Back Field not in Motion

This has been a slower moving kind of week for me. I was baking a carrot cake for Sunday dinner with family when I felt a pain in my lower back. By the time we sat down to eat, well, I was having trouble sitting. The body is an odd machine sometimes. When you have a sore back, you realize how fragile and intricate its workings. As a result of several days of low-grade pain, I wasn't able to sit and work at the computer as usual so a forced break from writing. Maybe, this is all for the good - a stepping back to approach the manuscript with renewed energy. I could even create a character with back pain at some point . . . no experience is ever a complete waste.

The Q and A with British blogger Susan was published on her site The Book Trail on Thursday. Susan's logo is "Discovering the World One Book at a Time". A very informative site for readers if you have a chance to check it out. Also cool to have a reviewer blogging about my books in Britain, a hotbed of crime fiction . . . think Scotland Yard, MI5, Jack the Ripper, the moors, fog and mist . . .

So this week, I will try to complete the study questions for The Hard Fall and submit them to the publisher for review. I'm also going to work on the next chapter of the manuscript I'm plugging away on - now at 13,000 words and aiming for 80,000. The adult literacy event with Alan Cumyn is Tuesday morning. I'll let you know how this goes next week.

I was typing something on my computer this past week and hit the wrong key. A box popped up telling me how to save a screen shot to a program called Dropbox, which my video friend had me upload a few years ago so that he could send me a video that he was making of my book launch. (A great memory since the bookstore is now a restaurant called The Flying Banzini) If you are like me, you have all these software programs - all this fire power - and no real knowledge of how to use it or even a grasp of what is possible. So if you click on the image below, you'll see a jpeg of the flyer Dundurn sent me this week for the March 1 launch of Cold Mourning.

As I look at the clock, I realize that I'm off to another slow start today. My back is better but a bit tender and achy so I'm now heading into the hot shower to get it mobile. Friends have called this a 'baking injury'. No real glory in that, but at least the carrot cake was good.