All right, so… I joined the Clarion West Write-a-thon. And there’s a pledge pending if they reach 300 writers for this year, so… go sign up or support your favorite writer! (You can also look up my write-a-thon page at the bottom of that one if you want to do something silly, like… sponsor my participation in the Write-a-thon.)

OK, so… the house has a small, formal living room (13′x11′–is that actually small? or does it just seem that way in person?) and we didn’t know what to do with it. We’re not the formal entertaining type so the room was a head-scratcher for us. The previous owners used it as a living/music room and had a console piano and some other instruments in it along with a love seat and a small secretary desk with a delicate little chair. Clearly not a practical idea for us. We put our first bookshelves in it and suddenly it was “the Library.”

See the rest of this post on my blog.

This is the path I cleared over the holiday:

Read the whole post and see the photos on my blog.

I’ve been lopping off the tree limbs that overhung the driveway and road, and I cleared off the front path which had become buried in cedar droppings and overgrown by plants. Yesterday I cleared some bracken ferns, salmonberry canes, and some sort of vine off the pump house and around the house and drive so you can actually see the road, the driveway, and the pump house now, and the house is no longer in danger of being invaded by a climbing vine of some kind the way the pump house had been. Eventually I’ll get inside the pump house and clear the vine out of the interior, and pull out the stumps of the vine root stocks and the bracken fern root masses too, but today I’m too tired. At least you can now find the house and the pump house and not be eaten by Audrey II every time you go onto the back the deck. The bees are miffed though, because I ended up cutting back quite a bit of their favorite pink-flowering shrub that was falling into the road. I hope they don’t hold a grudge….

And plainly she approves, even if her humans are discussing mundane and boring things, like shower curtains.
Click to see the video on YouTube.

Guess what these are…

Yup, house keys! I’m ecstatic!

And now more of the amazing and amusing Tell a Story Day! I’m posting part 21 on the blog, but the story started April 15th on M. Todd Gallowglas’s site with Part 1 and has continued on up to Part 20 on Christopher Kellen’s site. You can see all the parts and links in order on Genre Underground’s Tell a Story Day event post. The story will wrap up on April 27th, so… keep reading and be sure to take a ramble around the other sites to see what else those writers are up to.

And now… Part 21:

As the bow sang and the arrow leapt free of the string, rushing to pierce the troll’s eye, a hand swept from down from the upper gantries of Assembly…

Read the rest on the blog!

Finished the proofs on Possession today, scanned, and emailed them back to the Penguins. Done with that book for a while. Now, on to the next one. This time: with dragon!

Today I’ve been invited to take part in Tell A Story Day with the Genre Underground–a group of (mostly) independent writers who’ve banded together to help readers find new stories. So, what is “Tell a Story Day”? Well, it’s an experiment based loosely on the Writer Under Glass project some of us participated in at World Con in Chicago last year: A group of authors create a story serially with no idea where the happy insanity will lead. Two authors will be adding to the story each day with their own creative spin, picking up where the previous author left off. Today I get to continue on with the story below as the mighty thirteenth contributing author (Yay 13!). I’ll also be posting another piece next week, so… stay tuned!

Read Part 13 at the blog.

I finally have my galley proofs of POSSESSION in my hot little fists. Due back April 23, so… excuse me while I’m absent.