This past weekend, my husband and I took a vacation. And by “vacation,” I mean that we drove about an hour away to stay in a hotel room overnight. That’s because one now spends the weekend away from the house. In the meantime, your house will magically be sold by the house fairy gods, aka the realtors (or Zillow). Why only one night, you ask? That’s because our daughter was moving this same weekend, and like good parents, we helped her out, both financially as well as bodily.

One of my friends told me that she’s a big proponent of taking vacations on a regular basis. Relaxing is almost one of life’s requirements, but for us Americans, it’s hard to do. We may be leading in a lot of things in this world, but vacations are not one of them. This causes a lot of stress, stress that is taken out on other people … mostly on social media, in my opinion, as keyboard warriors need an outlet since they are not taking any vacations.

The pandemic has had much to do with this lack of fun time. Between shut downs, lay offs, WFH with no work-life balance, and … death and sickness … we need to start taking back our beaches and mountains and amusement parks. All this causes stress, too.

And then, being stressed out leads to more stress, which leads us to be stressed out at each other, which means we just have a lot of stressed out people.

You want a less stressed out world? Take more vacations, I say.

We have two different book promos this newsletter! Check out both of them for some free reads. Maybe you’ll find something for your vacay.

We first have Ghostly Encounters: An All-Genre Giveaway for Stories with Ghosts or Spirits. As the name implies, you will find a bunch of spooky spooks and ghostly ghosts. Right up my alley.

Next, we have Book Gathering Giveaway. A great many free books, a little bit for everyone.

I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones (finally) series these past two weeks, and I’m almost done and standing next to everyone else in line for his latest book. Should Mr. Martin ever decide to finish it. Or change that awwwwwwwwful ending in the GoT series. Here, I link up the paperback version because (at least when I got the link), the real paper version is cheaper than the Kindle version.

I’ve also been in the middle of a summer class—dang learning—so I apologize to everyone for being a couple of days late with the newsletter.

By next newsletter, I should have my act together (again) and release my newsletter on the new platform … drum roll please … Revue!

With love,

Maureen

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