Weekend hiatus

I will be back on Monday with the continuation of my Criminal Thinking series. If you haven't read it yet, it's information I gleaned from a fascinating presentation given by David Malinowski of the Florida Department of Corrections.


Meanwhile, you can check my website and enter my July contest for some South African souvenirs.



Or visit my Red Room page.



Or read a good book. I have a few of mine I could suggest. First chapters are all available on my website.

A one week feature spot at The Red Room

What I'm reading: Tempting Evil, by Allison Brennan

What I'm working on: contest entry evaluations.

Last night I received an email from The Red Room that they wanted to feature Finding Sarah's review from Romance Reader at Heart on their "Best Review" slot on their home page. It's up for a week, and I hope you'll take a peek, and browse the site. And while you're there, pop over to my author page and poke around.

That being said, in accordance with my usual collisions with Murphy's Law, the Red Room site is having trouble this morning and is very slow to load. I hope it'll be fixed soon, or that you're very patient. I'm assuming they'll fix it before my week of 'fame and glory' is over.

Same thing happened when I got the Romance Studio review for Hidden Fire -- that's when they were changing servers, so anyone looking for me (or anyone else on that site, to be fair), got a 'page not found' error.

Today, officially, I'm "retired" from my day job. I emailed my final invoice to the outgoing president,, he approved it, and told the treasurer to cut my check.

I spent half of yesterday getting the membership roster in the format the publisher wants it to take over membership duties, and they said it looked good. I killed any links to me on the website.

I've packed up the postage meter, filled three large storage boxes with binders, files, and goodness-knows-what-else to be placed in storage. All my questions about what to keep and what to trash went unanswered, so everything will be crammed in that 5x5 room. I wonder what will happen when they say they need something. I mean, I don't work for them, right? So what makes them think I'll go back and find what they want? I asked them to whom I should send the keys. Haven't heard back on that one.

I've tried to get the incoming president to give me a forwarding address for the local PO Box. No response on that one, either. Why would he think I'm going to drive to the Post Office, check the box, and mail the contents to the new staff? There's no "office" -- the board is made up of people from all over the planet.

Meanwhile, I have space in my office that can be filled with writing stuff. And I have a LOT of writing stuff.

Please drop by

I'm being 'lazy' today. Yesterday, the a/c was defunct at the Y. It had died relatively recently, so the fitness room wasn't too bad, but I was there by 7:15 am. I had no desire to deal with the conditions if they hadn't fixed it yet, since it was over 90 yesterday, and things don't cool off -- not when it's still 90 at 9 PM. I did call to see if they'd fixed it, but the line was busy for over half an hour, so I opted to skip it. Regrets? Only that I wanted to use the time to read without guilt. And, I've been vegging to Wimbledon.

Writing for a small press, and not having another release until December, keeping my name visible is a major but necessary time suck. One of my publishers pointed out a new writing community site, and although I didn't investigate too deeply, it's free, and Susan Wiggs and Amy Tan had pages, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I now have an author page at The Red Room. Please drop by and check it out. Let me know how I can improve it. I'm still trying to decide if I want to get a video clip up there. Right now, they default the page to whatever they're pushing. I can't say I like the idea of someone else's choices being on 'my' page, but the thought of doing -- or even finding -- a suitable video is something I don't want to deal with right now.