Archives for February 2012

Well, I’ll be.  The stats are in on my website and I wanted to personally thank all of the site viewers over the past year.  4,235 unique visitors stop by and read my website, daily.  PHEW. It may not be a lot to some people, but to me it is.  I am genuinely grateful. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to see what Lee Bice-Matheson has to say and for your continued support to keep me writing. 🙂 We are having a lot of snowfall today in Ontario; it is a glorious day!

Thank you to all of the loyal readers of Paige Maddison’s journey in the first book in a series, entitled Wake Me Up Inside.  It means a great deal to me for a first time author that readers have found my novella in the midst of the flood of ebooks this past year.  It just amazes me.  I also want to thank my sister Lynn, my editor,  who is in a joint venture with me on re-launching this ebook with a new editorial approach and re-design of the cover. Some of you may know that my sister Cindy did the original cover: a sketch of O’Brien Manor and the estate, and I love it!  It is with her blessing that I am co-designing a new cover but will have the estate sketch in each of the ebooks of Paige Maddison’s journeys.  In short, I am announcing this today so readers will STOP buying the ebook until it is relaunched in June of this year, 2012.  In the meantime, I am halfway through book two and am totally engrossed in it.  Many authors really just write to entertain themselves and hope someone will enjoy it too and maybe pass on a few helpful hints along the way. Happy Family Day fellow Ontarians! 🙂 We will be with our son on this long weekend celebrating family.

As a writer, one must experience life in order to interpret situations within a frame of reference.  But sometimes life has a way of reminding us, again, just how precious life is. For those subscribers to my feed you may remember when our son was mugged in Montreal. It is a cosmopolitan city and probably that’s what our son and even us love about it.  However, in big cities there is always the chance of more violent crimes. We still love Montreal – it’s full of culture and history and wonderful people.  However, last Friday night as our son was out at a bar with friends, someone slipped a new street drug into his drink.  I cannot explain well enough the journey he had that night but he ended up in the hospital with cuts on his hands and face and a deep gash on his writing hand – bad enough to have stitches.  While he cannot remember anything after two drinks, it is pretty obvious it happened not long after he arrived at the bar.  This is a WARNING once again.  To all of the university and college students that feel they are invincible – think again.  Just for a moment, imagine not remembering the night at all, and waking up in a hospital with an IV drip and electrodes all over your body, not knowing what happened.  Our son survived the night but not without two hospital stays and is still in a lot of pain.  A gang tried out a new street drug and the doctors could not detect what it was.  Nice.  Never, ever, leave your drink unattended wherever you may be and if you do, ask for a new one.  It’s worth the extra cost!  We are forever grateful he has survived these two violent crimes! Always go out in a group of friends that you trust and never ever remain behind if they leave.

Only the famous physicist and chemist, Marie Curie, said it best: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”  2012 seems to be the year for remembering this enlightened quote and can be applied to every facet of the sciences.