I hope you're keeping warm and toasty. I don't dislike winter, but I get tired of it after awhile. The snow's been around since November, the banks are too high, and it's too cold. The songbirds are beginning to return, but there's not much food for them. Stock your feeders! The little beasties are beginning to start their families, and since they're looking for warm, snug places, our houses look pretty good to them. We don't have them in our house, but I can just imagine the heyday the mice are having in our poor old bus on the lake.

But to brighten up my day, I got the new Tor/Forge catalogue in the mail. I like their synopsis of Spirits in the Wires due out in August. (MaryAnn and I are guessing that Terri Windling wrote it.) I've never been very good at boiling a novel down to a few lines (that's why it takes me four or five hundred pages to tell the story), so I've cribbed their write-up and put it on a page along with an image of Palencar's gorgeous new cover. If you click on either image, you'll get a nice big version. The link is here:
www.charlesdelint.com/spirits-desc01.htm

Here's a great bit of news about my pal, the lovely and talented Charles Vess, the artist for our upcoming picture book, A Circle of Cats (June release). Charles has just won a Spectrum Gold Award for the cover of our book! Jury members made their selections from over 3500 works of fantastic-themed art for this year's book, Spectrum 10: The Best In Contemporary Fantastic Art, to be published in October, 2003 by Underwood Books of Nevada City, CA. Charles was among 18 artists awarded gold and silver awards. Congratulations to our lad for his golden achievement!

Here's that glorious cover:
http://www.charlesdelint.com/coverart/circle_djart.jpg

As usual, my inbox is overflowing. MaryAnn recently took a photograph (linked to a large version), just to prove it (ha).

Speaking of MaryAnn, Reclectica's got a few auctions up—a last hurrah before we head off to Florida for the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. MaryAnn's turned into quite the tattoo artist. I love her rose goddess in particular.
http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewListedItems&userid=reclectica&include=0&since=-1&sort=2&rows=25

I hope to have Medicine Road finished before we go to Florida, and it looks promising...

Take care of one another and think peace.