A Letter from Danielle for January ’21
Hi Everyone,
I hope that you had good holidays—even though all of our holidays were quieter this year and different than they usually are! It took some careful managing and restraint to keep the holidays safe, but hopefully you had some joy in the festive season. Now we get a whole new year to look forward to, a clean slate, hopefully without the challenges we faced in 2020. This will be a great year!! We will hopefully be able to return to what we knew as “normal,” with maybe even some adjustments and improvements from what we learned last year. A challenge like that doesnt leave you where it found you. We all grew from it, and learned something about ourselves and others.
January is usually a quiet month, while we recover from the busy holidays, and many people tuck in at home in the cold weather. It’s a great time of year to do some reading. And I am VERY excited to have a new book coming out in hardcover today—Neighbors. It’s about what happens when there is a big earthquake in San Francisco—and everything that happens in the aftermath—when neighbors who didn’t even know each other before the big quake, end up helping each other (becoming friends), and even living together in the big house of a woman who has lived in seclusion for years and generously throws open her doors to her neighbors. It’s about how strangers can become friends and almost family in a crisis, and about a woman who was a famous movie star and has shut herself away from the world for many years after a tragedy. Suddenly, she is catapulted back into life by helping others, and opening her doors and her heart to people who become vitally important to her. Crises like the pandemic we’ve all lived through teach us a lot about others and ourselves, inspires the good in people, and exposes the less good ones. And the same is true in any major crisis—so the development of the book, the storyline, and the characters in Neighbors were challenging and really fun to write. I hope you love it!!
I wish you all a very, very Happy New Year and a fantastic, wonderful, healthy, happy, prosperous year ahead!!! And, more than ever, I like to think that “The Best is Yet to Come”!
Love,
Danielle