Juvenile Spotted Drum on reef off Key Largo, FL

School is back in session already? Goodness, hasn’t the summer whizzed by? In actuality, for us, summer tends to be one of our busiest times. This is because even though the snow birds have left South Florida until later, many families come down for various activities and it is the best season for diving in the Keys. Most of the dive shops have full charters for days on end, all the dive professionals and boat captains know that days off are limited, and a dive professional who is looking to get into the business will have the greatest opportunity during these months. Although this summer has been rather “wet” with frequent pop-up showers and more wind than is liked, at least to date, severe storms have not interfered with the summer trade.

I don’t do as much corporate proposal writing as I have in the past (summer being a prime time for that), but a couple of community projects, plus preparing for the release of Small Town Lies, and getting False Front to the publisher, have kept me quite busy. (This is the second novel featuring underwater investigator Chris Green from Deadly Doubloons.) One of the community projects was working with Homestead, Florida: From Railroad Boom to Sonic Boom, which was the book commissioned by the City of Homestead through the Centennial Committee. In general, I do not edit, but I made an exception in this case since I had already been involved in some of the other Centennial projects.  In thinking through the best way to release the book which was published only a couple of weeks ago, the Committee decided that a book fair was appropriate. The City Council approved the idea and so that will be taking a chunk of time. I’ll post more about that as we finalize the details.