Pride comes but once a year! This month we are emerging from a pandemic. It feels like we ought to be joyous and yet there is more anxiety in the air than joyousness, for the most part. (Although on June 1, when #PrideMonth started trending on Twitter, it felt great!)

To my dismay, I found out that a nice woman who particularly loved my lesbian historical novel set in Ireland, Time of Grace, and wrote to me about it a few years back, died of Covid last spring, along with her partner. She was a therapist in the Santa Cruz area and even a Facebook friend, but she slipped away without notice. This just seems incredibly wrong, somehow. I remembered that after our conversation I sent her a couple of signed copies of Time of Grace, and feel glad that I at least did that! I would not have discovered this had I not visited her page on her birthday, which just passed. A cousin of hers stopped by to let people know what had happened. There is no obituary, no trace of her on the internet. Her name was Ann Sisk.

On to happier matters. While I’m here, I wanted to mention a couple things in book news this month. First of all, the ebook version of Time of Grace is 50% off over at Smashwords for June, the only book sale I have going at the moment. (More to come in July with the Summer/Winter sale, of course.)

Meanwhile, Connecting the Dots: My Midlife Journey with Adult ADHD is on a monthlong promotion in audiobook format, so for the first time it is only $1.99 at three platforms: Google Play, Nook Audiobooks, and Apple Books! If you want to learn about women and inattentive ADD in a short audio, narrated by Daniela Acitelli, that only takes an hour… this is the time to do it!

It looks like we are fogged in here for the month of June in San Francisco. However, today the sun peeked out. Suddenly everything got a bit better!

Stay safe, everybody… and let’s hope we can ease back into “normal life” post-vaccines with a little more awareness. Perhaps we can even be nicer to each other.