1500-Mile Road Trip and Working on the Cover for the Next Book

It's January 3 and this is my first blog of 2009. Was a good start to the new year, all in all. We had a safe and fine time driving around the South visiting family and friends--Eastern Shore to Atlanta to the Blue Ridge mountains and then back to the Eastern Shore, some 1500 miles in the new Prius. By the way, the Prius is a great cruising car--the great gas mileage claims (44 to 50 mpg) hold up as advertised and the car can go down the road at 80 mph without any problems (Terry says she was doing 90 while I was napping-I don't want to hear about it). Handles well and is a comfortable ride. Don't listen to claims its a wussmobile.

This is a picture of a draft of the cover for Book II of the Eye of the Stallion trilogy. I've been communicating with my publisher and, after a year and a half of sitting on the manuscript, they are going to bring it out this spring. Book II is a continuation of Book I--sort of. Continuation when you consider that the Space-Time Continuum proceeds in circles and my characters have been around a few times--okay, more than a few times. Sonoria and Dag-gar are together, again and finally, and find themselves fighting an intransigent evil unleashed on the world by their own inability to get along. Shame on them--but discord in the circle of love inevitably leads to discord in the Circle of Time and they are small gods after all. They should know better. And Scraps comes back as a funky wizard-type guy and the Ancient Boy is there, too.

Weather? I'm enjoying the mild challenges of winter on the Eastern Shore--cold one day, spring-like the next. It's a taste of winter without the evil bite we got in New England. We had a little snow yesterday--just a flurry and that was just enough.

My siblings and I just inherited our parents house. I'll need to drive to New England next month and help sort things out. Looks like I'll get to experience a Massachusetts winter after all.