For the Criminally Inane

 Hello friends! What's coming down the pike for 2025? Are you excited? What books are you most anticipating? Seasons of Sugar Creek Book 4 Three Spring Wedding s (outlined, not started.) Helping of Hope book 3 The Cookie Platter  (15k words so far) Chains Of Deceit by A. E. Zeigler (40k words so far) Books/series in planning stages: (Hopefully happening beginning in 2026) Gauche Girl book 2: Wing Girl (plotting stages)--Reverse Cyrano de Bergerac. She writes song lyrics and but gets a job as a social media manager for a famous singer and starts communicating for her boss via social media with a hot DJ (LiveR@ from book 1) . Everything is fine until she falls in love with him. Mark of the Beast : Baker's Dozen book 3 (plotting/planning stages) These take me a long time to write because of all the research! I have a few ideas of where it's going, I just need to dig into the details. Serving of Self: firefighter's series set in the same world as the Helping of Hope Series-...

Young Adult fantasy is my favorite genre. If you look at my shelves, they are filled with YA fantasy books. I love YA because it's clean, it's adventurous, it's all about growth, making mistakes, and taking responsibility. It was about putting off more mature decisions like intimacy until you're older and focused on the emotional relationship in the romance. YA lit is written for CHILDREN ages 12-18. However... Recently that's changed. I'm not sure when or why. I opened a book a while ago and was SHOCKED to find a scene in YA fantasy where they legit had S3X! It was euphemized. But it was totally obvious what they were talking about and they were clearly in bed. Another book talked about how they were gloriously naked after a tactful description of the act. GLORIOUSLY NAKED? WHAT THE HECK????  I know that some people are like, I let my kids read whatever they want and they're turning out okay. Fine. I get it. You can let your kid read Game of Thrones or wh...

 Waaaaaaay back in 2010 when we were still in grad school, my husband met a Japanese man at church who came to the area on business. Since my husband lived in Japan as a missionary for two years and is fluent, we invited him over for dinner after the services. I made homemade pizza which was fast and easy for me to make and fed a lot.  Then my husband offered to take him to the train station so he could catch his flight. (He offered to take him all the way to the airport, but the man insisted on taking the train--public transportation is much more common in Japan and it wasn't much of a hassle to taketh train to the airport and our family had taken it many times.) During dinner, the man casually asked my husband what he missed as food from Japan. My husband listed off a few things including Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. The Osaka-style was more of a pancake where it's prepared omelet-style of throwing everything into a bowl and then cooking it. Hiroshima-style was more like lay...