A January Surprise

Oh wonder! Oh Joy! I have the Starbird Ridge Snowflake in my possession--a gift from my sneaky Sis Nancy and her husband Mike. I so wanted it as a memory of my four years Starbird Ridge fiction series with Pockets Magazine. And once my dear family found out about the Robert's Snow auction to benefit cancer research, they decided to bid on the Starbird Ridge snowflake for me for a belated Christmas gift. There was a lot of bidding going on--thanks to all of you who decided to support this worthy cause.

But my sister persisted, and on January 4th, sitting at their kitchen table in Tucson, I opened the surprise gift and rejoiced. Anni Matsick, my illustrator for the series did such an amazing job of capturing the other Annie (Sammy's youngest sister in the story series.) And Haggis, the family Scottish Terrier! He makes me smile each time I look at Anni's rendering of him. The snowflake will soon be ensconced in a glass case and put in a place of honor here in my office, not only a joyful memory, but also an encouragement as I write, to bring to life my characters for each story, so that readers may have that jolt of recognition when they read, knowing this is a worthy character, real in the best sense of the word.

And now on to the New Year--so many books to be written. I'll be sharing that process with you in its many aspects--from simmering the "soup" of my daily life and skimming off the ideas, to applying writerly glue to the seat of my pants to stay attached to my computer chair each day, to weeding my writing garden as I revise.

There now, I've mixed three metaphors all in one sentence, just to make you all smile.
May this be a year of smiles for all of us.