogger when left to my own devices. I do have a blog (www.stephanieblackink.blogspot.com), but I last updated it in October. Sad, huh? Whoa . . . I have an idea for a New Year’s Resolution. Update my blog regularly! (“Regularly” being defined as “more often than never.” Resolutions should be realistic, right?). Another resolution: clean out the garage. And that’ll do it for my 2013 resolutions, folks, because if you’ve seen my garage, you’ll know I won’t have time to accomplish anything else next year.

So what have I been up to in the last year and a half since the Frog Blog disbanded? I published a couple more mysteries (Rearview Mirror and Shadowed). I’m currently getting ready to submit a Halloween-related novella for a project I’m doing with Gregg Luke and Traci Abramson. The story turned out lighter than my usual books, so it’s been fun to work on something shorter and more humorous.

Other than that, I’m still specializing in falling behind on things I should be doing and watching my kids get SO OLD. We sent our second daughter off to college, and our oldest daughter is now in the process of APPLYING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL. Pardon the shouting, but it’s kind of an all-caps event to have a child almost done with her undergraduate work. I’m accustomed to having kids in college, but to have a child graduating from college? Oh my. My oldest son is, like, four inches taller than I am and my second son is growing so fast that his jeans would make appropriate wear if the need arose to wade across a creek on the way to school. My youngest daughter turned eight this year, so that pretty much makes us old all around. Bonus: it’s a lot more fun playing games when your kids get older. In the first round of the Goblet Gobblers tournament on Monday night, the eight-year-old beat me.

Then there’s the cataclysmic shift in family policy that occurred a year ago when I went all gooshy minded and gave my oldest daughter permission to bring home a stray cat she and her roommate had taken in. I’ve always been adamantly anti-pet, so this was a big stretch for me. And lo and behold, I’ve grown used to the strange little beast, and even fond of her. Who knew I had it in me?

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!