Hiya! I know,  it's been a while since I've written here.There are reasons! Since coming home from ConcCoction I've been BUSY. Focused. Working hard on revisions to Sharp Edge of Yesterday and the new book/new series Ghost Town......Yeah, okay, so I've been distracted by Dark Life Things (tm) and reading a bunch and also I went on a 7-day cruise that was scheduled before the DLT meteorite crashed into the roof of Chez Herkes (metaphorically speaking. We are well. All is well. It's all resolved, just sad, and...I'll blog about it eventually.)I realized while staring at the amazing blue of the Caribbean waters that Spouseman & I hadn't had a recreation-only vacation in three full years. Cons, yes, but those are fun work. Family visits, yes, but those are...family fun. This was an actual getaway.Now I'm back  and feeling re-energized, with 76k words of Ghost Town and 2  new scenes of Sharp Edge under my belt. (amazing how much writing time is freed up when I don't have to think about shopping, or meal planning, organizing, scheduling, or cleaning...and I don't mean the doing of those things necessarily, it's the *thinking about* them that I find creatively exhausting. )ANYway. I'm filing the experience under "Holy wow, I never expected to get to do this in my life, but geez, it was fun!" Someday I will get around to sharing cruise pictures for vicarious travel enjoyment, but it will not be this day.Please enjoy this picture of  Spouseman & my favorite wedding present. Not the most needed/practical one, nor the one we used most right after the wedding (the bath towels gifted to us by one of my dorm mates hold that place of honor) but it's the gift we hold dearest, going on 33 years post-ceremony.Yes, a kind woman from my church congregation hand-sewed it and gifted us with a quilted stuffed animal. (St. Paul's Episcopal church in Richmond Indiana. Altar Guild, represent!)The toy came with a card and some cash (which helped pay our rent in that first lean year of our first scrappy decade) and in the card was written the most important marriage advice we received, hands-down:

"Always keep a little whimsy in your life." 

We're still plugging along, me & Spouseman, and we still have Kitty to remind us that whimsy makes the world a better place.

That's all the all for now.