Photo from Morguefile

I was thinking about this today and wondering which excerpt I should put up, and I decided on Alien Dreams, one of my upcoming new releases! Enjoy!










Denara crouched behind a crate waiting for Lamdarak to return to the cargo hold; he always seemed to know when she was there. She had never been brave enough to go to the bridge, worried that someone else might sense her presence. She’d been leaving her body during sleep and traveling to the starship since the first time she’d accidentally come here when she was fifteen. That was ten years ago, and now she traveled here as often as she could, simply by thinking that she wanted to.


Suddenly Denara heard heavy boots slapping metal and knew that Lamdarak had sensed her presence and come to see her.


“You can come out now, Denara. I am here.” He called, his voice heavily accented. How he had managed to learn English she had no idea. Especially considering she didn’t think he even knew where her planet was.


Denara took a quick sniff of the air to be sure she only smelled Lamdarak. Once a crewmember had followed him and she had nearly been discovered by another. When she could only smell his heavy earthy scent, she stood and came out from behind the cargo crate that was being held by a force beam to keep it from moving around the cargo hold.


She took in the sight of the man she had loved for ten years. He was six and half feet of lavender skinned muscle with long hair that was a much darker shade of purple. His eyes had square rather than round pupils and were an enchanting color that she thought of as opal because the milky color with the flashing colored sparkles reminded her of the stone. Even stranger was the long tale covered with a short coat of fur, and ending in a thicker tuft the same color as the hair that nearly reached his hips.


She loved everything about him, his look, his eyes, his trim hips and long muscled body, but while he had always been very affectionate with her, he had never shown any sexual interest. This made her sad, but she respected him too much to push for something that he might not be capable of.


“Hi, Lamdarak. I missed you!” She called, running and then jumping towards him, knowing he would always catch her.


As was normal he shoved his face into her hair taking deep breaths, scenting her as he had always done. Denara had learned early on that his people’s sense of smell was much more developed than her own.


“Mmmmm…I’m sorry it was so long before I came again, but I had friends visiting from out of state and you know I talk in my sleep.” She rolled her eyes. “ I didn’t want them to hear me.” She said, pulling back from him.


(c) Copyright 2008-2014 by Regina Paul. All Rights Reserved.

Photo from Morguefile.

One of the hardest things to do when you're an author in my opinion is finding the balance between your writing, editing and publishing and your day job and just everything else that life throws at you. It's something that I've been working on for years and this last year I've been failing pretty miserably in most cases. I do quite a bit of freelance work on top of my day job and so my writing has taken a back seat to everything else in my life. Throw in a lot of overtime with my job at the hospital and you can guess how frustrating that can be at times.

Initially I thought if I set a schedule for myself with this blog that I'd be able to keep it, but as usually happens, my day job, my home life and my freelance work got in the way. While I was able to keep it for a few weeks, continuing became difficult when the time just wasn't there. And there's another thing, this thing called time and how we use it. Why is it that we always think we don't have enough time. The truth is I think at least for me is that I don't manage my time well. In fact, I'm lousy at it, and I'll be the first to admit it. So that's one part of me finding balance as an author that I've been working on.

The main thing with time is that I'm finding I have to work on training myself to focus on what I'm doing this moment. For example, in this moment I'm writing this article. So, the trick is whenever my mind wanders to what I'm going to make for dinner tonight, what I have to get at the store, the statements I need to print out so I can pay my school loan payment, and when I'm going to do my taxes that I work on gently bringing my mind back to the task at hand which is writing this article. We get so caught up in what's coming up or what has happened ie we got a bad review for example that we don't focus on the present. My Native American ancestors were actually really good at focusing on the present tasks and I think it's an important part of finding balance to adopt this habit. It's not easy by any means, but it does work when you continue to employ it. I also find I get much more done when I focus on the task at hand. We've become such a society of multi-taskers that it's not any wonder that we feel so frantic all the time. We rarely give our brains a break to just think about one thing at a time.

Since I've begun doing this paying attention to what I'm doing in the moment I mean, I've actually begun writing again. Wonder of wonders, with just this little tip to help me find some balance in my author life, I've begun writing again. Imagine that!