So what has this erotic romance writer been up to lately?

©Pixelchaos/Deposit Photos

It’s been a busy few weeks. Have I mentioned I was on the conference committee for the 2017 New England Chapter RWA “Let Your Imagination Take Flight” conference? Well, I was. We held the conference April 7&8 and it went spectacularly well. Kind of hard to go wrong with Zoe York and Joanna Bourne as your keynotes and Molly O’Keefe presenting the master class, not to mention roughly 10 million* workshops. (*Poetic license. As a published poet, I’m allowed to say that.) In the midst of introducing workshop presenters, organizing a vendor fair, putting out metaphorical fires, and herding nervous authors into their agent/editor appointments, I managed to have promising appointments with Carina Press editor Stephanie Doig and agent Courtney Miller-Callihan and take part in a terrific book signing. I even managed to have a few drinks, go out to brunch on Sunday, and even write a chapter of Yield. But I came home ready to sleep for a week.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I had a bunch of Sophie Mouette items to deal with, since we’ll have a new book out in May. (More on that to come.) Sophie had a short erotica release on April 10. (And I still need to post about that. Glad I wrote this post to remind me.) I’d re-released Thrill-Kinky and Bad Kitty just before the conference and had promos to set up.

Meanwhile, I’d promised my mom I’d go visit her in central New York on Easter weekend. Mom celebrated her 84th birthday last week and has slowed down a lot. One of the things we do to help her out is bring a cooler full of homemade frozen dinners that she can just pop into the microwave. So Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week involved a lot of cooking as well as writing-related stuff, conference follow-up, and Sophie admin such as proof reviews.

The weekend with Mom was lovely and quite restful (well, except for cooking her two more freezer-friendly meals and finishing up checking another proof), but involved 5.5 hours of driving each way and sleeping poorly without the Cat-Herder and the cats. By the time I got home on Sunday, nothing much was accomplished. Oh, I tried, but my laptop–with the notes on the proof I’d done over the weekend–froze up. I got it working again today, but damn Mercury retrograde!

Did I mention it’s finally spring in New England? That means I’m planting veggies on top of everything else. I love digging in the dirt. It’s stress relief with delicious results. It’s also time sensitive in that there’s a narrow window to plant peas, spinach, lettuce, and spring onions between “too damn cold” and “too damn hot”. Of course, this window of opportunity opened on April 3.

And then there were taxes. Yes, we should have dealt with these several months ago, but we ended up scrambling. Thank goodness we’re related to our tax preparer!

From www.icanhazburger.com, although it’s been all over the web

I’m not complaining. My life is wonderful. I helped bring about a well-received conference that I managed to enjoy–no mean feat. I’m letting my old Samhain titles back into the wild. I’m writing new books as myself and as Sophie. I have peas and greens coming up and will probably be harvesting asparagus by this time next week. Mmmmmmmm! (The mmms were inserted by Noodle the Cat, but it fits so I added punctuation.)

But I’m looking forward to staying close to home for a little while.

Maybe then I can focus on something that’s been elusive in all this wonderful busyness: new words.

Oh, and the proposal for the new series I came up with at the conference….