I have winners of the last 10 contests - including BlogFest!

33 - Tore

10 - Benita

6 - Linda Kish

10 - ibeeg

14 - holdenj

32 - Jill

11 - carolsnotebook

21 - anonymous/headlessfowl

42 - Linda Henderson

16 - Beth

19 - Rebecca Graham

2 - Martha Lawson

29 - misusedinnocence

3 - DarcyO

9 - ossmcalc/Christine

12 - Rebecca Graham

6 - BookSake

15 - Chey

12 - Cecile

31 - tanya904

Blogfest winners:  I want to thank all the participants in blogfest - both hosts and entrants! I had a lot of fun visiting a TON of new blogs - my feed reader is exploding!  It amazes me how many bloggers I find every day.  A big thank you to all my followers both old and new!  I hope that I can get you to stick around!

I had one small rule for blogfest and that was for a google follow - I figured if I am giving away boxes of books - on my dollar - the least I could ask for was a follow - Unfortunately the first winner that I drew could not be verified as a google follower so I had to generate a new number.  And that was:

87 - Jodi - confirmed

92 - Sue/okibi_insanity

151 - jellybelly82158 - confirmed

Congrats to all!

Once winners have been emailed - they will have 48 hours to reply - at that time, any unclaimed books will be given away on twitter. (except for Blogfest - a new winner will be drawn)

What's Blooming in Your Life? (Guest post and Giveaway)

Some of you may have seen my review of Sand in My Eyes by Christine Lemmon a few days ago.  It was so wonderful to read a book that had shades of some of the mothering experiences in it that I had gone through.  The book dealt with more than that, but I really loved all the ways she used flowers to teach about life.  So I am very excited to bring to you a guest post by none other than Christine Lemmon! 

During the writing of Sand in My Eyes, while pregnant, I would go for a morning ride on my ‘trike’ around Sanibel Island where I live, and continued this after my daughter was born with her sitting on my lap. I would see a morning glory and knowing they open for only one day and then die, I couldn’t help but think that like those morning glories, we won’t live forever so we may as well make each day spectacular.


Some mornings I started my ride feeling bothered by life and the negative things I was hearing in the news and all around me. Daisies were everywhere, growing alongside dumpsters and in fields littered with trash, and I thought even when life gets ugly, there are always glimpses of beauty if only we look. I knew I had to incorporate flowers as a major theme in my story, how they all had something they wanted to tell us. And because a writer doesn’t just pick her themes like apples from a tree; she prepares the ground, plants, harvests, nurtures and processes those themes too, I began to almost eat, sleep, drink flowers, noticing and thinking of them like never before!


In the midst of writing Sand in My Eyes, I experienced extreme morning sickness and clusters of intense three-day headaches. And life picked up speed. I found myself busier than I liked to be. I stopped bike riding and taking walks and felt like I was falling out of shape physically. And because I only wrote while my children were sleeping—during those hours when I could have been catching up on housework—I felt like a disorganized mess. ‘But such is life,’ I wrote, ‘not everything in life can be blooming at once and sometimes it feels as if nothing is blooming at all.’


Because I had become super sensitive to flowers, interweaving them as themes throughout my novel, I would have a challenging mommy moment and tell myself, ‘don’t worry, Christine, what you are doing when your children are small is working on the underground roots, the things not seen, but vital below the earth,’ and I added that to my story.


There was one point where I didn’t like my story and considered giving it up. I started taking long walks around the island and sure enough, flowers were everywhere and I couldn’t help but to think, ‘how should you be talking to yourself when feeling down and out? The same as you would to a flower when wanting it to bloom.’ There were times when I would walk away from the story I was writing and spend my evenings like a couch potato, feeling guilty that I wasn’t writing. It was then I reminded myself that women, like flowers, need rest. We need non-productive periods in order to prepare for our next bloom.

Before writing this story, I used to see an orchid and think, ‘how pretty.’ Now I see one and think, “Orchids are beautiful, but cannot change their variety, whereas a woman has the liberty to constantly adjust who she is, how she thinks, behaves, reacts, what she learns, pursues, talks about, as well as who she wants to be in life. And if she finds she no longer likes parts of herself, she has the ability to change what it is she no longer likes.” I can’t help but look at flowers now and think deeply about them.

Christine Lemmon is the author of Sanibel Scribbles, Portion of the Sea and Sand in My Eyes. She lives on an island off Florida’s Gulf Coast - in a house on stilts! - with her husband and children.

For more on Christine Lemmon and her books, visit: www.christinelemmon.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.

I am happy to say that thanks to Book Sparks I have 3 copies of this book, Sand in My Eyes to giveaway! 

Just leave a comment below with your email to enter. 

One entry per person. 

Giveaway is open to US/Canada. 
This giveaway will end on Aug 31.

Sand in My Eyes by Christine Lemmon (Book Review)

Title: Sand in My Eyes
Author: Christine Lemmon
Publisher: Penmark Publishing

My synopsis:  Fairly early in Anna's marriage, she discovers that her husband has had an affair.  Believing that a change of scenery, and getting her husband away from his co-worker with whom he cheated, she quits her high power publishing job and moves her family to Florida, to a house on stilts. She has always wanted to write a novel and figures now is a good time to start.

New to the stay-at-home-scene she is overwhelmed by the demands of twin boys and a little girl.  Feeling like all she does is clean the house, feed, or change the kids, or grab some much needed sleep, her novel isn't a priority.

"All I wanted was to finish an act from start to finish without interruption, so I set the egg I wanted to fry on the counter and steadily walked to the sink, trying hard to block out the noise hitting me from every direction. To an ordinary person, washing a pan is simple. But for a mother, who is also like a ringmaster in a three-ring circus, doing dishes is more hair-raisingly difficult than swallowing fire." ...

"You can do it," I chanted under my breath, trying hard to be the little engine that could. "You can make it through this day." At least I thought I could, thought I could, thought I could.  There was nothing I wanted more this very moment than to become an escape artist and disappear, but then I saw from the corner of my eye the egg I was going to make for my children's breakfast, the only egg in the house, the extra large one sitting on the counter, roll to the edge and take a great fall. I dropped to my knees, trying to save old Humpty, but hard as I might, he slipped through my fingers." (Sand in My Eyes, p44)

I think that gives you a good picture as to Anna's state of mind.  I know that I have been at this point before.  It is actually this scene that sort of sets up the rest of the book.  Anna's husband is leaving on a business trip, so he arranges for his parents to come and pick up the kids for a week.  He doesn't really get why Anna can't get everything done with the kids there, but I think he doesn't really trust her to leave the kids alone with her.

Anna decides that this is the week to start her novel.  So she does.  She gets a lot of inspiration from her next door neighbor, Fedelina Aurelio, a geriatric gardener who shares with her much wisdom about life as it relates to flowers. She also meeds Fedelina's professor-son Liam and we learn about yearning and love lost. But I am leaving out an important part.  We are learning all of this 20 years later, as she has gone to visit Fedelina in a nursing home, to share with her the novel that she has actually spent the last 20 years writing.  The one she started the week she was home alone. 

So you see, it is actually a story within a story.  We learn all about Anna and Fedelina and the relationship that developed between them 20 years ago.  But we also see the stage of life they are now in, and how their relationship has changed.  Fedelina  had shared with Anna letters from her mother Cora which she had written to her daughter over the years.  As Anna lost her mother when she was in college, I believe that both Fedelina and Cora's letters served as a surrogate to her. They made it into her book, so they were definitely an inspiration to her. 

I loved the way that whenever she felt stressed she would throw in children's rhymes (like the little engine that could, or Humpty Dumpty from the quote above).  It gave the story a little whimsy. I enjoyed this book very much as I could relate to Anna so well (quitting a management job to stay home with the kids - it was quite a shock to the system!) There was so much inspirational, but not sappy, stuff in the book that I wanted to write down so I would remember it. The ending was a complete surprise and I never saw it coming, but it did wrap it up nicely. I would highly recommend this book to any mother at whatever stage of mothering she happens to be at!

I received a review copy for this book tour from Book Sparks, in exchange for my review.

About the author: Christine Lemmon is the author of Sanibel Scribbles, Portion of the Sea and Sand in My Eyes. She lives on an island off Florida’s Gulf Coast - in a house on stilts! - with her husband and children.


For more on Christine Lemmon and her books, visit: www.christinelemmon.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
 
 



 
 
 
Sand In My Eyes
Publisher/Publication Date: Penmark Publishing, July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9712874-2-6
353 pages