I sent out my reader e-newsletter last Monday, somewhere between three and four in the morning. I'm not sure of the exact time, since I was doing an all-nighter to finish up revisions for BREAKPOINT, High Risk #4 at the same time.
In the newsletter I bemoaned a lack of snow for the past six years, but did include a photo of one puny snow day -- which lasted about all of thirty minutes -- we'd had. The same one I'd put here on my blog earlier.
I'd closed the plantation shutters on my office windows, and even if they had been open, it was dark outside, so I probably wouldn't have noticed that while I was finishing up Dallas O'Halloran's story, it had begun to snow. I stumbled to bed around four-thirty, and when I got up at nine, white stuff was starting to stick to the ground. And it just kept coming, all day.
So, here are the pictures I would've shared in my newsletter, if I'd only waited a few more hours. The one at the top, with my winter house flag, shows my forsythias in the background. I'd been staring at them all week willing them to bloom. Obviously it's going to take a bit longer for their yellow spring show.
And here's Shadow, aka the Abominable Snow Dog. By April that rose bush he's trudging by is going to be gorgeous, but I also like it this way.
Next are Toby and Shadow, training for the Iditarod. 
This time of year our pansies are usually in full bloom on our deck, offering winter color. Last Monday the color was white. The bushes in the background are red bamboo. In the summer they're covered with leaves, and, along with the butterfly bushes, turn the deck into a secret garden, but in winter they turn a deep scarlet which adds more winter color.
Now that we've had the winter I was yearning for, I'm ready for spring. It was sixty-four degrees and sunny yesterday, the Bradford pear trees are starting to bud, and I have to keep reminding myself that if I don't wait until after Easter before planting all those hundreds of heirloom flower seeds I bought last fall, I'm going to risk them being hit by a late frost.
My sweetie and I grew up in ranching/timber country in the Cascade Mountains on the Oregon/California border, where it could -- and once did -- snow on the 4th of July. East Tennessee isn't anything like that, but the one thing both places have in common is that if you don't like the weather. . . wait ten minutes. Phoenix, which I never got used to, was just the opposite -- hot, pizza oven hot, and welcome to hell.
Meanwhile, since I can't garden, I guess I'll just start on High Risk #5, which is going to be Navy SEAL Sax Doucett's story. I do so enjoy passing a good time with those hottie Cajun heroes, so I'm really looking forward to this one!!
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2 comments:
Thanks for posting the beautiful pics! I'm so homesick for snow in East Tennessee!
How do you move so quickly from one story to the next? I always need a little time to let the last story fade away. Or had Sax already begun to exert a siren's call? :-)
Hey Anna,
Glad you enjoyed the pictures!
I usually start seriously thinking about the next book toward the last third of the book I'm working on. I think I developed that habit in my category days when I'd write, on average, five to six books a year.
These are a bit easier because I'd first conceived the High Risk books as a trilogy, so I knew that each of the three books would continue the day of the failed mission through each hero's eyes. (All in backstory, though.)
Then, when NAL wanted more books, since I'd already put more guys in that helicopter in book #1, I continued to show them moving past that disastrous day.
In Breakpoint, Air Force Combat controller, Dallas, who appeared in book #2 and #3, is teamed up to investigate murders on an aircraft carrior with the JAG officer who'd been assigned to investigate the members of the SEAL team who'd been with him on that mission for a court martial. Obviously they have to get past the fact that she'd been trying to send his "brothers" to prison in order to work together. :)
The most difficult thing was to decide which guy's story to tell next, but after much waffling, and a lot of input from readers, I went with Sax, who's pretty much NOT dealt with the failed mission by retreating from life more than the others.
I chose him mostly because I'm homesick for the PNW and wanted to put a story in an isolated town on Washington's Olympic Penninsula coast, which is ruggedly beautiful, way rainy and foggy, and definitely the place to go if you're looking to get away from the world!
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