Not just a new banner, but a new blog

Well, you know I could not have come up with this one on my own.  I needed a trip to Chanticleer's lotus pond, so that I might find the photo.  I needed my husband to make that photo art.  But most of all, I needed Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of Winsome Media Communications to patiently wade through my design hopes (can it be simple? can it be easy for me to maintain? can it be basically like it was but a million times better?), to kindly walk me through Feedburner and the Site Meter, and to be there, pretty much around the clock, to answer my profoundly unintelligent technology questions and to be their dear, helpful, knowing, calm selves.

Amy and Nicole, you are the best, you really are.

So what do we have here?  We have, at long last, an uncluttered sidebar.  We have my biography—the books, the awards, the teaching, the anthologies, the judging—all housed on one page.  We have review excerpts of books past and present; an interview revealing a little why, a little how; a YouTube channel that collects my various adventures on film (not all of them, indeed, I tossed many of them out; call it summer cleaning).

We have the blog, still—the photos and musings on the writer's life, the heat of summer (or the chill of winter, if we ever get there), and, mostly, books I've loved and other writers who have taught me.

The door is open.  Please stop by.  Please stick around.