Jan­u­ary is fly­ing by. I guess that’s good, I can’t wait for warmer weath­er. I can’t com­plain too much though, this win­ter has been mild for the most part knock on wood Also, base­ball sea­son is com­ing up! I know you’re all as excit­ed as I am about this. I’ve got a Swedish exchange stu­dent liv­ing at my house who has (get this) nev­er seen a base­ball game. Does­n’t that just hurt your heart? Don’t wor­ry, I’m tak­ing care of the situation.

Favorite Song of the Week ~ Etta James passed away ear­ly Fri­day morn­ing. She will be missed. Here is the song that made her famous: At Last:

Work in Progress News ~ Still chug­ging away on Dean’s sto­ry. Book two in the Earth Scents series. I had a great name for my hero, but now I can’t use it. Lots of rea­sons why. I’m blog­ging at RomanceWrit­ers­Be­hav­ing­Bad­ly on Mon­day 1/23/12. You can help me out with my angst over there.

Indus­try News ~ Besides the big Apple announce­ment regard­ing a user friend­ly inter­face to upload ebooks to iTunes (which looks to be for text­books, not fic­tion) the only news I have to share is that the big Print On Demand (POD) pub­lish­er Cre­ate­space (aka Ama­zon’s POD wing) did some tweak­ing on their end. This makes paper­back books sold through them earn a lot more roy­al­ty! I cel­e­brat­ed by low­er­ing the retail of all my paper­back books some by almost three dol­lars! Plus, over at Dark Moun­tain Books, we’re offer­ing a “buy the paper­back, get the ebook free” pro­mo­tion. It’s like buy­ing a DVD and get­ting the dig­i­tal for­mat for your portable device!

Search Term of the week aka How Peo­ple Found My Web­sites ~  I’m shar­ing three this week. To this person: “dowload tes­sa pride on to your nook for free”, I wish you would­n’t (sub­text implied) And ‘down­load’ has an N in it. To this per­son: “earth scents 2 brynn” I’m work­ing on it! See above. To the two peo­ple who found my site by search­ing for “fun con­tem­po­rary romance authors”, I love you.

What I’m read­ing ~ I read a very good one this week. And again, it’s book two of a series, and I did­n’t real­ize it until halfway through this one. It’s okay, it stands alone just fine. This is an old­er man younger man romance, and K.A. Mitchell is quick­ly becom­ing one of my favorite authors. Here’s a snip­pet that I just have to share. I don’t even need to set this up:

“C’mon. I’ll take you down­town for some pie.”

“How het­ero­nor­ma­tive”

“I can’t have pie on Thanks­giv­ing because straight peo­ple do?

“Fine. Have pie. I want crepes.”

Any­one who can give her char­ac­ters per­son­al­i­ty through four sen­tences is my kind of author.  I’m off to read book one now…

Hero Quote ~ From the unnamed hero in the unnamed work in progress men­tioned above:

 “I’m not pout­ing about being sin­gle. I like being sin­gle. I just don’t want to see your lovey dovey crap. You’re my lit­tle sis­ter for Christ’s sake.”

Okay boys and girls. I’m off to do wild author things (Twit­ter) so you all play nice. Have a great weekend!