If you’re reading this post the day it goes live, today is your last chance to enter the Braving the Boneyard ebook Giveaway! In other words, you best be clicking over there now! The winners should hear from me by Monday, so watch your email. I need confirmation from winners that there are actual human beings that want a book at the provided email addresses within 48 hours, or I’ll move on to the next person on the list. I’ll announce the winners in next Friday’s blog post (surname initial only, so no need to feel shy). I’ll also be doing a Braving the Boneyard Magpie Moment (sharing little bits of real life incorporated into my fiction) next Friday. Don’t worry—it’s not a spoiler, just something that provides texture and context to Sydney’s north Florida world. Finally, I started sharing Boneyard quotes this week on my Monday Facebook quote pics and will continue to do so until the release.

With less than a month now until the May 19^th release, I’m getting pretty excited, and even more scatterbrained than usual. Of course, that’s when random things arise like, Huh—that’s funny; I don’t remember having three separate email lists, or What do you mean we’ve used more than 70% of our data less than halfway through the month? Among the contributing factors (i.e., excuses) for my mental state are:

• The weather: We’ve had a week of wet monsoon weather, although yesterday the rain finally abated to intermittent rather than nonstop. I can’t really complain since we had a drought during our regular rainy season, but I won’t miss muddy paw and footprints, the soaked cat mewling to be dried (for the tenth time that day), or wet garments scattered throughout the house. (My husband suggested we could measure our socked-in duration by the number of wet dog-walking outfits.) It doesn’t help that my raincoat is temporarily out of commission because of…
• The ants (again): We wage an ongoing battle [Carpe Bibliotheca] with ants—regular and fire—here in east Hawaii, and recently they’ve brought in reinforcements. Of course, there were fire ants in my raincoat. My husband kindly rinsed my coat, but the ants returned before I could reclaim it. And meanwhile, a gecko pooped in my hood. It also seems that our bath towel pegs are a tempting off-ramp right below a fire-ant superhighway (took a couple of squealing rushes back to the shower to figure that one out), so we’re hanging our towels in weird places to avoid that pleasant method of awakening. Not to be outdone, the regular ants are counter-swarming again, and got up bright and early this morning to envelope the agave. (Want to make me cranky? Interfere with my morning coffee.)
• The pigs: Yep, still in the thick-with-feral-pigs season. The dogs are thrilled with the ever-present scents and sounds and need to alert us (inside and outside the house) of interlopers. (Humans, less thrilled.) A few days ago, we were walking the dogs up the driveway and a monster swine made a roaring, burping noise from the brush a few feet to my left. We all froze, even the dogs. You know that look the protagonists exchange in an action-adventure movie just before running for their lives? Yeah, there might have been one of those.
• 

  Recovery requires lots of napping

  The dogs: This morning, Fritz’s snoring three feet behind me was almost loud enough to rattle my coffee cup. To be fair, the dogs are a little crazy-making, but all things considered (see Weather and Pigs), they are doing really well. We finally got Travis, the Dingbat Dog, fixed (manfully broken?) this past week—woo hoo! He’s been very good about his stitches, but still requires monitoring. To leave the house, I have to switch out the dog bedding, put Travis in Fred’s (bigger) crate and apply The Cone. Thanks to the vast cone circumference, Travis gets stuck in his own crate (no, unfortunately we did not videotape it), and even Fred’s ginormous crate requires some assistance maneuvering Conehead Travis around to face the front. Needless to say, I haven’t left the house very much.

• Tech stuff… You may remember that I’ve had some laptop issues. It’s doing much better now, after some professional tweaking, but the tweaking involved dumping all of my folders and loose files into a “Desktop” folder on my desktop. So my files aren’t where they used to be. Grrr … I’ve also realized that laptop defaults are like the mirrors on your car. You don’t notice someone has changed them until the swearing starts. The one that’s really driving me batty is my browser history. I’m always researching things and coming back to them later through my history, but now my computer wipes my browser history after every session. (Yes, I’ve checked Safari’s settings, and it’s supposed to keep it for a year.) It’s annoying enough that I’m willing to feel like a doofus when I take it back in and they fix it in 23 seconds.
• Including serial killer dating sites: Finally, I have to mention this as a cautionary tale. I got a message from a 69-year-old woman I thought was the friend of a friend, so against my better judgment I started to log on to something called Zorpia. (I stopped, realizing my mistake, when they required a profile picture.) I can hear some of you laughing now. A couple of hours later, I got an email with pictures of sixteen serial killers, looking for love. Or maybe victims. Okay, they didn’t identify themselves as serial killers, but if you saw the pasty-faced photos… My husband is a much better person than I am, and even he thought the men weren’t right. I swear, I think one of them was Bob from Twin Peaks. Maybe I should have used the photos to cast my next villain, but after a few more emails I finally got around to unsubscribing.

Whew—I feel better. That’s probably (more than) enough kvetching about distractions for a Friday afternoon. Oh, look, there’s the pile of library books I picked up yesterday… Is it 5:00 yet? 😉

Have a great weekend, patient readers, and remember to enter the Boneyard ebook Giveaway today!

[Ereader and coffee by Aliis Sinisalu from stocksnap.io; Travis the Dingbat Dog by Judy K. Walker]