I was supposed to take yesterday off. I have been feeling the need for a "Mental Health Day." A day to recharge my drained creative batteries. The plan was to drive to Ohio's Amish Country for lunch with our cousins. Do some shopping. Enjoy a quiet day off-grid.  Then I saw the weather forecast. Ninety-plus degrees combined with high humidity is not a pleasant setting for walking from shop to shop. We postponed our lunch date to a yet-to-be-determined point on the summer calendar. Besides, we have dense smoke from the Canadian wildfires and are under a stage red air quality alert, which occasionally wanders into code purple. It's bad, but I won't complain. How horrible must it be in Canada??? Stay safe, my northern friends. All of this goes to illustrate how plans change. Sometimes the change is sudden and unexpected as when Kensi Kitty became deathly ill just prior to the Pennwriters Conference. My husband was also sick, but less so. I made a quick decision to ca...

Following up on my previous post, I completed the three chapters and synopsis for another new series proposal and just clicked "send" so it will be waiting in my agent's inbox when she returns to her office tomorrow.  Saturday, I took another mental health day. I can't even disguise it as a research trip. My husband and I took a day trip east to the Laurel Highlands' Amish Country.  We did a little shopping and then turned south into Maryland. We had lunch at Penn Alps and then wandered around a while. It was odd that this is a place I had visited once long ago for a quilt show, but he had never been there. Often, we think there isn't any place within a two-hour drive we haven't seen. More than once.  We thought wrong.  After a full day of seeing new sights, we came home exhausted but relaxed.  Now I'm buckling down to finish another round of revisions on the next Zoe Chambers mystery. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm noodling over the plo...