So, yeah, RT is going on this week in New Orleans and it seems like 75% of the erotic romance writers I know are there swilling drinks and enjoying the French Quarter. Due to previous engagements in England and Chicago this year it just wasn’t a possibility for me, but I’m enjoying reading all the tweets and FB posts from my friends in NOLA. And next year it’s in Dallas, and I will SO be there.

In other news, Two to Tango is quickly creeping up Evernight’s Coming Soon list, and I think I may have an early June publication date at this rate. Of course, this also means I get to do promo work such as a book trailer — whee! I have an inordinate amount of fun putting those together (I think it’s something about being a frustrated filmmaker), so keep an eye out in the coming weeks.

Breaker Zone looks like it should be finished on time by the end of the month, which is excellent. I’m currently spending a lot of time doing worldbuilding for the mers (come on, this is me — I can’t resist worldbuilding) and figuring out what exactly being the Bearer of Asclepius’s Rod (that still looks dirty to me) means for Nick. As Chiron rather snarkily tells him, it’s not a damn magic wand, it’s a diagnostic tool that has to be used correctly in order to fulfill its total potential. As Nick is an ER doc, this is an abrupt change in specialty, and it may wind up complicating a plot point in Book Three. I dunno — I’m just going to keep writing and see how it all plays out.

And in non-writing news, I just finished refurbishing this:

Back in 1996, Ramón and I were living In Montreal, three years into our marriage and pretty much dependent on second-hand furniture (which was fine, because I was pretty good at refinishing/reupholstering it). One of our favorite places to furniture shop was this amazing two-story Salvation Army. On one visit, I stumbled across an old Singer treadle sewing machine that not only had a perfectly functional sewing machine and treadle AND the hand crank parts, but almost all of the original feet.

The only problem? Someone had painted the top very sloppily in thick white latex paint. Which is probably why it had been marked down to CN$35. We snapped it up with the intention of stripping off the latex paint and refinishing it, turning it back into the grand old lady that it should be.

Yeah, well, the machine came with us to Holland…and then Sweden…and then Texas. Where, upon getting laid off four months after I moved here, I broke down the machine/base with every intention of stripping off the latex paint and refinishing the base as a way of distracting myself from my increasingly shitty financial position. Things being what they were, however, this never happened.

Thirteen years and another (local) move later, I finally decided to clean and organize our garage, which took up most of the latter half of April. After I did so, however, I realized the disassembled treadle base took up a fair amount of space along the storage shelves, and I really should do what I’d planned to do eighteen years ago and refinish the damn thing.

So I did. Took me a week to get all the latex dug out of the grain, old veneer stripped off, sanded, cleaned, reassembled, and waxed with paste furniture wax to within an inch of its life, but by God the treadle base looks gorgeous now (and much to my amazement, I could put my hands on all the components — hadn’t lost one of them). I then cleaned and oiled the actual sewing machine (which has lived in my office for the last thirteen years), and reattached it to the base, and now have a fully functional treadle machine again, which rocks.