Update from Eliabeth

I am sorry for missing Picture it & Write this past week. It was a really difficult Labor Day weekend for me as I had to put down my beautiful 5-year-old calico, Shira. She was having trouble breathing on Saturday and I took her to the animal ER. They told me she had a sinus infection and sent me on my way, but when she hadn’t eaten anything 24 hours later I knew something else was going on. They took blood work and discovered she was in severe kidney failure. It was not a good chance she would live through the weekend even with treatment and I didn’t want her to die in pain and alone in the vet’s office so I made the hardest decision of my life. She was the friendliest cat you could ever meet, the very definition of a lap cat.

Thank you for being patient and understanding while I try to run the blog myself in Ermisenda’s absence. I feel very blessed to still have a community we can engage with and I don’t mean to neglect you. I appreciate you all more than I can write.

Thank you,
Eliabeth

__ermisenda’s absence

Tags

cancer announcement, ermisenda's absence, hodgkin's disease, lymphoma

Hey everyone,

It’s Ermi here. I’m making this post to announce that I will most likely be entirely absent from the blog for the next half year. I’ve been diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma (cancer of the lymphnodes) and I start chemo this Thursday (for approx. 6 months). It’s been a crazy past month from finding out there was an abnormal tumour in my chest, to now being treated for it. The doctors say I have a very good prognosis and nearly all young people recover from Hodgkins as chemo is VERY effective at killing the active cancer cells. So my family and I are coping okay even though it’s all a bit scary and sad. It seems like it’s just going to be a crappy few months but then everything will be fine again (hopefully).

I might find the energy and motivation to post here, but Eliabeth will most likely be taking charge. There may be less posts because of this. I don’t want to commit myself to anything just yet since I don’t know what I will want to do with the (potentially limited) energy I’ll have left.

I don’t make this post to scare anyone, but I do want to inform the amazing readers we have. I haven’t abandoned you all! I’m just going through some things. I hope everyone and their families are healthy and well.

Love,
Ermisenda

Blind Sight: Aniela (Coming Soon)

Due to an unfortunate incident with my laptop involving it giving me a blue middle finger, we will start posting Aniela’s volume of Blind Sight next week. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Leocardo’s side as he tried to figure out why his blind little sister could suddenly draw. Blind Sight Through the Eyes of Aniela Dawson is the same story, but through the point of view of Odette’s friend.

Whose eyes will you read through?

Book Review: Oedipus Tyrannus

Tags

classics, fiction, Oedipus, plays, theater

Oedipus Tyrannus

by Sophocles

genre: classics, play

Summary

A blind prophet predicts that a son will kill his father and marry his mother. After running from this fate, Oedipus realizes that the boy is him.

Happy Birthday Eliabeth!

Tags

candles, cool cake, happy birthday to eliabeth

Yay! You have blessed the earth and its inhabitants with another year of your presence. May you continue to do so for many years my lovely co-blogger, co-writer, and friend. 😀

Remember to blow out all the candles! 😉

– Ermisenda

Girl Effect Donation

Tags

charity, donations, education, girl effect, picture it & write

The Picture it & Write Publication had many hiccups, but we’re still proud of the final result. I’d love to be able to say we raised hundreds of dollars for The Girl Effect, but we’ve always said that every dollar counts. As we continue to be active in charity runs and other projects, I’m excited to see what we’ll be able to do in the years to come. Not counting our volunteer hours, we’ve donated $1646 USD since starting our company. In addition, we have $160 AUD circulating in Kiva loans .

One thing I like about The Girl Effect is that you can donate to the organization and let them pick what to put the money towards or you can select a project to fund. Ermisenda and I are big believers in the power of reading and education so I’m excited to announce that we’ve been able to donate $21 towards providing an Afghan girl with a scholarship to attend school.

Join Us By Donating.

Thank you to all of the writers who contributed pieces to the publication and thank you to everyone who bought a copy. Special thanks to everyone who continues to participate in our creative writing exercise.

Blog Update

Tags

Blind Sight, books, changes, ermilia blog, life update, writing

Hey everyone!

So as you may have noticed, we haven’t been as consistent on the blog as we would have liked in the past few weeks. The past year has been really crazy for Eliabeth and me. We haven’t been able to work on our books as much due to other priorities and out of all our writing related projects, the blog has taken most of our energy.

We had a big discussion about Ermilia this morning and we came to the conclusion that we needed to change the blog schedule. Four posts a week was too much. But two posts a week wasn’t quite right either. So we are doing three posts a week.

1. Picture it & Write every Sunday
2. A chapter from Blind Sight on Tuesday
3. A post on Thursday (e.g., a book review, an interesting find on the internet)

On Sunday, we want to keep reading your responses to our writing photo prompt. We love the community we’ve built through Picture it & Write. Tuesdays, we will be posting a chapter of Blind Sight: Through The Eyes Of Leocardo Reyes. We are planning on putting the whole novel on the blog and we may do the same for Ana’s perspective. For the Thursday post, we want to continue to share book reviews and our weird and wonderful internet finds with you. This new schedule will start next week, but we’ll post the Prologue to Blind Sight as our Thursday post this week.

By posting our novels on the blog, we hope to get people more engaged with our writing and our stories. We want these stories to be read and enjoyed. Since our motivation has dipped in the last year due to work and study, we hope that each chapter’s post will remind us of our goals for book 2 and entertain those who are looking for a read.

We hope our loyal and amazing readers will embrace the new changes to the blog. We’d also like to hear from you with what you like about the blog and what you don’t like. We’ve never wanted to be a broadcast pushy blog where we talk and you listen. We want there to be a dialogue here at Ermilia.

We also hope everyone is doing well in the first week of the new year. May you and your families be doing well both physically and mentally. We care about you all and we hope that 2015 will be a great year for all of us.

– Ermisenda and Eliabeth (Ermilia)

PS One of our New Year’s Resolutions is to finish editing Book 2. What are some of your resolutions? Tell us in the comments.

Merry Christmas from Ermilia

We hope everyone is able to spend time with friends and family. It’s been a busy year for us, but expect to see another post tomorrow. We’re so thankful for our blog family. Some of you, we’ve known for years.

Merry Christmas to all and for now a good night.

-Eliabeth

Happy (Belated) Birthday Ermisenda!

Given her last post about wanting to raid bookstores during the Purge, and I have no doubt she really would try, I found this birthday cake…

Apparently it’s actually a Minecraft cake, but it comes up in Google Search as “The Purge Birthday Cake.” I’m so blessed to have this wonderful woman, coauthor, friend, in my life.

 For the record, it’s still her birthday in my time zone for another 42 minutes.

__WINNER of the graphic design giveaway

Tags

authors on a budget, free book covers, freebies, giveaway, graphic design, graphic design services

Thank you to everyone who entered the graphic design giveaway!

We have a winner:
Congratulations, Helen Cita! 😀

You have the lovely opportunity to choose between having your very own book cover, blog banner, or Facebook cover designed uniquely for you from scratch. Without costing you a cent (while it’s valued over $200)!

I regularly host giveaways on behalf of ErmisendaDesign. So keep an eye on my Facebook page and here on Ermilia Blog for future posts. 🙂 Remember, I always have my free book covers and paid services on offer.

Have a great day everyone!

– Ermisenda Alvarez