As many of you may already know, I am a summer person. I often comment that I never complain about the heat in the summer because I reserve the right to complain about the cold in the winter. The heat gets a bit uncomfortable at times, but it never bothers me much, as I much prefer being too warm than too cold, which is why I really despise winters. Makes you wonder why I live in the frozen north, where we often joked we have two seasons–winter, and construction.

This year has been especially weird because of a powerful El nino weather pattern, resulting in a warm and dry winter here in the north. Of course, that ended in the beginning of March when we started getting heavy snowfall, which has continued to this day in abnormal amounts of rain. We certainly paid for our nice winter with a spring that has been much less than optimal. But hope springs eternal (pardon the pun), and it looks like we’re heading toward better, more seasonal summer weather. Except for the rain storm that is about to hit us bringing about 6 inches of rain in the next day or so. Sometimes you just cannot win for losing.

My grousing about the weather aside, summer has long been a time for me to get far more done than I can usually do. The reason is simple: my wife and daughter spend almost all summer in Japan visiting her family, and as a result, I do not have trips to volleyball, shopping (my wife is a window shopper), cooking dinner and cleaning after, and all the attendant concerns that come with having a family. My older sons do not go anymore so I share a house with them, but it is a little different. I buy the food and tell them that they can make their own dinner while I concentrate on other things. The instruction to them to share in the cleaning does not work nearly so well as I might wish, but I suppose that is to be expected. Either way, the result is that I end up with a lot more time on my hands than at any other time in the year.

I have been talking about trying to make progress on other projects for some time now, and though I have done some work, it has been slow going. I am hoping this summer will be a time that I can finally bust out and get some of my other work done so that I might eventually break into some other genres. Do not misunderstand me–I love writing Pride and Prejudice and have a blast coming up with new story ideas, and I will continue to write them. At times, however, I feel I have grown stale always writing the same thing. I would like to change things up a bit and write some other things, keeping myself fresh in the space I have been writing in for many years. Outlining Pride and Prejudice variations I feel is easy, relatively speaking, and some of these other ideas I would like to develop have proven more difficult to figure out. I hope I have the time and the inspiration to make some progress. The image to the left is the last book in the fantasy set I am writing with Lelia, which has unfortunately stalled due to some real life busyness that has entered her life. Hopefully we can get back to it in the next few months.

For the moment, I have several novels that are in the works and on the verge of being published, and several audiobook releases scheduled. In my last post I spoke of Four Days at Netherfield which is on schedule to be published on July 11 as planned. I have sold the audiobook rights to that work, but the audiobook publication will come several months down the road. In August, the long-anticipated (at least by me) Saving Anne de Bourgh is set for release in physical, eBook, and audiobook formats, and in the fall I have two more of my older works also coming out in audiobook. Then early next year another pair of older books will find their way into audiobook format. So lots coming. I will post cover reveals for the two that I listed when I have them, likely in the next week or two.

Hopefully I can post an update about how my other projects are coming, so stay tuned!