For Barely Breathing, I had to research search and rescue operations. I knew a lot about climbing already, of course, because I grew up with a dad who taught both rock climbing and mountaineering (alpine climbing). Weekends involved hiking in the mountains, watching my father practice rappelling or bouldering, and climbing over piles of gear in the living room. I grew up knowing a piton from a carabiner from a cam. But as familiar with climbing as I am, I had no idea how you’d go about rescuing a fallen climber who was still on belay, for example.

For Hawke’s book, I need to research how small, rural fire stations work. He is, after all, the chief of Scarlet’s fire department. Fortunately, the chief of Nederland’s fire department has been extremely open to talking with me and spent the better part of a day discussing the unique position his station occupies in the spectrum of firefighting.

Yes, I spent a day with firemen. Oh, the sacrifices I make!

I think I left the station with 20 pages of single-spaced hand-written notes on college ruled paper. The chief also gave me a couple of big textbooks to read that are all about fighting fire in wildlands and in structures. As to how I accidentally walked through the locker room area when the firefighters were changing into their turnout gear, or bunker gear as they call it — well, that’s another story. Let’s just say I got lost and leave it at that.

I hope to have Eric and VicTORIA’s book out to you by the end of August or early September at the latest. I don’t have a title yet. But it will not involve metaphors involving major biofunctions. I can assure you of that.

If you haven’t yet read Barely Breathing, you can find it in ebook for Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords as well as in print through Amazon or by order from your local bookstore. We’re hoping to get it out in audiobook by the fall. (Fingers crossed that Dead By Midnight, the I-Team grand finale, will be out in audiobook by Christmas!)

I hope everyone is keeping cool and having a safe and fun summer. I know there’s dangerous heat in the West, along with wildfires. We’ve got a lot of smoke in the air here, and temps today are supposed to hit 97. (This is why I prefer snow.)

Watch here or on Facebook for details on Eric and Vic’s story and audiobook news. Also, stay tuned for a makeover of this blog.

What it's like right now in Colorado's high country

I thought these photos were kind of fun and wanted to share them with you. A couple weekends ago, I went for a drive in the mountains with my younger son, Benjamin, and his girlfriend, Lucy. We drove along Trail Ridge Road to give Lucy a view of the real Rocky Mountains. She'd never seen mountains like this before. And although it was technically late spring, up there it was still winter. We got caught in a bit of a snow storm, which made me nervous. Anyone who has driven on Trail Ridge Road will understand why.

We drove Lucy to an overlook where she'd be able to see where I almost died — but the clouds were so thick and the snow falling so heavily that the entire mountain range was obscured. D'oh!


A look at the snowpack along the Continental Divide

The photo above shows where ploughs cut through the snow to clear the road. Just to give you some perspective, my son is six feet tall.

Meanwhile, down at 5,000 feet elevation, my garden is in high bloom. It's so lovely I could sit out there all day.



Here's a glimpse of our King Arthur giant delphinium, which just popped. It's so majestic. I tried to get a close-up so you could see the details inside the blossoms.


Click on photos to enlarge for more detail

This is a shot of the middle bed in my front yard rose garden. You can see the King Arthur delphinium in the background. Anne Bolyne and Heritage are the pink roses toward the front. Beside them is lavender, which is just starting to bloom. There's penstemon, a Rocky Mountain wildflower, and purple coneflower, which hasn't yet bloomed.

Update on Naked Edge: I saw that they've moved the release date till March 2010. The book is due on July 15. If I can make that deadline, there's still a chance the book might be bumped to April or May. Hopefully not. So I might not post again after this until the book is done. I really need to focus every word my brain can conjure on the story.

I am taking vacation from the newspaper in the beginning of July and can't wait! I'll spend the time writing and sleeping and sniffing roses.

Actually, it's not such a lazy day. I'm writing my behind off. I finished Chapter 21 yesterday and am one-third through Chapter 22 of Naked Edge. That means I'm more than 67 percent done with the book. I must be done by July 15. And that's a lot of writing...

I want to get back to book piracy for just a quick moment, but not yet because I'd rather talk about...

Flowers!

My garden isn't in high bloom. Not yet. That will happen within the next 10 days or so. But here's what I found outside this morning...



Red Yarrow. The bunnies like to nibble this. I love how the color contrasts with all the green foliage around it. It's self-seeding, so it spreads on its own. This patch grew from one bedding plant we put in a few years ago.




Louise Odier is a Bourbon rose that was bred in 1851. It has a beautiful, rich old-rose smell. It's one that Benjy wanted to plant when he was younger, so it's kind of "his" rose bush, along with Hot Cocoa, which hasn't bloomed yet.




This is Golden Wings, a beautiful yellow rose with only a handful of petals on each blossom. It has a fresh rose scent and can be grown as a climbing rose. It's our only yellow rose, because someone (i.e., me) is stuck on pink. What can I say?




Stef, here are the peonies in full bloom. They're quite eye-catching!



This is Anne Bolyne, an Old English rose. It's scent is so fantastic and amazing that I almost get high off it. I planted lavender around it (that's lavender just below the bloom), so that I can smell both. Together. At the same time. Both scents are beautiful. Together, they're unbelievable!



Here is a view of my massive sage plant in full bloom. That's about the size of a queen-sized bed, actually. Right now, it sounds like the plant is buzzing. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. There are zillions of bees on those tiny blossoms.



Here's red yarrow bumping up against a bud on our Abraham Darby bush, which produces fully cupped, enormous flowers, also with a lovely Old English rose scent. I love it when the various flowers overlap. The colors, the scents, the foliage all make it a very sensual experience.

Thanks for indulging me. I hope you enjoy the photographs.

We're getting to the time of year where the "What's blooming now?" feature on the left column here won't be enough to show you what's happening in my flower garden. I'm a lover of flowers, particularly the flowers I've chosen to grow in my garden — antique English roses, Rocky Mountain wildflowers, irises, lavender, delphiniums and so on. Because I'm such an "olfactory" person — I have a very sensitive nose — everything must have a smell. And when it's all in bloom, the scents mix together in the sunlight and I get drunk just standing on my own porch sniffing.

I took a quick stroll this morning and snapped some photos of what's blooming right this very second.



Stef, the peonies above are dedicated to you. They're such a lovely rich, red color, which is a perfect contrast to their deep green foliage. They just started blooming yesterday.



White iris is one of my very favorite scents. I could stand there all day with my nose in the blossoms, huffing like an addict. When Benjy was little he saw these from a very boyish point of view as the dust and light and fire from an explosion. (Hey, I'm not a boy. Don't ask me.) He started calling them "flak explosions" when he was about eight or nine. So that's what we still call them. LOL! Nice explosion, huh?



Sage is sacred to Native people here, and I grow a ton of it. White sage is really what I wish I grew, because it's the preferred form of sage for smudging and praying, but I love these tiny purple blossoms. This plant is perhaps five feet across and six feet long. It stands about two feet high. And when it's in full bloom, it seems to buzz from all the bees.



The dry climate and heat are great for growing California poppies. I love the rich orange color of these tiny flowers. They're just starting to pop, and they'll bloom all summer, though they get rather leggy by August.



Penstemon is a Rocky Mountain wildflower. It has slowly been spreading through one part of the garden, and I'm encouraging it. You can see the park-like green of my lawn in the background. It won't stay that way. It's too hot and dry here in the summer. Also, I think you can catch just a glimpse of the first Stelle del Oro daylily to bloom this year in the background.



Near the street I have irises of mixed colors behind a very tiny, dainty flower called Snow in Summer, which somehow defies the direct sun to bloom most of the summer. I just love it.



The first rose to bloom this year is Blanc Double de Couvert, a lovely scented rose with a bright white double blossom. It survived this past winter, which combined unusual extremes of heat and cold and dryness, better than the other roses, which all died back to the ground. Our climbing rose, which was 12 feet tall and last year must have had a thousand white roses on it also died back to the ground. Lamentation! It's only about two feet tall and has maybe forty buds right now.

I'm now more than two-thirds done with Naked Edge and hope to have another chapter done before I go to bed tonight. That puts me on target for finishing by mid-July and hopefully holding on to an early 2010 pub date.

Have a lovely spring day, everyone!

I'm just popping in to say hello and to share some photos of my birthday flowers. I hand-picked the flowers for this and let the arranger at the floral shop put it together. I just love flowers, so this was my birthday present to myself.

It has blue hydrangea, pink roses, stargazer lilies and waxflower. The roses have opened most of the way now, and they look so lovely! Somehow, the beauty of the bouquet didn't translate well to my hasty photographs. But you get the idea...




Thanks to all of you for your wonderful emails and birthday wishes!

I'm caught in the midst of a busy work week at the paper, but I'll be back soon! I just wanted to share these photos.

Have a great day, everyone!