Monthly Archives: July 2016

Seasons follow each other in an imperfect flow. Winter’s freezing, Spring’s fresh awakenings, Summer. Oh yes, Summertime, and here is my favorite song for the season

What could be more appropriate, more moody, and more in keeping with the slow, heated beat of the summer. Here in New Mexico we can have such a HOT summer and the humidity can get up to (WOW) fifty percent. Okay, during monsoon even higher but that’s bad enough don’t you think?

Growing seasons are so different here from Southern California, where you could push a stick into the ground and, like Jack’s beanstalks, produce a massive bush with little effort. Instead we choose, we nurture, we water and fuss and hope. And if we are successful, if we manage to defeat drought and grasshoppers and wind, we have a garden.

At least for a few brief months. I’m experimenting with earth boxes for my zucchini and hoping for the best. These should help with the hot dry days.

Summer means leisure and lazy, unless you have somewhere vital to be in the middle of the day. We can take the wiser approach of staying in with fans blowing during the day.

The payoff is, of course, spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Such as this one

For such a sight, I can deal with gardening difficulties!

In approximately sixty sunsets, A Question of Faith, the next Stormhaven Love Story, will release for your reading pleasure. And if I can work through the hot days, A Question of Trust will follow close behind. Faith is Ty’s story, and he’s matched with the perfect partner. I’ll be sharing bits with you soon.

Also I think it would be fun to share authors you might not meet otherwise. What do you think?

Remember this one? What fun to hear it again:

For love, my late husband Tom put up with my insecurities and seriously poor house keeping. Not to mention my obsession with all things Saluki and my odd bursts of excitement when a story took off in me and I frantically tap tap tapped on the keyboard all hours of the night.

For love, I stayed by him throughout the fears, the diagnosis, the surgery, the rehab, then the home hospice. What else would I do? Vows meant something to both of us.

On a lighter note, for love of dogs and my dog friends I find myself going to meetings, managing shows, working on newsletters.

Or is that a sick obsession? Hmmm

Seriously, a pizza crust made from chicken and cheese. Period. Is it good? Well, yes. Is it as good as a premier high gluten yeast crust smothered in olive oil?

Well, no. Nothing I’ve found so far is that good. But this really is pretty darned good and it is MUCH easier.Not to mention friendlier in the carb department. When I first heard this idea, I looked around for recipes, most of which seemed to require raw chicken. Since I’d been to Costco, I used canned chicken, the chunked kind, and grated Mozzarella cheese. Big cans, let’s see 12.5 ounces. Here’s the basic recipe, from Southern Yankee

Ingredients:

1 Pound of Ground Chicken

1/4 Cup Parmesan Cheese

1/4 Cup Shredded Mozzarella Cheese

1/4 Teaspoon Black Pepper

1 Teaspoon Italian Seasoning Blend (or just a bit of Oregano and Basil)

You mix all this together, spread it out, cook. Then add your toppings. Go crazy here!

How did I change this? You know me too well. I mostly added more cheese,  plus using the cooked chicken since ground raw chicken is not only difficult to find here, it’s also kind of yucky. I’ve found if I use extra olive oil I can almost fool myself into thinking ‘real’ pizza.

Let’s face it, seriously. We each have to make our own decisions on what adjustments we want to make with our lives once we have set ourselves onto the path of less carbohydrates. For me, this is a really good VERY easy pizza crust which makes me happy. It looks like this before you add toppings:Pretty much pizza-ish. It keeps well in the fridge so I can have breakfast pizza.

You haven’t had pizza for breakfast? Seriously?

Hmmm.

We can still be friends. I guess.

Of course we can.

Overall, weather in my part of New Mexico is acceptable to fabulous. Generally we might have a week of too hot. No better way to say this than with music. But which one is better? I’ll let you decide:

There’s this one…

OMG the energy…that’s enough to exhaust me, just watching. I had to watch that footwork over and over.

And this one, from a revival of Kiss Me Kate…the first clip I found was from the Tony awards. This one is longer and even more exhausting!

I can’t choose, but I know for sure it’s too hot to do much but watch right now. I’m off to coach conformation handling in a while, but the facility is air conditioned. Phew! When I get back I’ll be working on A Question of Trust. Somehow I decided my hero was going to be kidnapped dropped in the desert. I wonder where that idea came from?

I remember this song from the first time I saw South Pacific. My memory brings up the singer as a woman. My search kept bringing up male singers. Such as this, from Broadway:

Then I found this poignant rendition, by Mandy Patinkin, and I was…charmed? Yes, charmed, through my tears. My earlier memories led me to believe understanding the origins of prejudice would eliminate it. How naive I was.

Is prejudice taught? Is it ingrained in all of us? We who study family lines, either human or animal, know there is a balance between nature (inheritance) and nurture (environment). A delicate balance, all too easily tipped. What tips the balance? What combination of fear and anger and some other nebulous excuse causes such violent outbreaks?

I don’t know, all I can do is ignore any feelings of prejudice, and try hard to be kind.

In the past I’ve mentioned the inspiration behind My Killer My Love (my war with snails in a Southern California garden.) Teach Me To Forget evolved from sleeping with my husband in the overhead of a motor home while rain pattered on the roof. This particular motor home was a rental, which led eventually to purchasing our own. But that’s another, ongoing story!

A Question of Honor blended many threads, including my concern for war veterans who aren’t quite ready to move back into society and all too often are not given the life skills to make that happen easily. As well as my love for New Mexico, long before I moved here. But the initial story line of a woman who left her husband, taking his truck, trailer, and horse, came about because of…you guessed it…a dog. I actually moved across the country to find this dog, and when we finally met, he’d been the loser in a divorce. Eventually the dog came to live with me for the last six years of his life…winner on all fronts.

I asked myself: what if it was a horse, and not a dog? What if the woman in question, Lana, disappears with the horse, then calls her sister, Sydney Castleton, to help? Sydney takes over the horse (Mosby)’s care until Devin Starke flies in to help her return Mosby to his partner, Ty Randolph. In this book Lana was kind of a footnote. Maybe a bit of window dressing. Certainly not a fully realized character in her own right. Until I came to the end of the story, and I began to ask myself: Why? Why would someone who married Ty Randolph (a highly intelligent person) do something so…detestable? Lana is mentioned during the suspense resolution, but the question stayed with me.

A Question of Faith touches on this conundrum while bringing together Ty Randolph and Rosalind Summerton, who has her own mysteries to solve. Into the middle of the book walks a wounded veteran, obviously in need of his own story, and more of Lana’s story came to fill in those empty spaces. A Question of Trust is seeping out of my fingers and becoming the third Stormhaven story.

A Question of Honor starts at the Long Beach, California, airport, when Devin comes off the plane to meet Sydney, starting an adventure that will change both their lives:

She knew that walk. With a slight hesitation in one leg, he prowled like a wounded predator, conditioned to succeed against the most dangerous game of all. Even limping, his reactions would be instantaneous, his balance superior. By itself, his body would be a weapon. He’d be the best man to have on your side in a battle. After the battle, he’d unwind with a drink and a woman. The drink would be strong and straight. The woman would be bosomy and not too bright. He’d very likely spend more time with the drink than the woman.
Sydney Castleton let her mind drift through bitter thoughts and buried memories as she waited for the man who proclaimed danger with every step he took toward her. He was no different from the men who’d worked with her father: soldiers of fortune, whose luck could run out at any minute.
What trouble had her sister gotten her into this time?

You can find A Question of Honor at most major e-book sellers, or at Black Opal Books

New Mexico sunset