Stephanie Verni

After you’ve stepped away from your writing for a bit, say for the holidays, how do you motivate yourself to jump back into it? It’s often difficult to find that motivation, especially if you’ve left a story mid-stream as I have done with the second novel I’m working on. To be honest, I’ve never really juggled as many projects as I have over the last year. Having surgery and taking medical leave left me recuperating in my chair for 12 weeks. During that time, I juggled two novellas and a novel. Now, those two novellas have been published, and I’m currently working on publishing a completed novel – The Letters…

The best part about life is that you are constantly learning. I take great pride in learning. Sometimes I feel as if the older I grow, the more I learn. Often, the lessons can be inspiring; at other times, they can make you sad or melancholy. But ultimately, these lessons help me continue to grow into the person I want to be…or not be. Lesson 1: When you go through something tough, you find out who your “people” are. This year, I had surgery to replace my hip. While some people may consider this an easy surgery to recover from, unfortunately, it was not the case for me. It was…

I’m 5’1″. In my next life, I’d like to come back at about 5’5″. Just a few more inches. That’s not asking too much. Until earlier this year, I was about 5’3″ – 5’4″ thanks to the heels I wore. I was always in shoes that gave me added height. “I can rock a heel,” I would say to people. Maybe all that heel wearing got me to the point of needing a hip replacement, of learning to walk again without a limp, and leaving behind heels for different types of shoes. Who knows. Maybe it’s that and the fact that there was a helluva a lot of arthritis in…