EC Sheedy, Writer

A snippet from what I'm working on right now. Working title: A Man for Grace. (What role does loneliness play in forming new relationships? I wonder about this...)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:26:13 -0400

Being lonely sucks.

A new tenant would take over Emily’s bookstore any day now. Workmen had been in there for the past couple of weeks, stripping out the bookshelves, dry walling, painting, getting it ready for its new occupant. All of which made her feel worse.

Admit it Grace Whitby you’re flat-out lonely.

That was all she could think to call her state of blue. Lately it was as if her chest had been hollowed out and her heart light set on dim.

Both of her best friends were married and gone. Well, not gone, gone, but off Salt Spring Island more than they were on it these days, and the Island, small to begin with, was positively claustrophobic without them.

…

Odd how you took your friends for granted, when they were close by or a local phone call away. Friends filled in all the fissures and cracks in your life, smoothed them over. Those cracks yawned like bottomless chasms when there was no laughter, lunches, and woman-talk to help you cover them up.

…

Still… Life might not be perfect, but it was good. She had no right to complain.

Maybe she should stop dreaming about him—her very own perfect man. Just because Emily and Lynn had won the male lottery didn’t mean she’d have the next winning ticket. She needed to get real and stop feeling gloomy and down about something she had no control over.

But that stop dreaming thing? She had trouble with that. Dreams kept her motor going, kept her up and doing, kept a smile on her face on those days when what she really wanted to do was pull the covers over her head and stay in bed.

Dreams were her only antidote to this…thick gray soul-creep she’d been feeling lately. Stop dreaming, you stop living.

Trouble was sometimes you were lonely even in your dreams.

_______________________________

This book will be the third book in my Salt Spring Island Friends trilogy. (Of course I have to finish it first!) The first was Emily’s story, California Man. The second was Lynn’s, Man for the Morning. Both are on Amazon.

http://amzn.to/Lgyz0m

The picture says it all—as pictures often do.

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 02:39:18 -0400

The picture says it all—as pictures often do.

Love, a one-syllable word heavy as a heartbeat . . .

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:04:32 -0400

Our long history of ambivalence towards love is rooted in the necessary vulnerability and uncontrolled surrender true love requires:

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

From Diane Ackerman’s amazing: A Natural History of Love.

IN GOOD HANDS

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:23:00 -0400

A sun-drenched island. A secluded estate. A reluctant promise. Ten days. A love story between a man and a woman who have good reason to distrust one another.

Esme Shane, a strong, self-assured woman, once a sex therapist now a book illustrator. Dane McCoy, a magnetic, secretive man, once a billionaire businessman now…

An instant and incendiary attraction.

An attraction easy to satisfy—impossible to contain.

Available on Amazon: http://

amzn.to/Yquqvm

Gandhi says: Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:03:45 -0400

I need to find this place!

A romance about a colorful, romantic, wannabe mother of a dozen...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:24:00 -0400

A romance about a colorful, romantic, wannabe mother of a dozen kids and a stressed out, kid averse workaholic. It’s a match made in chaos, featuring a war between wrong-headed attraction and rational thinking—and it’s .99 cents on Amazon until April 28th. :-) You can find it here: http://

amzn.to/I9ejva

(Some reader/reviewers say they laughed out loud reading Love Letters, Inc. which is very cool because I laughed out loud writing it.)

"You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving."

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:08:28 -0400

“You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.”

- John Keats, English poet, to Fanny Brawne. October 13th, 1819

"He is the half-part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided..."

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:51:27 -0400

“He is the half-part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fullness of perfection lies in him.”

- William Shakespeare —From King John

New short romance up on Amazon—not my usual style of cover. When I saw this character, I...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:25:08 -0400

New short romance up on Amazon—not my usual style of cover.

When I saw this character, I just knew it was Ginger, my strong-willed, determined heroine. Like Ginger, she’s striding confidently toward her future—with what she wants on the deepest level emblazoned on her shirt for all to see.

It should be noted that in the story, Ginger had to learn a few things—get a new attitude—before she earned this t-shirt. :-)

The book is here: http://amzn.to/XIglvu

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people." Victor Borge

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:41:20 -0400

A blog about blurbs...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 22:18:26 -0500

If you’re thinking about those blurbs—so necessary to sell your books—here’s a couple of thoughts and some fine examples. http://bit.ly/WF7k06

IN ROOM 33 is going free on Amazon tomorrow and will be free for two days, Feb 15th - Feb...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:02:00 -0500

IN ROOM 33 is going free on Amazon tomorrow and will be free for two days, Feb 15th - Feb 16th.

If you’re interested in a derelict hotel full of empty rooms and shadowy halls, peopled by misfits and ill-fits, with a sly and cunning old guy—who’s bent on revenge—living in its penthouse, you might want to take a look.

It’s here: http://amzn.to/14ZiEtr

Happy Valentine’s season—definitely need more than a...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:14:13 -0500

Happy Valentine’s season—definitely need more than a day to spread some love.

Did you know the term honeymoon comes from a time when the bride and groom drank mead for one month (or one moon, a lunar cycle is 28 days) after their wedding. No wonder they were happy. Mead can have an alcohol content of up to 18%!

"Success in life consists of going from one mistake to the next without losing your enthusiasm."

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:08:00 -0500

“Success in life consists of going from one mistake to the next without losing your enthusiasm.”

- Winston Churchill

One of the fun things you can do as a self-published author is...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 10:38:41 -0500

One of the fun things you can do as a self-published author is change your book covers, and when the mood strikes, give your stories a fresh new face

I just did this for one of my books, Love Letters, Inc. I wanted a bright, sunny cover, because that’s who Rosie, the heroine, is—sunny, sassy, and sexy—even while she temporarily wears a neck brace.

I’ve loved hearing from readers that reading Rosie and Kent’s story made them laugh out loud. And as our world can get very short on laughter at times, those comments are gold to me.

Dorothy Parker said it best:

“Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”

You’ll find Love Letters, Inc. here: http://amzn.to/I9ejva

Falling in Love--it's a trip.

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 14:26:00 -0500

How do we fall in love? Author Jeanette Winterson offers this breathlessly poetic response:

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

PS You have to be brave.

Thank you to: Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/ This is a great site. Period.

It’s not often that one thinks about cabbage. Perhaps this...

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:41:01 -0500

It’s not often that one thinks about cabbage. Perhaps this should be the day.”

“Cabbage as a food has problems. It is easy to grow, a useful source of greenery for much of the year. Yet as a vegetable it has original sin, and needs improvement. It can smell foul in the pot, linger through the house with pertinacity, and ruin a meal with its wet flab. Cabbage also has a nasty history of being good for you.”

Jane Grigson (March 13 1928 - March 12 1990) was a notable English cookery writer.

Unimaginable and incomprehensible

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 02:14:03 -0500

Today I did not/could not watch the news. My heart wept for Newtown.

"There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated..."

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:53:41 -0500

““There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.””

- Dale Carnegie

MAN’S BEST FRIEND, a love story. Cue an ambitious...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 18:34:47 -0400

MAN’S BEST FRIEND, a love story.

Cue an ambitious business tycoon, who believes he can either buy or control everything in his well-ordered life—until a stubborn puppy and an equally stubborn dog trainer show up to create some dis-order. While one of them happily gnaws on his Italian shoes and ruins the odd Aubusson carpet, the other goes after something much more valuable—his heart.

This book is designed to make you smile—and maybe sigh a little. And it’s free on Amazon October 15-17, 2012. Please to enjoy—and review on Amazon, if you’ve a mind to. :-)

http://amzn.to/PrNPV5