News & Muse (October 2021): Throwaway Jane in Audio, A House That’s a Bit Emptier

Paisley, trying to soak up a few rays between showers.

As I write this, it’s cold and drizzly and gray outside my office window. After a months-long record dry spell in the Willamette Valley (everything climate-related seems to set a record these days, doesn’t it?), it’s nice to see the rain again. Some fall color on the trees is nice too. We got our daughter off to college a couple weeks ago (a trying all-day ordeal because of some poor planning on OSU’s part), so the house does seem quieter. Since we live just a few blocks from a 2000-student high school, however, our street is definitely bustling more than usual, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s nice to see the vast majority of kids in face-to-face school again. On the other hand … well, it was nice not to have all that traffic on our street a couple times a day during the school year.

But hey, it’s a minor inconvenience, and the way the world’s been going lately, I’ll happily endure a whole bunch of minor inconveniences if we can get some semblance of normality back again.

For those of you who love audio books (and I count myself among you!), Throwaway Jane, the first Karen Pantelli book, is now available in audio. You can find it at both Audible and iTunes. Thanks to the excellent Jennifer Pickens, a top notch narrator, for bringing the story to life.

As far as other news, I’ve got a middle grade fantasy that should be heading off to the copy editor in the next few weeks, a little change of pace, and I’ll be talking about that soon enough. I took down the Run of the House comic website for now. The website was hacked and it was just easier to take it down. Unfortunately, this sort of hacking seems to be pretty common these days, even for small fry websites like mine, and I’ve had to add a couple more security tools to my main website to project it.

I was never really happy with having the comic strip be so separate from everything else I do, anyway.

Working on the next Gage book now, which I know a lot of you will be happy to hear. As I joked to a friend of mine, it would probably be a lot better for my bank account if I just wrote Garrison Gage books, but then, I wouldn’t be me. C’est la vie.

Nothing else to report as of now. Back before too long.