I have a new blog, and a whole new gig going.
Long time no see. Last time you heard from me was a few years ago and I sort of left you all on a cliffhanger.
Well, here's the Road So Far version.
My first husband died in 2020. Not from the Great 2020 Plague, but from a struggle with alcoholism. Things had gotten very, very dark and oppressive in our house, and then suddenly me and our kids were thrown into a whole new reality. I had no idea what to do, or what the future looked like, and we were all still in lockdown mode.
That's when I found some new friends on a Facebook group called Jim Steinman's Rockman Philharmonic. It was a group for fans, friends, and people who had worked with Jim in the past, and a small group of us got together in a chat to cut up and joke, lighten our lives a little, and we'd get together on FaceTime to sing karaoke and share stories.
One day I came home from shopping to find the girls in the chat going on and on about this guy they'd found on Instagram. He could play piano like Jim, singing while smoking a cigarette. He had long hair, he looked like a vampire, he read James Joyce and Plato, and best of all he was English.
I read through all of the messages and went to his page to scope him out and said to the girls, "If you want to talk to him so badly add him to the chat. He's a person."
So one of the girls messaged him and got him to join us. We bantered back and forth a little, and I thought he was really cool. Then he joined in on the group call that night. He played Jim songs and did impressions of Jim and Meat Loaf. I sang Bat Out of Hell karaoke, and fangirled a little more than I expected myself to over how well he could play.
The next day he sent me a message asking if I had five minutes for a phone call. That FaceTime call lasted 8 hours. After that we were messaging every day, all day. From the time we both woke up to the time we went to sleep the conversation never ended. It was like we'd been reconnected after knowing each other for years.
After a week we were in a relationship. He says we were never friends because he loved me after our first conversation. I hadn't dared to hope. There we were, though, and 8 months after our relationship began I was on a plane for the very first time, all by myself, leaving the country for the very first time to go to England to meet him in person.
He proposed to me while I was there and then we started the process of getting him to the US. It took 15 months for the approval of the petition to apply for the K-1 visa, and just a day after that approval we found out I was pregnant. That was Spring of 2023, and it would be another year and five months before he finally got to come home to us for good.
We got married and then a month and some days later I found out I was pregnant again.
So, here we are. We have four daughters; Alessa (12), Teagan (9), Jael (2.5), and Eleanor (10 months). Aaron is a composer and retired rock musician (though I'm trying to get him to record a new record), he's also the head chef of a local restaurant called The Filling Station.
And I have started rebranding all of my books and author pages with my new name, Amanda Leadley.
Right now I have Left In The Dark available on Amazon for Kindle (it's FREE for a limited time), and Strange Magic for Kindle and paperback.
Follow me over on Threads and Instagram, sign up for my Substack, or follow me on my new Tumblr!
