Leona Bushman on Writing, Mothering and...Green Eggs? I mean A GIVEAWAY!

Please welcome the lovely Leona Bushman. Today she is sharing with us about her personal life where she must wear many hats to get through the day as a mother of many, and a writer who has hit a rough patch, which happens to the best of us! 
She is also doing a GIVEAWAY!! See bottom of this post for details!

I've been working on a sequel forever. Okay, not forever, but for a year. That's a long time for me. By now, it should be 150k words long going by my rate of writing. But, I got stuck. Things changed. I have five kids, three at home, the youngest with Down Syndrome, all of them with Asthma, and we've been through the wringer. This has led me to believe that I could write anywhere, anytime. Well, that's mostly true.

I've written on a plane, on a train, in the air, in a car, I do not like green eggs…oh, wait, that's another story. I've written at Costco, Taco Bell, McDonalds, gas stations, parks, rooms, on laptops, tablets, computers, etc. But, since getting The Ulfric's Mate under contract, I've developed a system, which I've still followed at various places, still a system.

Then, I lost my editor. *cue dark dangerous music here*

She had to quit for personal reasons. I understand. I do. But I lost my way. Funny in the odd, definitely not a laughing matter sort of way, that I'd managed to write literally hundreds of thousands of words before I had an editor, then after having an editor for like nine months, I'm lost without her?

I don't know when it happened, but she'd become my talisman. When those around me didn't believe, I told myself, "She does!" Or when life threatened to take over my writing time, I told myself, "I can't let her down."

So I floundered. I wrote shorts for anthologies or special calls, like Naughty Nursery Rhymes and the Holiday series. It worked out well. I released Rick Sexed Up the Doc in November, and The Captain's Christmas in December. I have a story in Crimson due out in March, and in Serviced shortly after that.

But I haven't finished my sequel.

I have written nearly 50k on the next two in the series, with ideas for the third, but nothing's finished. Well, this month, I got my head out of my asterick and got serious. I've made some edits, added a scene with notes for another scene and how I need to pump up the action in a fight scene. *spoilers :D*

What did I learn? That I'm a superstitious and stuck in my writing ruts as the next writer. My rut is just a little crazier. LOL So, in the spirit of getting this sequel done, I'm going to give you a taste test and feel free to tell me what you think.

In the meantime, you can get The Ulfric's Mate here:


Breathless Press where you can get any format you wish to.

The sequel, tentatively titled The Midwife's Moon, is part of The War of the Weres series (The anthology Ravaged has a prequel that introduces the werebears and a couple of characters.)

Lisa, our main character is purposefully made into a werewolf and abandoned to deal with it alone. This is from the scene of her first change.

Deeper into the green woods she tracked, her wolf telling her she didn't need to worry, she would find her way home the same way she came. The silvery moon peeked through the tree branches as if to watch over her new child of the night. Lisa found a newfound comfort in the darkness, a sense of safety she wouldn't have felt in her human form.

She forgot, for the moment, that even wolves have their predators.

How many miles she trekked looking for her lover, she never knew. On she went. The crisp air, the scuttle of rodents, the wing song of the night owls surrounding her, comforting her wolf, letting her know she was safe. But fatigue caught up with her. She needed to eat. Joseph's scent winded around after the initial straight path from the clearing and she didn't have enough experience to tell the freshest trail from the oldest one.

Hunger gnawed at her ribs. Her mind's focus changed and the smell of fresh meat tainted the air. Lifting her noise, she sniffed twice. It was close. Saliva dripped from her jaw and she broke into an uneven run in the direction of the meat. There!

She pounced on the meat, put one paw on it, and jerked a huge hunk of bloody red flesh into her mouth. So satisfying. Her human mind rebelled at the goodness, but the wolf won the day. She put more pressure on the meat to hold it in place for tearing. Something clicked, then snapped as ragged pain tore through her forepaw still on the meat.

Hard metal encased her paw in jagged teeth meant to entrap. Inside she cried tears of pain until she could stand the silence no more and howled. The sound vibrated in the hills, the morose cry as lonely as her heart.

She pulled against the metal, trying to use her other foreleg to push the teeth far enough apart to get her injured leg out. But she tried to use her wolf paws the same way as she would use her human hands. Panic started to swell, the beast in a trap. Hunters and other animals of the night, which she recalled with sudden clarity, might get her at any time.

Hadn't someone mentioned cougar sightings lately? In her panic, she couldn't remember where. Panting, her tongue lolled out the side. As the frantic need to be free welled up into panic, she began to gnaw on her leg. She had to get out of the trap. But fatigue combined with blood loss caused her to pass out before she'd freed herself. As she lost consciousness, she thought a shadow moving toward her as her eyes swayed shut against her will.

Now for the GIVEAWAY! If we reach ten commenters--Leona will GIVE AWAY a copy of The Ulfric's Mate! Yay! So, get to commenting and please share with your friends!