Welcome to the very first entry in my very first blog. My intention is to post an entry at least once a week, so we’ll see how that goes. The BOOK comes out in 26 days and I’m so excited about it I can barely sit still. Six months ago, June 3rd seemed like it was an eternity away, now I’m counting the time in days. Not quite sure how that happened.

So what I’m thinking about right now is this: how in the heck do you work on a second book when your first one is coming out? Holy cow. I’m fairly easily distracted as it is (by dogs walking by the café where I’m writing, by emails from friends, by the documentary on pandas that was playing on the TV at the café—apparently it’s pretty hard to get them to breed in captivity), so the fact that my book is coming out in 26 days and all sorts of people I don’t even know are writing about what they do and do not like about it is straining what control I have over my concentration. I guess it really is time to cut myself off from wireless connections.

But actually, the second book is in that really fun stage when there are still about a million different possibilities of what could happen to whom and when. I’ll have to start closing some of those doors soon, but for now I still get to play in the world of endless options.

Thanks for checking out my blog. More to come soon. Seems like writing a blog is a GREAT distraction from writing. . .

I recently heard from El Anden, the publisher for the Spanish language edition of The Wolf Chronicles (Book One is entitled “El Pacto de los Lobos”) that they are organizing a campaign around the series to help save the Iberian wolf, an endangered subspecies of the gray wolf. Like many populations of wolves, the Iberian wolf was seen for many years as a pest, and bounties were offered for its extermination. I’m still reading up on the Iberian wolf, but I’m really excited about this opportunity. Once I find out more, I’ll be posting information on how people can help this effort.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the Rocky Mountain gray wolf population is still at risk. At least 39 of the Northern Rockies' 1,500 gray wolves have been killed since they lost federal protection on March 28th. Common sense wildlife management has gone out the window as the anti-wolf forces are doing everything they can to reverse the progress wolves have made in the last thirteen years.

A coalition of nonprofit organizations has filed a lawsuit to return the wolves to the endangered species list and to stop the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming from killing off huge numbers of the wolves in those states. The Montana government tried to delay the lawsuit so that they could get started killin’ more wolves, but a federal judge put the kibosh on that saying that he was unwilling to risk more deaths.

As goes the wolf, so goes the world. I’ll be keeping close watch on these conservation efforts and posting what I know.