July has been an exciting and busy month. In one sense it's been a bit of a rollercoaster, with preparations for my youngest daughter's wedding, a book under revision, a dog to prepare for a long distance trip and having our kitchen units replaced with all that entails. It has been a month of positives and negatives, so I'll start with the negatives.
The new kitchen unit meant stripping out the old kitchen and repainting the walls in preparation. That proved an interesting challenge and left us without a kitchen for two days. Thankfully we do have a BBQ and made do around that. Harry was quite intrigued by all of this and it was a challenge at times to discourage his "helping". All of this took place in the last few days before the "big" event on the horizon, the wedding of my youngest daughter which was to take place on Friday the 19th in London.
Our carefully planned and prepared trip to the wedding almost came apart at the airport. Despite having done extensive research to make sure we'd covered all bases, the British animal regulations still had a hidden, and rather unpleasant surprise in store. Harry, our 9 month old Sheltie was refused at the airport. Why? Because to enter Britain by air he must be "shipped" as cargo, separate from all passengers and through an "approved" agent of DEFRA. Since this is not on any website and was apparently unknown by the airline when we booked that left us stranded and unable to fly. To cut a long and convoluted story involving a flight to a European destination, then trains invloving three changes, and my son travelling by car to a ferry port, then crossing the channel, fetching us and a return journey, we made the wedding. But not without upsetting the rest of the family.
The wedding went well despite the dramas, the reception, in a grand former Stately Home, also went extremely well, so now we are embarking on a short holiday in the UK with Harry in a Mobile Home (RV in the US) before we return to the grindstone.
On the even more positives, I have just received another Royalty payment for A Baltic Affair, which brings the tally up rather nicely. It is a nice feeling to see sales holding steady and spilling over into sales for my other books as well. As a result I have begun discussions with Indiego ePublishing to publish the next of my Harry Heron Adventures. This one entitled The Outer Edge and it follows on from Harry's adventures on Canus in On the Run.
As they say; watch this space!