It’s going to be a busy few weeks around the old Casa de Hartness (since the last few months haven’t been chock-full AT ALL). This week is obviously Thanksgiving, which we’ll be spending in South Carolina with mi familia. It’s either a note on how frugal I’ve become or what a cheap bastard I am that I’d really like to take a Cheesecake Factory Pumpkin Cheesecake with us for dessert, but I’m balking at dropping the $50 on it. It’s not that $50 is a huge sum, but it’s a lot of money for one 10″ cheesecake, and I’ve gotten cheap about things like dessert recently.

Then Sunday I have a book signing at Park Road Books, which is one of only a couple of independent bookstores left in the Charlotte area. I’ll be signing anything anyone wants to buy, hopefully my restock order will be in by then (and hopefully I’ll need it!).

Next week I’ll be in Atlanta the first part of the week for work and then when I come back to Charlotte Suzy and I will be getting on a plane to go to New York for our 15th wedding anniversary. Sometimes it feels like just a few months ago that we were in college down at Winthrop together, and now we’re going off to the Big Apple to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center, check out America Idiot on Broadway, and go shopping at Mood fabrics in the Garment District (I’ll take a book, hopefully they have chairs for husbands). Suzy and my sister Bonnie are HUGE Project Runway fans, so this trip to Mood is a real highlight for her. Me, I could meh about the whole thing because I don’t know anything about fabric, but if it makes her happy it’s worth the trip.

And then I’m home for a couple days and then I turn around and head off to Las Vegas for the annual WPBT debauchery-thon. I’ve got a room at the MGM and would like to do a small book signing there for some folks if people let me know that they want copies of books. That will take some logistical figuring out between now and then.

And then there’s Christmas. We’re probably not doing much in the way of gift exchange, because there’s not much we want, and because we’re going to NYC a few weeks before Christmas. I think the whole family is pitching in together to get my parents a new TV (which I can blog about here because my parents are blissfully internet-free), so that will be a nice upgrade over their 20-year old Zenith console TV. We’ll have to get a stand, too, because despite my sister’s protestations, having a TV sitting on top of the old, busted TV is never acceptable.

Oh yeah, speaking of sister – she’ll be staying with us for the week after I get back from Vegas because of her second hip replacement. Yeah, her second hip replacement this year. Sucks to be her. Except that she came through the first one with flying colors and now is in a lot less pain, so I guess it sucks less to be her. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there, since Suzy is the one with the caretaker gene and my contribution to having her in my house for a week is mostly whining about sleeping in the guest bedroom.

So that’s life here lately. As you can see, I’m trying to make a more concerted effort to revive the blog. At least this week. I’ve started on the sequel to Hard Day’s Knight, so hopefully it will be ready to go sometime in the spring. And I got word from Rob that the ebook conversion for HDK should be finished this month, so it will come out on Kindle in time for Christmas, which is exciting. I have about enough story for five books with those characters right now, and I’m working on a couple of other things intermittently. I don’t see me becoming Hocking-level prolific anytime soon, but maybe in a few years I’ll generate some real revenue from this little side gig and be able to focus on it more full-time.

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