Katie MacAlister

I’m just going to get the bad news out of the way first–I’ve decided that rather than write the Ben and Fran book in the next month, well before it is due to be written, I will let it go back to its original due date, and take the next month off to recuperate from the past two weeks. I know how disappointed some of you will be that the B&F book will come out in November 2010 rather than May 2010, but given the recent happenings, I just don’t have the heart to write it at this time.

Given that the stress related to my furry girl’s illness sent me to the ER last Saturday night/Sunday morning with a severe ulcer attack, I am confident that people will understand, even though they’re disappointed. I’m disappointed, too. I really want to get this book written, but not at the expense of making another early-morning visit to the folks at the local hospital. They were certainly nice enough, and introduced me to morphine, which I have to say is a wonderous, wonderous drug, but meh. I’d rather not do that again.

So Love in the Time of Dragons, the new dragon sept book, will be out in May 2010, and the Ben and Fran book, as yet unwritten, will be out in November 2010. Smooshed in that schedule are also Steamed (February), a paranormal novella for the animal shelter anthology, which I believe is scheduled for July 2010, and my Jim short story in the Charlaine Harris/Toni Kelper antho Death’s Mysterious Vacation (out in August 2010, if I’m recalling the date correctly).

This gives me a couple of weeks off to edit the dragon book, and cope with the loss of my furry girl. I plan on reading like crazy during this time–I’ve already started–including some of the old classics that I mentioned via yesterday’s BookGlutton post.This free time should also let me catch up on all the reader request letters, reader e-mails, and to spruce up my websites, as well as clean Rancho Doghair from top to bottom (it’s amazing how much crap you can accumulate during the year!). OK, that last one is pretty low on my priority list, I admit, although it would be nice to have a belated Spring Cleaning and replace some old furniture with new pieces.

In the mean time, thank you all for hanging in here with me. I’m sorry that my plans to whip off the B&F book fell victim to life’s sorrows, but since I have yet to be made Supreme Ruler of the Universe (and dammit, I don’t see why I haven’t!), that’s just going to be the way things are.

Thank you all again for your words of sympathy. They mean a lot to my husband and me.

In a desperate attempt to distract myself, I created an account at a new online service called BookGlutton. BG allows you to read books online with others, leave comments about the book, and chat with others who are reading the same book in real time.

Accounts are free. The books contained there are limited, I believe, to those out of copyright, but I thought that BookGlutton could be used by those of us who need a little encouragement to try reading something new and different.

With that thought in mind, I set up a Katie Mac Reading Group for folks who want to join me in reading some of the classics. I really would love to go through Ann Radcliffe’s books, but they don’t have them included in their offerings (although I suppose I could upload a version from Gutenberg). I did suggest they get them in, so hopefully they’ll do that. Until that time, I decided that I would read another old classic Gothic novel, Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole.

If you’d like to join BookGlutton and read the book with me, you can find me at http://www.bookglutton.com/glutton/KatieMac.html and the book group at http://www.bookglutton.com/bookgroup/show/id/156.

It should be a fun way to try something new/different.

Since I’m not quite back to full steam after my night spent in the ER–although I do now have a much finer appreciation of just how lovely morphine is–I am offering instead the new short story I wrote for the Penguin site.

This short deals with Alec, so those of you who were wondering if/how he was going to ever find another Beloved, here’s your answer. Just click on the Crouching Vamp cover to read the story.