UPDATE: The winner is…Mary McCoy!
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Hello, everyone! I want to start by thanking Delilah for letting me come play here again. I always enjoy hanging out with all of you.

If your summer has been anything like ours, it’s been ungodly hot pretty much from the start. Summer isn’t my favorite season, though I do love all the fresh fruits and veggies. When I was a kid, I didn’t mind summer—of course, it was school break, so we had long days to play, and it wasn’t this hot then either. My birthday is even mid-summer, so you’d think a summer baby might enjoy their season more.  I just find it harder every year to tolerate the heat and humidity we have here in southern Pennsylvania (I know it’s much worse as you go south from here), so my outdoor activities are severely limited once we get to steady summertime weather. I wish I’d kept track from the start of how many 90 and 100-degree-plus days we’ve had—I bet it would be a long list this year. I’ll be thrilled to see it end—no more walking outside to grab the mail and coming back inside forty seconds later dripping sweat. I’m ready for days cool enough to spend time outside with a good book, pretty colors on the trees, and cool nights around the firepit. And after that, winter, at least in theory; it’s been more than a few years since we had a good snowstorm in my neck of the woods. And I love spring, all the flowers waking up, the trees sprouting new leaves after their rest…though spring seems shorter as summer starts sooner every year.

I found some relief from our actual summer, though, with both my reading and writing—when you get lost in a good story, it’s easy to imagine yourself in that place and time, so when it’s sweltering where you are, why not pull out a book set during a blizzard, or if you’re freezing, a hot romance set in a tropical locale? I recently finished reading a holiday story with lots of snow that made me way less unhappy about our weather for a few hours while I lived in the winter with the characters as they fell in love. One of the stories I’m writing at the moment is set during late fall-early winter, so lots of chilly days there that need hot cocoa or cozy sweaters—at least in my head; I doubt I’d want to do that even with our frosty a/c running. (The one story I really should be finishing, though, is a summer story, the third and final book in my Medusa’s Daughters Trilogy, and they’re headed for an even hotter destination than where we are.)

Am I the only one who likes to visit another season this way? What is your very favorite season and why? If you share your response here in the comments, I’ll do a drawing this Sunday, 8/18/24 after 12 noon for one of my eBooks (winner’s choice!).