Cold feet

Spring is sprung! The grass is riz! what is bloomin? The flowers is!

Well, not quite yet. And I just threw away a pair of socks (holey socks!) so my feet are cold. Hence the title.

At the moment I'm feeling a little lazy. My cat is demanding my attention but I'm sitting here staring out the window.

And of course, there are stories running through my head. I worked on Fairy Ring yesterday and it turned in a surprising direction. Two of the other books in the series are out, but I need to work on a new cover for the first before making it perma-free. The cover for the third book is in transition.

So at the moment I am actively writing Fairy Ring and Let It Go, re-vamping DemonBorn, editing Guardian and Heart of the Castle and trying to figure out the marketing thing. I have Axon, Seshallass and Glory Road that I'm thinking about when there's nothing else running through my head and a dozen others that try to squeeze in at odd moments, screaming to get my attention and demanding I work on them next.

An author's life, I guess.


Excerpt from BayStorm, a novella set in the Demons Bay world. This is the same world as the DemonBorn series, Heart of the Castle, and Guardian. Heart of the Castle should be the next book out.


She should have been terrified. Instead she stared up into the dark pit of the vortex, wondering what it would be like to die.

With a growling surge the thunder wrapped around her. Mutters and screams in the thunder were certainly only her imagination. If she died she would no longer be a threat. The curse would die with her.

She raised her hands, stared into the black maw surrounded by rainbow lightning, and begged it to take her.

For a moment the winds died. The air tightened around her, making her breath come short. The air around her heated, and darkened until she seemed to be staring up a narrow tunnel toward a black sun.

Abruptly the funnel reversed itself, darting down toward the ground faster than she could follow. Darkness followed the lightning, dragging it back toward the funnel, and the wind returned to yank her off her feet.

My life in jigsaw

I have a puzzle on my desk. Well really I have five of them, but one I'm working on. The idea is to make sure all the pieces are there and send it off to the thrift store.  Otherwise, if the pieces aren't all there it's going in the garbage.

My nephew said I should just count the pieces and I told him it wouldn't be as much fun.

My life is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle.  Not these nice, neat puzzles with the perfectly shaped pieces that might fit anywhere in the frame--a jigsaw puzzle. Of course if all the pieces are the same shape that creates a different problem.

My problem isn't finding out where that black piece goes--it's that every piece of my life is a different shape. Making them all fit is near impossible.

It's the writing, and the puzzles, and the laundry and the books I want to read. It's looking for a job and wondering where the money is going to come from and thinking about the herbal stuff and a science project. The old language project and I need (i.e., want) to make a batch of soap but if I get the soap stuff out I'll get distracted by all the other projects I haven't finished. And the garden, the weather, politics and dancing. And that book of magic pictures is calling my name, which brings me back around to the writing because magic, you know.

Tomorrow I'll go off on another tangent. But no matter how hard it is to put all the pieces together I wouldn't trade the craziness for that perfect puzzle with all the pieces precisely the same size and shape. I graduated from that one a long time ago.