Category: Life in the Pacific Northwest
Introducing – The Good Neighbor
Cue the trumpets! Ta -da! Here is the gorgeous cover for The Good Neighbor, the next book in the Fortune Bay series.
(For those of you who have read Summer of Fortune, TGN is Sean and Frankie’s story. 🙂 )
I’m moving right along. Since the launch party for SOF, I finished the final edit of The Good Neighbor. (Whose bright idea was it to put out another book every two months this year?! Oh yeah. Mine! This falls under the category of, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” LOL)
The release date is August 23rd, and I know it will be here before we know it. The Good Neighbor is already up for pre-order on amazon, with more platforms coming soon. (See the side bar for links.)
Now I’ve taken a week off before going back to work the final book.
A week to do some normal things, like baking cookies. Not just any cookies, but the original recipe for Children’s Delight that I promised at the end of Summer of Fortune I would share on my website.
Currents and spice – these are delicious!
(More about the Great Cookie Battles of 2016 next week when, I promise, I’ll put up the recipe.)
And I went with a friend to see a rousing version of Footloose at the Chemainus Theater. I have fun memories of volunteering there a few years ago, helping with props.They always do a fabulous job of set design, and of course the food, in this case lunch, was great.
And let’s not forget weeding. This is one of the better areas of my wild garden.
After all the rain we’ve had, I really will get out this weekend and weed.
They said in the paper that the weather will be warming up, so here’s hoping next week I’ll be ensconced on the back porch, deep in the fun part of being a writer again – writing new scenes for Home for Christmas.
I can hardly wait.
Come back for the cookie battles next week, but until then, get out and enjoy the summer.
Rosemary recipes – Anyone?
I love growing herbs. They are so easy, forgiving of not-perfect conditions, fragrant, useful all year round and they flower!
Rosemary thrives in the hottest spot in my garden, and earlier in the spring I heavily pruned the rosemary shrub to make room to plant my tomatoes. I laid the prunings out on a screen and left it to dry on the porch. I don’t really even need to dry any since Rosemary stays fresh in the garden all winter, but I couldn’t bear to throw it away. This will give us enough dry rosemary for the year, and I think I’ll be giving bottles of dried Rosemary for hostess gifts this year.
Rosemary skewers for Lamb kebobs.
We use fresh rosemary branches to skewer lamb kabobs for the barbecue to add even more flavour.
Just marinade lamb pieces for a few hours in olive oil, lemon juice, crushed garlic, bruised rosemary leaves, salt and pepper.Thread onto rosemary branches before barbecuing. The sticks are quite oily and don’t burn easily.
I also like to sprinkle fresh rosemary leaves, with salt and pepper, on sliced potatoes to roast, but you can also use the dried herb. Easy and delicious.
If you have any ideas for other uses for rosemary, I’d love to hear them.
A Walk On The Wild Side
With all four books in different stages rattling around in my head this week I felt ready to explode. Or maybe melt down is a more appropriate analogy. So we decided to head for the wild west coast of Vancouver Island for a short respite.
How can it be that on an island that is only 30 miles wide, it can take so to get from here to there? It’s the mountains and the inlets. And the road. When we were finally sitting in a restaurant in Tofino, road weary German tourists collapsed into seats nearby and said, as if no explanation was necessary, that they had Just driven up from Victoria. Only 200 miles, it’s all winding roads that get progressively narrower and windier. From 120 km/hr on the Island Highway near Nanaimo, it drops to 90, then 80, then 60 on the curves, which are pretty well non stop, then 50, 40 and finally 30 with the wiggly road signs.
Then you get to Kennedy lake, where the road snakes along the cliff side, and there in the middle of friggin’ NO WHERE is a big overhead sign that’s lit up (where did the power coming from?) that says DRIVE CAREFULLY – NARROW ROAD AHEAD. That’s where they’ve cut right into the rock enough that cars can get under. There is another thoughtful sign that warns that trucks can’t make it and will be swinging out into your lane on the curve up ahead so – you’ve guessed it – drive carefully.
But then suddenly you’re there, and it is worth it. Tofino and Ucluelet at the two ends of the 44 km beach, with Long Beach National Park in between. Both towns are a combination of fishing village and tourist town, Tofino being the more established in the tourism trade. I p
refer to stay in quieter Ucluelet, which is what we did.
Followed were two days of great food, Norwood’s In Uclelet with it’s Asian inspired
decor and presentation and interesting menu of locally sourced produce and seafood, and BC wine’s. In Tofino we ate at Wolf in the Fog, named no doubt for the wolves that have lately started following joggers on the foggy beach. Named best new restaurant in Canada in 2014 by Air Canada’s enroute magazine, it is also famous for serving locally grown, fished and foraged foods on their menu.
But it’s the landscape you come for, so I’ll let a few photos speak for themselves.
8 Weeks – 8 Guest Bloggers – 8 eBook Giveaways.
I’m happy to announce the beginning of a series of blog posts hosting eight authors from all over North America who write Small Town Romance. And, to add a little spice to the pot,
I’ll be giving away an eBook copy of one of their books each week.
Yes, I’m highlighting in red today because this is exciting! The small town setting is, to me, the perfect crucible in which to mix family and friends, through good times and bad, for better and for worse. And of course, the worse it gets the better we like it!
Relationships are brought under the microscope in a tight knit community, shining a light on things that I think we might prefer to keep hidden. It’s always intriguing because it’s the people and their journey that keeps us reading.
From spicy to sweet, that small town experience is something all these writers have in common and pass along in their books.
Jenny Andersen will be kicking things off with one of her desert westerns, next Monday, May 23.
If you like quirky characters, you’ll love Jenny. As she says on her website:
Should be fun. See you next Monday.