Life is rich. There's a lot going on.
In fact, sometimes it feels like I drank a metaphorical milkshake a little too fast and gave myself karmic brain freeze. But it's all good. Cast your eyes over to the right. That's Bella, ladies and gentlemen. She is a spirited two-year-old gal, newly freed from the burdens of maternity, her five kittens all launched, settling in to her new home on The Potter Ranch. I love her ridiculously much. She is going to be a handful. My browser history lately: cat toys, feliway spray, how to introduce kitties...
Our lovely Bentley cat (a getting-older Bengal mix boy) is afraid of her. Oh, Bentley, don't growl at Bella. She doesn't play. But considering that it hasn't even been a week, the supervised sniffing and exploring is going well. No one has even hissed yet, although there was one run-for-the-roses through all three stories of the house in which we needed to intervene.
So I'm doing the Jackson Galaxy thing, submitting poems, social media-izing my new poetry book, and working on a new YA that I think will end up being sort of a Bean 4. It's a fourteen year-old girl from the Cuban Missile Crisis days whose time traveling parents try to send her to the past to get her out of harm's way. Except their little circle of time travelers aren't as skilled as they boast of being, and our heroine ends up in 2018 instead--going from duck and cover from The Bomb to duck and cover from active shooters. Some of the adult characters are from the Bean series, except they are in their sixties now. It's a challenging but fun book to write, and a lot less dark than it sounds.
In other news, it stopped raining. So I think I'm going to stop blogging and see if it's not too hot to make it around Congers Lake. Ken's upstairs with Bella, Bentley's on the snooze in the TV room (the warmest place in the house when we have the AC on, natch), and it's time for some sunlight on my shoulders.
Poems and novels and cats, oh my!