Come visit me on Fatal Foodies, with a special guest!

Nadia Gordon, author of the Sunny McCoskey mysteries, is my guest on Fatal Foodies today. Stop by and say hello!

And don’t forget, Wednesday is Ravenous Romance Day on Unbound, with the lovely Sephera Giron!  I’ll post a reminder and the direct link beforehand, but add it to your calendars!

Other news, Mugatu was adopted this Saturday by a very lovely woman who lives nearby and has three other cats to keep our little girl company.  Two more to go.  Friday is the big day to get them fixed – did I mention thank you to everyone who donated?

Thank you!     

Waste Not…

This post was originally written for a Summer Blog Party that fell through due to illness.  I hate to waste it… so here ya go!

I used to think of summer as vacation, pure and simple.  The school year would end and three glorious months of unstructured time stretched out before me.  We lived in San Diego, so I spent a lot of time playing in the water and building sand castles. Summer meant the smell of coconut suntan lotion, and meals made up of Bugles (we’d put them on our fingers like Fu Manchu nails and then eat them off one by one), Lemon Cooler cookies, buckets of extra crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken (I refuse to call it ‘KFC’) and Shasta Tiki Punch soda.

As I grew older and realized how good a golden tan looked against white camisoles, I spent more time sunbathing. My parents built a pool in the backyard, so I’d spend hours adrift on a raft in the middle of the pool, dozing, reading romances, and daydreaming while soaking up those rays.  This was before sunbathing was declared a bad thing, of course.

When I started working, summer lost some of its glow. Mind you, I loved my first summer job at the San Diego Zoo (Food Stand Two, directly across from the shit-slinging monkeys) and the magic of volunteering as a dresser at the Old Globe Theater’s summer Shakespeare Festival in Balboa Park.  But the sense of free-floating time to follow whatever whims would hit … that was gone.

After I graduated high school (college and I had a brief fling, but it didn’t work out), summer lost all meaning beyond “Boy, it’s hot outside!”  No more gloriously aimless days thinking the world was my succulent oyster.  The future still held unlimited possibilities (as it always does when you’re under forty or so), but I missed the sense of freedom that always came with summer break.

Now?  Summer is a time of fog and cool weather in San Francisco.  I’ve gone from a perpetually golden-skinned sun worshipper to a pale Goth of my former self.  I go down to San Diego a couple times a year and enjoy the sensation of surfing in board shorts and rash guard instead of a heavy-duty wetsuit, but I’ve lost all sense of the magic of summertime.  I haven’t, however, lost all sense of a world of possibilities. If anything, passing the forty-year marker made me realize that even as you lay one dream — whether fulfilled, partially fulfilled, or unfilled — to rest, there’s always a new one to take its place. And maybe in the years to come summer will once again be a time of sun and leisure.  If not, I can still conjure the memories.  Now if I can just accept the fact I’ll never look that good in a bikini again in this lifetime…

News and Announcements!

Which I guess are sort of the same thing, but put together they look so…important!

Okay, first things first!  A relative and writing critique pal of mine, Lisa Brackmann, has sold her book Rock, Paper, Tiger, an ‘existential suspense’ novel, to Soho Press and it will be released in Spring/Summer 2010!  May I hear a WOOT and other assorted noises of celebration?  The book is set in China, a country that Lisa has spent a lot of time exploring.  Visit her blog, Paper Tiger, and read more about her adventures in China and her upcoming book! Lisa’s agent is Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown.  Who says agents don’t support and sell literary fiction? I’ve read the book in several incarnations, loved it the first time around and am happy to say it just got better and better with the subsequent drafts.  

Second, tomorrow (Wednesday the 15th) is Ravenous Romance Day on Unbound, featuring Isabel Roman, author of the historical paranormal series Dark Desires of the Druids.  Join us as Isabel talks about the suspension of disbelief!  

Other news can wait!    

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who donated to the feline cause and a lucky break with one of our local humane societies, we will be able to get all five cutie kittens spayed/neutered the end of July, which means they’ll be able to go to their adoption center up in Santa Rosa (if they’re not adopted out first, of course!).  Moxie, the mom-cat, was spayed July 2nd and is enjoying a kitten-free convalescence with M, while the five rug-rats are currently skittering around Dave’s and my guest room.  Fun to have them, but I’ll be relieved when they’re gone.  So far our permanent feline residents are handling the invasion with good humor and grace (in other words, no random peeing or destruction of clothing/books/other property).  I just don’t wanna push our luck or their patience.

So thanks, everyone!  And thanks, MY momcat for sending a check ’cause she doesn’t do that Paypal thing.  🙂

In other news, I have just been too damn tired to do much of anything in the way of posting. I believe it’s called ‘Total Burnout.’  Either that or ‘Insidious Depression.’  If the latter, I’m sure it was caused by the former.  So I’ve been taking it easy on myself, catching up on emails, and lying in the middle of the guest room bed letting kittens swarm me.  Ever been swarmed by five purring kittens, all looking for dangly bits on your clothing to attack?  I highly recommend it as a pick-me-up.  I hope to be back in full on writing mode after this weekend and just a few more nights of letting my brain rest and not forcing it to think or do anything it doesn’t feel like doing at the moment.  And lots of sleep.

I did have a flying dream last night, where everytime I started to lose the power to fly, I’d just tell myself I could do it, and WHOOSH, back up in the air I went with more control than I’ve ever had in one of my flying dreams.  Pretty sweet!