Exciting News!

I have something really cool to tell everyone, but first, here are a few recent pictures.

Sampson, the donkey is still here. One morning one of these three knocked a rail down and  Emmy Lou, the milk cow on the right, and the steer, jumped the now two and a half foot fence into his corral. Sampson was glad for the company, but those other two just considered him competition for hay.

This morning Tom put Swanee in with Sampson. Swanee is a hard keeper. Last winter we had to put him in a corral to make sure he got enough to eat. I recently noticed he was losing weight, so we brought him in again. Sampson thought he had a new friend,

 but Swanee wanted nothing to do with him.

"Why do I have to bunk with a donkey?"

Yesterday we moved the Wild Bunch onto fresh feed. It wasn't very dramatic, just through a gate, but I decided to use the burst function on my camera to take a bunch of rapid shots as they went through.

I got a few ok shots. Here's Sixty-Five, one of the mustangs, and Cole. You can see the mustang's freeze brand on his neck.

And here's the Peepster.

But a lot of the shots, at least the ones that weren't blurry,

 looked more like this.

Tom has to haul water out to them now, which isn't a problem, unless it gets really cold. So far we've had a mild winter.

Now for the exciting news. For the months of April and May I am doing a virtual book tour. Instead of hauling copies of my book to stores and then having to hang out and sell them, I can do it all from home through the internet and reach a lot more people. A company called Pump Up Your Book was recommended to me and this morning we sealed the deal.

Virtual book tours are done through book review blogs with author interviews and guest posts. Some of the blogs are syndicated to major newspapers and are a great way to get exposure.

A while back, a blogger posted a review of A Story of the West on her blog that made me cry. I reread it today and teared up again. Here's a link to it:

Emma Michael's Review

I am busy writing a sequel to A Story of the West that I hope to have published to coincide with the end of the tour. I'm planning on posting an excerpt, one that I read at the local library last fall, in the near future.

So, I'll be really busy this spring, and did I mention how excited I am to have this expanded coverage.