I fear many of you have given up on me during my recent radio silence generated by the holidays. That had much to do with it, but the bulk was due to the fact that I was finishing up the second silver dragon book, Up in Smoke. Yes, that’s the title. I giggle at it, too, and have the worst yearning to watch Cheech and Chong, but that’s beside the point.

The book is now done, and off to my editor, so I have five glorious days to…well, not rest. I have to come up with a couple of novella ideas so that my editor Laura can tell the crack team of folk at NAL about it, and get them working on the book that I haven’t even written. Isn’t publishing wonderful?

Because I shelved everything to finish this book, I’m sadly behind doing other things, so added to my substantial to-do list are things like do the last couple of podcasts I promised everyone, get new book info onto the websites, and oh yes, there’s that e-mail queue going back to May to tackle.

While you’re all waiting for that, I scanned the cover for Playing With Fire. Forgive the less than sterling quality of the scan–my scanner, despite cleaning, refuses to give me a good scan any more–but at least you can see the whole thing. I’m putting it behind the cut below, for those of you who have slow connections. And no, the front cover isn’t as dark as it looks; the foil background scans darker than it should.