WHAT'S NEW...the wild ride

Whenever I get on the computer it seems like my website is the last place I think to visit.  Busy this past year with settling into Casa Alegre, riding my horses and writing,  the time has sure flown.  As I've been consumed with all of these things, I'm afraid I've neglected the business end of writing. While I have now finished my first thriller, Bobby Bad, I am also without an agent and need to get that taken care of before I market the book. The business stuff is never the fun part anyway.  I'm like most writers in that the magic is in the process...getting the words down as new characters take you into their worlds.   When I look back at Bobby Bad I'm still amazed at how I started out with a blank computer screen and a year and many words later  I've now met 47 new characters and committed four new murders in a world that had not existed before that first letter popped up on the screen.  How can you not love a job like that?

Now I'm halfway through my second thriller, Harvesting Ray.   Like the first, it has a fresh premise which is leading me into new areas of research, another fun part of the job.

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Have you ever marveled at how our fortunes can change in a blink of an eye?  You trip over a misplaced telephone cord and break your elbow - a perfectly good elbow until the slip, or you're minding your own business at a stoplight when someone broadsides you at 60 mph.  Those are just two of the things that happened to me last year and I suspect you've had similar milestones in your lives too. 

Then, the monsoons, which I so dearly love, cost me my beloved home of 20 years.  In late August we - along with 60 other families - were flooded out of our home in Southern Arizona.  It sounds ridiculous, I know, to be flooded in Arizona, but that's precisely what happened.

Heartbroken, we began searching for new property and discovered that the universe indeed works in mysterious ways.  We found a beautiful rammed earth, passive solar home outside of Sonoita, Arizona. Located just 40 miles from the Mexican border, we are bordered by national forest on two sides.  As I write this, my horses are grazing in a pasture outside my window, as I sit in a home built by the same man who built the chapel on our old ranch!

Work, as you might imagine, has taken a back seat to all of the flood arrangements and our subsequent move.  In a stranger-than-fiction scenario, the suspense novel I finished last summer (before the flood) was set in...Sonoita, a setting I had never chosen before.

Ah, life....

And of course in the midst of everything, Traggedy Ann, the fifth Trade Ellis book came out. 

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