Condolences to New Orleans

Just the other day, my kids and I were watching a National Geographic video featuring hurricanes. We'd had this video for a few years and for whatever reason just hadn't sat down to watch it before. The eerie part was when the video showed footage of Hurricane Andrew and commented about how it had fortuitously missed New Orleans. The video warned that such a disaster could not be far off--an unsettling pronostication of things to come. My heart goes out to those who have lost loved ones, homes, jobs...here's a wish for much brighter days in the future. May the universe grant you the strength and the means to hold on until then.

I haven't blogged in a terribly long time--much longer than I intended. I've been on a little hiatus following that last book revision. I'm trying to get my household back under control, working on painting a kid's room, starting our new correspondence school year, and trying to reclaim some parts of my life I'd put on hold while revising. But soon I need to start the third book of the trilogy, and I've been giving some thought to a couple of possibilities for YA fantasies to write in the near future. Even if I only managed to get 10,000 words a month on one of them, I'd have a book before a year was up. How hard can that be?