Welcome to the final week of November for 2024. Where has the year gone? I know I’m not the only one who has noticed the time is flying. Sadly, I’m not in any hurry so time could slow down and not upset me. At. all. I keep making plans and think I have all this time to get things done and then I blink and all the sudden it’s not tomorrow, it’s freaking next week!

And I have things to do. All the things! Thanksgiving things. Writing things. Life things. And it’s already next week!

Good thing I’m not one to panic. Actually, the Thanksgiving things are pretty simple. My duties for T-giving feast are yeast rolls and pumpkin pie. Easy peasy. I’ve been making the rolls since I was big enough to kneel up on a kitchen stool next to my grandmother and then my mother and then talle nough to stand there and mix them up, then bake them out after a night in the fridge. The roll dough, not me. As for the pumpkin pie, that recipe on the back of the Libby’s Pumpkin can is simple. So’s the pie crust.

The writing things? That’s a different story. It’s a long story. Okay. Not really. It’s three shorter stories that I am turning into a long story. It’s a slog. Which sounds bad. The books I’m compiling are really good books. Even if I do say so myself. Seriously. Most writers tend to…well, not exactly disparage but…downplay. Yeah. That’s a good word to describe it. Most of us have this mindset that our books aren’t as good as we want them to be. It’s been a few years since I read these books and I’m discovering–because I’m reading with fresh eyes–that they are better than I thought. And I’m entertained. Which means I’m reading instead of editing and plotting and filling in so there’s lots of new material. So that’s the writing things. Still hoping to have this ready to go by year’s end. I did fall down the cover photo rabbit hole on Saturday. I have several possibilities. I’ll get with my cover artist and we’ll decide which is the best one.

I’ve been reading things too. I finished off all the most recent novellas in Darynda Jones’s Charley Davidson world and then got a wild hair to relisten (for the umpteenth time but not for a few years) the Rock Chick books by Kristen Ashley. These books are pure crack and they make me laugh. This is a good thing.

Friday, LJ, Jake, and I went to Stormy’s Thangsgiving program at his school and then took him home to wait for his mom to get there. She had car lane duty at her school and then caught traffic so it took awhile. We let Jake and their dog Dozer (a very fuzzy and goofy German Shepherd) play out in the backyard. I kept hearing another dog bark and turned around to find a white pittie up in a tree barking at us. You read that right. Up. In. A. TREE! No clue how the puppers got up there but he had no trouble jumping down and then getting back oup there later. Sadly, while I have an awesome dog and two cats, none of them will ever be social media successes. That pittie? Yeah, that dog could go viral!

That’s pretty much the news. I’m going to slow down this week so tomorrow will be something short and hopefully entertaining rather than the usual Tuesday thing. Wednesday, there will be words because they were alreayd done from last week. Thursday is that whole Thanksgiving and family thing here in the States. Friday? Who knows what things I’ll be up to by then. The one thing I WON’T be doing is shopping out in the world! Here’s hoping your things are all manageable and that Monday is a good thing for you. And feel free to tell me about your things… 😉