Vacation holidays are great!  We all need time to recharge our batteries--and that's what I've been doing for the past month.  We left home on May 21, arriving in London on May 22.  Immediately after landing we fled to one of our treasured places, Cornwall, where we spent five glorious days over the Bank Holiday weekend (no rain!) touring some of the area's best attractions--the Eden Project, the Lost Gardens of Heligan, St. Michael's Mount, and magnificent Lanhydrock House.  Back in London we visited some favorite museum's and took in a couple of great plays including seeing Helen Mirren's outstanding performance in "The Audience".  After visiting friends in Bognor Regis for the weekend we flew to Scotland for six days of touring through the Highlands, a place we can't get enough of and find ourselves returning to every few years.  Then it was back south, stopping for three nights in Newcastle to visit with my Godson, Henry, and his family.  He's now almost eleven and becoming quite a delightful young man.  While there, he and I were able to set up protocols for how we can better stay in touch via the various social media applications while separated by 8,000 miles of geography.  He's already so much better at that than I am.

From Newcastle it was back to London for a couple of more days, including dinner at Xi'an (located in Orpington), our favorite restaurant in England.  Then it was home to Seattle and Whidbey Island where the reality of getting my next novel, Falling from the Sky, through the last throes of the editing process stared me right in the face, that is it did when my jet-lagged body was able to concentrate. After almost a week dealing with that phenomenon and all the other things demanding attention after twenty-five days away from home, I finally am able to sit at the keyboard, string words together and begin to focus on my writing.  I'm hoping to have FFTS ready for publication by the last week of July.  Spurring me on is the fact that my incredible book cover designer, Desiree Kern, has completed her work and now I have to get something ready to go with her beautiful endeavor.

I'll keep you up-to-date on my progress and in my next blog posting will begin to tell you a bit about FFTS and the characters you'll find behind the cover.