Dumfungled

 

This seemed like the perfect word for my state right now. Yes, the election was a blow, but it was a hellacious week overall. Mother is doing better, or was at the most recent visit, but her permanent location is still undetermined. 

Some of you already know this: Medicare covers 20 days. After that, her health insurance will cover it until Day 100. Then it goes up to full cost, which is around $10K a month. The facility she was at is unlikely to take her back; she requires a level of assistance they don't provide. We are in limbo, a state I despise but find myself in all too often.

We're also looking at relocating. We have enjoyed most of our time in Safety Harbor, but the hurricanes are getting worse. We've evacuated multiple times. One neighbor lost their home to Milton, and other neighbors are in their own limbo state until inspections are finished. Our place suffered some damage and our heat pump needs repairs. Due to problems with the previous heat pump, we have wall units to compensate.

Our home is not insured. We can't buy insurance; it's manufactured housing and too old (1979) to insure. Once it's gone, we're screwed. Plus, the lot rent has become steeper and will probably climb again due to necessary repairs to the park. A house in another state would be just as affordable.

Finally, we still have the next Strangely Funny to publish. Three hurricanes and a family crisis have slowed us further from our usual crawl.

There's a lot on our plates. So, dumfungled we are.

Under the Radar

This has been a very quiet year for us in terms of announcements about the books we've published or stories we've written. We've been dealing with home repairs (free air conditioning should be a constitutional right in Florida), getting involved with our new Sisters in Crime chapter, and facing our first official hurricane in the Sunshine State. You can assume from this post that we survived Hermine. It was odd, though, to get time off for bad weather in the summer.

Oh, and we had a vacation. A real vacation, the first in several years that was longer than a three-day weekend. Gwen cooked many lovely things, we swam daily, and we also got to read for pleasure, something that we don't get to do as often as we'd like.
During this quiet summer, though, after the release of Strangely Funny III, Gwen and I were very busy, but not so you'd notice on our business page. We were finishing our first novel together. You're probably wondering how we accomplished that: she's a plotter who writes very serious, often dark, mysteries set in the 1870s; I'm a snarker with a short attention span, and most of my stories are set in the present day. I think you'll like our compromise: a mystery set during the 1920s Florida land boom. It has poison, car chases, mobsters, and some serious hangovers. Oh, and one Gertrude Stein book.

Murder on the Mullet Express will be coming out in early 2017.


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