I’ve been pretty much absent from the usual cyber places lately—Twitter, Facebook, my blog, ect. It’s funny to think of the Internet as a “place,” but it kind of is. I disappeared when I was fighting breast cancer and just sort of never came back (I’m totally fine. Reconstruction at the end of September!).

I mostly took the summer off. My daughter only did a couple days of camp a week. The rest of the time was summer figure skating training, so I was heavily involved with her stuff. Also, I just needed some time off. I needed to relax with coffee in the mornings, spend time in my garden, meet up with friends. That sort of thing. I needed no stress, no deadlines, no “shoulds,” no “oughts,” and no word count goals. I needed to let writing go so I could find it again.

Writers need to be careful not to turn the thing they love into something they resent. I never want writing to feel like my old cubicle job. If it feels like that, I’ll quit. And there’s nothing like cancer to put life into perspective for you.

But I haven’t quit writing, and I have found my love of it renewed. I’m back to word count goals now…and I want them. I’m well into the third novella in the Mates of the Lycaon series and I’m really enjoying the world and characters.

Other than ferrying my daughter to the ice rink and back, the summer was filled with raising Monarch butterflies (give me a few minutes and I’ll bore you to tears about their decreased numbers due to pesticides killing off all the milkweed….), my organic garden, and chicken raising.

Chicken raising! OMG, what was I thinking? Well, I know what I was thinking—we have the space, I have the time….free range eggs!!! They’re a lot of work, though, those free range eggs.

Right now I have three bunches of chickens. The first bunch is three young pullets that just started laying (first pic is of Juliette, Claudia and Priscilla).

The second bunch is made up of nine week old Rhode Island Reds (second pic). Unfortunately, they are mostly turning out to be roosters. (If a farmer ever tells you he can sex a week old chick by looking at their wings, run away.)

The third group is only two weeks old and will be in the brooder for awhile (third pic…cute, right?). Eventually I’ll get all the groups grown up and integrated, though most of the roosters are going to have to go.