After almost a week in California, Karen and I are back in Texas and I'll be back to regular blogging. My mother and I played bridge yesterday at the local duplicate club (Oceanside) and managed to do fairly well despite a few new-partnership misunderstandings. We came in 2nd in the N/S section and third overall in the 'C' group. There were a total of 21 tables although the C group was not that large.

Karen and I made an offer on a house in Long Beach. I'm not convinced that there isn't going to be another major downturn in the housing market. There are a lot of houses under water in CA and I'd think a lot of "owners" will be looking to walk away from huge mortgages they can't afford, especially with California's sky-rocketing unemployment rate. Still, Karen and I found a really charming place and we put in an offer. It's a 'short sale' (which means, basically, that the seller doesn't clear enough to pay off the old mortgage but at least the bank won't have to foreclose), and short sales are notoriously slow and unpredictable. I'll believe it when I see it. Karen asked what we would do if we end up with two houses as we haven't sold our TX house. Answer. I don't know.

I got some reading done on submissions on the trip and should be contacting some authors shortly. I've received a lot of really well-written novels lately but many of them aren't quite right for me. It takes a strange chemistry between writer, writing, and story.

I'm going to make THE BRIDE'S FATHER by Amy Eastlake the www.BooksForABuck.com book of the day. In the last of my 'cowboy' series, Brad Mittermann struggles with how to deal with a teenage daughter prone to sneaking out at night to be with her boyfriend. He looks for an ally in the boyfriend's sexy mom--and discovers something a lot more disturbing--and interesting. Sexy and fun, only $1.00. (Available in HTML, Adobe Acrobat PDF, eReader and Microsoft Reader formats). Here's the URL: http://www.booksforabuck.com/rompages/bride_father.html

Here's the cover (cover design by Jane Graves):

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