I’m going to try to get back to regular blogs and decided hump day was the best for me to gather my thoughts and stick them on my website.  So here I am, with 15 minutes left in Wednesday, putting together my blog post.  I’m sure you can tell I was the student writing her English papers at three in the morning the day before they were due.

This is what I’m working on now, since Exodus is with the editor and won’t be back until the first of August.  It’s part one of a sci-fi trilogy that has been burning a hole in my brain for a while.  Lots of aliens, political intrigue. The main POV is a third son of the Emperor of Sol, and… well, you’ll just have to wait and see.  There are some freighters that have vanished and what happened to them is bigger than anything the various races in the Twenty Sectors have ever experienced.  Fun stuff. (Cover by Kanaxa, btw.  Isn’t it beautiful?)

Book 1 (Two Souls) should be releasing October some time, with books two and three coming out next year.  If the series does well, there might be spin-off novels on some of the other characters, or additional stories on the two main characters.

In between all that, I find myself obsessing over campers. I have this weird ritual at our county fair where I go to the RV/camper display and wander through all the models, daydreaming about running away and living out of one, off the grid, escaping my life. Then I realize that they’re really darned small, and where would I put my two giant hellhounds, and two ponies, and kids, and taxes and bills and microwavable burritos and my jumbo sized washer and dryer and the kayak I just bought…

But this past weekend I went camping with my two youngest boys.  Camping, as in TENT camping, because that’s the only kind of camping I’ve ever done in my life and the whole camper/RV thing is for wimps who can’t deal with the Real Outdoors.  The only problem is I’m now over 50, and no matter what kind of camping pad or inflatable thingamajig I put under my sleeping bag I’m still waking up every ten minutes feeling like my hip has shattered into little pieces under me.  By six AM I’ve had a total of two hours of sleep and I feel like someone drove over me with a truck.  I swear to Glom this was not the way I felt twenty years ago.  Heck, it wasn’t the way I felt two years ago.  I used to tent it All The Time. I once did a 3 day bike/camp trip on the C&O canal. I used to backpack/camp.  Just a few years ago I did a 7 day horse back riding pack-trip in the Grand Tetons.  And now I can’t manage to sleep a weekend in a tent without being ready to confess national secrets by Sunday morning.

I’m now eyeing up campers.  Mattress. Dinette. Fridge. And a toilet, because at my age, middle-of-the-night potty trips are a fact of life.

I always longed for an Airstream, or a cute refurbished Shasta. Anyone else own a camper they want to suggest I look at?  16′ or less please, because although the Beast can tow the world, I don’t want to be hauling down the highway with a Ford Excursion towing a 32′ bumper pull.