Amazon | Lori Ericson, Author

After years, I mean decades, of working toward a goal, it’s really a great feeling to meet it. I started thinking about writing a novel based on a series of stories I wrote in 1994 about problems in the Arkansas 309 prison program. Lack of confidence, life, and other issues kept me from ever starting to work on the novel for ten to fifteen years. Then I piddled at it forever. My daughters will even tell you that I wouldn’t even call it a book for years. It was “my project.” Seven or eight years ago I got more serious about it, joined Northwest Arkansas Writers Workshop and rewrote it. Then I rewrote it again, and again, and again.

Thanks to Shannon Press, a division of Oghma Creative Media, A Lovely County has been published and released on Amazon this week!

I can’t tell you how thrilled and excited I am with this accomplishment. Yes, I am writing still. I have a thriller in the works that may turn out to be a novella, and I’m working on the second in a series about reporter Danni Edens, the protagonist in A Lovely County.

Thank you to everyone who supported me through this process, especially Sara and Hillary, my daughters, and my ever-proud husband Lloyd. Also, I doubt I’d ever get to this place without the Northwest Arkansas Writer’s Workshop. Thank you to everyone who read and critiqued and encouraged in our weekly sessions.

Here’s the link to my newly born Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/author/loriericson

In the early 1990s a group of U.S.-Russian archaeologists found a 2,000-year-old burial mound near the Kazakhstan border that included the graves of warrior women buried with their weapons. According to the April issue of Smithsonian, the women were unnaturally tall for their time. The graves are believed to be evidence of the Amazon warrior women in so many stories carried down since mid-sixth century B.C.

Today’s mother isn’t an Amazon warrior, but the ones who are able to truly raise good kids in this crazy world are no less heroic.

My two girls and I celebrating my youngest daughter’s 21st birthday!

The U.S. Census Bureau released some statistics this week in honor of the Mother’s Day holiday. Some of those statistics included the following:

62.1 percent of women 16 to 50 who gave birth in the past year and are part of the labor force
29.5 percent of mothers who gave birth in the past 12 months have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
84.6 percent have at least a high school diploma
10 million single mothers were living with children younger than 18 in 2013, up from 3.4 million in 1970
5.6 million is the number of custodial mothers who were due child support in 2011
24 percent of married-couple households with kids under 15 have stay-at-home mothers, up from 21 percent in 2000

I’m no Amazon warrior, but sometimes felt like a negotiator, taxi driver, maid and cook as a mom. Yet, of all the things I’ve done in my life, I am with no doubt more proud of being a mother than anything. I have two wonderful daughters that continue to amaze me daily.