This July Fourth has been busy, what with Dash really experiencing fireworks for the first time (“POW-BOOMS” he calls them) and lots of beach time. It’s one of the great benefits of living where we do that the beach is half a block away. The night of the Fourth we kept him up past his bedtime to take him down to the beach (my mother watched Evie) to watch the Pow-Booms and listen to the live music. When they started going off overhead he was a little startled, but he was quite a trooper – what a brave kid. He forced himself to laugh through his fear.

Aside: this reminds me of his little adventure last month, when he fell off a ramp at the playground. He cried and my mother took him home. But later that afternoon he literally took me by the hand and walked the four blocks to the park to show me where he fell. Then he started playing again. I love this kid.

Anyway, this has definitely been a working weekend for Jan and me. I STILL can’t talk about the project, but at the moment things are looking good. At the request of ** ******/*******, we’re taking the third whack at the outline and diving even further into the research. Suffice to say, this will be historical fiction, but entirely, completely, totally unlike THE MASTER OF VERONA.

And, no, this is not the Roman novel. That is still proceeding apace.

We turn the outline in tomorrow. Wish us luck. The moment the deal is made, I’ll be back with news.