Happy Monday everyone!

I write that with some sarcasm, but I do hope your Monday is happy, or at least pleasant. Not terrible?

I had a productive weekend; I submitted my next book for publishing!

It’s the second book in the Dance Diaries series, called Ballroom Budgeting. Three guesses for what it’s about! I had this one finished over a month ago actually (maybe even six weeks). An advanced copy went to dancesportplace.com for their member appreciation month and BCBallroomDancer won a copy in my Story Cartel giveaway of the first book.

After that giveaway, I slowed way down on the promoting/marketing for Dance Diaries: Learning Ballroom Dance (although I was still obsessively checking its ranking on Amazon). I think I was a little disappointed about the lack of reviews. The whole idea of the giveaway was a free book in exchange for an honest review. Pretty much everyone just took the free book. Funny thing though – some new reviews were posted during the giveaway but not by people who downloaded the book for free! Go figure.

I lost a bit of direction on my ballroom journey too. Not having a dance goal to work toward was getting to me, even though I had the goal of my second book. Then there was the whole starting the new job but still working the old job. If you count this blog and the books, I’m working three jobs now!

Allowing myself to consider Holiday Dance Classic as a fantasy goal seems to have renewed my motivation. It was nothing dramatic, but I have felt like I have a bit more energy to take care of things, like submitting Ballroom Budgeting for publication.

Another motivator was revisiting waltz! I was starting to really miss dancing smooth; my lessons had been focused on rhythm for a couple months now. But apparently I wasn’t the only one because Teacher brought it up on Tuesday’s makeup lesson and said we were going back to smooth on Wednesday. Yay!

I dreamt about Wednesday’s lesson the night before, and in it, we danced waltz and I was terrible! Of course.

During the actual lesson, we danced waltz to see what I remembered. My muscle memory was a little rusty, but at least it wasn’t as bad as my dream the night before. I was happy just to have reality turn out better than my dream. I forgot how much I have to stretch my body to maintain my frame and the proper sway and whatnot. My neck especially was sore the next day! Rhythm seems to be easier on my body in that respect.

Moving forward, Teacher wants to do one rhythm lesson and one smooth lesson each week. Works for me! The thought crossed my mind that we probably have enough time to prepare both styles for my fantasy comp goal in December. But that means paying twice as much and there’s no way for me to know yet if I can even afford to enter in one style. But how fun would that be?! I’ve always wanted to compete in nine dance. We’ll see!