Website Makeover and VESSEL Excerpt

Happy Fourth of July!  (Or, to those of you outside the US, happy random Wednesday!)  Today, I did all the traditional Fourth of July things:

- Cooked hamburgers and hotdogs.  Except I cooked them on the stove instead of the barbecue grill because a squadron of yellow jackets has colonized the grill, and I chose to grant them their independence.  So sweet of me.  Or cowardly.  But let's go with sweet.

- Watched fireworks.  On TV, because it's so much calmer and simpler that way.  No parking.  No crowds.  No mosquitoes.  And total access to my fridge (which is also, incidentally, a lovely perk of being a writer).  I don't really understand why the Washington DC fireworks are always shown hidden behind a bugle corp.  Makes the fireworks look like one of those cheesy school picture backdrops.  But I adore the Manhattan fireworks with their four barges worth of fireworks in sync to the music.

- Updated my website.  Okay, maybe that's not really traditional in the, um, traditional sense of the word.  But in addition to being the birthday of our nation, it's now about two months until the pub date for my next novel, Vessel, so I gave my website (and the backdrop of this blog) a Vessel-centric makeover.  Click here to check it out!

And while I was Vessel-izing the site, I decided that today marks the official beginning of my personal countdown to Vessel (during which I will get more and more deliriously excited as we get closer to September!!!).

So I posted the first two chapters of Vessel on my site!  Hope you like it!

Here's a taste.....

On the day she was to die, Liyana walked out of her family's tent to see the dawn. She buried her toes in the sand, cold from the night, and she wrapped her father's goatskin cloak tight around her shoulders. She had only moments before everyone would wake.

She fixed her eyes on the east, where the sky was bleached yellow in anticipation. Shadows marked each ridge, rock, and sand dune. Overhead, a few stubborn stars continued to cling to the sky, and a raven, black as a splinter of night, flew into the wind before angling toward the dark peaks of the distant mountains. Liyana felt the wind caress her cheeks and stir her hair. She'd left it loose last night, and she'd counted the strands when she couldn't sleep. The wind stirred the sand at her feet, and it whistled over the dunes and rocks. She listened to it so intensely that every muscle in her body felt taut.

She had wanted to be calm today.

Click here to read through the end of chapter two.

Go ahead.  I'll wait.

*taps feet*

*tries to whistle, but fails*

*hums*

Yay, you're back!  Did you like it?!  Did ya?!?!  Did ya?!?!?!