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I’ve gone from 80s & a warm Caribbean Sea to below freezing and snow, from tropics, to the buckle of the Bible Belt, to the East coast, back to the Bible Belt, to upper west coast, all within two weeks.  We’ve been home about 96 hours in those last two weeks. Jon has been with me throughout & we were even able to keep the dogs & our other significant others, Spike & Genevieve, with us until this last trip to Seattle, which helped a great deal to make everywhere we went feel like home. But now with them back in St. Louis with the dogs, I am feeling more cut adrift.

This year is an experiment in travel, in saying yes to adventure & new places. Its our daughter Trinity’s first year in college, in the dorms, so Jon & I decided we’d travel like we’d been wanting to but couldn’t because of being tied to her school schedule. It’s an experiment & Spike & Genevieve have agreed to try it with us for this first year of cohabitation. Thanks to technology their jobs can travel with them and it’s a telecommuting fest.  We also decided to do a major remodel in the St. Louis house, because Jon & I had been planing to anyway & now the space will be our space, all four of us have picked the colors & style of everything. One of the reasons we went to the tropics for me to finish writing Dead Ice was to have a working kitchen, TV room, and living room, while the remodel happened. It’s still not done. We’ve been eating take in, in the Solarium on a table meant for leaning on in the summer, but we’ve done it cheerfully and with a lot of laughter, which bodes well for many things.

We all liked the two months in the tropics, and I may try finishing every book somewhere else from now on, because wherever I type “the end” I want to runaway from it; I seem to need a change of scenery. I think it works better wanting to run to home rather than away from it. I was so happy to walk into my office in St. Louis. It looked beautiful & sunny, surrounded by trees at the top of my three story eyrie.  I miss my ocean view terribly, but I was still very happy to be home.  Usually, I finish a book and don’t want to see the office for weeks afterward.

I’m typing this in Seattle, Washington in our room before my first panel of the day here at MythicWorlds.  It was FairieCon West once upon a time, but they’ve changed their name to reflect a more diverse myth and folklore interest.  All wee and not so wee beasties are now welcome from all walks of the between spaces, not just the wee folk of the fey.  The vendors area is fabulous here.  I’m wearing a necklace I bought yesterday from Touchstone Runes.  We have already committed much commerce! Fairecon East, that we did earlier in the year, had a fabulous vendor’s room, too.

All the huge, dark trees here in the NorthWest make me think of the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Especially the line, “The Woods are lovely dark and deep . . .” indeed they are here, so the poem’s title was more appropriate than ever.

The edits for Dead Ice come back from New York on Monday, maybe a few hours before we land in St. Louis, and we finally get home.  I’ll have a week to see what the copyeditor, and my editor, Susan, have noted in the book.  I know that I’m already reaching out to my police friends that help me keep my mistakes to a minimum, because I know I didn’t do one of the police scenes exactly right.  I’m just not sure what I missed, but I finished the scene and then had that niggling feeling I’d dropped a ball along the way.  That’s what edits are for, to catch the dropped balls and put them back into play

Genevieve has sent us pictures from St. Louis of the fish pond frozen so solid the big dogs can walk across it.  Jon says, he’s never seen a pond frozen that hard there in twenty years, and he’s lived in Missouri all his life.  We keep telling her and Spike that it’s never this cold in St. Louis, I think they’ve stopped believing us. *cross my heart* I say, and Genevieve gives me that look, you know the one, your wife/girlfriend has one, too.  The one that says, she loves you, but . . .  We’ll be home Monday and do our best to make it up to her and Spike.  We’ll find ways to keep them warm through the long winter nights, but first – edits.