Except for my Six Sentence Sunday excerpts, I’ve been largely absent from my own blog this summer and early autumn. Behind the scenes, I’ve been working steadily, but little of it has shown up here, for a variety of reasons. I’m well, but caught in the hurricane of work. Some of it is writing, but most of it is revision, formatting, business planning, and of course the day job.

Here in Minnesota, the foliage along the Mississippi River bluffs is going to rust and gold, as the blue skies sharpen toward October blue and the clouds begin to take on their winter contours: lowering, amorphous, shadowed in steel-blue that threatens snow. In a week or so, I’ll begin work on the reading and character interviews for this year’s National Novel Writing Month project, Cleopatra’s Ironclads. This year’s novel will take me to sunny Alexandria, Egypt, in its glory days as a crossroads of culture and science in the century before the opening of the Common Era.

In the queue for this fall are four writer interviews:

• In the Beta Bop series, an interview with my beta reader Sparrow, a poet working in Jerusalem. This interview took place in May of this year, and is my first trans-Atlantic GChat interview. We ranged over far more topics than beta-reading. The conversation lasted five hours and I will be posting additional parts as we move into October and November.
• Wild Horses Gender Roundtable, in which TruantPony and BrainSister and I took a wild gallop through gender, biological determinism, romance tropes, and other exciting topics. I’m looking forward to editing and posting this one. The asynchronous nature of on-line chat made for a choppy transcript as three energetic and opinionated writers talked all at once.
• Writing Community interview with Becca Patterson aka Mreauow, writing buddy and also one of the three Municipal Liaisons who facilitate the creative chaos that is National Novel Writing Month in the Minnesota-Twin Cities region, one of the most active NaNoWriMo regions in the world. She talks about her own experience as a NaNo novelist, as well as the collective experience of our lively Twin Cities writing community. This interview is coming in October, in time for prospective NaNoWriMo participants to think about whether this annual event might help this year’s projects-to-be.
• Devin Harnois weighs in on publishing options in the new age of the e-book, what she looks for in a traditional publisher, and how she became an independently published writer. She provides resources for readers and writers alike who are interested in a backstage tour of the independent publishing movement, as well as the business end of publishing.

Thank you to all of my faithful readers who left comments inquiring about my health. I’m back, and looking forward to continuing the adventure with all of you!