Holiday? Huh?

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

By the time you read this, the Labor Day holiday will be over, and I say thank Goodness!

Whoever started the canard that Holidays were for a holiday, a respite from work? I work harder on a designated Holiday than just about any other day. Like this last weekend – THE EGYPTIAN FILE officially released on the 30^th, so there was all the attendant announcement publicity to do.

A digression - WHY does each book/readers site have different rules on publicity? Different days; different things accepted. Some will accept a post any day; some allow them only on certain days or on one specific day. Some will take only a simple announcement; some want everything – blurb, excerpt, links, cover, websites, everything but your blood type. Some take links, some don't. Some take cover shots, some don't. Some want blurbs, some don't. Some want excerpts, some don't. All seem to want something different in the subject line. Why don't they get together and make one set of rules for all that will be easier for writers and readers both?

Back to holidays. As I said, doing the basic release announcements takes a great deal of time and attention. Plus, The Husband is home, which at the least means more cooking. Plus, we're redoing the garage. The actual hammer-and-nails remodeling is done (thank Goodness, and before there was physical violence) but now we must clean out our various storage rooms and decide what to keep and what to give away. Worse yet, it seems that we each regard our own stuff as precious (mine is mostly antiques, by the way) and the other's as simply stuff, or worse, junk.

My head had barely lifted off the pillow on Saturday before The Husband began prattling about Let's Work On The Garage This Weekend. (When he asked me early in the summer what I wanted for my birthday, I told him two whole weeks in which he neither said nor wrote the word 'garage.' Instead I got a trip to Vegas and a huge kunzite ring. Sigh.) Of course, we were to start working right after I fixed breakfast. Normally cooked breakfasts are reserved for Sundays.

It's late summer in Texas, and ten minutes after dawn the sky is on 'Broil.' Needless to say, our garage is not air-conditioned. Neither are the storage rooms, and neither is our ancient but still (barely) running pickup. I keep telling myself I'd be paying money to use a sauna in some health club to be just as hot. It doesn't help.

The Husband doesn't seem to understand that when I am sitting in a reasonably cool room (who can afford to keep a room truly comfortable with today's abominably astronomical electric rates?) typing on a computer that I am truly working. Believe me, I am. I have blogs to write. I have release publicity to do. I have publicity on previous releases to do. I have future releases to get ready for my formatter and cover artist. And sometime – I don't know really when – I have to write on the next book, whose deadline is galloping steadily closer.

Thank Goodness tomorrow is Tuesday and his job will once more devour The Husband for the better part of the day. Don't get me wrong – I love him, he is the most wonderful man I have ever known and I love being with him, but he does have a fixation. Garage, garage, garage... I'm even coming to hate the sound of the word. I do love being with him. I will love it even more once the garage is finished.

We did work most of the weekend and got a fair amount done. At this rate we should have the job completed just when the weather finally gets cool enough to be outside without my becoming a fountain of perspiration. I do, though, have the dreadful premonition that when that day occurs his repetitive vocabulary will evolve from 'Garage' into 'Yard.' Help me...

Holiday? Phooey.

UPDATE

This fortnight's release is THE EGYPTIAN FILE, a contemporary romantic adventure which takes place in my beloved Egypt. Like THE JERUSALEM CONNECTION, my 30 July release, THE EGYPTIAN FILE is a brand new book, not a backlist rerelease.

I got the idea for THE EGYPTIAN FILE during my last visit to Egypt and it would not leave me alone until I wrote it. Luckily I was blessed with the research help of two good friends, Dr. Stephen Harvey (perhaps the world's most acknowledged authority on Ahmose I) and Dr. Dirk Huyge (Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to El Kab). They were both most generous with their time and information, and Dr. Huyge even allowed me to add a tomb to the El Kab site – mainly because things go on in that tomb that should never go on in a real one!

THE EGYPTIAN FILE tells the story of Melissa Warrender, who is sent by a telephone call - which may or may not have come from her dead father - to retrieve a mysterious file in Cairo. Others who are willing to kill for it want the file as well, and Melissa's only ally is a handsome Cairo cabby who may not be what he seems. As they flee across Egypt they know they must translate the cryptic message in the file if they are to survive. An unimaginable treasure is at stake if they can live to find it.