This week I’m reading a book by Anne Stuart that you can’t get yet (feeling smug about beta reading) and some Terry Pratchett and some Elle Kennedy and a lot of recipes. Possibly Hogfather (about Discworld’s Santa) to get me closer to the Christmas mood, especially the part where Susan Sto Helit asks her grandfather (Death) what the point of the whole thing is:

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Welp, it’s December, so I’m going to have to get serious about getting the Christmas stuff up, which means buying batteries and putting a cheapo Christmas tree on each side of my door. That’s the extent of my Christmas cheer: I’ll make na effort, but don’t push it. I don’t need to worry about decorating the living room because I didn’t take down the gnomes from last year. Of course now they’re a little dingy from the stove fire, but they were looking shady to begin with. Gnomes. There’s just something shifty about them. Possibly it’s the hats. Somewhere around here I have a green wreath and I was going to put a gnome on it so that anybody who came to the door would go to eye to eye with it and possibly reconsider. Wreath, gnome, lighted trees = rah, humbug, merry Christmas. Mixed messages, but bases covered.

What did you work on this week?

Our own Melissa Yi is back with the ninth book in her Hope Sze medical mystery series, White Lightning. It’s out tomorrow and it sounds wonderful: romance, Al Capone, and “two centuries worth of clues.” (Remember Scorpion Scheme: “Pharoah’s Tombs, Ancient Myths, Modern Murder”?) How can you resist?

Hope Sze escapes for a romantic weekend away at the Rumrunner’s Rest, a Roaring Twenties inn once celebrated both for Prohibition’s best alcohol and the smoothest jazz bands north of the Detroit River. Then a convention of fictional villains overrun the tavern, her friend glimpses a ghost, and Hope uncovers a grisly surprise in the fireplace that may be related to Al Capone, the infamous gangster. At least two people disappeared from this very inn, and one soul will not rest in peace.

Tonight, unless Hope unravels a century’s worth of clues, death will collect several more lives. Including the one she holds most dear..

Find out more about White Lightning on Melissa’s website.

You can buy White Lightning here, buy direct from Amazon here, or go through Windtree Press for one more click.

Like everyone else, I’m still Coping With Things, and that means that I have spells of despair, questioning everything. But in between those, I have moments of delight.

• Knitpicks just had a sale and I opened a box of yarn so beautiful it glowed.
• My adopted cat who I was prepared to wait years for before she was affectionate (she was a stray for at least two years) likes to sleep next to me and rub her head on my arm and runs into the house when I call her name.
• My daughter called the other day and we talked for two hours about absolutely nothing and everything.
• I bought a crepe maker and I’m now researching great crepe recipes (I got tired of running out of bread and not wanting to go to the store).
• I cleaned and redecorated my bathroom and it’s now a riot of color with two fish bags and an incoming octopus-holder-of-everything from Amazon (see right).

I mean, the octopus alone is going to give me a Moment every time I go in there now.

So what was your octopus this week?

The Drifters! (Yes, I know it’s a Christmas song and we’re multi-holiday here, but c’mon, it’s The Drifters. Also an Argh tradition since 2010, Clyde McPhatter and Bill Pinckney forever.)

Since this is the US Thanksgiving Day, it behooves me to give a shout-out to one of my favorite cookbooks, Rick Rodgers’ Thanksgiving 101, which has the best gravy recipe, and let’s face it, Thanksgiving is all about the gravy. Plus it’s only two bucks which is always something to be thankful for.

So, what books sparked gratitude in you this holiday? (It doesn’t matter if this isn’t your Thanksgiving, we should be grateful for books all year round.)

If you’re in the US, you’re probably staring down a frozen turkey and not being thankful for it. If you’re not in the US, be thankful for that: half of our government is evil whack jobs and we’re going to be dealing with leftover bird for at least a week. (Favorite turkey moment still: WKRP’s “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”)

So what have you been up to lately?

I just deleted over 600 unread e-mails. Part of this is because I was the victim of an e-mail cluster bomb, and part because I just got behind and gave up. They’re all gone now, but if you e-mailed me in that 600+ cluster, I did not read your e-mail. Please resend.

In other news . . .
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Our own Deb Blake has a new book out, Doggone Deadly, and it sounds doggone good. (Pause for moan from Argh People over lame opening line.). It’s the latest in the Kari Stuart Catskills Pet Rescue Mystery series. If you’ve missed Deb on here (it’s possible, her anti-spam software had a spat with the blog and she was tragically exiled for awhile), Deborah Blake is the author of the Baba Yaga Series from Berkley (Wickedly Dangerous, Wickedly Wonderful, Wickedly Powerful), as well as the Broken Rider Series, and the Veiled Magic series. She has also published eleven books on modern witchcraft with Llewellyn Worldwide, along with a tarot and an oracle deck. When not writing, Deborah runs The Artisans’ Guild, a cooperative shop she founded with a friend in 1999, and also works as a jewelry maker, tarot reader, and energy healer. She lives in a 130-year-old farmhouse in rural upstate New York with various cats who supervise all her activities, both magical and mundane.

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Really. Go look and see if you don’t smile.

What in your wild life made you smile this week?