Tuesday’s winner is posted at the bottom of this blog! ~DD

I’m late posting today. Have a headache and I really wished I could have stayed in bed longer. However, I have to play catch up with my goals for the week.

Already out of the way:
* The short story is done and shipped to the editor.
* The synopsis for a new novella was written, shipped and accepted by the editor.
* Yesterday, I completed revisions on the first Viking book and returned it to my editor.
* This morning I finished work on the straight-to-Kindle project and shipped it to someone else to format for Kindle and Smashwords.

When I state everything like that, I think I haven’t done so badly this week, but one glance at my planning spreadsheet reminds me what more has to be done and out the door this week.

What got in the way? Family. My daughter’s a smart girl, but math isn’t one of her talents. I spent the last two days over at her place working through problems with her. Hours working through function points, formulas and graphing lines. Makes my head hurt.

And the pool is cloudy and starting to turn green. That’s what two days of not paying attention to my baby gets me. I so wanted to swim this morning, but the chemicals have to dissipate a bit before I can.

Did I tell you about my encounter with the water moccasin?

I was outside my back door on the phone with the tattoo artist I’m going to see on Sunday in Little Rock at a tattoo convention. Mid-sentence, I glanced down and saw a coil beside my hand. I jerked back. The snake started slithering away.

Now, I like snakes. I don’t have a problem letting them go about their business—unless they are in poisonous and in my yard where they can hurt my family or my dog. This one was an olive-y brown, around 3-feet long, thick-bodied, and with a triangular-shaped head. Water moccasin! Cottonmouth! Whatever you want to call them. This is what they look like:

I couldn’t find my snake stick (it’s just a long supple branch you can use to beat the back of a snake to kill it) so I ran up the stairs to get “Dead-Eye” dad and his shotgun. Without his glasses, and on the first shot, he took off the snake’s head.

Ah! Life in rural Arkansas!

So you want to know who won the signed copy of Darkness Burning, right?

The winner (by random number generator) is…Jennifer Mathis! Jennifer, e-mail me with your snail mail address!