And The Rains Came

I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the blog that rainfall totals for our area of Central Florida are way down this year. We have something like a 5 inch deficit where we are, midway between Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral. So we have definitely been needing some rain, and we got some yesterday. In fact we got a lot of rain yesterday!

At 9 AM it still looked like it was dark outside, and by 11 AM it seemed more like just barely after dawn because the sky was so dark. And when the sky opened up, it dumped rain throughout the region. Along with the rain was thunder, lightning, golf ball sized hail in some places, and strong winds. This was the weather map at 12:27 PM. Our house is that little blue dot low on the right side of the screen.

The storms kept rolling through the area for most of the day, with a few pauses between them. But the crazy thing is that last night on the 11 PM news, Daytona Beach was still nearly 4½ inches below their normal rainfall amounts for this time of year.

During one of the lulls in the storms I went outside to check our citrus trees and my pontoon boat. The trees were doing fine, and the full cover on the boat was holding up well. The extra support arms that Terry put in kept most of the water running off instead of pooling on the canvas.

I spent most of the day working on my new Tinder Street book, with my office door onto the carport open because I love to watch it rain. By the time I knocked off around 6:30 PM, I had another 4,500 words under my belt. I’m trying hard to keep up the pace so I can get the book finished before my daughter Tiffany comes to visit on the 24^th of this month. It’s going to be a race to get it done, but I’ll do my best.

Several people have asked me if I will be doing audiobooks of the Tinder Street series. I doubt it. I have eight audiobooks out now, plus Tantor Media bought the rights to create audiobooks of the first four books in the John Lee Quarrels series. And while some authors I know do very well with audiobooks, I don’t. While my print and e-book sales are always healthy, if I sell 10 or 15 audiobooks in a month, I consider that very good. For the time, effort, and cost put into creating them, they are a losing proposition for me.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. This seems like a laid-back kind of place, doesn’t it?

Congratulations Carsten Wiemken, winner of our drawing for an audiobook of Big Lake Blizzard, the fourth book in my Big Lake mystery series. We had 37  entries this time around. Stay tuned, a new contest starts soon. Note: Due to the high shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with U.S. addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – I know the voices in my head aren’t real, but sometimes their ideas are awesome!