Remember to Enjoy the Small Things

This week has helped me remember to enjoy the small things. I tend to get caught up in the stresses of the moment, both good and bad. That isn’t always a wrong thing, but sometimes, as the stress and pressure mounts, that’s where all my focus goes. I miss some of the good things going on around me.

This week, the stress mounted. Several projects in my day job have fallen behind schedule, in spite of all the work I and others have done to complete them. Because those are behind, others fall behind, meaning the stress and pressures from the deadlines grows. On top of that, I had a car breakdown and the loaner car ended up with a flat tire. Everything seemed to fall apart this week. It seemed too much, and I found myself quite frustrated.

I felt much the same way characters in a good book must feel. But, in the midst of all that stress and frustration, good things happened. Like in a good book when a rough patch passes and the main character gets a slight pause, I had some breaks this week. A friend loaned me a truck and a couple others helped me tow my broken down car home. The loaner car with the flat tire was a different story. I was able to find a cheap used tire at a place another friend recommended.

Life is full of experiences that bring stress, frustration, and pressure, but along with those rough experiences, come reminders that good things still happen. Sometimes, all it takes is looking for the light in the darkness, even if it’s fleeting. Life is so chaotic that it’s easy to focus on the bad. In those moments, focusing on the small things helps.

Dissonance, my sequel to Resonance, goes live on Amazon Kindle today, September 3, 2021. The paperback version is also live. In that book, time travel is tearing the world apart, and only those that sense the resonance can feel the changes. Wyatt, Brooke, Aldan, Jeremy, and Avery, have to determine who to trust as they look for the source of the changes. It is a sequel to Resonance, which is my best performing book on Amazon, so far.

My most recent book, an epic fantasy titled, A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice, was a fun book to write. It is set in a world with limited technology, but where sacrifice is a necessary element to magical power. The greater the pain and suffering, the greater the magical power generated. The few mages in power use voluntary sacrifice of the citizens to generate power they use to protect and defend the empire. But their rule may be coming to a close.

If you’re looking for a science fiction story, try my book The Promise of Dust, which takes place in a cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Or Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which takes place many years in the future on a tidally locked world that orbits a red dwarf and has been reached by humanity in their search for the alien progenitors who seeded the galaxy with nano machines.

If a young adult science fiction is more to your liking, check out my series This New Earth, that starts with Demons of a Dead World and Secrets of a Dead World.

If you are looking for a young adult fantasy, check out my book The Threads Unbound.