Daytona and Change

Not coin of the realm. Change as in: the new surface, lack of striping on the track, and the drivers who are testing have me both excited and sad. No Elliot Sadler. One of my fav photos is of a banana from his bay during testing a couple of years back. Don't ask. And Scott Speed, sitting at home, is a casualty of the Kasey Kahne deal struck with Hendrick to get him in a car for one year. I find myself wishing Rusty Wallace, Ken Schrader, and Michael Waltrip were still running regularly, which I guess makes me an oldie in terms of Nascar. While Sam Hornish never made a good impression on the stock car crowd, I keep wondering if he was really given a fair shake. Shouldn't he have started in trucks for a while before being thrown into the melee? I always worry about drivers who disappear from the scene, like Scott Wimmer.

The up-side is that the live streaming of testing on speedtv.com is great. Makes up, almost, for staying home this year. Locked myself in the office because I'm working hard to get some of my older westerns, including one I consider to be my best, The Last Campaign, into a format Kindle can read. Working on the third Tal Jefferson book for the same deal. Why not? I still have readers who want to know what happened to my slightly crazy heroine. SIGNS progresses slowly because it's a tricky book to write, and I'd like to nail it the first time around. Getting tired of doing a zillion rewrites. At this stage of the game, I should know what I'm doing, LOL.

This crazy cold weather is good for a writer. No temptation to work in the garden. However, the itch to do a little pre-season shopping for new plants and seeds is lurking in the background, trying to entice me into slacking off.

Get thee behind me, plant catalogue satan!