Susan's February so far

February's been a busy, sometimes up, sometimes down, month for me. It started with a bang with a ski trip (with all the usual suspects) to the Mazama Ranch House in Washington's Methow Valley.

Eat...Sleep...Ski. That's a motto worth living by. Right up there with Write hard. Die free.

It was very cool--and the only opportunity I had to ski this year since, as anyone's who's been watching the Olympics can tell you, the Pacific Northwest is having an El Nino winter of higher than usual temps. My tulips are up, if not yet open, my crocus and Daphne Odora are blooming and my Thundering plum trees are about to burst into bloom. I put in some new ground cover on one of my parking strips this afternoon while my cats raced up trees and pounced on the dirt I displaced. In February. Weird.

My oldest brother broke his leg snowboarding and my husband was held up in Sakhalin, Russia, for an entire week waiting for freaking Alaska Airlines to find his duffle bag with all his tools, so he could board an 18 hour ferry to Iturup Island, get his work done and get home. (the latter hasn't happened yet)

I attended a 90th birthday party up on Whidbey Island for my sister- in-law's mother--a woman I've known since I was a kid--and got to see the new dream home it where it was held.

I received the covers for my next release: Burning Up (September) and 2 reissues: Skintight (June) and Obsessed (August)



HQN, bless em, let me make some changes to Skintight. I wish, wish, wish Kensington would let me edit Obsessed as well, as it's an early book of mine with freshman writer mistakes. I still love the characters and the story, but I've developed my craft quite a bit since then and to be able to strike out a paragraph here or a sentence there would have made the pacing soooo much tighter. But, sigh. It's not to be.

As mentioned, the soul mate's been in Russia since the 2nd, so Valentine's Day was a non-event. But my sweet baby boy took his girl and me to a restaurant called Spring Hill for dinner on the 13th. And oh my gawd their food was good. By sharing dishes we got to taste mussels and clams and pan fried trout, rolls with creamery butter and sea salt, a fuji apple salad, dinah's cheese and handmade tagliatelle with crispy pork shoulder and hen of the woods mushrooms. For dessert we shared bites of popcorn hushpuppies and blood orange sherbert. Got two words for ya, my pretties: Yum-mee. (I really like to eat. Does it show?) If you're ever in Seattle I highly recommend this restaurant. Reservations recommended.

I had a scare with my mom, who has dementia and my brothers and I have made some adjustments in her care. I think we'll be lucky if we're able to keep her in her own home beyond this year.

I've been hard at work on the beginning of Ava's story, but it's slow going. This is not exactly news, as starts are always the toughest for me--starting books, starting scenes or chapters. But especially the book itself. I always have to pick my way through several chapters before I begin to figure out what the heck I'm doing.

It now has a title, though. Drum roll, please, maestro. Rat-atat-atat-atat! "LAdies and GENTlemen! Please direct your attention to the book in ring three! Officially Announcing........rat-atat-atat-atat!.... Playing Dirty! (too much build up, anticlimactic pay-off?)

As you can probably tell, I've been on my own quite a bit this month, so I tend to run on a bit. I was going to add even more, but this thing is turning into a manuscript in its own right and I gotta go catch the women's snowboard cross. So tell me, how's your February been going?