Hi there, guys and dolls!  Happy New Year, everyone — I wish for all of you health, wealth, peace and love for 2015.  Personally, I love the change of the year.  It puts me in quite a contemplative mood, reflecting the past and projecting the future.  While I’m in my cool shade of blue, I’ll let Andrea and Heather take over this week’s blog, as they’ve been feeling the same way, too… As all of you know, in your own way, we all have such busy lives and juggle so much — work, family, life, health, everything is about balance.   For us, we’ve been writing, shaping and honing our Poppy Cove Mysteries for a long time and plan to continue on for years to come.  The third is coming, thank you for all of you asking.  We’re coming along and we’re really happy with the story, it’ll be worth the wait, we promise!  It’s such a labor of love for us and are so pleased we’re reaching readers and visitors to Santa Lucia.  Everyone’s always welcome. We’re making some changes in our lives, and as with all things in life, the biggest shift is how we see our world.  We so enjoy creating our Santa Lucia and meeting new readers.   We have a long list of plans of events, readings, online and in-person projects surrounding both the Poppy Cove series and Barbara Jean’s world that we can’t get to them all, as well as ideas for other series that we’d like to develop.  To do so, we have to take risks, albeit small, smart ones that may challenge the conventions of what we were raised in, but natural and organic in the truth of how to live our best and creative lives. It comes down to priorities.  What do you want to do?  How do you want to live your life?  What do you naturally gravitate towards?  What feels like purpose?  What feels like filler?  For years, we’ve been following our ingrained nurturing that was meant well, but are no longer fully appropriate.  Now it’s time for us to encourage our natures.  We’re happy to announce that the time is right for us to make the shift, both mentally and tangibly.  We’re in the process of switching from outside jobs and writing on the side, to writers with a job on the side.  It may not sound like much, but it is.  It means that now we can start to do more with our stories, sharing and developing our world further, creating and attending events and readings that due to other professional commitments we had to either decline or postpone, participating more publicly to share our books and truly test our wings.  We feel very blessed to have to opportunity to do so and it would be such a waste to let it slip by without giving our creativity its full potential.  We’re very excited and we’ll share more as time and our plans continue to reveal themselves to us, but we have to say it does have this very quiet rightness about it that we know it’s meant to be. In all sincerity, we thank you all for sharing our journey so far.  We wish you all as amazing a life as we continue to have. Warm Regards, Andrea and Heather aka Barbara Jean