Saturday morning. The time of day with endless possibility. My office window looks out over pine trees and uneven heaps of snow. Today, I need to keep reading Awesome Author short stories. I narrowed down the second batch last weekend and will determine order of finish by tomorrow. That leaves the 15-17 year entries. I'm also working on a new adult murder mystery manuscript and am about 21,000 words in. This one has been a bit of a struggle to pull together since I haven't had much extended time to work on it. I'm promising myself three weeks in the summer to sit down and go at it every day. Working full time makes a writer's life challenging!

The new cover for In Winter's Grip arrived today. The background trees are a photo taken by my friend Frank Bowick, who has given permission to use the image. It's also the image on my website. The woman's face came from a photo shoot in Toronto. The cover will be unveiled on my website tomorrow, so stay tuned.

My multi-tasking weekend: Reading Awesome Author entries, fine-tuning my website with Guy Mercier, visiting Prime Crime to pick up some books, working on a new manuscript, cracking a novel by Lee Child and watching lots of the Olympics! I wish the weekends lasted longer than two days . . . .

The package of short stories for the Ottawa Public Library Awesome Authors contest arrived yesterday. It looks like I have a lot of reading to do - there has to be over a hundred stories! I'm looking forward to seeing what story ideas they've come up with. They are organized into three age groups between nine and seventeen year olds. Great fun.

Saturday, February 6th - my new website goes live. Thanks Jay Blackwood for all the work you did on my old site and Guy Mercier for my spanking new one!

Welcome to my first blog entry! The talented Guy Mercier has redesigned my website and set me up with this blog with the intention of sharing the road to publishing my first adult murder mystery. The manuscript is in my publisher's hands and we are currently settling on the cover. We had a picture that worked extremely well, but couldn't get copyright so that means a photo shoot. Not much gets done in the book world until the cover is ready to go. It's the anchor for marketing and publicity, which starts months before the manuscript goes to print.