New Year, new goals, let's see if we can pull it together.

I will admit, I am a terrible blogger. I'm lazy. I let it go for months and months and try to forget about it. I don't market the way I should, I don't tweet every day like I should, and I wonder why my sales are less than stellar.

I don't know why I am not a good blogger. I have ideas, clear opinions on all kinds of interesting topics, and if we were sitting here face to face, I would talk your ear off. But, when it's just me this blank screen...not so much. I think most people experience the opposite: face to face they can't quite get their feelings out, but given a blog post and they all become Nicolas Sparks. I envy those people.

Well, this year I am leaving my comfort zone and I will blog, and tweet, and market. Anti-bullying is still my platform and so these two books will be my focus for 2014.

They say you should write what you know. Unfortunately, I know quite a bit about this subject. I was bullied mercilessly because of a birth defect. Basically, people didn't like my face. And what was I going to do about that? Nothing. There was nothing I could do, and they all knew it. I finally quit worrying about it and stuck with my true friends, they shielded me as best they could, and I managed to enjoy at least part of my school years. But, it hurt. I'm not going to lie about that. It got better, but now and then I still hear the voice of a particularly nasty bully in my head. In times of stress, or feelings of self-doubt, that cute little cheerleader's vicious little taunts echo in my head and will wake me from a sound sleep. All of the sudden, I am no longer a 46 year-old mother of four, published author of five books, one of which is an amazon best-seller. I am a fourteen year old ugly girl who hides in the bathroom at school because she is afraid of what the cheerleaders will say to her when she tries to walk past them in the hallway. 

The scars I carry on the outside, from all the surgery I endured growing up, are nothing compared to the emotional scars I retain at the hands of the pretty girls. We are all grown up now, me and my bully. We are both mothers, wives, professional women...but I haven't seen her in over 25 years and I doubt very much if I could be in the same room with her even today. Bullying hurts. Bullying scars. Bullying kills. And this is the message I want to hammer home in 2014. 

So, I will try my best to make these blogs at least interesting, if not amusing. This one wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, but it's easy to write what you know.