It's been a while...

Hey everybody!

It’s been a long time since I sat down to blog for fun. It used to be my favorite part of the day in Vieques. I’d sit at my glass-topped kitchen table and drink coffee and watch the hummingbirds hovering all over my hibiscus plants in the yard. There were so many little birds that I’d get distracted. I never saw that in my yard in Washington, DC.

So, I’d start my day in Puerto Rico by blogging and it got me far – I never actually paid for advertising for Weddings in Vieques, unless you counted the island map. But that was more of a necessity than an ad on a tiny Caribbean island where there are fewer street signs than potholes. This time I’m hoping that my blogs will entice somebody who has never met me before to read my books. 

Right now, I’m sitting at my desk in my office in my beautiful forever home on Jekyll Island, Georgia, looking into my backyard and loving the view. It’s much better than the way the inside of my house looks LOL. We just finished renovating the bedroom end of our house, and everything that was in those rooms is in the rest of the house right now, waiting to be put back. And I mean EVERYTHING because we tore out the super-fashionable 1970s popcorn ceilings, replaced the carpet, put in a new guest bathroom. What a mess! But it looks fantastic now. Many thanks to our incredible talented contract, Blu Hunt. All it needs now is everything put back, pictures hung, and then the rest of the house reassembled. OMG. Yikes.

I do have constant motivation to get the house reassembled and all the boxes from my mom’s apartment unpacked – two elderly neighbors are moving and they call me every single day for boxes. I love it because they want them assembled and full of the packing paper – sure makes my job easier. But I have to keep unpacking or I won’t have anything for the next one who calls me for more boxes. Oh the pressure…

On a serious note—I finished writing a new book that I’m really proud of and it will be coming out on Oct. 9^th. It’s nothing like the Gem of the Golden Isles Series. 

Thicker Than Blood tells the story of a fictional, patriarchal society family in the DC area for whom money and influence are far more important than anything. The story is told through the eyes of three generations of women in that family. Two of them get Alzheimer’s. The novel is fiction,BIR but a lot of the story is true.

I lost my mom in November. She had Alzheimer’s but she died, suddenly, from a bunch of brain tumors that we had no idea were there. Honestly, I think my mom would have chosen to die before she forgot my name and curled up in the fetal position, like my grandmother and great aunt did. My mom never forgot who I was, and two days before she passed, she was still yelling at me in the same voice she used in high school.

“Sandra Elizabeth Nelson!” I jumped up from the window seat in my mother’s hospice room and raced over to her bed. She hadn’t talked in the last 24 hours and now she wanted me.

“What do you need mom?” I held her hand.

She looked at me with a serious expression on her face. “Shut up.”

Then she shut her eyes and went back to sleep. I laughed. She spent most of my life telling me I talk too much.

Later on, she did the same thing again in front of nurse. The nurse looked horrified and assured me that wasn’t my mom talking to me like that.

“Oh, that’s my mom,” I corrected her and laughed. “I have no idea who that super-sweet lady was that inhabited her body for the past three years but the lady who just yelled at me was definitely my mom.”

I didn’t mean to do it, but I wrote a book about my experience coming from a family where all of the women who raised me lost their minds and their memories to that horrible disease. And what it feels like to have the threat of Alzheimer’s looming over me. I think it’s something a lot of us can identify with as more and more of our loved ones are succumbing to dementia or worse. 

Okay, wow, I told you. That was the first step. Next step will be to post an excerpt for you. But put it on your calendar – BOOK LAUNCH NOVEMBER 9^TH! Thicker Than Blood will be released with all the good formats available (including large print and audible). So keep an eye out to pre-order your copy. Or come to one of the book signings that we’ll be announcing soon and get your copy personalized.

You may have noticed that you’re reading this on my new website. Thank you to Aimee Ravichandran from Abundantly Social for getting me all on track.

Until next time, happy reading!

Sandy