The above patio umbrella (in beloved Devils red) will soon be closed for the season! I can’t believe how fast the summer is slipping away. I haven’t accomplished even a small fraction of the things I planned to do! The heat really got to me this year. I’ve all but deserted my own backyard. The humidity is paralyzing. Lately I refuse to lift a finger anywhere if air conditioning isn’t involved.

News of Another Man’s Poison – it’s coming. The tentative release date, August 10^th, has come and gone. Any day now is all I can say. It will definitely be out by August 22^nd, as I am doing another Day in the Life guest post for Dru’s Book Musings on that date. I will have all the links here on this site, as well as links on Dru’s site if anyone cares to purchase it.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve been busy working on other things. I wish my brain could function at a faster pace, and I would love to have fingers that fly across a keyboard instead of staggering like ten drunks! As it stands, there’s another series in the works, revisions on Recurring to make the book a lot more edgy, and an extremely serious book that I have to drag, kicking and screaming, out of my past – Lesser Saints. This one is tricky. It’s not exactly a mystery. The book is about the religious restraints placed on Catholic schoolgirls growing up in the sixties, the importance of virtue and chastity even though the abuse is not the victim’s fault, four reticent classmates who make a solemn pledge to keep a deadly secret, and the ethics involved in lying to save one’s own skin. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever written, even more tough than a newspaper story I covered years ago about a brave woman who chose to have a double mastectomy as a preventative measure when first diagnosed with a cancerous lump at age 29 (that one really upset me).

I will update the exact release date of Another Man’s Poison as soon as I hear the news. Meanwhile, stay cool, enjoy what’s left of the summer, keep your patio umbrellas open and tilted, and remember to read while you’re tanning!