Baby chicks are here!

Hi friends,

This was a big week on the farm, as we had lots of rainy days to plant flowers. Planting in the springtime involves threading the needle between nights that are cold enough to kill the baby flower seedlings and days that are hot enough to fry them. This week was the perfect window for planting out the Pick Your Own flower field and market garden down by the pond.

We made a huge push over Memorial Day weekend, and rewarded ourselves with a trip to Tractor Supply to buy chicks! We get chicks almost every spring. They are adorable and fill the house with a chorus of little “peeps” while they are in a box under a heatlamp in the walk-in fireplace in the dining room.

This year we got eight chicks, all female—four white leghorn pullets and four gold laced wyandottes.

Gold Laced Wyandotte (photo link)

Absolutely stunning birds. I can’t wait to watch them grow up. The white leghorns have been some of our best layers.

On a practical level, the chicks will eat ticks in the yard, helping to prevent the spread of Lyme disease.

Hopefully they won’t get eaten by our resident bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, foxes, and coyotes this year.

The adult laying hens in the barn coop are laying a lot of eggs right now, which means it’s time to start selling eggs again.

A white leghorn chick this morning

The book launch has been taking up most of my free time, but now I’m starting to rewrite Queenslander book two, tweaking the plot to better set up the events in book three.

Writing groups are super helpful during the editing process. I belong to several peer critique groups where we trade chapters of our books and edit them for each other, which is always fantastic when I’m revising. I can’t recommend them enough!

Finding time to write in the spring here in Massachusetts on the farm is a challenge, since the spring is our busy time, which is why I generally only write a book between January and March. The rest of the year I “just” edit and rewrite. Theoretically easier.

Queenslander book two comes out in six months, November, 2026. It starts shortly after the end of the first book and covers the events of one calendar year on the farm, starting and ending around the holidays. While the chapters will alternate point of view between Ronnie and Nev, it is more of Nev’s book. Ronnie got her life together in book one and figured out what she wants, and now it’s Nev’s turn.

There’s a fire and a flood at Upsend Downs, biblical weather, climate change, etc.

If you haven’t left a review of Queenslander on Goodreads and Amazon, now’s the time to do that! I’m trying to reach 100 reviews on each platform.

This week I have four book events for Queenslander, three of which are open to the public—the fourth is an interview which will be recorded and released later.

Today (Tuesday) I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton MA at 7pm talking about Queenslander, reading, and signing books.

Thursday, I’ll be at the Salisbury, MA Library talking on a panel and selling books.

Thursday, I’ll also be zooming in remotely to the Austin Texas Lesbian Book Club, which read Queenslander for the month of May. I’m looking forward to talking with them.

If your bookclub would like to read Queenslander, you can reach out to me about a virtual author visit.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson who has a useful daily new digest, Letters from an American, just announced this week that she will be releasing a series of short one-minute videos about various topics in US history to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

As she wrote in her post yesterday:

“Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.

That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”