My trip to Paris, the UK and Ireland was a great success. Both personally and professionally. It rests in my memory as various kinds of touchstone shimmers that my heart shimmers along with whenever I remember. I met wonderful people was received generously and took in the landscapes with great delight and unfortunately brevity. I am usually glad to leave London but this time I only wanted more and more. Upon returning winter came fairly quickly and hard and hasn't let up ever since so I definitely had a difficult adjustment. Which continues. But winter is also the time of getting down to work. And that's what I'm doing. I am working on Second Kiss, book 2 of my Spell Crossed fantasy series. I have in the hand an advance copy of The Paper Sword book 1 of the series and it looks great. After almost a decade of work it's good to see this long time dream get reified. There's been some very good reviews on net galley of the PDF version of the novel and I'll have copies of the real thing on July 7 3 days before my birthday. The official release date is the end of July. The work is going well—which is to say consistently. I'm trying to keep to a reasonable word count on the novel and that was a good enough reason to cut two puffy diversionary chapters near the beginning all full of exposition and new character nuances. Instead I've replaced them with some pertinent dialogue that gets over all the same plot points in a much speedier fashion and with the friendly addition of some dramatic conflict. Meanwhile I'm trying to earn my living. The grant I thought I'd get I didn't get. I thought I was much thicker skinned than this but I confess that it smacked me down for a few days. Oh well, those are the hazards of a Canadian author's life. In the long view I'm glad to get any grants at all of course. I'm pleased with the excitement about the book so far and I am excited with the energy and imagination of the sequel. And perhaps particularly with my full sense of the characters and of how much that is what determines the action of the story. I'd like to get in here and blog a little more often than I have been. So if you get a chance—do encourage me. And maybe I'll post a few juicy sections for brief online hits of what's to come.—oh, and I almost forgot my collection of children's poems, Rosa Rose, got a Silver Moonbeam award in the US. And I did an interview recently with Shelagh Rogers. on the CBC. I'll let you know when they're going to play it. Also Jaymz Bee who works at the Jazz FM station in Toronto recited the poem Rosa Rose on Rosa Parks's birthday and a number of people called in to say they liked it and the station boss was also very pleased.